Editorial September 12, 1908 Issue

GOD FOR THE RIGHT

John B. Willis

No attribute of the Deity is more frequently and more emphatically named in the Scripture than is His justice. Everywhere He is declared to be "a God of truth and without iniquity," and Christian believers have always been at one in holding to the immutable integrity of the divine nature. It must follow that every feature and fact of God's ordering is also "just and right," so that in all the range of His government there cannot be the least increment of wrong-doing. More than this, it must be His desire that full justice be secured to every creature,—that absolute justice be administered under all circumstances,—and in all His kingdom this is surely effected.

When one turns from this concept of God and His rule to the consideration of past and present human conditions, the unspeakable wretchedness imposed by heredity and environment upon the unnumbered millions who merit only good, he can but know that the protest of his own moral sense against this colossal and world-embracing injustice is divinely impelled. He is entirely sure that God is against all this wrong, and that every expression of His Word is the coming of the divine "advocate," to declare and make good the freedom of man, to champion the cause of the oppressed, to lift up the fallen, to set the captive free.

Christ Jesus' "Render therefore unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's" was not an endorsement of the cruel and sanguinary rule of Rome, nor of the present world-wide despotism of material belief. His whole life of healing and of earnest espousal of the cause of the downtrodden is a rebuke to every tolerance of wrong and injustice. His heart was with the people, he stood for them against the iniquities of material law and mortal order, by whomsoever voiced, and his attitude is forever right. It is Truth's eternal protest against the reign of error.

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