Editorial July 10, 1909 Issue

A QUESTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

John B. Willis

He was on his way to the station, and fell in with the deacon, who said, "This hot day will be rather hard on Mary B——.She has always been frail and sickly, poor girl, and they have had to doctor her ever since she was a baby. She is all they've got, and it would be hard for them to lose her: but, do you know, may be it's needed. Jim is a member of our church, but I don't believe he has attended a service for fifteen years, while his wife has been given to parties and fine clothes and all the rest of it, as though there wasn't anything else to live for. It don't seem right for a professed Christian to turn down the church like that."

They had reached the train, and as the listener mused upon the matter on the way to town, he could but think how Christ Jesus attracted and linked the people to his ministry by his healing works, and he wondered if it had ever occurred to the deacon that the church is not altogether irresponsible for the lapse into worldliness which he so heartily deplored. Such a state of spiritual indifference is true of many today, and even when brought to the extremity of human need, as in "Jim's" instance, they do not return to their Christian allegiance, but the rather go hunting the world over for some more favorable climate or some famed specialist who can give promise of relief. How is it that they do not "cry unto the Lord" in their trouble, that they may be saved from all their distresses?

In trying to answer this question we must not forget the relation of habit to conduct. The average man does for the most part just what his boyhood education and the customs of his calm impel him to do, and it is therefore fair to ask whether if the deacon's friends had always been taught that spiritual thinking and living have immediately to do not only with one's health but with the harmony and protection of the household, and that when assailed by a disease which one does not seem able to resist his pastor or some other earnest Christian brother is to minister to him, in keeping with their authorization "to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick,"—if such a thought had been established and such a habit of looking to divine Truth and its exponents for succor from every ill had been acquired, would "Jim" have separated himself from his base of supply, would he have ignored the preacher and stayed away from church, had he understood that to know God means life and health and peace now as well as in the indefinite future? Surely not. Every consideration of self-interest and family affection as well as of Christian privilege and duty would then have prompted him to maintain his religious activities, and his troubles might thus have been made to serve a purpose in impelling him to seek health and happiness at the source of all real good.

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A QUESTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

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