Editorial September 11, 1909 Issue

TARRY YE IN JERUSALEM

John B. Willis

Religious history has disclosed no more persistent mortal predisposition than that which leads men to center their interests upon some human sense or symbol of the truth, or some phenomenon of its unfoldment, and give this such emphasis in thought that in the end they quite pass by the truth itself. Again and again has some doctrine or some form of faith's expression been thus "lifted up," and devotion to the secondary and suggestive usurped the place of loyalty to the primary and permanent, until for many the incidental has seemed quite to eclipse the essential.

This forgetfulness of fundamental Truth, even the God of their fathers, was the great sin of the children of Israel. They were quite willing to escape from Egypt through the divine guidance, but in the presence of after demands for faith, and consecration to their deliverer, they turned with longing to the leeks and onions which indeed symbolized the divine bounty but which ministered to a most transient satisfaction; in the place of God they demanded the golden calf of their enslavers.

This same disposition expressed itself among the disciples, and in counseling them to tarry in Jerusalem until they should be filled with "power from on high," Jesus must have awakened in their thought the need of preserving ever their articulation with fundamental and eternal Truth. This necessity was reaffirmed when he declared to Peter that upon the rock of spiritual perception his church was to be founded, and it is to be seen that the divisions and strifes of organized Christianity, together with the bulk of all those contentions and difficulties among men which have destroyed so much happiness and defeated so many hopes, have been the result of indifference to the larger issues, an insistence upon some point which after all was relatively unimportant.

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