Editorial February 10, 1945 Issue

"Let it rather be healed"

John Randall Dunn

The twelfth chapter of Hebrews is an excellent digest of Christian morals, manners, and methods. Certain it is that the lines of tender, wise admonition in this great letter could have emanated only from a deeply spiritualized consciousness.

The writer first exhorts his fellow Christians to keep thought turned constantly to the example of Christ Jesus, "who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebr. 12:2). Surely if the great Master never lost sight of the spiritual joy involved in every overcoming of error, his followers should not faint or repine if they find their paths unduly rugged. They are importuned in the exacting race before them, to "lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset" them. Weymouth, in his rendering of the New Testament in Modern Speech, puts it, "Let us fling aside every encumbrance and the sin that so readily entangles our feet."

A young man who had never smoked, and who was approaching his majority, asked his father if he could advance any good reasons why this abstinence should be continued during the years to come. The father sagaciously put these questions to him: If you were about to enter a race, would you consider it sensible to fill your pockets with stones and thereby add needless and useless weight? Would not the wise course be that wherein you would divest yourself of superfluous baggage? The son saw the wisdom of this argument, and began as never before to appreciate the freedom from tobacco bondage he had known throughout his young manhood, and he resolved then and there not to be tricked into taking on worthless earth weights.

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