Signs of the Times

Signs of the Times

From the Morning Press, Santa Barbara, California, October 8, 1927

Modern modes of thought tend more and more to deny or to belittle the moral responsibility of man. We hear too little these days about sin and its consequences, and very much too little about the rewards of righteousness and holiness. 

Men have more emphasized the importance of creed and dogma, of belief and profession, and have almost forgotten the righteousness that exalteth a nation and the holiness that makes the individual strong and beautiful in character, and full of happiness, success, and peace. And yet these correct standards of living and doing are the principal theme of all the prophets, the Gospels, and the epistles.

In the effort of the so-called modernists to destroy the things in religion that have been emphasized much above their value, or that the race has outgrown, let them have a care lest in their militant attitude they do not also destroy those things without which religion—even life itself—is worthless, empty, meaningless. Moses did not make the law when he declared unto the children of Israel the Ten Commandments; he only revealed it. When he said to the Israelites, "Ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess," he was not giving to them a law that is not equally true for every nation and for each individual composing it. 

The path of righteousness and peace, justice and love, is the path that leads to real success and happiness, as certainly here and now as it did for the Jews in the wilderness. When Moses threatened the Israelites with dire punishment should they forsake the path of righteousness and peace, justice making empty threats, but was revealing the eternal law that the creator has written in the lives of all men and has made a part of their very beings. History, no less than revelation, speaks with no uncertain voice, telling of man's responsibility for his life and conduct, and of the terrible consequences of his yielding to unrighteousness. 

The nation that walks uprightly, that has been strong to resist the temptation to immorality, intemperance, indolence, injustice, and crime, is the strong, the great nation. A nation to be truly great must have high and great ideals, and must be striving with some success to realize them.... Young men and old have always been proving their own responsibility for their lives and conduct, and are still doing so.