Our Ministers
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responsible work of God’s ministers, how important that they give
themselves wholly to it and watch for souls as they that must give
an account. Should any separate or selfish interest come in here and
divide the heart from the work? Some ministers linger about their
homes, and run out on the Sabbath, and then return and exhaust their
energies in farming or in attending to home matters. They labor for
themselves through the week, and then spend the remnant of their
exhausted energies in laboring for God. But such feeble efforts are
not acceptable to Him. They have no mental or physical strength to
spare. At best their efforts are feeble enough. But after they have been
engrossed and entangled all through the laboring days of the week
with the cares and perplexities of this life, they are wholly unfitted for
the high, the sacred, the important work of God. The destiny of souls
hangs upon the course they pursue and the decisions they make. How
important then that they should be temperate in all things, not only in
their eating, but in their labor, that their strength may be unabated and
devoted to their sacred calling.
A great mistake has been made by some who profess present truth,
by introducing merchandise in the course of a series of meetings and
by their traffic diverting minds from the object of the meetings. If
Christ were now upon earth, He would drive out these peddlers and
traffickers, whether they be ministers or people, with a scourge of
small cords, as when He entered the temple anciently “and cast out
all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables
of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and
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said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of
prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” These traffickers might
have pleaded as an excuse that the articles they held for sale were for
sacrificial offerings. But their object was to get gain, to obtain means,
to accumulate.
I was shown that if the moral and intellectual faculties had not been
clouded by wrong habits of living, ministers and people would have
been quick to discern the evil results of mixing sacred and common
things. Ministers have stood in the desk and preached a most solemn
discourse, and then by introducing merchandise, and acting the part of
a salesman, even in the house of God, they have diverted the minds of
their hearers from the impressions received, and destroyed the fruit of
their labor. If the sensibilities had not been blunted, they would have