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Testimonies for the Church Volume 5
comparative prosperity be left undone until it must be performed in
days of darkness, under the pressure of trial and persecution?
There is a terrible amount of guilt for which the church is responsi-
ble. Why are not those who have the light putting forth earnest efforts
to give that light to others? They see that the end is near. They see
multitudes daily transgressing God’s law; and they know that these
souls cannot be saved in transgression. Yet they have more interest in
their trades, their farms, their houses, their merchandise, their dress,
their tables, than in the souls of men and women whom they must
meet face to face in the judgment. The people who claim to obey the
truth are asleep. They could not be at ease as they are if they were
awake. The love of the truth is dying out of their hearts. Their example
is not such as to convince the world that they have truth in advance of
every other people upon the earth. At the very time when they should
be strong in God, having a daily, living experience, they are feeble,
hesitating, relying upon the preachers for support, when they should
be ministering to others with mind and soul and voice and pen and
time and money.
Brethren and sisters, many of you excuse yourselves from labor
on the plea of inability to work for others. But did God make you
so incapable? Was not this inability produced by your own inactivity
and perpetuated by your own deliberate choice? Did not God give
you at least one talent to improve, not for your own convenience and
gratification, but for Him? Have you realized your obligation, as His
hired servant, to bring a revenue to Him by the wise and skillful use
of this entrusted capital? Have you not neglected opportunities to
improve your powers to this end? It is too true that few have felt any
real sense of their responsibility to God. Love, judgment, memory,
foresight, tact, energy, and every other faculty have been devoted to
self. You have displayed greater wisdom in the service of evil than in
the cause of God. You have perverted, disabled, nay, even besotted
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your powers, by your intense activity in worldly pursuits to the neglect
of God’s work.
Still you soothe your conscience by saying that you cannot undo
the past, and gain the vigor, the strength, and the skill which you might
have had if you had employed your powers as God required. But
remember that He holds you responsible for the work negligently done
or left undone through your unfaithfulness. The more you exercise