Board Meetings
507
or force them to accept the terms of those who do not know what it
is to make books. These men have a conscience and are accountable
to God for their entrusted capital and the use they make of it; you are
not to be conscience for them. They want the privilege of investing
the means which they may acquire by hard labor, when and where the
Spirit of God shall indicate.
My brethren must remember that the cause of God covers more
than the publishing house at Battle Creek and the other institutions
there established. No one knows better than Brother J how that office
came into existence. He has been connected with the publishing work
from its very commencement—when it was oppressed by poverty;
when the food upon our tables was hardly sufficient to meet the wants
of nature, because self-denial had to be practiced in eating and in
dressing and in our wages, in order that the paper might live. This
was positively necessary then, and those who passed through that
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experience would be ready, under similar circumstances, to do the
same again.
It is not becoming for those who have had no experience in these
trials, but have become connected with the work in its present prosper-
ity, to urge the early workers to submit to terms in which they can see
no justice. Brother J loves the cause of God and will invest his means
to advance it wherever he sees it is necessary. Then leave this burden
of receiving and dispensing this means where it belongs—on the men
to whom God has entrusted talents of influence and of ability. They
are responsible to God for these. Neither the Publishing Association
nor its chief workers should assume that stewardship of these authors.
If the board should be able to bring Brethren H and J to their terms,
would not these writers feel that they had been dealt with unjustly?
Would not a door of temptation be opened before them, which would
interfere with sympathy and harmony of action? Should the managers
grasp all the profits, it would not be well for the cause, but would
produce a train of evils, disastrous to the Publishing Association. It
would encourage the spirit of intolerance which is already manifest to
some degree in their councils. Satan longs to have a narrow, conceited
spirit, which God cannot approve, take possession of the men who are
connected with the sacred message of truth.