Education of Workers
523
We have too little working talent in the different branches of the
cause. New enterprises must be set on foot. We need ability to devise
plans whereby souls who are in the darkness of error can be reached.
We need the intelligence of varied minds, but we should not find fault
with them because their ideas do not just fit our own. We should
have broader plans for the education of workers to give the message.
Those who believe and love the truth have done nobly in giving of
their means to sustain its various enterprises, but there is great lack of
capable workers. It is not wise to be constantly expending means to
open untried fields while so little is done to prepare workers to occupy
them. God’s work must not be hindered for want of agents to execute
it. He calls for cultivated men, who are Bible students, who love the
truth that they open to others, and who bring it into their own lives
and characters. We want men who love Jesus and cling to Him, and
who appreciate the infinite sacrifice made in behalf of fallen humanity.
We want lips touched with holy fire, hearts pure from the defilement
of sin. Those whose piety is shallow, and who have great ambition to
be considered first and best, are not the men for this time. Those who
think more of their own way than of the work are not wanted.
Our churches are not receiving the kind of training that will lead
them to walk in all humility of mind, to put away all pride of external
display, and to labor for the inward adorning. The efficiency of the
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church is precisely what the zeal, purity, self-denial, and intelligent
labor of the ministers make it. An active missionary spirit should char-
acterize its individual members. They must have deeper piety, stronger
faith, and broader views. They must make more thorough work in
personal effort. What we need is a living religion. A single individual
of enlarged conceptions of duty, whose soul is in communion with
God and who is full of zeal for Christ, will exert a powerful influence
for good. He drinks at no low, turbid, polluted stream, but from the
pure, high waters at the fountainhead; and he can communicate a new
spirit and power to the church. As the pressure from without increases,
God would have His church vitalized by the sacred, solemn truths
they believe. The Holy Spirit from heaven, working with the sons
and daughters of God, will surmount obstacles and hold the vantage
ground against the enemy. God has great victories in reserve for His
truth-loving, commandment-keeping people. The fields are already
whitening for the harvest. We have light, and rich, glorious endow-