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Testimonies for the Church Volume 5
ments from heaven in the truth made ready to our hands; but men
and women have not been educated and disciplined to work in the
fast-ripening harvest fields.
God knows with what fidelity and spirit of consecration everyone
fulfills his mission. There is no place for the slothful in this great work,
no place for the self-indulgent or those who are incapable of making
life a success in any calling, no place for halfhearted men who are not
fervent in spirit, willing to endure hardness, opposition, reproach, or
death for Christ’s sake. The Christian ministry is no place for drones.
There is a class of men attempting to preach who are slipshod, careless,
and irreverent. They would better be tilling the soil than teaching the
sacred truth of God.
Young men must soon bear the burdens older ones have borne.
We have lost time in neglecting to bring young men to the front and
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give them a higher, more solid education. The work is constantly
advancing, and we must obey the command: “Go forward.” Much
good could be done by youth who are established in the truth and are
not easily influenced or swayed from the right by their surroundings,
but who walk with God, who pray much, and who put forth most
earnest endeavors to gather all the light they can. The worker should
be prepared to put forth the highest mental and moral energies with
which nature, cultivation, and the grace of God have endowed him;
but his success will be proportionate to the degree of consecration and
self-sacrifice in which the work is done, rather than to either natural
or acquired endowments. The most earnest and continued efforts to
acquire qualifications for usefulness are necessary; but unless God
works with the human efforts, nothing can be accomplished. Christ
says: “Without Me ye can do nothing.” Divine grace is the great
element of saving power; without it all human efforts are unavailing;
its co-operation is needed even with the strongest and most earnest
human efforts for the inculcation of truth.
The cause of God needs teachers who have high moral qualities
and can be trusted with the education of others, men who are sound in
the faith and have tact and patience, who walk with God and abstain
from the very appearance of evil, who stand so closely connected with
God that they can be channels of light—in short, Christian gentlemen.
The good impressions made by such will never be effaced, and the
training thus given will endure throughout eternity. What is neglected