Helping Those Who Need Help
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increase in proportion as they exercise disinterested liberality, sharing
their abundance with institutions that are struggling for a foothold. Our
prosperous institutions should help those institutions that God has said
should live and prosper, but which are still struggling for an existence.
There is among us a very limited amount of real, unselfish love. The
Lord says: “Everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” “If we love one
another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us.”
1 John
4:7, 8, 12
. It is not pleasing to God to see man looking only upon his
own things, closing his eyes to the interests of others.
What One Institution Can Do for Another
In the providence of God the Battle Creek Sanitarium has been
greatly prospered, and during this coming year those in charge should
restrict their wants. Instead of doing all that they desire to do in enlarg-
ing their facilities, they should do unselfish work for God, reaching out
the hand of charity to interests centered in other places. What benefit
they could confer upon the Rural Health Retreat, at Saint Helena, by
giving a few thousand dollars to this enterprise! Such a donation would
give courage to those in charge, inspiring them to move forward and
upward.
Donations were made to the Battle Creek Sanitarium in its earlier
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history, and should not this sanitarium consider carefully what it can
do for its sister institution on the Pacific Coast? My brethren in Battle
Creek, does it not seem in accordance with God’s order to restrict your
wants, to curtail your building operations, not enlarging our institutions
in that center? Why should you not feel that it is your privilege and
duty to help those who need help?
A Reformation Needed
I have been instructed that a reformation is needed along these
lines, that more liberality should prevail among us. There is constant
danger that even Seventh-day Adventists will be overcome with selfish
ambition and will desire to center all the means and power in the
interests over which they especially preside. There is danger that men
will permit a jealous feeling to arise in their hearts and that they will