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The Publishing Ministry
and plans devised for taking up more responsibilities, and your plans
in reference to consolidation, taking under your guidance and control
all institutions nigh and afar off? You are simply stretching yourselves
beyond your measure. You have not the men who are capable of carry-
ing such responsibilities as you have already embraced.—
Manuscript
28, 1896
.
Man’s Consolidation or God’s Theocracy?—Stop where you
are. You cannot retrieve your past record by seeking to reconstruct,
reorganize, and consolidate other institutions with the institutions so
defective in Battle Creek. I cry to you in the name of the Lord, No,
No. Leave the Pacific Press under God’s theocracy, and humble your
hearts before God before it is everlastingly too late. The great day
of God is coming when every man shall be known as God knows
him.—
Manuscript 7, 1897
.
Consolidation Tends to Exalt the Human—The policy of con-
solidation, wherever pursued, tends to the exaltation of the human in
place of the divine. Those who bear responsibilities in the different
institutions look to the central authority for guidance and support. As
the sense of personal responsibility is weakened, they lose the highest
and most precious of all human experiences, the constant dependence
of the soul upon God. Not realizing their need, they fail of maintaining
that constant watchfulness and prayer, that constant surrender to God,
which alone can enable men to hear and to obey the teaching of His
Holy Spirit. Man is placed where God should be. Those who are
called to act in this world as heaven’s ambassadors are content to seek
wisdom from erring, finite men, when they might have the wisdom
and strength of the unerring, infinite God.
The Lord does not design that the workers in His institutions shall
look to or trust in man. He desires them to be centered in Him.
Never should our publishing houses be so related to one another
that one shall have power to dictate as to the management of another.
[153]
When so great power is placed in the hands of a few persons, Satan
will make determined efforts to pervert the judgment, to insinuate
wrong principles of action, to bring in a wrong policy; in so doing he
can not only pervert one institution, but through this can gain control
of others and give a wrong mold to the work in distant parts. Thus the
influence for evil becomes widespread. Let each institution stand in
its moral independence, carrying on its work in its own field. Let the