BY MRS. S. M. I. HENRY.
As it is true that “God is in the generation of the righteous” (Ps. 14:5), so it is true that he is not in the generation of the unrighteous; and where he is not, there is neither safety nor honor. This is equally true and momentous whatever shade of interpretation we give to the word “generation,”-—whether we use it as verb or noun,— and in this fact lies all the force of heredity as well as of environment. God, in his beneficence has so determined, in Christ, that if he is forgotten or even repudiated at one point in life, and we are consequently overtaken by evil, yet, by true repentance and seeking unto him, We may be able to find him and his help, when we shall earnestly seek him. Jer. 29:12, 13. And we can trust him to go back along the path that we had traveled without him to our loss, and gather up all that is worth recovering of our mistaken past, and use it to the glory of his truth. Sometimes it is by the remembrance of sins and failures repented of that a man is made capable of being a soul-winner, even in his own home.
Herein we behold a part of the mystery of the , love of God—that .although he may not have been recognized in the act of generation, he may be later sought and found, so that somewhere, sometime, when the poor delinquents will, his merciful love may be; brought to bear, and the life that came into the world loaded with the results of parental folly may be saved and ennobled; for the promise is to us and our “children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call” (Acts 2:39), and his call is to “whosoever will.”
But this work of recovery cannot be done easily; it will not do itself. It is harder to win back a lost touch of purity and truth than to build up a fortune when one is old. And since God has been so universally left out of the generation of our race, it becomes the great question how his purity may be recovered; or rather, how the children may escape the consequences of that blind rashness which brought them into being without him.
There is no question but that multitudes of children have been born who never would have been born but for sin; and that somewhere along the line, every family has its share of them. Some have gone so far as to say of such a child that he was predoomed to eternal death. Some parents who knew in themselves that a certain one of their family was especially a child of sin have carried always a terrible fear that no efforts for its salvation would avail; and so have been given over to a sorrow for which there seemed to be no remedy, even in God. But this is because they have failed to understand the loving will of the Heavenly Father. 1 Peter 3:9. I fully believe that the word of God teaches that since all were conceived in sin, since all have died in Adam, so all may be born anew to life in Christ; and even the most unfortunate product of sin, the most hardened child of marital cruelty, may be led into the way of eternal life.
True, many “go astray as soon as they are born” (Ps. 58:3), even in apparently Christian homes, and never are found going right. Such children have become the most perplexing problems to those who are acquainted with the word of God and the expectations of those who believe it. Many an unbeliever is looking curiously on at the strange incongruity of a home of prayer, and its profligate children, and saying in his heart, “Aha! aha! where is now thy God?” Many a man and woman whom I have found in my work have, like Job and Jeremiah, cursed the hour in which they were begotten and the day in which they were born (Job 3:3; Jer. 20:14), because of the sinning to which they were apparently doomed from the first. And some of these, because they have seen the light in homes of prayer, under the shadow of the church, have been very hard to lead to Christ. But this has been done; and so it has been demonstrated that even such can be made glad and strong in him who came to save the utterly lost. It is not with small comfort that I come to these studies, because of the revelations which years of work for the most degraded have brought of the plan of God for man ; and I have a large hope of helping my readers to the solution of this home problem.
May I not ask every father and mother to whom these articles come to pray most earnestly that, from this time especially, the pen that writes may be guided by His own Spirit as we come to the heart of the subject which we have been approaching in these weekly studies.
( To be continued. )
ADVENT REVIEW AND SABBATH HERALD
Mar. 9, 1897 Vol. 74 No. 10
(Written from the Sanitarium in Battle Creek, MI)
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