Safe Leaders—We see the need of earnest, devoted men to take up the work that must be carried forward in the future …. We are not to regard any human being as one to be believed and trusted, unless it is evident that he is established in the truth of the word of God.
Some who have been leaders in the work of God are seeking to make of none effect the work that God has placed in the world to educate His people, and to prepare them to stand the test of the miracle-working powers that would make void the precious facts of faith that have for the last sixty years been given under the power of the Holy Spirit.—Letter 256, 1906 (August 1, 1906, Ministering Brethren in Australia).
The Cause Suffers—When you weaken the confidence of God’s people in their leaders, you weaken the cause of God. The minds of the people are left in uncertainty. They cannot depend anywhere. I cannot engage in the work in making prominent the weakness and errors of God’s people.—Letter 13, 1871, p. 5 (September 2, 1871 to James White).
The People Have Lost Confidence—It is working upon wrong principles that has brought the cause of God into its present embarrassment. The people have lost confidence in those who have the management of the work. Yet we hear that the voice of the Conference is the voice of God. Every time I have heard this, I have thought it was almost blasphemy. The voice of the Conference ought to be the voice of God, but it is not, because some in connection with it are not men of faith and prayer, they are not men of elevated principle. There is not a seeking of God with the whole heart; there is not a realization of the terrible responsibility that rests upon those in this institution to mold and fashion minds after the divine similitude.—Manuscript 37, 1901, p. 8 (April, 1901, Talk by Mrs. E. G. White in the Review Chapel regarding the Southern work).
Safe Leaders—We see the need of earnest, devoted men to take up the work that must be carried forward in the future …. We are not to regard any human being as one to be believed and trusted, unless it is evident that he is established in the truth of the word of God.
I saw that it is our duty in every case to obey the laws of our land, unless they conflict with the higher law which God spoke with an audible voice from Sinai, and afterward engraved on stone with His own finger. “I will put My laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to Me a people.” He who has God’s law written in the heart will obey God rather than men, and will sooner disobey all men than deviate in the least from the commandment of God. God’s people, taught by the inspiration of truth, and led by a good conscience to live by every word of God, will take His law, written in their hearts, as the only authority which they can acknowledge or consent to obey. The wisdom and authority of the divine law are supreme.
The government under which Jesus lived was corrupt and oppressive; on every hand were crying abuses—extortion, intolerance, and grinding cruelty. Yet the Saviour attempted no civil reforms. He attacked no national abuses, nor condemned the national enemies. He did not interfere with the authority or administration of those in power. He who was our example kept aloof from earthly governments. Not because He was indifferent to the woes of men, but because the remedy did not lie in merely human and external measures. To be efficient, the cure must reach men individually, and must regenerate the heart. CCh 314.3-4
The word of God is to stand on its own eternal merits; to be accepted as the word of God; to be obeyed as His voice, which declares His will to the people. The will and voice of finite man are not to be interpreted as the voice of God. CT528.
“The equality declared by our fathers in 1776, and made the fundamental law of Massachusetts in 1780, was equality before the law. Its object was to efface all political or civil distinctions, and to abolish all institutions founded upon birth. ‘All men are created equal,’ says the Declaration of Independence. ‘All men are born free and equal,’ says the Massachusetts Bill of Rights. These are not vain words. Within the sphere of their influence, no person can be created, no person can be born, with civil or political privileges not enjoyed equally by all his fellow citizens; nor can any institutions be established, recognizing distinctions of birth. Here is the great charter of every human being drawing vital breath upon this soil, whatever may be his conditions, and whoever may be his parents. He may be poor, weak, humble, or black; he may be of Caucasian, Jewish, Indian, or Ethiopian race; he may be born of French, German, English, or Irish extraction; but before the constitution of Massachusetts all these distinctions disappear. He is not poor, weak, humble, or black; nor is he Caucasian, Jew, Indian, or Ethiopian; nor is he French, German, English, or Irish; he is a man, the equal of all his fellow-men…. To some it [the state] may allot higher duties, according to higher capacities; but it welcomes all to its equal hospitable board. The state, imitating the divine justice, is no respecter of persons.” PRUS 12.5
This is the true doctrine of civil government, this is the Bible doctrine for civil government. PRUS 13.1
There is still another principle in the Declaration of Independence which is worthy of notice here. The doctrine of the nations of medieval times was that “might makes right.” If a nation possessed enough arbitrary power and physical force to accomplish a certain end, no matter how criminally aggressive, no matter how tyrannical or despotic that end might be, the power to do was always supposed to prove the rightfulness of the thing done. And back of this time, in the dawn of European history, in the days of the Roman Republic, that nation had held to the doctrine of “Vox Populi vox Dei,”—“The voice of the people is the voice of God;” in other words, the Roman doctrine was that if the majority of the people approved of a thing, it must be right. PRUS 13.3
But the Declaration of Independence, with one simple yet sweeping statement, disowns, disclaims, and discards both the Roman and the medieval theories, and substitutes in their place a principle beyond comparison with them for its lofty and holy teachings. In the last paragraph of that immortal document it is written that THESE UNITED COLONIES as FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES “have full power to levy war, conclude peace, CONTRACT ALLIANCES, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things WHICH INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do.” PRUS 13.3
Wrapped in these words was a new doctrine. Here was the enunciation of a principle hitherto unheard of. Heretofore sovereignty had been considered as being unlimited and illimitable. But the Declaration of Independence brought to the birth a new principle, that right is superior to all earthly power, whether vested in prince or potentate or in a republican form of government. With the founders of this government it was not a question of what the nation was able to do, but contrariwise, what was right for the nation to do. I quote once more from the great Sumner:— PRUS 14.1
“But the great Declaration, not content with announcing certain rights as unalienable, and therefore beyond the control of any government, still further restrains the sovereignty, which it asserts by simply declaring that the United States have ‘full power to do all acts and things which independent States may of right do.’ Here is a well-defined limitation upon the popular sovereignty. The dogma of Tory lawyers and pamphleteers-put forward to sustain the claim of parliamentary omnipotence, and vehemently espoused by Dr. Johnson in his ‘Taxation no Tyranny’-was taught, that sovereignty is in its nature illimitable, precisely as it is now loosely professed by Mr. Douglas for his handful of squatters. But this doctrine is distinctly discarded in the Declaration, and it is frankly proclaimed that all sovereignty is subordinate to the rule of right. Mark, now, the difference: all existing governments at that time, even the local governments of the colonies, stood on power without limitation. Here was a new government, which, taking its place among the nations, announced that it stood only on right, and claimed no sovereignty inconsistent with right.” PRUS 14.2
In 1837 John Quincy Adams in a Fourth of July oration at Newburyport, said:— PRUS 14.3
“The sovereign authority conferred upon the people of the colonies by the Declaration of Independence could not dispense them, nor any individual citizen of them, from the fulfilment of their moral obligations. The people who assumed their equal and separate station among the powers of the earth, by the laws of nature’s God, by that very act acknowledged themselves bound to the observance of those laws, and could neither exercise nor confer any power inconsistent with them.” PRUS 14.4
Still further alluding to the self-imposed restraints upon the sovereignty which had been established, he said:— PRUS 15.1
“The Declaration acknowledged the rule of right paramount to the power of independent States itself, and virtually disclaimed all power to do wrong. This was a novelty in the moral philosophy of nations, and it is the essential point of difference between the system of government announced in the Declaration of Independence and those systems which had until then prevailed among men…. It was an experiment upon the heart of man. All the legislators of the human race until that day had laid the foundations of all government among men in power; and hence it was that in the maxims of theory, as well as in the practise of nations, sovereignty was held to be unlimited and illimitable. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed another law, … a law of right, binding upon nations as well as individuals, upon sovereigns as well as upon subjects…. In assuming the attributes of sovereign power, the colonists appealed to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions, and neither claimed nor conferred authority to do anything but for right.” PRUS 15.2
With every nation, as with every man, an account is opened on the ledger of life in the record office above. With unerring accuracy the Infinite One keeps an account with every kindred and nation and tongue and tribe and people. “While his mercy is tendered, with calls to repentance, this account will remain open; but when the figures reach a certain amount which God has fixed, the ministry of his wrath commences. The account is closed. Divine patience ceases. There is no more pleading of mercy in their behalf.” PRUS 19.1
With men there is a hereafter. With nations there is not; and as they can not be punished or rewarded in the next world, they must be in this. Will the United States remain true to her trust? That is the question which even now is hanging in the balances of time. PRUS 19.2
* PRUS means The Perils of The Republic of The United States of America by Percy Magan Tilson book 1899
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