Weighed and Wanting: Addresses on the Ten CommandmentsMoody, Dwight Lyman
Religion
Weighed and Wanting: Addresses on the Ten Commandments
Moody, Dwight Lyman
Sermons, American; Ten commandments -- Sermons
Let me give you a passage from H. L. Hastings: "A friend of mine
visited the Fiji Islands in 1844, and what do you suppose an infidel
was worth there then? You could buy a man for a musket, or if you paid
money, for seven dollars, and after you had bought him you could feed
him, starve him, work him, whip him, or eat him--they generally ate
them, unless they were so full of tobacco they could not stomach them!
But if you go there to-day you could not buy a man for seven million
dollars. There are no men for sale there now. What has made the
difference in the price of humanity? The twelve hundred Christian
chapels scattered over that Island tell the story. The people have
learned to read that Book which says: 'Ye were not redeemed with
corruptible things as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of
Christ'; and since they learned that lesson, no man is for sale
there."
Men tell me that the world is getting so much better. We talk of our
American civilization. We forget the alarming increase of crime in our
midst. It is said that there is no civilized country on the globe
where murder is so frequently committed and so seldom punished.
SUICIDE.
There is that other kind of murder that is increasing at an appalling
rate among us--suicide. There have been infidels in all ages who have
advocated it as a justifiable means of release from trial and
difficulty; yet thinking men, as far back as Aristotle, have generally
condemned it as cowardly and unjustifiable under any conditions. No
man has a right to take his own life from such motives any more than
the life of another.
It has been pointed out that the Jewish race, the people of God,
always counted length of days as a blessing. The Bible does not
mention one single instance of a good man committing suicide. In the
four thousand years of Old Testament history it records only four
suicides, and only one suicide in the New Testament. Saul, king of
Israel, and his armor-bearer, Ahithophel, Zimri and Judas Iscariot are
the five cases. Look at the references in the Bible to see what kind
of men they were.
OTHER KINDS OF MURDER.
But I want to speak of other classes of murderers that are very
numerous in this country, although they are not classified as
murderers. The man who is the cause of the death of another through
criminal carelessness is guilty. The man who sells diseased meat; the
saloon-keeper whose drink has maddened the brain of a criminal; those
who adulterate food; the employer who jeopardizes the lives of
employees and others by unsafe surroundings and conditions in harmful
occupations,--they are all guilty of blood where life is lost as a
consequence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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