| The Joy of Service |
Chapter 6 |
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Men hang on the preacher’s utterance to learn how to live, so as not to fail of eternal life. But suppose that the teaching is wrong – what will the consequences be? The minister’s half hour on Sunday before a listening people is a holy time. Not a moment of it should ever be wasted. Not a word should ever be spoken which is not after the pattern of sound words which God has given. A wrong interpretation may start a soul on a course of fatal error.
A Christian woman has told how all her life has been shadowed by the effect of the preaching she heard in her girlhood. Only the sterner phases of truth were preached – God’s justice and terribleness. So she was made to dread God. His name meant terror to her. No thought of love found a place in the conception of the Deity which the preaching of those years left on her mind. Later, the truth of God’s Fatherhood, with all that fatherhood, interpreted by the life, teachings, and death of Jesus Christ, means, was brought to her; but the early teaching had so wrought itself into the very fibre of her life, into all her thoughts, feelings, and motives, that its effect never has been altogether neutralized. Her life still suffers from the mistaken teachings of her girlhood years.
Countless lives have been hurt or marred by unfaithful or mistaken handling of truth in those who were truth’s ordained guardians. The teacher of the young comes under the same responsibility. The writer of books, to whom the gift of composition is entrusted, is charged with a sacred duty in this regard. There is no distinction of moral and secular in the matter of authorship. It is just as important that the novelist, the romancer, and the poet shall follow the pattern of sound words as that the writer of books of devotion or religious instruction shall do it. This puts a most serious responsibility upon every one who can write what people will read. Many a popular story has carried in its pages perversions of truth, misinterpretations, errors, insidious scoffs or sneers, which have marred life and wrecked destinies.
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