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Show llrtiii, ' - It! IIIIiIN IntonMbanal Unilorm M - .IM UilUT7! Smvr School Lm. HH b.By DR. KENNETH JfOREMAM i SCRIPTURE: Act 19:23-41. DEVOTIONAL READING! Romans 13M-10. For a Belier City Lesson for September 19, 19-18 U TfOR A BETTER CITY" Is a. J- good slogan. No one would think of objecting to It. If the great city of Ephesus, capital and metrop- rssmmii olis of the wea,th-MlMz'ty wea,th-MlMz'ty iest and mosl lnick- !f, , ''yfA ly populated prov-" prov-" 'AX'1, ince of the Roman X&lffiffify EmPire' had had a chamber com-'tffi&0$mi' com-'tffi&0$mi' merce. no doubt X0m they would all have "'Mt-X Deen m favor of a tJ'AK't... 1 Better City. There would be no argu- Ir, Foreman . , .... ment about that. The question is: What makes a city better? Four different ideas on that line two very bad ones and two good ones can be seen in the story of Acts 19. You should raad the story itself before looking over these comments. com-ments. Because we are beginning toward the end of the story, with the very lowest and silliest of the four ideas how to make a city better. bet-ter. It is a very simple idea: Just "h6ller," yell, make a demonstration. demonstra-tion. Make it long, make it loud, and the city will be the better for It. For two mortal hours that absurd ab-surd mass-meeting kept the uproar going: "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" A curious thing, the mob-mind. mob-mind. If something is true, how can noise make it truer? If a thing is a lie, how can all the shouting In the world make It respectable? But the mob-mind thinks that if a thing is said loudly enough and by enough people, It Is bound to be true. So that theater-full of fools wasted a good afternoon shouting a lie into the deaf blue heavens. It did Diana no good. She was as dead as Mar-ley's Mar-ley's ghost, she had never lived, in fact It was no use drumming up the decibels. Do you know people who think they can make your town better by shouting about it? It won't work. You can make a town or county famous if you shout long, enough; but you won't make it better. bet-ter. . Making Money . THE SILVERSMITHS there' in' Ephesus had another theory. : The way they looked at it, the big, thing is money. They used to make! money selling their little silver j shrines. Now this fellow Paul had' come along, persuading people thatj hand-made gods are no gods at all, and the trade in "sacred" trinkets ! had fallen off. It looked like a bad1 year for the silversmiths. To make things better, they decided, theyi needed more money. More bu3i-nessl bu3i-nessl More production! The fact that what they produced was not only worthless but actually harmful, harm-ful, did not seem to bother them. Do you know people like that to- i day? Abiding By the Law THE TOWN CLERK of Ephesus had a simple idea, vastily better bet-ter than these other two. He saw1 no sense in the mass meeting, he seems not to have been taken in by the silversmiths' crocodile tears. If anything was wrong in Ephesus. he said, the courts were open, and trials were open, and trials could be held. We have laws let us live by them; that was the gist of his idea. That is not bad advice. All honor to the honest ser-ants ser-ants of the publio who now as then give their best efforts to seeing that good laws are made and well enforced. Changing Lives SPEAKING OF LAWS, there are three kinds of people in the world. One kind will not obey the laws whatever they are. These are the criminal classes. A second kind say "inside the law" but they never advance a step beyond them. A third kind, too rare, will go far beyond the law's requirements in, personal living and in social helpfulness. help-fulness. Now Paul had been in the city of Ephesus for some months, and he had nothing to do with the laws of that city. Yet what he was doing was more effective in making that city better than anything the courts could have done. For what he was doing was nothing less than changing lives. "The trouble with people is that they're people," and the business busi-ness of Christianity first of all is changing people. It Is no use hanging out the slogan "For a Better City" unless you are working for better people. A tree is no healthier than its roots, and a community's roots are the characters of her people. And from St. Paul's day to this, the one and only organization which sets out to change people from the inside, in-side, is the Christian church. (Copyright by fh nlernalfonoJ Council oi Reuqlous Education on bohall ot 40 Pioiesfaat denominations. Released bj WNU Foatmia.) |