Article October 11, 1900 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from Horace Bushnell

In an editorial headed "A Word to the Brethren," the (Baptist) Examiner says: "We have no sympathy with the pessimistic spirit, and do not permit ourselves to believe that present conditions will be of long duration; but optimism must not blind us to the fact that the spiritual state of the churches is the reverse of encouraging, and that there is much justification for grave concern in the temper and tendencies of the period. This stricture is not made in a spirit of fault-finding. Facts carry their own comment. For some time past the record of conversions has been extremely meagre, and an average acquaintance with the conversation and modes of life of professing Christians would induce the belief that the cultivation of personal piety is, at present, far from being an absorbing concern."

Rev. George C. Lorimer, D.D., the eminent Boston preacher, said in a recent sermon published in the Watchman: "Religion is also an excitant to unrest and conflict, and we must not shrink from recognizing its possible disturbing influence. There is a sense in which Christ sent a sword on the earth. Not that the truth was to be advanced by violence, but rather that it would provoke violence. At the first, Christianity had to propagate itself in the face of persecution, and now, as ever, the blood of the martyr is the seed of the church. When religion has reached that bloodless character that it arouses no antagonism in such a world as this there will be reason to expect that it has ceased to be what it was when it was first proclaimed."

The Boston Transcript says: "A somewhat unusual case will come up in the Supreme Court of Connecticut within a few weeks. A Hartford man named Hall, left a will bequeathing $10,000 for the purpose of combatting the fundamental Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul. His natural heirs have opposed probate on the ground that it would be contrary to public policy to permit such a will to stand. There will probably be no claim made that the testator was not in his ordinary sound mind when he made the will, for it was in line with his usual operations when living, inasmuch as he had spent thousands of dollars publishing tracts attacking this same doctrine."

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