Article June 28, 1900 Issue

Religious Items

The Congregationalist publishes the following prayer of Jeremy Taylor: "O Almighty God, give to thy servant a meek and gentle spirit that I may be slow to anger, and easy to mercy and forgiveness. Give me a wise and constant heart that I may never be moved to an intemperate anger for any injury that is done or offered. Lord, let me ever be courteous and easy to be entreated; let me never fall into a peevish or contentious spirit, but follow peace with all men, offering forgiveness, inviting them by courtesies, ready to confess my own errors, apt to make amends and desirous to be reconciled. Let no sickness or cross accident, no employment or weariness, make me angry or ungentle and discontented, or unthankful or uneasy to them that minister to me; but in all things make me like unto the holy Jesus. Amen."

In a recent editorial the New Church Messenger says: "Why preach always to the sinner in ourselves or in our brother? Better a million times to make our appeal to the slumbering spirit of good, to the captive soul sleeping and bound with chains. What are the powers of evil beside the glorious and unconquerable might of the spiritual man aroused to break the illusory bonds of a lower inheritance and habit and to lay hold of his prior birthright to a share in the limitless creation and unfoldment of the Kingdom of Heaven? In the contemplation of our infinite opportunities how our petty impulses to wrong thinking and wrong doing shrivel up and roll away like a cloud that is past, and we stand facing the glorious East with its thrilling promise of a never ending day!"

Charles William Pearson, A.M., of the department of English literature in the Northwestern University, in an open letter to the General Methodist Conference, published in the Chicago Tribune, says: "The question is not, Are we doing some good? but, Are we doing all the good we can? How can we in consistency ask the heathen to abandon their errors if we refuse to abandon ours—ask them to receive new truth from us if we ourselves refuse new truth? If we refuse the flood of light that the nineteenth century has poured upon the world shall we not become blind leaders of the blind? 'Be ye perfect' is the law, and when once that is deliberately set aside not only is it impossible to progress, it is impossible to stand still; the only possible thing is decline and decay."

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