Article July 4, 1901 Issue

Religious Items

In a sermon on "Happiness and Unhappiness," based on the account of Jesus' appearance to the disciples at the lakeside after his resurrection, the Rev. I. W. Gate, a Universalist clergyman, says: "The change wrought in the disciples by the appearance of Jesus was the difference between listless drudgery and joyful service, between un happiness and happiness. The secret of it is the secret which will solve the great question of satisfied living. Jesus supplied for his disciples an overmastering motive. As yet it was spasmodic and intermittent, because it had not taken full possession, and because they had not yet learned to walk by faith instead of by sight. But his absence has taught them how much he was to them, that he had in their three years of companionship raised the tone of their lives and inspired them with such hopes, and opened up such vistas of spiritual beauty, that to abandon these new ideals was to sink into despair, and to live for them was to find their highest satisfaction."

James H. Pettee, in an article in The congregationalist and Christian World on "Japan Within and Without," says: "'Japan's Emperor has a grandson; the prince imperial has a son; the nation has three generations of royalty or "three living emperors to reverence," as yesterday I heard one impasioned speaker express it. Japan does well to give glad welcome to the royal infant. For the first time in hundreds of years purity in family life has been observed in the imperial palace and monogamous marriages received the sanction of the court. At last, as predicted a year ago when the crown prince was so auspiciously married, japan has turned her back upon one more feature of Chinese teaching and adopted the Western Christian standard of family ethies. Japanese orators not only express great satisfaction over this auspicious event early in the first year of the new century, but they predict that when the prince reaches a proper age he will be sent around the world on a tour of observation, and a few go so far as to voice the expectation that it will be as a Christian prince. May it so come to pass." "

The Rev. F. W. Perkins says in the Universalist Leader : "The Old 'Testament stories are unlike other stories in that they have been used by men whose sole interest was in religion, and who used them as the natural instrumentality for teaching the great truths which God had taught them. We study them, not to learn seience, but to learn and have enforeed the foundation truths of religion. Many other valuable sources of religious suggestion are open to us. but we study the Old Testament stories because to Israel was given the mission of seeing and declaring the root idea, and without the idea at its root the religion of any man or any time, though it may have many beautiful elements, will be but a feeble sentimentalism and will at last wither and die. That idea is that God is "the Eternal who loveth righteousness,' and His simple, but unyielding demand is that men 'cease to do evil, learn to do well.' "

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