Article July 10, 1902 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from I. O. R., ANON, FELIX ADLER

William Elliot Griffis, D. D., has an article in a recent issue of The Boston Transcript under the title "Is Christianity Deelining?" in which occurs this paragraph: "In reality this is a religious age. Though labels may be re-written or transferred, the trend of things is nearness to the divine Founder, and this is increasingly manifest—whether those to whom tradition is hallowed like it or not—by the removal of many courses of intermediaries between the men of to-day and the Son of Man. To those who see the reality of things, there is transformation indeed, but it is of the tree not of the cloud, that is, normal and beautiful evolution. Those who realize that all true progress in Christianity consists in a deeper insight and closer apprehension of the original ideas of the Master, will not be cast down but cheered. So much is certain, that when the Church lives more like her Master and goes forth seeking to save, when she more clearly apprehends the truth which he lived before he taught it, when she substitutes the simplicity of his teaching for the vast accumulations which have been deposited upon it, when she stands for righteousness and for righteousness only, there will be nothing to mourn over either in the phenomenon or the leavening. There are not two gospels but only one. Between those who seek worldly culture and selfish gain on the one hand, and there who are on fire for God in self-denial there will always be contention. Yet although renunciation and sacrifice will ever form part of true religion, yet self-culture and the wholeness of life are equal factors in the one undivided scheme of eternal evolution. The Church which has the widest outlook, and which most fully ministers to the needs and service of the human soul will never lack for members. Only as the good news of God is made convincingly clear and the Church becomes more like her seeking. healing, and saving Founder, can the decline in Church membership both as to quality and quantity be arrested. There is no other patent medicine or prescription of the faculty that can heal her disease."

God is not afraid of a miracle. From mission lands comes abundant and trustworthy testimony of incidents which admit of no other interpretation than that of direct supernatural interference. The biographies of Sehwartz of Paton of Mackay of Uganda, of Livingstone. of Carey. of half a hundred others should be sufficient to convince even the most sceptical that wonders, physical and material wonders, are still a recognized agency of God for the furtherance of His kingdom among peoples to whom such a mode of revelation is fitting and effective. Dr. Pierson has brought together in a little work, called "Miracles of Missions," and in his new "Acts of the Apostles" an incontrovertible array of facts to show that God is not above using demonstrations to sense where such demonstrations will accomplish what the demonstration to reason would not accomplish. If these phenomena fail to square with text-book theories of the way in which the universe is ordered. allowance must be made. even in behalf of the wisest, for partial knowledge. There may still be some things in heaven and earth not dreamed of in our philosophy.— This Christian Adrocate.

It is a pleasing but often a deceiving occupation to dwell upon the similarity of our doctrines to those held in primitive days: for doctrine means little save in so far as it is the outgrowth of life and is itself worked over into new and progressive life; and the average of present-day Christianity, or let us say of present-day Baptist Christianity to be specific, is hardly nineteen centuries ahead of that of the Churches that Peter and Paul served. They had, indeed, grave sins and gross weaknesses which are exceptional today: but they had great graces and a high level of endurance and heroism which can scarcely be matched in our time: hence we turn our minds more upon Christianity as a life which is mainly concerned with every-day problems met in the light of the kingdom of heaven, and less upon Christian as a theory which one is to accept or to reject. That is the same thing as saying that what we want is to let the Spirit of God guide our daily living, as the early Christians and the saints of all ages have been willing to do, and found blessedness therein.—The Standard.

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