A great many recent utterances of leading men have implied that the future welfare of the United States was so assured that nothing could seriously retard it. Our readers will easily recall utterances of prominent men and journals that sound much like the boast of Nebuchardnezzar: "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty?" In the prosperity that has come upon the country during the past four or five years, there has been an increasing tendency to overlook the part of God in it. We have attributed it to almost everything but to Him. Now in the midst of it, the withholding of the rain for a few weeks transforms every outlook. It makes us realize that there are other factors in the prosperity of the country than the energy of our people or the skill of our financiers, or the enactments of Congress. Whatever else may have been our sins, we realize that we have not glorified God, "in whose hand our breath is, and whose are all our ways.—The Watchman.

Rev. George A. Gordon, D.D., in an article in The Christian Register says: "Finally, there is the religious need, the profoundest need of all. The most significant thing in our life to-day is the cry among our best people for a profounder religious experience. We are weak and poor and miserable, of little worth to ourselves, and of less to the community because of our superficiality. That is more and more recognized among all our serious people. Stand by your individual thought. Stand by your individual feeling. Stand by your individual purpose, but at the same time open the depths of your moral being to the sovereign presence of God. All lasting unity finds its source there. The space that is below is a divided space. It is divided by streets, by houses, by fences, by rivers, and by seas. The space that is above is undivided, continuous, entire. The earthly mind is the fountain of our division, our strife, our prejudice, our isolation. The heavenly mind is the great mother of union and power."

President Angell, in his baccalaureate sermon at the University of Michigan, as reported in the Detroit Free Press, said: "In the prayerfulness of our Lord we find a most worthy example for the scholar. If there was a being on earth who, it would seem, could afford to dispense with prayer, whose unaided resources would suffice for any exigency, that being was Jesus Christ. But his life was pre-eminently a life of prayer. The windows of his soul were always open heavenward, and in answer to his prayer gales of inspiration from heaven were always filling his heart. The very source of his life and power was in his constant and prayerful communication with his Father. He taught his followers in all persuasive ways by word and by example that they should go to the same source for strength and light."

It is not strength of brain that saves a man, or orthodoxy of creed, or connection with a Church. All these have often proved to be but ropes of sand. They are not proof against the tides of temptation. There must be firm, heaven-implanted principle—for no one is safe in business, or in politics, or in social life, or anywhere, when conscience is unloosed from God. The parting of the cable may be unseen for a while, it may even be unsuspected; but it is a mere question of time how soon the backslider may strike the rocks. Jesus Christ never insures any one who unites with his Church, and yet has no "anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the vail," and "binds fast to Christ himself."

Theodore L. Cuyler, D.D.

Rev. S. A. Eliot, D.D., president of the Unitarian Association, at the recent Anniversaries said:—

"Our task is not so much to conceive new ideals as to achieve the ideals we have already discovered. Our peril lies in the fact that, having apprehended great ideals, we do not live up to them.

"Religious liberty is not a competition in which the prize is taken by the individual or the Church that can exhibit the greatest singularity. It does not consist in neglect of the counsels of common Christian experience. We are not, because we are free, obliged to indulge in whims and eccentricities, and to strain the bonds of brotherhood to the uttermost."

Dr. Maurice H. Harris of New York, in an address before the New York State Conference of Religion, remarked, that if the Conference ventured to formulate an interreligious creed it would run somewhat in this way: "Religiousness is the ultimate orthodoxy; wickedness is the ultimate heresy; materialistic life is virtually atheism; mammon is always a false god; hell and heaven are of our making and our time." Some other and more explanatory articles were mentioned, and the whole matter summed up in an eighth proposition, "Good life evolves the best faith and readjusts false views to the truth."

I. M. A.
In The Universalist Leader.

There is only one way by which a man can be made peaceful, and that is by his being made good. Nothing else contributes to the tranquillity of a human spirit except its conformity to the divine will. It is submission to the divine commandments and appointments, it is the casting off of self, with all its agitations and troubles, that secures our entering into rest. What a man needs for peace is that his relations with God should be set right, that his own nature should be drawn into one and harmonized with itself, and that his relations with men should also be rectified.

Alexander McLaren, D.D.

The real and satisfying interpretations of life lie with those who are spiritually minded, and therefore in harmony with the divine will and order. One who had drifted far from the moorings of his early faith, but had returned after many years of pitching and tossing upon the sea of unbelief, said that our estimate of the worth of life depends upon our belief in God and the immortality of the soul. There must be vital association with spiritual things in order to give real value to life, to disclose its deeper meanings, and to bring one into possession of its richest treasures.

The Christian Advocate.

The only salvation is life. In the deepest sense of the word it is character, the character of God repeated in us. He only is saved who has within himself a pulsating, spiritual life. The life in us may be humble, but just as the acorn has in itself the promise of the oak, so our life has enwrapped in it the loftiest attainment. It is potential perfection. And God looks upon us, and in His grace accepts us, not solely as we are, but as through Christ we shall be.

Richard M. Vaughan.
In The Standard.

Opportunity is duty no matter when it meets us. The world needs Christians who are ready at any time to speak a word or do a deed by which the kingdom of God may be advanced. Such an one keeps his soul aglow and finds the deep truth in the words of our Lord. "It is more blessed to give than to receive."—The Standard.

There is one thing that makes life mighty in its veriest trifles, worthy in its smallest deeds, that delivers it from monotony, that delivers it from insignificance. All will be great, nothing will be overpowering, when, living in communion with Jesus Christ, we say as he says. "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me."—Maclaren.

It is not in understanding a set of doctrines; not in outward comprehension of the "scheme of salvation." that rest and peace are to be found, but in taking up, in all lowliness and meekness, the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ.—F. W. Robertson.

Theology, anyway, is no more than speculation; it always stumbles along in the wake of spiritual experience. Experience cornea first, and theology afterward.

Rev. R. J. Campbell,
In Homiletic Review.

No man is the mere resultant of his past misdeeds, but each has in himself a fountain of incalculable spontaneity, and lies all open to the inundation of the moral forces of humanity and the benignant spirit of the world.—J. W. Chadwick.

That is the theology best suited to the age which is put forth by living men of the age, drinking of the living Word for themselves by the power of the living Spirit.

James McCosh, D.D.

Professor George Albert Coe, in an article written for the Morning Star, says: "Denominationalism, from being a doctrinal squabble, has become loving emulation in good works."

We are not to wait to be in preparing to be. We are not to wait to do in preparing to do, but to find in being and doing preparation for higher being and doing.—Henry Giles.