Article June 16, 1906 Issue

From our Exchanges

with contributions from F. W. Walker Pugh

Concluding the remarkable series of meetings in the South Congregational church, Concord, New Hampshire, where a representative of every Protestant church gave the reason for the faith that was in him, the pastor, Rev. Dr. E. W. Bishop, summed up, as the product of the composite theological utterance, as follows: "There are now more points upon which we are agreed than upon which we disagree. The chance visitor to a strange church finds it hard to tell from the preacher's words under what denominational flag he is worshiping. The blessed era is fast approaching when we as a common army will face one common foe. God hasten the day!" "For my part," said Dr. Bishop, "I would rejoice in an ideal church which should combine the evangelical fervor of the Methodists, the honest expectancy of the Adventists, the intellectual freedom of the Unitarians, the companionship and fraternity of the Free Will Baptists, the contagious optimism of the Universalists, the independence and scholarship of the Congregationalists, the beauty and dignity of the Episcopal church, the tenacity to conviction of the Baptists, the cheerful lives of the Christian Scientists, the far-reaching statesmanship and diplomacy of the Roman Catholics."

The Universalist Leader.

The same error that makes us think of the sky beginning somewhere over the tops of the hills makes us think of heaven as a distant and future fact rather than a present reality. Christ is in heaven, but heaven lies all about us. The Church needs now and again to be reminded of this. Her teachers need to be warned that because this is so it is as much their duty to make a heaven for men here on earth as it is to prepare them for a heaven hereafter. The Church can count nothing foreign to herself that makes for righteousness here. She dare not by her indifference or aloofness repel those who, whether within or without her fold, are giving themselves heart and soul to the service of their fellows. The whole life of the community, its politics, its business, its charities, its educational and municipal activities, are as much the affair of the Church as any of those things to which we mistakenly appropriate the term "spiritual."—The Churchman.

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