Article April 27, 1907 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from John Bascom, John Reed Shannon, Marion D. Shutter

[The Christian Work and Evangelist.]

For three years Jesus, who based his judgment of men and women on the spirit that animated them, who laid all his emphasis on the spirit as opposed to the letter, had been traveling up and down Palestine, spreading the message of his ideal of a society where love and kindness should govern all the relations of men. He had taken what was good in the religion of his times, yet by his emphasis on the underlying reality and his disregard for the external form, by his carelessness for such things as strict Sabbath observance and social considerations, he had sorely shocked the Pharisees, those good churchmen who held salvation to be merely a matter of religious creeds and observances, and by the broad spirit of his humanity he had roused their bitter enmity. [John Bascom, LL.D., in The Christian Register.]

The supreme purpose of the pulpit is the exposition of divine love and a vital transfer of it to all conditions and all classes in human society. As long as a preacher keeps within the bounds of Christian belief—and it is a wide field and no man's paddock—and converts that belief into a life ever more tender, more penetrating, more explicit, we should accept him as one of God's messengers, ordained under His own hand and possessed of the only apostolic succession that can ever master the world. It is these men that ate to transform the world into the kingdom of heaven, not those who have established themselves as gatekeepers, and turn back more than they admit. [John Reed Shannon, S.T.D., in the Western Christian Advocate.]

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