Article January 11, 1908 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from R. J. Campbell, Marion D. Shutter

[Rev. R. J. Campbell, M.A., in The British Congregationalist.]

All our social miseries arise from the fact that, as a people, we are so slow to learn that to hear the cry of human anguish is to hear God's call to relieve it. We have no business to dally with the question as to who deserves this or who has incurred that; the law of love demands that we should manifest the works of God in destroying the root causes of human misery. I do not care where suffering came from or whose fault it is; it is not the will of God that it should remain. We are so accustomed to take granted that it is part of the permanent order of things that we never dream of summoning our full divine resources in dealing with it. I suppose it would startle the ordinary British citizen to be told that he is guilty of sin in believing that poverty, and all the pain that follows poverty, have a sort of vested right to exist, but so it is. The real sinner is not the sufferer so much as the people who go on living quite comfortably in the assumption that such suffering will last as long as the world lasts, and that it is divinely ordained. There is no greater devil's lie poisoning the public conscience in this land of ours to-day.

[Rev. Marion D. Shutter in The Universalist Leader.]

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FROM OUR EXCHANGES

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