Article December 12, 1908 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Charles Cuthbert, John Haynes Holmes

[Rev. Charles Cuthbert Hall as quoted in The Outlook.]

"As we begin to realize how complacently and confidently we have assumed that the world can only be Christianized by adopting our theologies and our sectarian forms, solemn questions suggest themselves: Who ever gave credentials of universality to Western clerical orders, or to Western ecclesiastical institutions, or to Western denominational confessions? Has God ever pledged Himself to complete the Christianizing of the world through these means? Has God ever limited Himself to the Anglo-Saxon interpretations of the Christian faith, and set aside as unusable those extraordinary gifts of religious discernment that are peculiar to the temperament of the East? Has God ever disowned those mighty religious aspirations that fill the old ethnic faiths, surviving in pathetic vestiges of their former majesty amidst the modern degenerations of those faiths? Is He not, by the might of His spirit, able to subdue and purge and transform and recreate those gifts and those aspirations, dedicating them to the knowledge and worship of the Son of God? St. Paul, amidst the decay of Israel, could cry, 'Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. ... God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew.'"

[The Examiner.]

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