FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Frederick A. Bisbee, L. C. Littell, Herbert A. Jump, J. G. Townsend

[Christian World, London.]

We can only keep good by the incessant effort to be better. There is no standing still. You go on or you go down. Note, too,—and it is a glorious fact to note,—that, however meager a moral and spiritual nature you start with, it can be indefinitely developed by an honest daily endeavor. You can, for instance, cultivate your heart, cultivate the love of your fellow-man. You can do it by a steady inward striving; by a determined extrusion of thoughts and feelings that are contrary to love. You can resolve not to speak ill or to think ill of your brother; to pay him as much respect when he is absent as when he is present. You can develop the habit of putting yourself mentally into his place, of realizing his difficulties, his sorrows. And it is amazing to find how this industry, honestly followed, develops in us; how it opens up branch industries which offer similar products.

[Rev. Frederick A. Bisbee, D.D., in Universalist Leader.]

The great need of the world is not more money, not more laws, not more offices, not more schemes for human betterment, but more of just plain, good, true men; men who are full grown in every department of their being; men of individual, personal righteousness; men of intergrity and character; men with a sensitive conscience. The best office in the world will fail unless you have a good man to administer it; the greatest wealth is a curse except a good man manage it. Every social system ever instituted has met wreck because of the failure of the individual man in it; or met success in proportion to the good men in it. All of our evils, social, economic, political, have their primary cause in evil men. The only way to reform the world is to reform the men in it. Put enough good men into your community, and they will solve your problems.

[Rev. L. C. Littell in New York Observer.]

Material civilization is busy finding out God's reservoirs of supply. This knowledge, supplemented by securing means to bring it to the surface, to the spot where most needed, and distributing it, is our work. Supply does not create a demand. We, as Christians, are as well stocked for doing good as a coal-mine; but that never warmed any one or made a home more comfortable, or the world better; it must be brought to the surface and distributed; that is the work of the owner of the mine. A buried gospel is of no more use—it is simply power unemployed and going to waste; and he has received command from the Master—"Occupy till I come."

[Rev. Herbert A. Jump in Congregationalist and Christian World.]

This imitative approach to God by the way of ministering deed, this "doing all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can as long as ever we can," is sometimes underrated by the ritualistic souls, but it remains nevertheless the best authenticated highway into the divine presence. If ye do the will, ye shall know. Acquaintance with Christ will come from the reproduction of the Christ-life of helpfulness in the world today. From wherever you are you can move straight into the glory of a deep experience of God, if only you pursue this program of being busy with love-deeds.

[J. G. Townsend, D.D., in Christian Register.]

Religion may be defined as our sense of God, our faith in the eternal truth, the eternal beauty. It is man's passion for the perfect, his unquenchable desire to improve. It is his desire to construct, to create. It is the prayer of the soul to break through the animal husk and rise into a larger, fuller, more beautiful life.

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