[Continent.]

"What insures the integrity of the church?" "The life of Christ in the lives of Christians." O excellent and comfortable sentiment—for times of quietude and concord! But when suspicion is abroad—when jealous churchmen think they see defection, disintegration, and apostasy threatening—is it enough to tie to then? In a real crisis will a merely spiritual defense prove sufficient defense for a visible church in a palpable world? With vital factors of religion at stake, does not loyalty call for something more humanly strenuous and militant? It is very natural, certainly when concrete dangers seem to loom over the church, that men should want to resort to safeguards that are concrete too—to the creed, the appointed ceremonial, the denominational organization, the ecclesiastical court.

Nevertheless, this disposition, however natural, is a snare and temptation. If hazards of false teaching and mistaken ideals multiply, the church's need is not to rear higher its external defenses, but most solemnly to renew its reliance on the invincible and infallible spiritual leadership of the Master who dwells within it. When the presence of Jesus Christ in the church seems less potent for its protection than measures of ecclesiastical authority, the mood cries to heaven for a livelier realization of Jesus Christ.

[New York Observer.]

Orthodoxy, which means simply right thinking and by implication teaching, is the desideratum in theology, just as much as it is in chemistry, biology, geology, or psychology. In any science there are always certain positions that are sound and others that are unsound, and to discover and support the former rather than the latter is to be orthodox in that science. In the interpretation of the Bible and the explication and application of the moral law there is a right way and a wrong way, and to hold or teach that in this matter any man's opinion is as good as any other's, is perfect nonsense, just as much as it would be to say that the opinions of a tyro in chemistry or a novitiate in philosophy are as good as those of a Helmholtz or a Bowne. We can all learn somewhat from one another, but in theology as in everything else we can best learn from those who know most about it, not in a merely technical or rationalistic way, but as having their learning wrought out under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and tested by a consistent and spiritual view of the whole tenor of revelation.

[Rev. Matt S. Hughes, D.D., in Zion's Herald.]

Jesus Christ in his world-ministry not only gave us a new moral ideal, and embodied that ideal in his own person, but beyond that he again parts company with all other religious teachers in providing for man's most desperate need. In actual experience it is discovered that a knowledge of duty is not the greatest provision for the necessities of human nature. It is not enough that we see the good and know the right, for there may be mental receptivity to the loftiest teaching coupled with moral inability as to the performance. He who "spake as never man spake" was not limited to the task of telling the blind they ought to see, the deaf they ought to hear, the degraded they ought to rise, and the sinners they ought to do good. He did not tantalize human weakness with impossible visions of excellence; but of all teachers, he alone promised power to willing souls, that they might make the splendid ideals of his teaching and example shining realities in their lives. His was the promise to disciples: "Ye shall receive power."

[Rev. A. W. Grose, D.D., in Universalist Leader.]

When we cease to claim for our Bible a monopoly of revelation, and put it, like all other books, squarely on its own merits, testing it by its proved value to the race, we see how groundless have been the fears of those who dared not use their intelligence for fear that they might lose their faith. The Bible is no talisman to be framed in boards and gilt and placed on the parlor center-table as a substitute for Christian worship or Christian living,—it is the simple yet inexpressibly eloquent record of how some of the greatest souls of the ages found God and were found of Him. Through temptation and struggle, through discouragement and sorrow, in repentance and aspiration, in the winning of character and the overcoming of selfishness, doubt, and sin, we see the life of God coming into the hearts of His children, and our own hearts burn within us as we find there a message to our need.

[Rev. Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr., in Outlook.]

Our metaphysical relationship to God and the metaphysical relationship of Jesus to God may well be the same—we are both sons; but one has completely realized his sonship, the other has only begun to grasp its full meaning. The one has been completely filled by the life of the eternal Spirit, and the result is the divine Jesus, the incarnation; the others, you and I, have given God and the things of the Spirit a meager welcome to our hearts. The result is inefficiency and selfishness. This is the great human travesty and tragedy. If the experience of Jesus is a repeatable experience, then he means more to me than he ever could if I believed that he must be forever in a different category.

[Prof. A. Duff, M.A., D.D., LL.D., in Christian Commonwealth.]

The religious situation today is remarkable. On one hand the abandonment, within the churches, of old fancies, fancied duties, and fancied doctrines is going on by leaps and bounds. In thirty years the "Christian" attitude toward, say, church attendance or Scripture has changed enormously; yet those changes are nothing to what is at present being accomplished. But while that goes on within, there is without a marvelous eagerness to learn what Jesus was, what the Bible is; what God, life, man, goodness, society, righteousness are.

[Christian Work and Evangelist.]

Memorial day should, with the Fourth of July, become more and more a day for dwelling upon the subject of Christian citizenship. We say Christian citizenship, for that is the only kind that will save the nation. The fundamental distinction between Christianity and the world is that the world conceives everything from the point of view of what it can get, while Christianity approaches every relationship of life, asking what it can give or render.

[Rev. David Utter in Christian Register.]

"Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead," is a Scriptural exhortation attributed to Paul. But the death from which he would have those to whom he wrote rise, is indifference to life's greatness and worth. Rise up and be a man, find your work and do it gladly and well. Be alive to your responsibilities, your privileges, your duties, and your opportunities of vision and joy,—this I take to be his meaning.

[Christian Register.]

Modern salvation lies in doing rather than in believing something. A thousand old creeds are like the mummies: they are admirable to illustrate the path of humanity forward, but they are no longer rallying standards. What we want is to discover the basic principles of a right life. Jesus summed up the Old Testament law in the golden rule, and perhaps the real strength of Christianity is that it can be modernized.

[Universalist Leader.]

We do not surrender our wills to the self-centered and isolated will of Jesus Christ. We follow him, we surrender to him, we seek to obey him, because in him and through him we verily believe we get a glimpse of the eternal truth about the world beyond him, and about the heart of God.