Article August 12, 1911 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from A. E. Owen Jones, George A. Johnston Ross, Thomas W. Barbour, Charles R. Brown

[Continent.]

Consider those who sink their lives in money-getting. "How small the world has come to be!" When the uttermost concern of a man is to multiply the accretions of his property, when the most eager and laborious use of his brain is in constant, cunning estimation of chances to turn a bigger profit in his next transaction, when with unflinching hardness of heart he listens to the grinding of the commercial machine that abrades new wealth for himself out of quivering flesh and blood; when money, money, and again money walls in the whole treadmill round of his life; when there is no fragment remaining in him of a gentle and mollifying recollection that other men also love life and hope for prosperity and desire comfort for their wives and children; when there is no consideration of the spiritual call to use wealth for human service, no sensitiveness to the finer business motives lying in the conception of trade itself as an instrument of blessing to the civilized world, no estimation of the greater wealth in true character and the unfeigned respect for one's fellows—nothing in all the horizon but self and gold—how small, how constricted, how mean has the money-getter's world become! [Rev. A. E. Owen Jones in Christian Commonwealth.]

It is fair to assume, I think, that most of us have been influenced by the work of literary and historical criticism. We have come to look at the Bible as a far more human book than we used to consider it. But though criticism has made the Bible more human, it has not therefore made it any the less divine. It still remains the word of God, because it remains the production of men who were in closest spiritual touch with God. We can no longer accept everything it says as literally true, nor everything it teaches as equally perfect and sublime. We have to estimate its literal truth by reference to the discoveries of science and history, we have to estimate its spiritual teaching by reference to the standard of Christ. We see it no longer a single book, where every word is literally exact and every principle completely divine, but as a series of books, written at different times, and using very different methods of instruction, in which can be traced the process by which the knowledge of God was gradually developed up to the highest point it reached before the coming of Christ. [Christian World.]

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