Article May 17, 1913 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Arthur T. Fowler, J. Bradley Markward, R. J. Campbell

[The Universalist Leader.]

There is a disposition on the part of some to be impatient at the demand that the gospel be preached; they say that the gospel is old-fashioned, and what we want is the message of this present century; the battle cry of the modern conflict! As we look over the existing conditions, it seems that the greatest need of today is for moral heroism, for sensitive consciences, for strong and saintly lives. Given these in abundance, we shall be able to manage the rest of the affairs of the world with considerable ease. Now, looking back along the track of Christian history to learn what it has done, we find from the very beginning that the gospel produced moral heroes, turning those humble fishermen into moral masters, making common men so sensitive to right doing that they would do the right even in the presence of kings, transforming those crude and rude men into spiritual natures of such strength that they stood against the world, and feared not even death itself. Following down through the centuries, the pathway of the gospel is marked by the monuments to the heroes, saints, and martyrs it inspired, and today that is its peculiar power, to produce that type of manhood, that type of Christian, that type of citizen who will transform the whole society in which he lives or go down to a martyr's death. The gospel has not lost its power to do the one thing most needed in the world today; but it must be preached, it must be taught, it must be lived, until it gets out into the world of actual life, when even as of old it transformed the fisherman into the master, so will it transform society from the master into the servant.

[Arthur T. Fowler in The Standard.]

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