Article September 4, 1915 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from James E. C. Sawyer, Charles E. Corwin, Bishop Theodore S. Henderson

[James E. C. Sawyer, D.D., in The Christian Intelligencer]

Spirituality is not fanaticism. It is not emotional eccentricity. It is perfectly consistent with common sense, sound business methods, the amenities of civilized social relations and pleasures, a reasonable religious creed, and an orderly and beautiful mode of worship. A crank may be a Christian; but he is not a Christian because he is a crank, nor is he a crank because he is a Christian. He is a crank because he is mentally or morally deformed. There have been very peculiar saints, but their holiness was not in their eccentricities. Spirituality promotes symmetry of character, intellectual, social, and moral. Strength and beauty are in the sanctuary of a really noble and holy character. The strength of Christ was beauty; the beauty of Christ was strength. [The Christian Work]

It is an inspiring thought that all we are to be is already present to the mind of God and is being wrought out by His mighty hand. God has the ideal Jerusalem always before Him, the ideal city of God, the ideal humanity. Properly speaking, we cannot attain to anything which we are not already; we cannot outdistance what God eternally sees; we become what we are. This is a point which it is difficult to make clear, for the facts of every-day life appear to contradict it hopelessly. Nothing can seem much more absurd than to say of a savage or a scoundrel that he is something other than he seems to be even to himself, and that in this fact consists his chance of being delivered from the power of his baser instincts; but so it is. Nothing truly exists, or ever will exist, which is not externally present to the thought of God; what we call evil is merely the finite mind taking the shadow for the substance and allying itself thereto, as St. Augustine said. We may not always be able to help it; some people would tell us that we are not able to help it at all; but whether we are able to help it or not, evil is evil only because the corresponding good is hidden from our vision. [The Christian Register]

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