[Northwestern Christian Advocate]

It matters everything that man should think soundly. He may not think as other people think, he may not think as his teachers think, but he must think right thoughts or his life goes all awry. Some tell us that creeds are nothing that the only necessary virtue is sincerity. But one may be sincerely wrong, and wrong thinking on cardinal things is fatal, while wrong thinking on anything is injurious. Wisely is it said that as a man thinketh so is he; it is his thinking that determines specific acts and courses of coduct. A man's thoughts often show in his face; they always show in his conduct.

[Virginia Percival Gwyn in The Living Church]

There is a phrase of good Sir Thomas More that has been continually repeating itself to one for many years,—"merrie in God." The response to this phrase is often seen. Those urbane souls who live in the radiancy of God's love have a charming mirthfulness in all the situations of life, as if there were ever present to their minds the words, "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh." They seem to have an unalterable gaiety and enviable repose, equanimity. Their souls, like that of St. Francis, go out in a burst of tenderness and blessing to beast, and flower; water, sun, and sky; child and sufferer. They know the sorrows of nature as well as its joys; they live at the heart of human suffering in this wonderful world—and yet they are blissful. That does not imply that they are comfortable, for in aspiring to perfect happiness their only wish is that they may be with God. Such merry souls are free, unhampered, cheerful amid any imperfection, any setback, for they realize that the saints are the sinners who have kept on trying.

Contrast with such fretfulness, the dour of some Christians, those who are always taking their mortal yours their spiritual pulse. Theirs is a deliberate rigidity of piety. Their excellence is stiff, starchy; it crackles, and so makes a noise that forces your attention to them, for they want to have their "say" to you.

[Dr. J. H. Jowett in The Christian World]

Who are the poor in spirit? They are the people who feel poor because they have seen something exceedingly rich. They have looked upon something better than themselves. They have gazed upon something inexpressibly glorious, and they have become profoundly conscious of their own want. They have complated the unattained, and what they have attained has dwindled to almost nothing. Their eyes have ranged over an entrancing continent, and now they find they are only in possession of an inch. There is no pride about them; that untrodden prospect is destructive of all their pride. There is no vanity about them; large vision is always deadly to small vanity, and their vanity lies prone in the dust. There is no self–satisfaction about them, for their eyes are filled with radiant wonders which make all their personal triumphs seem dim. The poor in spirit are rich in the sense of want.

But there is more than this. There is not only a sense of want, there is a sense of hunger. They are contemplating an unfolding spiritual glory, and they are filled with aspiration to possess it. They are poor in attainment, but they are rich in prospective triumph. Yes, they have want plus hunger. They have poverty plus ambition. They feel the limits of the inch, but they aspire to the conquest of the mile. They realize the limitations of the mile, but they reach forward to the possession of the league. And so the poor in spirit are the people who lack and yearn for the things of the spirit. They never feel so rich in possession as they are in prospects. There is always something ahead which makes all their present attainment seem poor. Whatever treasure they hold is dulled by the treasure which yet invites them. They are poor in spirit, and the Master gives this conscious sense of want the place of first beatitude.

[The Christian Register]

There is no danger that the search-light of truth will be kept out of the pulpit. The prophets as a race are not extinct. The commercial, material spirit has not penetrated so far as we sometimes imagine. Denunciations directed toward the totally depraved are deemed useless, because the world is coming to believe there are none such. It is health, not hysteria, that is demanded of the teachings of the church. A church we know may be slowly dying, though it looks prosperous and flourishing on the outside. It is like a blooming fruit that has a worm at the center. Such a church shields and protects the evils that are secretly eating out its heart. It will not allow the probe to enter and do its work. Pathetic is the case of a man who feels it his duty to probe deeply into the secrects of the human heart and touch the sensitive nerve of sin and awaken it to pain and aching that may bring it regeneration through an awakened conscience, and yet who finds all surfaces smooth and unresponsive to his efforts. It is a holy task, and the world is not worthy of such a true apostle. What will it profit a church if it gain the world and lose its soul?

[The Methodist Recorder]

We see now what human ambition, human sin, can produce,—a veritable hell of misery. Can we not hope that this is the dense darkness that precedes the dawn of a better day? If a new spirit inspires the nations, born of their great anguish, we may hail even now the daybreak. But it must be a spirit of deep penitence and humble confession before God. That this result may be achieved, the church of Christ must play the part of the suffering servant of Jehovah. She must take the suffering of this time into her soul; must seek to understand it, and interpret its meaning to the world. Taught by the agony of the age, she must proclaim unfalteringly the moral cause of all human disasters, and emphasize the spiritual nature of the things that belong to the nations' peace. Thus shall even the stern discipline of war become God's great instrument for the abolition of war.

[The Christian]

Creeds and doctrines, however tenaciously held and zealously propagated, are but poor substitutes for the living Christ, who was never more alive than now, when the failure and breakdown of materialistic civilization is bringing once more into general consciousness the world's great need of a Saviour and a Lord.

[The Christian Work]

When we read the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount we know that there is nothing ephemeral or contemporaneous in them ; we cannot conceive that they were any truer when they were spoken than they are now, or that they will be any less true twenty centuries from now than they are today.

[The Sunday School Times]

Blessings come soonest to those who rejoice most without them. We postpone a needed blessing if we are anxious over its delay.