Article August 4, 1917 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from William Arnold Shanklin, John G. Hill, Joseph Fort Newton

[Pres. William Arnold Shanklin in Zion's Herald]

The war has brought a new sense of the reality of spiritual values. Names matter not at all. It is the revealing of God in men that matters. Christ came not to destroy but to fulfil. It is the spirit of the more abundant life. This is a day of judgment. It is not Christianity that has failed, but the dreams of our materialistic civilization; these are tested and found wanting. What we have been largely living on in Christendom for centuries is a combination of faith and force, a worship of God and mammon. In individual souls Christianity has flourished and borne fruit, but for the ills of the world itself it is an almost untried catholicon. Our civilization has ceased to be God-conscious. We have been so busy, so preoccupied with the external things of life, that we have forgotten what life itself is for, and to what end it shall be lived. We have forgotten that the material is only of value as the instrument of the spiritual. When this truth is acknowledged, men will see the face of God.

Though the struggle of law and equity and freedom against anarchy and injustice and slavery is age long, and though the former has seemingly been vanquished in many a fight, presently democracy will be triumphant, building up the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. "The impulse of democracy is identical with the ceaseless effort of human nature itself." Self-sacrifice, not self-assertion, the giving of love, not the claiming of power—that is the redeeming thought of the world. [The Bishop of Peterborough in The Record]

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