Article June 26, 1920 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Roger W. Babson, R. LL. Langford-James

[York (Neb.) Republican]

Many movements which go across the stage of passing events show an increasing spirit of fairness and tolerance toward questions upon which human minds are wont to differ with strong accent. The movement of the Protestant churches of America for a closer unity of aim, for example, is an outstanding and assuring indication that denominationalism, so rife and rampant a half century ago, is falling before the mellowing influence of a higher conception of religion. Christian institutions of this nation have for their foundation and source the teachings of Jesus. He is both the founder of the church and the example for its members. Differing human beliefs about what he taught have made many denominational creeds and organizations. For years the letter was more important to organizations. For years the spirit, but to-day the spirit is rising in belated ascendancy and sweeping away before it that narrowness and the prejudices which grew out of an attempt to build material structures where the founder of Christianity intended only spiritual ones to be.

The Christian Science movement, to take another illustration, is neither an attempt to found something new nor to substitute the teachings of a woman for the teaching of the great Teacher. What the discoverer of Christian Science thought she had done was to discover the rule and practice of the early Christians, of the Master himself, by means of which they were enabled through divinely bestowed power not only to minister to the spiritual needs of men but to their physical demands also, so that in the application of the principle upon which the life of the great Physician rested, his disciples also do, though in less perfectness, the works he said they should do also.

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