[Dr. H. L. Herberts, as quoted in the Times, Los Angeles, California]

"No sociologist can prove to me that permanent unemployment and permanent relief are necessary," is the challenge voiced by Dr. H. L. Herberts at Immanuel Congregational Church. "Once greed, selfishness, and unbrotherliness are destroyed, unemployment and relief will disappear. Jesus did not preach contentment in poverty. He taught the abundant life. He apotheosized humbleness of spirit, but he never pronounced poverty a virtue. He announced a higher order of life, founded on love, good will, and brotherhood. He advocated the kingdom of God as the ultimate goal of life. The first concern of the kingdom of God is that poverty shall be abolished and that all may enjoy those good things which our Father has provided for His children. Followers of Christ [Jesus] must support his teachings and abandon those evils that have brought about our depression and poverty. It is for each of us to do our part to break down falseness, untruth, and unreality, to the end that the kingdom of the Spirit may be established."

[Professor T. M. Carter, in the Michigan Christian Advocate, Detroit, Michigan]

There is something wrong with Christianity that is not social Christianity; but there can be no social Christianity without individual Christianity. ...

But we cannot lift life to the higher plane through the use of negatives. The best way to avoid the evils of life is positively to work and strive for the good life. Experience in college has been a failure unless it has aided us to set our faces steadfastly toward the life that enables us to know God and to be known of Him.

Life does not necessarily begin at forty, or at thirty, or at twenty. Life begins when we learn to live it in terms that will enable us to know God. No one has begun to live until he has achieved a high purpose in living.

In order to purpose nobly and live well, we need to identify ourselves with some great cause. The cause need not be a spectacular one that will cause us to make the headlines of the newspapers. An obscure life may be great if lived in terms that will enable one to know God in service of man.

[Ernest H. Cherrington, in the American Issue, Westerville, Ohio]

Most students of social phenomena are not convinced that outstanding social problems are unsolvable. There may be wide differences of opinion as to how and when; there may be radically different views as to methods and as to the speed or slowness which is likely to characterize progress toward solution, but there is general agreement with the idea that great social wrongs can be righted.

By general agreement of most thinking groups, alcoholism and the beverage alcohol traffic present one of the great social problems of modern life. Surely no student of the question considers that this problem has been solved by any governmental program now in vogue.

That the temperance cause has been and is passing through a difficult period goes without saying. In the United States particularly, the current political tide of recent years has been running strongly against the cause of sobriety, and the attitude of a large number of the people appears to have shifted. That in itself is not strange. Public opinion is sometimes very easily swayed by clever propaganda, and sometimes it is strongly influenced by a general psychology which suggests a change. Peculiarly is that true in times of economic depression.

Unquestionably the most important and influential factor of power in the parliaments of man is that of public opinion. Legislative bodies, like political parties, are opportune. They listen to voices. They respond to clamor. They take notice of organized activity in regard to general policies. They yield even the judgment of statesmen to the dictates of popular will. In the halls of even the greatest parliaments of free nations, public opinion is king.

Parliaments, legislatures, and executives, however, do not have the final word regarding such a problem of social welfare. There is a power beyond parliaments, governments, or public opinion. In the temple of eternal justice, Truth is the supreme arbiter. That is the court of last resort—the tribunal from whose decision there can be no appeal. That tribunal in the last analysis determines the ultimate course which government and society must take. To that supreme court we appeal the case against beverage alcohol, confident not only in the justice of our cause, but even more confident in the justice and righteousness of whatever verdict that tribunal may render in connection with this complex and difficult social problem,—so confident, in fact, that we are willing in advance to accept the final decision of Truth.

[J. L. Newland, in the Frederick Leader, Oklahoma]

To be useful to one's community, to other generally, is a laudable ambition in anyone, and it is assuring to realize that we do this best by doing our own work the best we know how. ...

The man who is proficient in any trade contributes more to the welfare of his fellow citizens than he could if he should project himself into some profession for which he was not fitted. The salesman who has learned to serve the wants of his patrons well is more useful there than if he were trying vainly to direct a department or a business which he did not understand. The most menial tasks about the home or in the service of others are a contribution to comfort and well-being, and can be the means of developing our capacity for greater usefulness.

When we do our best at the work we have in hand, life has a way of giving us a larger task. To be "faithful over a few things" is the sure way to become "ruler over many."

[From the Halifax Herald, Nova Scotia, Canada]

This new generation is efficient, but only from religion can come that spirit which will make its service truly sublime.

Efficiency concerns itself with the ways of doing rather than with what ought to be done. Science seeks to find the way to do things better in the world rather than to do things that will make the world better. Such is the function of skill; religion must supply the spirit that will take us farther.

Whatever the hopes of the nineteenth century were, science has not provided the world with a new ethic. Its interest is with methods not motives; science does not make men moral. Much as it has seemed to alter everything, it does not change the human heart.

There is, however, this difference in this era of skill, namely, that the power of good or ill is immeasurably increased. Scientific methods are doing untold good in the hands of the pure and the merciful, just as they can do terrible harm in the hands of evil and the selfish. ...

It is, after all, the heart, not the hand, that is vital, and religion alone can touch and transform the heart. The scientific transformation of life is essentially a surface change, while religious transfiguration means a new creation.

The need of the hour is spiritual, and the keyword to the better state is not revolution but religion.

What wonders the right spirit might perform in such a world as ours with its industrial efficiency and its international machinery! We have the means, but we need the motive; possessed of the machinery, we only wait for more morality.

This, be it remembered, is where Christ [Jesus] laid the emphasis in all his teaching—the birth of a new spirit in men. He stressed a new order in the human heart without which there would never be a new order outside.

The very bigness of our problems today forces this message of the Christ home to our minds. "Without me ye can do nothing," is as true of human society as of the men and women who compose it.

[Dr. Theodore Gerald Soares, as quoted in the Pasadena Star-News, California]

"Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee." There is a great field for scientific ... religion as it bears on health. From very early times man has been dominated by a regret for the past and a fear of the future. How foolish and how dangerous that is. "Let the dead Past bury its dead!" "Thou wailt keep him in perfect peace" whose mind is free from the bondage of the past and also from the dread of the future.

How are we going to meet this problem of the dread of the future? Sometimes I think religion is common sense deepened and magnified. It is not fatalism, but a great faith that eternal God is in the world and that whatever comes we will find Him there beside us—which gives strength, patience, and peace.

[Editorial in the Herald, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada]

Men have failed to see the contentment expressed in the words, "Give me neither poverty nor riches," but have set the acquisition of wealth as their one goal. It is not to be argued that wealth is to be despised. It is not riches that Christ [Jesus] preached against, but the evils of riches, if men set their minds to attaining them oblivious of everything which makes life the living it should be.

The mere striving after wealth is not a wholesome endeavor with the appetite made hungry with what it feeds on. There are the finer perceptions of life which become dulled in the race for wealth, and when Christ [Jesus] spoke of the difficulty of those who have riches in entering the kingdom of heaven, he had not in mind riches themselves, but the evils which riches bring if men are obsessed by them. ...

There are treasures which money cannot buy—the quiet contentment, the pleasure gained in doing acts of service, the inward satisfaction derived in doing a kindly deed. But to enjoy these things to the full it is necessary to shake off the lure of riches which grips like a vice and holds the individual in its fetters. Here we might well ponder on the meaning of the words: "Where you treasure is, there will your heart be also."

[From the International Review of Missions, New York, New York]

The great sins today are war, race prejudice, and economic injustice. These are the great challenges to the Christian world.