From Our Exchanges

The old idea of heaven as a place to be admitted to, and of hell as a place to shun, has largely given way in the minds of Christian believers to the better idea of heaven as signifying a heavenly condition and of hell as expressing the inner state of the sinner who persistently and flagrantly violates the laws of his being and disregards those divine precepts which are designed, through compliance with them, to make the life prosperous and happy. The Christian world is becoming more sane and more Christian as the centuries pass. This is evidenced in several ways and particularly by the changed views on the subject under consideration. The belief that this world is a miserable habitation for man, made so by the transgression of the first pair who entered upon this stage of existence, and that life here must be borne with as much patience and grace as human beings can muster while they anxiously look forward to another world where unending felicity shall be vouchsafed to them, is happily waning through the growing acceptance of the better and truer conviction that life in this world is a great and noble thing; that God made no mistake in ordaining the conditions of man's life here; that heaven and hell,—success and peace happiness, or defeat, unrest, and suffering,—are the experiences of men and women here according as they seek to know the real meaning of life, seek the truth and obey it, or follow low and selfish instincts and give no heed to God's commands as weitten in the human constitution and promulgated in the Scriptures.

The Universalist Leader.

Where is Galilee in the geography of your spiritual life and mine?

Galilee is for us that land of simple, homely, and familiar experience out of which we may have supposed for a moment that the Lord had lifted us, away from which forever, as may be we fondly thought, he had led us. He had lifted us up to heaven and we feel the shock of being brought back to earth. Heaven, those years with the Master must have seemed to the disciples even while they were living in them, heaven, still more in the retrospect. And yet to the same old Galilee, yours and mine, it may be quite clear that Christ is now calling us back. It is thither that he bids us go. It is there that he will be found going before us, or else not found. It is there that we shall see him or else we shall not see.—The Congregationalist and Christian World.

It is doubtful, however, if all these causes taken together hinder the conversion of the world to Christ so much as do the imperfections of professing Christians. It is easy to declare that one man's failure does not make another's success, that the weakness of Christians furnishes no excuse for the disobedience of those who reject God, that every man must stand or fall by himself, and all these declarations are true. But the fact remains that the weakness and the strength of Christianity lie in the lives of Christians. There is no argument for Christianity like a worthy Christian life; there is no argument against Christianity like a life that claims to be Christian and is not.—The Standard.

One cannot conceive of a heaven without thinking of it as embracing righteous personalities, and only those. One cannot think of hell without thinking of it as made up of wicked personalities. With such facts before us we easily see that our first personal business is to build righteous personality within ourselves, and to seek to build it in society, in the home, in the church, all about us, till the world is filled with it.—The Examiner.

If the reverent temper does not run through the week it will be in vain to seek to be worshipful on Sunday.

The Watchman.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit