From our Exchanges

with contributions from Daniel Dorchester

We speak of pagan lands, of paganism, as of things remote, not observable from either our front or back windows,—places to send missionaries to, and to support them by contributions in labors of which we are little conscious. We speak of the missionary spirit as of a different kind of religion from any with which we are practically acquainted, perhaps as of a holier and better kind.

Then in another great class we place Christian nations, so-called Christian institutions and civilization. Christian ideals, with a self-congratulatory feeling, a certain consciousness of superiority and of virtue.

But the fact is there is no such hard and fixed line as we believe. There are pagans in Christendom, and there may be Christians in the so-called pagan lands who never heard the name of Christ. We should be as liberal as Saint Paul was, as Jesus himself, who called those who did his works his followers, and those who were not against him his friends.—The Christian Register.

Sin in all its forms and manifestations is a violation of the law of God, and tends always and everywhere to destruction and ruin. It has taken long weary years for men to discover this truth. Righteousness has as its fruit quietness and assurance forever, and hence tends to stability, to health, to permanence, to long life. One may not, cannot, do all that must be done to drive out sin and bring in peace, but he can ally himself with forces which tend toward holiness and righteousness in the earth. One cannot make all homes ideal, but he can do his part in making one home a fair type of the heavenly home, and through that home give the members of other homes right ideals and a correct standard.—Pacific Christian Advocate.

Looked at rightly there is nothing so intolerant of evil, or so exacting and almost exorbitant in its requirement, as the divine love that demands that men shall have the best the resources of God can bestow, because they are fit to have them. The idea that God desires to have men happy independently of their righteousness, is surely one of the grossest perversions of ethical principles. What satisfaction would it give any parent to know that his daughter was happy in a life of vice? Such tidings would give him the keenest pain. God desires our happiness, but only the happiness which is the flower of righteousness.

The Watchman.

A man said it was hard not to believe a certain phase of a new teaching: it was so attractive he wished to believe it. Then soon these words of Julius Hare came. "The question is not whether a doctrine is beautiful, but whether it is true. When we want to go to a place, we don't ask whether the road leads through a pretty country, but whether it is the right road, the road pointed out by authority, the turnpike road." The deepest philosophy assures us that the True and the Beautiful are one. Our trouble is that sometimes we consider this or that beautiful when it is not truly so.—Pacific Baptist.

He who looks for Christ to-day will not find in a humble manger, but in countless homes, in halls of state, on the college campus, in the sweeping currents of trade, and on the world's battlefields. The Christ life is becoming practicable, even from a novelty point of view, because the world is becoming purer as the light of his truth pervades it, and the reign of peace and good-will, though still far away is "the divine event toward which the whole creation moves." Rev. Daniel Dorchester, Jr.
Christian Advocate.

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