FROM OUR EXCHANGES

[The Universalist Leader.]

The true unity of the Church is produced by the spirit of Christ animating every member thereof. Destroy this spirit and the Church is no longer Christian; or let any member lose this spirit and he becomes useless, morally dead. If the gospel is clear on any point, it is on that of the sacredness of the individual conscience. All Christ's appeals were directed to the individual soul. He did not seek to reform men by massing them and then moulding them by some foreign power; but he sought to reform them by appealing to each soul, by touching each individual heart, and thus working from the one to the many. He used no power but the power of truth and love, which left each free, but persuaded their wills and caused them to act freely in the right way. So then the only possible unity in a church that is truly Christian, is the unity of the spirit. How does Christianity purpose to secure this unity? We answer, by making men of one spirit!

[The Standard.]

There is not a little evidence that an increasing number of people who have the Christian temper and who are sincerely striving to live the life that Jesus would have them, refuse to identify themselves with the churches. While it is gratifying to believe that there are devoted Christians outside of the churches, it would be still more satisfactory to know that the Church is so commending herself to those who love God that they seek her fellowship. The very fact, if it be a fact, that more and more thoughtful and earnest people are disposed to live the life that Jesus has taught without entering into any ecclesiastical relations, creates the presumption that something is wrong with the Church. If in no other respect, yet in power to attract to herself men and women of Christian spirit and purpose. it may be shown that the progress of the Church has been arrested.

[Frank White in The New York Observer.]

To-day! Half of us do not live up to our possibilities, because we are dwelling in the memory of our yesterdays or dreaming of our to-morrows. A right value of to-day is a grand cure for laziness, for procrastination, for self-indulgence. Moreover, it is a tonic for the tempted soul, for as one realizes that he has but a day in which he needs to stand fast against the foe, hope is strengthened and courage is renewed. "To-day the noise of battle, the next the victor's song;" that is the order. To-day has in it such chance to pile up worthy deeds that the exhilaration of doing should be far more stimulating and pleasing to us than all the rosiest dreaming associated with that wildest and most delusive chimera, that mirage, that hollow, mocking vision of airy nothingness which mortals call "to-morrow."

[Rev. F. J. Powicke, M.A., Ph.D., in The British Congregationalist.]

Revelation on the human side can only be another name for insight—insight due to that rapport of God and the soul which is only another name for inspiration. Nothing outward, whether written in the processes of the physical world, or in the events of history, or in the words of a book, can disclose the Divine, except so far as a man is endowed with the power of spiritual vision. And so, even granted that the Bible is everywhere equally a record of Divine truth, that means nothing to the morally unenlightened. The truth must be realized through the medium of a spititual life akin to that from which it flowed, before it can become a word of God.

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November 23, 1907
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