FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from W. W. Willard, George William Knox

[Western Christian Advocate.]

In a measure we can discern the face of the sky, and we say. "To-morrow it will rain," but we miss God in men and movements because they are outside our organization or do their work differently. Mark you, this is not the old fact of the tendency of the world to stone its prophets. It is something deeper and more difficult to characterize. It is the inadequate power inherent in moral force to perceive a new moral star. It is the one chief blind spot in the eye of the righteous. It is the failure of organized moral forces to realize that God may still have other resources and other men. The result of this amounts to a moral obliquity and to disaster to the cause of God and humanity. Nor should we strive to conceal our fault. The danger of self-satisfaction is the danger of the Church. We are not to defend truth alone, but to welcome it. We are not to work old methods only, but to be inventive of new ones. We are not to join hands alone with the forces on the field, but to cultivate the power to know the new ally and rejoice in his coming. Christians should be the highest experts in the sensing of new moral forces.

[The Christian Work and Evangelist.]

In numbers certainly the ministry has declined, and as many clergymen think, there has also been a decline in influence during the past half century. In fact, we believe that this decline is generally admitted by the ministers themselves, who, together with the religious and secular press and professors in the colleges and theological seminaries of the country, have been devoting no little attention to the subject.

[The Universalist Leader.]

In the long run no culture, no fine ideas, no brave radicalism, can be a substitute for the one supreme thing for which the Church, its altar, and all its ministrations stand. For these have always stood and always must stand for a gospel of glad tidings to men. Their business is to set at liberty the captive, make the blind see, the deaf hear, and the heart to know the peace of God.

[Rev. W. W. Willard in The Advance.]

Gains in religious thought must be gains that can be preached and lived out, gains that contain a divine dynamic and the germs of unlimited development for thought and life. Theology is ever undergoing renewal, as vegetation grows through an inner and vital necessity. Its forms change, but the life which it strives to express abideth forever.

[Prof. George William Knox in The Congregationalist.]

The Church may well lament its divisions, but it will become one only when possessed of some great purpose for whose realization all inherited traditions and prejudices and individual likings shall be given up — a purpose so great that in its comparison their surrender will seem a trifling sacrifice.

[Zion's Herald.]

It will not do to forget what manner of spirit we are of, to lose sight of the fact that the mightiest forces of the world are unseen, and that the success of the gospel is largely a silent success.

[The Examiner.]

If each of us will do his best, working in love, the flinty crust of worldliness will gradually be worn away, and the pure gold of a redeemed humanity will be revealed.

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