FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Silas McBee, Robert Stuart MacArthur, G. Campbell Morgan

[Silas McBee in Churchman.]

Our Lord spoke a language and lived a life which was understood by the people, and the common people heard him gladly. He did not invite them into some vague spiritualized organization, but he enlisted them in his work, which was to go about doing good. They were his disciples, his body of disciples. There is not to be found in him or in his teaching, or in the whole of the New Testament Scriptures, any individualistic or isolated conception of Christianity or of Christian life. He dealt with every phase of life with which he came in contact, and he dealt with it as the common work of God and the brethren. It is not so with Christendom today. There is something vague and indefinable about the spiritual kingdom into which men are invited. Christendom as a whole does not work at the real and actual things of life, because in its divisions it does not work as a unit. And none of the churches of divided Christendom are willing in their corporate organized capacity to work at, much less to work out, the great social, political, industrial, and economic problems that face men and society at every turn. They insist that as spiritual forces their true domain is something apart and separate from these so-called worldly affairs. They maintain that they are great spiritual institutions, whose business it is to produce spiritual lives, which in their individual capacity will work these reforms, as economists, politicians, philanthropists, and such like. Thus the incalculable and irresistible influence of the organized family of God, that corporate life which gives to the Christian church something that was never given to the world before in its fulness is left unused.

[New-Church Messenger.]

No man can see truth clearly unless he believes in his heart that he can live up to it. To see it without the power of doing it would only tantalize, discourage, and condemn him. To preach to men that they must overcome their evils in their own strength is to ask them to overcome self with self, which is an impossibility. But teach them that the Lord God Almighty has come down on earth and lived out the laws of His own life in order that they might follow in His footsteps, and you have given them an inspiration that will not only enable them to live up to the truth they already understand, but to understand all the truth that He has revealed for their guidance. Those who fail in any sense to recognize the saving power of the Lord, will be inclined to fall short in their estimate of what He demands of them. Those who realize His saving and keeping power will rise to the highest conception of the wholeness, righteousness, and purity of His teaching.

[Robert Stuart MacArthur in Standard.]

The idea is: He that is bound up in himself, in saving his earthly life, shall lose his spiritual life; and he who in his devotion to Christ is willing to imperil, to destroy, to crucify his lower life, shall save his higher life. The truth here taught goes to the very center of our being, and strikes at our inmost self. Christ's words are thus directed against every form of selfishness. To lose our life means to lose our sinful self, and to lose our sinful self means to find Christ and eternal life.

[G. Campbell Morgan, D.D., in Advance.]

Men never come to restfulness, never come to victory, never come to crowning, until somehow they have found their way into immediate realtionship with God, and into that realtionship which is expressed in absolute surrender and submission. No man has found his way into peace who has not found his way to God.

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