FROM OUR EXCHANGES

[Watchman.]

On this occasion Jesus was in that high spiritual state when walking on the water would be a natural result of his fulness of eternal life. He was indeed at all times filled with the Spirit's grace and power, and was never at a point of weakness like a Samson when the Spirit was departed from him. There was not a moment when he was not ready for the demands of the hour, and his exercise of power was a quick and complete one. But it can be seen that even in his experience there were times when the tide of spiritual power rose to meet emergencies, and seasons when he felt the timeliness of retiring into the divine presence and gaining fresh supplies of faith and power. Walking upon the sea was an act that he could have done at any time, but it appears at a time when he was uplifted himself and charged afresh with the fulness of God. His own intimation to Peter was that he also might have walked if his faith had been sufficient. Peter, however, had had no such spiritual uplift as his Master at this time. The power of Spirit over matter, and its capacity to become superior to natural limitations is illustrated in this incident in the life of our Lord. It can be seen wherein his power wrought its victory. The same Spirit in us may not repeat the same miracle, but it enables us to be superior to the natural conditions and the seemingly impassable barriers of so-called laws, and to show power that also works marvels in the physical condition, social states, and religious life of men. Whoever fills himself with the same Spirit as that of Christ, through communion with God and by the exercise of the grace bestowed upon him, will have a sense of glorious freedom from limitations, a power to mount up like an eagle above the low-lying plane of common effort, and a feeling that nothing for the glory of God or the good of man is impossible.

[Christian Register.]

That religion requires us to be well physically as well as morally is a novel proposition to many people. We have hardly got by the habit of attributing ill health to divine interference. We know now that disease in all its forms is attributable to removable causes, and we also know that any broken law of nature abrades our physical condition and interferes with our intellectual and moral operations. Remorse over failures and blunders or repentance over sins will play a much less important part in future religious estimates. Remorse must be looked upon rather as a loss of time than as a duty. The instantaneous demand is for an amended law and a spirit of obedience. What we want to get rid of, in round terms, is disease; and this brings us into very warm sympathy with those who teach that sickness is sin. Of course we do not hold any such extreme doctrines, but we do hold that there is a very close affiliation between wrong-doing of any sort, bad habits, careless indulgence, intemperance, and ill health. What we want is not quarter manhood or half manhood, a feeble, frail semblance of life, but life in its fulness. When we say a man must earn his bread according to God's mandate, by the sweat of his brow, what are we going to do with those whose physical fiber will not let them do a decent day's work, who are possibly children of vicious inheritance, or with those without willpower or steadiness of purpose, the lop-sided victims of weak mothers or weaker fathers?

[Rev. R. J. Campbell, M.A., in Christian Commonwealth.]

The thing Jesus hated most was the negative life, the self-satisfied life, the life that was content to regard its own excellence as the great end to be aimed at. It was this against which Jesus protested most strongly in the religious teaching of his time and would again today. He would accept no meaningless compliments. He would not allow us to call him sinless unless we clearly saw what that term involved, and even then he would require from us a good deal more than lip homage. One thing is certain, and that is, that if Jesus stood again in our midst, and we did not know who he was, his sinlessness would not be self-evident even to the best of men. He would be blamed and critized for doing this and that or for leaving this and that undone, and the probability is that he would fall foul of some of the accepted notions of righteousness today as surely as in his own day. We should not escape his censure, you may be sure, and how indignant some of us would become! "What language!" we should say when he called us hypocrites and vipers. "How unchristian! How unlike the meek and lowly Jesus in whom we believe!"

[Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch, D.D., in Watchman.]

If religion, instead of revealing God, obscures His will and love and keeps men from a clear experience of their heavenly Father, what greater condemnation is there? Yet that is the indictment brought by both Jesus and Paul against the religious system in which they were trained. That, too, is the indictment brought by many of the noblest religious minds of all past centuries against systematized religion. It becomes the letter that kills. It does not merely lack the power to give life. It kills. It slays. It paralyzes religious insight. Has not the church for generation after generation assiduously bound the veil around the eyes of men? This should be our second lesson. It shoud be our heart-searching query if our theological and religious methods and institutions have to any degree slipped into this original sin of the great religious systems of the past, so that they veil the religious vision and become obscurers instead of revealers of God.

[Congregationalist and Christian World.]

The highest service of the minister is to call up visions and vivify them. If he does that for you, he is truly a prophet. The preacher who renews the ideals of the worshipers listening to him from week to week takes high rank among the benefactors of mankind. It is natural that men of spiritual vision should seek the churches where prophets speak. No nobler task is calling the churches, nor any of so great importance, as to cherish the conviction that they must have prophets for their ministers, and to raise up prophets who will freshen the visions and renew the ideals of the seeker after God so that he is "renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him."

[Universalist Leader.]

We make our plea for those voices in the wilderness which simply cry, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord." They serve who speak and wait. They toil who travail with their dreams of good. There is a place, a mighty place, in the economy of God in history, for those whose aspirations are so noble and whose prophecies are so cosmic that by them progress must be measured by a thousand years for its yardstick. The world has few enough of those who sing the music of the moral spheres and are not disturbed if only the echo of the heavenly song floats back to them. We must keep faith with God, even though we fail to win the world.

[Churchman.]

The present age needs something of the spirit of St. Francis who, when his followers asked him on a certain occasion why he had not taught them to preach, said that their going unostentatiously and informally among the people of the town in which they dwelt was the kind of preaching that he valued most and considered the truest following of Christ's command.

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June 18, 1910
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