FROM OUR EXCHANGES
[Universalist Leader.]
While the faith of some inside the church is weakening and there is real anxiety at the seeming portent of loss of position and power for the Christian church, there are wise men outside who are coming back to the church as the only way of individual, social, national, or world salvation. The note of confidence which the pulpit has lost the secular press has caught. But recently in Leslie's Weekly there appeared a plea for church attendance. After exalting the sermon as an instrumentality of power, it says: "But, aside from the sermon itself, be it inspiring or otherwise, people ought to go to church to worship God. Should there ever arise a generation that forgets to worship at appointed times and places, moral advance will have received its death-blow. It is instinctive for man to worship a power higher than himself, and it is the Christian church which conserves the instinct. The church has always been too closely identified with the moral and intellectual progress of mankind to allow its influence to languish. Can there be an easier or simpler way for every man to lend a hand than to have a revival of the good habit of church-going?"
[Standard.]
Whatever we may think about the possibility of bringing together the different bodies of Christian believers, no one can doubt that there is, in this and other lands, a strong and increasing conviction that the present divisions of Christendom are harmful and unnecessary. There is an unselfish and genuine devotion to Christian unity which increases with each day. It is being generated on the distant mission fields as Christian workers of different denominations face the tremendous task of evangelizing the non-Christian world, and as the native Christian body expresses its perplexity over the divisions which exist among those who serve a common Lord and are committed to a common undertaking. The serious consideration of this problem by the Edinburgh conference was unavoidable. Thoughtful men could not come together for the consideration of the Redeemer's work in foreign lands without giving attention to that which hampers and hinders their undertaking. That the question is a most difficult and perplexing one does not excuse us from giving it thought. If present conditions are ideal, then agitation for closer relations among Christian bodies is a sin; but who believes them to be so?
[Charles W. Stevenson in Christian Register.]
Love and life are the measure of eternity and infinity. It is through these that we shall approach the understanding which will bring us into closer relation with the divine and which will make us like Him. But life in its abounding and love in its blessing have no measurements in time. That which we are and that which we would be are both divine. And we shall rise to the might and majesty of one who sent us through the exercise of life and love! Here, then, is the key to the redemption of the soul, to the fulfilment of the purpose, to the development of man and race. Live and love! It matters not that behind there stretch the slow ascending steps that we do not understand. It is from the summit of the present life that we shall look and discover the God who is leading.
[Rev. Robert W. Rogers of San Francisco, as reported in Redlands (Cal.) Facts.]
Men who are feeling the pulse of the religious life of our day cannot help but predict that the next awakening of the churches will be a return of vital faith. The pendulum is swinging from confidence in iconoclastic thought to a demand for constructive thinking. The people are rising up and demanding the comfort of positive truth and tested light. They are seeking not so much the labeled man as the consecrated man who can illuminate and inspire faith. Romanes said: "Science is moving with all the force of a tidal wave toward faith in Jesus Christ." The next great era in the religious life will be when men shall rise up everywhere and say, "Christianity is true." The sense of the wonderfulness of Christian civilization and the startling uniqueness of the Christ is growing with such irresistible power in modern life that the spirit of trust is sure to break forth.
[Rev. Charles S. Lane in Hartford Seminary Record.]
There is need of an enlarged conception on the part of the Christian church of its educational mission and ministry. The church is not to stand barely as a lighthouse, sending its beams across the stormy waters of life to warn men from rocks and shoals, but rather a light to point out the road and to help men to keep walking steadily in it. The voice of the church is to be not barely the call to come to Christ, but to show all what following Christ means. If the religious life is to be conserved and deepened, if we are to present an intelligent and virile faith, able to grapple fairly and victoriously with the problems of humanity and society, there must be more definite, intelligent, and comprehensive religious training.
[British Congregationalist.]
That we are in the midst of a great revival of interest in religious ideas and beliefs is not to be questioned. Recent discussions and controversies have caught the ear of the man in the street, and have moved him to strike in and take a share. "Theological reconstruction" is as familiar a phrase to him as, say, "payment of members" or "limitation of veto." If a quickened interest, so far as the mind is concerned, were the sign of a real religious revival, then we should be in the midst of a revival indeed. No one will do anything but welcome this revived intellectual curiosity as to religious affairs, and as to the validity of religious belief, it is a preliminary, and probably an indispensable preliminary, to the richer religious revival still to come.
[Zion's Herald.]
The accreted charity, the collective sentiment, of the bettered and bettering centuries, is furnishing now a movement toward mercy which with every year is gaining increased headway and sweeping farther afield in all the earth. Jesus Christ is more and more getting his way with mankind, and we, in common with believers of every tongue and race, rejoice this Christmastide that, taught and impelled by him, the people of America are more generally and heartily converting their sentiments into services, and making of Christianity both a creed and a life.
[Churchman.]
The Son of God in giving life to the world did so in the most real and most effective way by showing what the divine life was under the common conditions of ordinary living. Jesus fully and entirely accepted whatever limitations were necessary, in order that his life on earth as man should be a really human life. In its various details of service for others, in its joys of companionship, in its disappointments, and in its apparent failure, the purpose of it was to reveal to men the ideal life, to stimulate in men the will to live that life and also to give them power to carry out that will.
[New York Observer.]
When the millennium comes it will arrive not just by force of bare, divine fiat, but because believing and repenting men have for generations been cooperating with God in the working out of the plans looking toward the consummation of that millennial bliss.
