[Christian World.]

Religion is immortal, because it represents the world's highest life. But its immortality does not mean the immortality of its forms. Their successive decay and disappearance are simply the preparation for newer ones which shall more adequately express its ever-growing vitality. Observe, as one illustration of this, what has been happening to the Bible. No instructed person now believes in its infallibility, in its verbal inspiration. It offers itself to us now as a human product, and thereby has opened for itself a fresh career full of new interests. Taken so, it comes to us as more than ever divine, because it is the deepest product of that humanity in which God seeks ever to incarnate Himself.

And what is true of the Bible is true also of the church. We have here, going on before our eyes, a change vaster in its character and consequences than that of the Reformation, or than any that has taken place in its previous history ; changes of which it is impossible to forecast the issue. When we try to estimate what has happened in our own lifetime, the revolution in doctrine, in the general conception of life, we are staggered at the conception of what, in this sphere, is to happen within the next hundred years. Of this, however, we may be well assured. The movement will be not toward death but for a larger life. The church will be occupied with new applications of its central energy. In the loss of some of its old interests it will have gained new ones.

[British Congregationalist.]

God's opportunity lies in every thought and emotion that expresses holy discontent, that confesses ends unrealized and life unsatisfied. To the student who takes all his knowledge humbly, who is ill content with it as an imperfect thing, who carries it without arrogance, ready to lay down his most cherished presuppositions if the truth demands it, the glory of the Lord will come by the eastward gate to which his face is set. To the man who is dissatisfied with the attainment of his work, be it handicraft or braincraft, who sets forward saying, "I can do better yet," who is anxious to learn the finer play of the tools, the nobler use of mind and tongue and hand, God, the great artificer of perfect things, will come on the wings of the morning. Best of all, to the one who is dissatisfied with himself, who searches his whole character, who tries the springs of thought and action, to confess how far short he is of what he wills to be, who faces the new year with yearning desire for larger life, — to him the glory of the Lord will surely come, and its form will be like unto the Son of man. If you want God in any of the ways in which He cares to be wanted, as truth, as purity, or beauty, or righteousness, you will not miss Him. That is the great promise of life.

[Rev. George Batchelor in Christian Register.]

Paul standing there, overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude to Jesus, which in him became a commanding sense of obligation to other men, shows the proper attitude of the Christian church and of modern society today, and is a clear illustration of that lesson which, more than any other, we need to take home to ourselves, — the lesson that the great gifts which we have received from the past should in our hands become still greater things to be given to the future. We are bought with a price. We are not our own. We have no gifts which other men have not paid for. We have no rights which other men have not fought for. We have no privileges which other men have not won for us by toil and trouble and fidelity.

The new, the modern element which Christianity has brought into common life is a great respect for man and a profound gratitude to man as the giver of gifts. The Hebrew system exalted God, and did well. The Christian system exalts man as the minister of God, and does better. What we have under God received from man, that under God is due to man and must by us be given.

[Rev. F. C. Aldinger in Universalist Leader.]

In a very real sense we create our own God just as we make our own heaven. God exists for us the moment we act upon the supposition that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them who diligently seek Him. He has no vital reality for us until we thus make Him our personal possession. When I say there is a God, stated as an intellectual proposition, it has but little meaning to me. But when I can say. "my God !" then He becomes vitally related to me alone. He comes into my conscious existence, as it were, in response to the yearning and outreaching of my own nature. My very craving for a personal God, for the ideal life that God represents, and the willing advance I make on the assumption that such an object is within my reach, are at the same time the creative activities that make such a satisfaction real and possible for me. God becomes real and vital to me only as I appropriate Him ; He responds only to the will and the heart that trusts Him and believes it wide for His incoming. He reveals and verifies Himself only to the will and the heart that trusts Him and believes that He is.

[Joseph D. Wilson, D.D., in Christian Intelligeneer.]

The moralists felt that wrong-doing must meet a requital, and they looked to see that requital in this world. Experience had taught them so to look. Nemesis was not a fancy, but a fact. When they saw punishment falling upon the wrong-doer, no matter how fully he had been forewarned or how carefully he was guarded,— punishment coming from unexpected quarters and coming relentless and resistless, — they saw that in the constitution of the universe was the principle of retribution, and that fundamentally justice ruled. Their conclusions must have been founded on experience. It was not simply that it ought to be so, but that it was so. The acts of a man come back upon himself.

[Rev. K. C: Anderson, D.D., in Hibbert Journal.]

True religion is the soul's increasing desire to realize the highest unity with its source, aspiration in every direction toward that sublime end. And the height of spiritual experience is to know and feel the real and true and perfect in every realm of existence. It is to enter the inner sanctuary, the sacred chamber of the soul, the beautiful world of peace and joy, the inner realm where all is well, that secret place where dwells the soul serene. It is the fulfilment of all the hopes of human life, the attainment of the peace that passeth all understanding, the joy unspeakable and full of glory. It is the attainment of Christhood, the finding of the universal self, which is our real self.

[Christian Work and Evangelist.]

The great majority of Protestant ministers are feeling more strongly than ever that to confine God to any ordinance, or denomination, or even church itself, is to belittle Him, and it is a dangerous thing for any church to try to confine the grace of God to its own channel. The grace of God is a great flood, and no church or sect is great enough to contain it. It will burst through any one sect and run through a hundred other channels. If anything is manifest in our day, it is this very fact. The grace of God is flowing through every consecrated group of men.

[Woodrow Wilson in Congregationalist.]

To my thinking, the Christian church stands at the center not only of philanthropy, but at the center of education, at the center of science, at the center of philosophy, at the center of politics ; in short, at the center of sentient and thinking life. And the business of the Christian church, of the Christian minister, is to show the spiritual relations of men to great world-processes, whether they be physical or spiritual. It is nothing less than to show the plan of life and men's relation to the plan of life.