[James De Normandie in Christian Register.]

You may say then, Is it not a time of discouragement for us all in this social and business world and this widespread and open denunciation of the church? By no means. This is to me an age of encouragement and hope. In all these deep-seated movements I read an appeal, an awakening to more of that truer spiritual religion out of which life and peace must come. The church has not failed, Christianity has not failed, religion has not failed. The difficulty is that the church does not quite know how to adjuct itself to the new conditions of thought and life. It hears the demand, loud, increasing, universal, for a truer religious life. A fierce light has broken upon it, and the light reveals how much of the same spirit which brings the world's unrest has entered the church, and it goes on in the old darkness. "The light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not." But it will, and its high ideals will be made more effectual than ever, only it must still hold to its mission of presenting spiritual verities, and not be turned away to fruitless preaching or discussion of all the social activities of which the air is full. Every doctrine of the church which seems to us harsh and cruel and false, and now discredited among intelligent men, except theologians, had a natural and necessary development out of received views about the inspiration or revelation or infallibility of the words of the Bible and about the divine government; but they are outgrown, they are like some of those wharves on our old seaport towns, riddled and weakened by the lithodomi, those silent borers of the eternal seas, and the church cannot bring itself to another interpretation of its doctrines and another application of its energies. It is not making of religion what the age demands of religion. But the better life will come, and it will come in and through the church, which is girding itself as never before to bear witness to a higher spiritual life. A time comes to society, as to the individual, when the ravages of covetousness and self-indulgence can no longer be borne. If you suppose infinite goodness, you have indefinite and constantly renewable possibilities in man. The idea that human nature—you and I—can be changed, born again, is one upon which, rightly received and rightly interpreted, lies the hope of the world. No one can be a pessimist who believes that God rules in the affairs of men. Every one who in any high way believes in the fatherhood of good, must be an optimist.

[Rev. Walton W. Battershall in Churchman.]

A certain type of mind and of churchmanship becomes nervous and intolerant at this perpetual readjustment of thought and method. It hates to be dislodged from its easy cushions, where it can repeat ancestral formulas and need not fatigue itself by trying to adjust old truth to new truth. On a higher plane of thought and conscience, we all demand truth that is fixed and absolute and beyond the drifts of the current thinking. For the ordinary navigation of life men ask for charts, which shall mark authentic lights and verified soundings. They want a compass that plays true. Organized life is possible only by moralities that are changeless and universal, and are put into laws that say what they mean. Those who desire to do right want to know what is right. Every age and clime and race, with all the local variations in tradition and custom, therefore, has its Mount Sinai; and from every Sinai the same divine voice declares substantially the same elemental moralities. The application and enforcement are the only points that vary. They all give echoes of the two stone tables of the Hebrew Sinai, to which Christ gave his penetrating interpretation. Everywhere social and personal morality has been and will ever be rooted in religion.

[Congregationalist and Christian World.]

The materialistic spirit is everywhere. It stupefies the conscience and makes multitudes content with transient, outward satisfactions. The strain and tension in the world of industry are putting civilization to the test. Conditions, which on the other side of the Atlantic have brought the leaders of the churches throughout Great Britain to a point of anxiety never before reached, are paralleled or are paralleled to be paralleled in this country. The dominant questions of the next few decades are: Can Christianity put an end to strife between masters and men, can it make men and women in all ranks fair and loving and kind, can it evangelize the nations, can it organize the world of industry and the world of nations so that peace, good will, and cooperation shall supplant violence, the lust for territory, racial animosities, and devastating wars?

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

If you treat a man like a brute beast here, what do you expect him to be on the other side of death? If his soul has been starved and stunted here through the starving and stunting of his body, will it suddenly become different elsewhere? Of course it will not, and that is precisely why all effort for the remedying of social evils is truly spiritual work and ought always to be inspired by a truly spiritual motive. Of itself it can do nothing to elevate the soul; the rich are no more spiritually-minded than the poor; but at least it does something to supply the opportunity for the spiritual nature to assert itself and rise above the level of mere animalism, and the nobler and more brotherly the desires of those engaged in such service the more likely is it to attain its end.

[Christian World.]

Christianity is cast into the cosmic system; appears as a part of it, and must therefore of necessity be subject to its laws. Never has it been a static, but always a dynamic. Even its seemingly most stationary elements obey those laws. You speak of its Scriptures, of its doctrines, as there in permanence. No. As a factor in human life they change with every human being they touch. There are as many Christianities as there are Christians. Are the Scriptures the same to the child who spells his way through them as to your professor of Biblical criticism? You may call your Book the same. It is never the same in the souls that read it, and they are here the matter in question.

[Watchman.]

The Bible does not teach that salvation consists merely, or even chiefly, in happiness hereafter. Its teaching is rather that this happiness comes, not as a special gift from God, but as the result of a process of purification from sin, and this process of cleansing is salvation. The process of purification from sin is one to be accomplished here and now. That is salvation. There is no other time which we are authorized to hold out as a day of salvation than the present. But all who trust in God may look for complete sanctification, perfect salvation at "the coming of our Lord."

[Outlook.]

As the boy felt in his heart the reality and wonder of a greater world before him, so the man knows that he is at the beginning, not the end, of his career; and that, as there is a lesser world behind him which was touched with the illusion of permanency but endured only for the brief span of his childhood, so the life in which the man shapes and trains himself is but a more advanced school; prophetic, as all schools are, of coming opportunity and skill and power and life.