[Continent.]

Consider those who sink their lives in money-getting. "How small the world has come to be!" When the uttermost concern of a man is to multiply the accretions of his property, when the most eager and laborious use of his brain is in constant, cunning estimation of chances to turn a bigger profit in his next transaction, when with unflinching hardness of heart he listens to the grinding of the commercial machine that abrades new wealth for himself out of quivering flesh and blood; when money, money, and again money walls in the whole treadmill round of his life; when there is no fragment remaining in him of a gentle and mollifying recollection that other men also love life and hope for prosperity and desire comfort for their wives and children; when there is no consideration of the spiritual call to use wealth for human service, no sensitiveness to the finer business motives lying in the conception of trade itself as an instrument of blessing to the civilized world, no estimation of the greater wealth in true character and the unfeigned respect for one's fellows—nothing in all the horizon but self and gold—how small, how constricted, how mean has the money-getter's world become! [Rev. A. E. Owen Jones in Christian Commonwealth.]

It is fair to assume, I think, that most of us have been influenced by the work of literary and historical criticism. We have come to look at the Bible as a far more human book than we used to consider it. But though criticism has made the Bible more human, it has not therefore made it any the less divine. It still remains the word of God, because it remains the production of men who were in closest spiritual touch with God. We can no longer accept everything it says as literally true, nor everything it teaches as equally perfect and sublime. We have to estimate its literal truth by reference to the discoveries of science and history, we have to estimate its spiritual teaching by reference to the standard of Christ. We see it no longer a single book, where every word is literally exact and every principle completely divine, but as a series of books, written at different times, and using very different methods of instruction, in which can be traced the process by which the knowledge of God was gradually developed up to the highest point it reached before the coming of Christ. [Christian World.]

The mental struggle of our time may be described as a search for reality; and the revelation granted to our time—for we may call it that—is the birth in it of the sense by which we are discriminating between the real and the various wrappages in which it is concealed. The lesson has been a hard one, but we are learning it. And here science and not theology has been its guide. Its method, regarded by the earlier ecclesiastics as a revolt against religion, has been the saving grace of our day; it has opened the way not only to physical, but to the heart of spiritual truth. It has shown theology the disastrous error into which it had fallen; the error of being arrogant where it should have been humble; of proclaiming itself an infallible teacher where its attitude should have been that of a learner; the error of asserting what it had not taken the trouble to prove; the error of condemning men who had realized that truth and not falsehood was the only atmosphere in which the soul could thrive.

[George A. Johnston Ross in Continent.]

There never was a time when the thought of the true end of religion as sacrificial lovingkindness was so widely recognized as now. I do not think we acknowledge with sufficient gratitude this signal work of God's Spirit, that over so wide an area love should be accepted as the touchstone and evidence of a real religion. What a distance man has traveled since the days when not even morality, not even decency had any necessary connection with religion! Now we have no right to quarrel with the fact that many to whom the vision of this truth has come are outside the organized Christian church. To ignore or decry the operation of God's Spirit outside the organized church is to commit once more the very sin which the Bible through much of its history and prophecy most labors to root out. [Churchman.]

Theories of the ministry cannot produce the convictions that are leading to the establishment of better relations between a divided Christendom. What is involved and what is needed at present is not so much the construction of new theories or the introduction of old doctrines of the ministry, as the bringing of all doctrines and theories into subordination to Christ's words and commands. His work must be done as he directed it should be done, under the terms of such devoted personal loyalty and faith that the idiosyncracies of historic communions can be forgotten and forgiven in an overmastering enthusiasm to carry out today Christ's mission to mankind and to realize the brotherhood of Christians as the supreme law of all his followers.

[Rev. Thomas W. Barbour, Ph.D., in Christian Work and Evangelist.]

It is time we put aside the sickly sentiment that whatever comes is ordained of God, for then we must charge up to the Almighty the evil as well as the good, the wicked and vile as well as the pure and holy, and such sentiment is obnoxious to all right-minded men. What we want to know, and know we must, is whether we are to struggle to meet the evils of life and make them good, or simply to sink into the habit of leaving everything in God's hands for Him to make good. If we are here for a purpose, then we are here to be a help to God, and in all ways to make our lives worthy of the confidence and commendation of the allwise Master.

[Rev. Charles R. Brown, D.D., in British Congregationalist.]

Every great thing, whether of the individual life or of an institution, or of a movement, has its hour in some little Bethlehem of Judah, its hour when it lies in the manger of some stable, its whole future undecided. It has its hour of helplessness, its danger of being slain by some cruel Herod. You do not know the undiscovered potencies of that life. No one knows save He who looks with the eye that detects every precious thing and who alone is able to make reply because He can bring out the unrealized possibilities of each life.

[Christian Register.]

We hear much said of the religion of common sense. It is only common in the sense that every soul is at times visited by gleams and glimpses of divine truth, intimations not to be explained by known laws, that engender convictions relating to the other side of us, the side not material, but spiritual, that can and does converse with God when we enter the sanctuary of conscience, of purifying pain, of deep-seated remorse, or of divine peace.

[Advance.]

"Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." Jesus was willing to stake all on that. If men honestly set about being true in the things which they know, doing the truth which is at hand, he will trust to them to accept his teaching in regard to the things which they do not know. Walking in the light which falls upon earthly things, they will believe his revelation of heavenly things.