[Advance.]

Let us carefully note the fact that with all Christ's supernatural power he refused to use it in the interest of sudden achievements or easy victories. With all his intense love for men and zeal for human welfare he proposed no short road to great blessings. Not all the iniquities of the dreadful pagan empire or the entreaties of a chosen and suffering people could move him to change the state by a stroke of power. On the contrary, his doctrines were germs, his propositions processes, his favorite illustrations the field, the sower, the seed, the grain of mustard, the leaven. He was in the world to set nothing aside, but to fulfil, to fulfil all beginnings, all promises, all laws, even the laws of nature, the laws of development, the laws of the human mind and of human growth. He came in the fulness of time, and did nothing out of time or without time. We need to note this fact and feature of Christ's method the more carefully now because we are in danger of becoming impatient of its spiritual processes. Troubled humanity wants a quick and easy remedy. There is a strong yearning for a "presto change." The desire to have Christianity change the state and society at a stroke is almost as passionate and impatient today as it was when Christ healed disease with a touch, but refused to revolutionize society by the same short process. The world is as eager to cast out that word "fulfil" as the Jews were to cast out him who used it, while classes of men would like to see a kingdom of prosperity brought in without reference to the troublesome conditions which hedge about all good kingdoms.

Strike to the center of much of the agitation of the day and the core of it is nothing more or less than a demand for profit, prosperity, and comfort, without going through the prosy process of putting away wasteful vices and destructive habits and of cultivating careful economies and prudent forethought. So far as the laboring classes are turning their backs upon Christianity, it is for much the same reason that Israel rejected Christ, because it fails to give them a kingdom without repentance and faith. And over on the other side is another class who would like to have a secure state and a peaceful, pleasant kingdom, without casting out the devils of selfishness, avarice, pride, and wantonness, a kingdom which will make one half of society meek and submissive without making the other half humble, generous, or brotherly.

Even the church has not yet rid itself of the error of looking for the full coming of the kingdom by some short and easy method of miraculous dispensation. Whole congregations, many prayer-meetings, and Christian families without number, pray for the conversation of the heathen world without once seriously thinking of dedicating a son or a daughter to the work, or denying themselves the luxuries of life in order to make greater gifts. But a careful study of those early days cannot but make it plain that the kingdom will never come along the way of self-indulgence or easy achievement. The Christianity of Christ is at heart, and in every limb and fiber of its being, a religion of self-denial and sacrifice, and a religion of spiritual means to spiritual ends. The kingdom of heaven must be within us before it can be round about us. It means new-born men and women, born to faith, to service, and to the everlasting hope.

[Christian Intelligencer.]

The fact that the world is full of unrest, striving after better things; that the air is full of conflicting opinions strenuously vociferated; that free discussion and investigation abound, sometimes treating rudely what should be esteemed sacred; that the masses are tossed to and fro like the storm-tossed sea,—should not awaken the least discouragement. These characteristics of the age are full of encouragement. In the searching and sifting going on, the proving of all things, the wheat will be separated from the chaff, and the chaff will be blown away in the agitation. There is safety in free discussion, danger in the repression of it. Never before did men say so freely and fearlessly what they think or imagine. Never has the individual counted for so much. In the contention, error will be exposed and the truth will be attained, and in the end will be heartily accepted because it is the conclusion of untrammeled investigation and debate.

In the light of all the past, duty is plain. It is to hold fast to the Bible, to declare it clearly and confidently, to embody it in our lives, to surrender ourselves to it, and allow it to do in us and for us what it has always done for those who have enthroned it in their hearts. Many storms have raged around it, and it has emerged unscathed from them all. It has come to this generation through fire and flood. God has been with it, in it, and for it. It has been "the sword of the Spirit," the gospel of redemption through the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the word of Christ, the all-wise healer and the almighty deliverer. It has been the mainspring of the world's progress, has created the world's unrest, begotten its longings, revealed the better life and the universal kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy, and it, and it alone, is completent to guide to the attainment of the hopes it warrants. [Continent.]

If the name of God is invoked to unite the people for the safety of the nation, those who invoke it must be ready to receive in simple Christian brotherhood all who are thus drawn to unity with them, no matter how alien otherwise. The atheistic blasphemy of these [at Lawrence, Mass.] would be totally vain among the immigrants, if the churches they knew in their home land were not in spirit aristocratic churches—churches, that is, whose concern for law and order is mainly an anxiety to keep the common people from upsetting the privileges and comfort of the great and pious. The God these European peasants have been asked to worship must have seemed to them a God interested only in maintaining a comfortable world for the upper classes. But America cannot ask them to be patriotic in this country for God's sake, unless it makes them know a different God. This aristocratic God is what they came here to escape. A friendly God, a God who bends down to help the struggles of the poor and means that life shall be something abundant to every man who lives it right, even the humblest,—that God introduced to the immigrant in America will make the immigrant the nations's right-hand stay. But there is only one way for that introduction to be effected—through friendly Christians showing this same divine friendliness. [Christian Register.]

As we stand at the beginning of a new year, it is a brave new world which appears to all those who are children of the light. There were never so many "doers of the word" as there are today. Still, we must remember that some of the noblest thoughts that inspire the workers today came into the minds of prophets and seers twenty-five centuries ago and have been slowly working through the ages to bring us to the point of progress which we have attained. The process is slow, but the outlook is glorious. [Universalist Leader.]

Many have lost the opportunity for which they were praying, through throwing away some experience just because it hurt a little, when really it was the gripe of a leading that seemed cruel, but really was kind in its cruelty. There is nothing lost or wasted in the divine economy, but we are so far from the divine point of view we make scrap-heaps of the most priceless jewels. There is something in every day of the coming year that is worth facing.