[Woodrow Wilson as reported in New York (N. Y.) Times.]

Every community ought to realize, it seems to me, that the search for God takes precedence over everything else. What is the foundation of our life? What is the source of our strength? Where is our salvation? Not in ourselves, but in something external to ourselves and greater than ourselves, from which we are to arise. So the first thought that I have in standing here tonight is, that these walls have witnessed the permanent impulses and instincts of human life, that they are greater than the walls of cities. And the second thing that I have in mind is this: that this search is fruitless if it issues in mere conclusion, if it issues in mere intellectual certitudes; it is fruitless unless it gets embodied in men.

I have seen this beautiful thing happen, and I know that the salvation of a church and the salvation of a community and the salvation of a state is to be found only in those men who are thus rendered greater than themselves and greater than their age, and greater than anything that can happen to them. Those old martyrs who went to the stake smiling and singing songs of praise were terrible fellows; terrible because their very gaiety in going to the stake was evidence of the fact that this was an incident, not an end; that this meant nothing, and that after them their ashes would seem to speak the condemnation of those who put them to the stake, and stand up and condemn the generation that dared interfere with the processes of divine Providence.

We ought to bless our churches. We ought to think of them as the instrumentalities by which miracles are wrought, these miracles of regeneration. The example of consecrated men is better than all the books and precepts that the world contains, except, perhaps, this Book that I am touching, which seems something more than a book. It seems to contains something more than words and printed pages, because everything in it is so concrete, the men it speaks of are so real, and the truths it utters are so compelling. Read in this air they are familiar, but they are not redeeming words unless they vibrate beyond the walls of the churches and walk the streets and are seen in the households, and are translated into the public life of the community.

[The Advance.]

Some men live in a universie the limit of whose outermost confines they can touch with their own finger-tips. It is their one end and aim in life to change their finger-tip touch into a good, in fast clutch. If their arms were only a little longer and their grip a little stronger, they would be able to hold in hand or mouth what is virtually their whole universe. They are as the beasts that perish. From this lowest stage of human apprehension on and up, the universe expands. From the man who is his own world on to the man whose world is his home, and whose concern for humanity is bounded by the four walls within which he dwells, the ascent and widening area are progressive and continuous. There are men whose universe is as big as their own country, their own church, their own profession.

The man with only his naked eye and a small imagination lives in a universe bounded by the horizon. To him even the stars are virtually only a mile high. The man with the telescope adds celestial diameters to the measure of his universe, and the man with the microscope does the same in the other direction, and the man with the X-ray machine sees still farther. But the man with the imagination, the man of spiritual vision, sees farthest of all. He can discover what "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard." He can see beyond the stars. He can possess for his own the regions from whose bourne no traveler has returned. God and the landscape are his; for his eyes see the King in His beauty, and he beholds the land that is very far off.

No man can measure out a universe and deed it in fee simple to another man. Discovery is creative. The universe shrinks and expands with the mind and purpose of man; it fits every man like a garment without seam. Each man grows his universe. He makes it big or little; he makes it glorious or contemptible; he fashions it according to the bulk and quality of his own soul.

[The Universalist Leader.]

Sometime we shall have a literature which will deal with David and Saul and Samuel, with Moses and the prophets, with a freedom from all the excuses or repulsions of our present state of mind. Those pioneers were in dead earnest. They were human. They had great ideals. They lived in a world of thought where the mystery of the eternal was ever with them. What they said and wrote was but the faint echo of what they felt. The Scriptures bear witness to those who searched for God. We are still searching for God. It is doubtful if we are any nearer the solution of that mystery than they were. When our day of intellectualism, rationalism, criticism, science, has passed over from analysis to synthesis, when the coming age goes about reconstructing its world faith out of the materials furnished by history, those ancient seers will come to their own again. In that day a wise, devout generation of men will go hand in hand with the author of Job, or Ecclesiastes, or the 19th Psalm, through the twilight of this world. The mystery and marvel of things will return in the greater splendor of the new thought, and the human spirit will break forth into nobler appreciation of the mighty struggle of that ancient people who laid the foundations of our faith. When dogmatic theology passes over into the spiritual dogmatism of great convictions about righteousness and conduct and God, we shall sing again those ancient marching songs of Israel, and we shall write a finer commentary on the Book which tells the story of that march.

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

Exiled humanity has often longed for its spiritual home without knowing what it wanted; in Jesus the revelation has been given. The spiritual consciousness has awakened on higher levels than heretofore, and has laid hold of and assimilated eternal realities in a way that, apart from the gospel, it has never been able to do. It is becoming ever clearer to me that the grace of God in Jesus Christ has produced unique effects in the world; it is a thing by itself, an imparation of life and power not to be accounted for on any other ground than that it is the eternally perfect, the kingdom of heaven, breaking its way through to the plane of flesh and sense, irradiating, transforming, and uplifting the soul that yields itself to it.

[Western Christian Advocate.]

Signs multiply on every side that there is, not only here in America but throughout the civilzed world, a decided reaction from the rampant and increasing materialism of our age, with its money madness and its rage for spending, toward something more associated with spiritual development and the higher life of the individual, society, the nation, and the race. This is a movement and a trend in which all Christians may well find a high satisfaction. It is an answer to the protests and the prayers of those everywhere who have noted with dismay the absorption of life in the mere means of living. The meat has become more than life, and the raiment more than the body.

[The Living Church.]

Temptation is always with us, but the conflict is always within us. The battle-ground is the lonely solitude of our own hearts; and every war of "the Spirit against the flesh" is lost or won long before the issue is shown in open act. Thus there is seldom, if ever, a sudden yielding to sin; for the fall must take place in the heart beforehand, no matter how unpremeditated the act appears.