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

"Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour." The man who used these words meant far more by them than that Jesus was only a human being who had been divinely chosen for the work of delivering Judea from her foreign oppressors and instituting an era of freedom and righteous government. Indeed, I question if he was thinking about that at all. By "a Prince" he meant a person preeminent over all human beings; and by "a Saviour" he meant a spiritual deliverer. This assumption is strengthened by what follows. He was to "give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins."

And here I should like to observe that doctrines grow out of psychological experiences, not vice versa. The experience comes first, the doctrine after. It is not the place of Christ in the Godhead that we have to reckon with at the beginning of our spiritual life, so much as his saviorhood. Do we need a savior or do we not? What do we need one for? — that is, if we need one at all. This is a point on which today, as at the beginnings of Christianity, a great variety of experience exists. The world needs saving in many ways. We still have with us those who long chiefly for social salvation, the setting to rights of our national and international relations; you could hardly interest them in anything else; they feel, and quite genuinely, that if we could only secure a better adjustment of material conditions there would not be much left to trouble about. In this, you see, they are very like the enthusiastic patriots of Palestine in Jesus' day. Then there are those who are oppressed by the thought of the world's suffering; they would like to abolish it utterly; if only pain could go, if only the miseries and inharmonies due to the infirmities of the flesh could be removed, anything further in the way of salvation, they think, could be left to take care of itself. Perhaps I am not stating this quite fairly. It might be better to say that when thinking about the subject of saviorhood there are many sensitive and generous natures in our midst who instinctively feel that what is most wanted is salvation from suffering. And I am not indisposed to agree with them,— at any rate up to a point. It is one's pity for the sorrow and pain of the world that makes one long for a root remedy.

But there is something deeper still, and that is the burden of the world's sin. Not everybody feels this keenly, but many do. There were some who did before Jesus came. The language of the penitential psalms shows this; but somehow the presence of Jesus in the world has intensified the perception that sin is our greatest enemy. This is an absolute fact, and not merely a matter of opinion. Jesus has quickened the sense of sin in the human heart; those who have come most profoundly under his influence have been those who realize most deeply their sinfulness and their need of his saviorhood in this respect. In other words,. Jesus has himself awakened the very need his gospel professes to satisfy.

[Rev. William T. McElveen, Ph.D., in The Advance.]

Through His prophets and saints God tried to teach Judea that it was elected to serve mankind, but Judea misunderstood and so misstated the idea. It regarded itself as an elect nation. It regarded all other nations as rejected nations. Instead of being serviceable, it was arrogant; instead of being useful, it was exclusive. To the Jew the term Gentile was as much a term of reproach as the term Barbarian was to the Greek.

And the Christian church for many centuries misinterpreted this great idea. For too many years the thought we call election meant to the Christian church what it had meant to Judea. It meant that some few men were predestined to be saved, but that the majority were doomed to be lost. Indeed, some of the great teachers of the church taught that mankind was not only divided into two groups, the saved and the lost, but that the number in each group was so accurately predetermined that no one by any moral effort could discharge himself from one group or promote himself into the other group. The Christian church, if you can call a church Christian when it fails to preach the basal verities of the gospel, forgot what Jesus said about our Father. He said that God loved humanity, and that it was not His will that any one should perish. The church not only dealt inhumanly with men, but it caricatured God. It misfeatured Him by picturing Him as an arbitrary, partial, unjust, capricious, irresponsible God. It substantially said that the God of love and grace was under no obligations to be good to everybody. It failed to see that God by His very nature was a seeking, saving, reconciling, renovating God, and that no man was lost save by his own deliberate, continuous resistance of all of God's overtures.

And the Christian church, because it believed in a God who was a respecter of persons, created castes in its own membership. It separated the clergy from the laity. To set certain men apart as religious leaders and spiritual guides is proper enough; but to say that certain men because they are clergymen have rights and privileges with God, which other men can not and do not have, is contrary to the spirit and teaching of the New Testament. The New Testament knows nothing of an exclusive ministry or a secularized membership. The words clergy and laity and the ideas they represent are not to be found in the New Testament. The New Testament never speaks of any man being a priest of God in any sense in which all saved men are not priests of God. When Peter says, "Ye . . . are an holy priesthood," he is addressing not the apostles or any group of leaders, but the entire membership of the church. A truth which the New Testament emphasizes and which Christians need ever to keep in mind, is the truth which has been called "the priesthood of all believers," and that truth is that every child of God is a coworker with God. We are saved to serve; we are blessed that we may be a blessing; we receive that we may give. All are stewards of God's grace; all are responsible for the extension of the heavenly kingdom. We are all prophets, priests, and kings.

[The Christian Work and Evangelist.]

The United States will be the greatest nation in the world if, like Greece and Palestine in ancient days, it can in these modern days give the world another truth that shall be woven into the very warp and woof of its destiny. And some of us dare venture to believe that God has called her to speak some such great word just as much as He called Greece to teach the ideal, or Palestine to teach of a righteous God seeking to make His children righteous, or Rome to teach order and organization under law. And is not this great truth the one truth for which all the world is just now asking, praying, and seeking,—the truth of the brotherhood of man? And this is not the mere saying of it, not the truth as a beautiful desirability and distant aspiration, and not as an unattainable ideal to be always approximated, but as a possibility, a reality, an achievement, an object-lesson to all other nations. The very situation is God's voice calling America to this high destiny.

[The Christian Register.]

The spirit of God is a new spirit. It cuts fresh channels for inspiration to flow in. The bearer of a divine message is not often known and honored; he comes as a surprise, and in time is found to be accredited of God. Let us be careful how we scorn or distrust the message or the messenger because both are new and surprising. Let us not shut our ears. A prophet may live round the corner in the next street, or even next door, but his appearance may be as strange and unaccountable to us as if he had lived five centuries ago. It is hard to believe that the fount of God's inspiration is always flowing and was not dried up ages ago.