[The Outlook]

It is not God, but man, who is on trial; man who prays often, not to the God of Christ, who declared that there can be no peace until righteousness is established, but to gods of his own making, to the tribal god whose care is for his own people and not for all his children in all nations. God's truth has not failed, nor has His love. He has never promised ease and physical comfort; He has never said that the world was made for man's pleasure. He has promised strength, but as the result of discipline, self-denial, and suffering; He has promised security, but as the result of overcoming evil with good; He has promised peace, but only when justice has been established; He has promised a redeemed world, but only when purity and love have been enthroned and crowned. Christianity has not failed; it has not even been tried. Hosts of men and women have lived by it, and been victorious over sorrow and trial, and died in the serenity of a faith which had become a life; but the world has never tried it. There is no Christian nation, nor is there a Christian civilization. In every nation there are sincere and faithful Christians, but there is no nation which, in spirit, institutions, and law, conforms to the law of Christian love. Some nations have gone farther than others in Christian experience and the endeavor to make Christianity the controlling principle of national life; but no nation has yet gone beyond the early stages of this radical reconstruction.

[The Christian Intelligencer]

Christianity in its true sense—the religion and spirit of Jesus Christ—has not broken down and can never break down, because it is spiritual in its nature and eternal in its duration. But civilization without Christianity not only has broken down now, but is continually breaking down, because its strength and wisdom are, after all, only the folly and the weakness of humanity. In our prayers for peace, therefore, let large emphasis be laid upon the restoration in the world, not of formal Christianity in any of its phases, but of the spirit of the living Christ. "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life;" and if, through this terrible baptism of fire and blood, the dead letter of materialism can be cast out of men's lives and replaced by the life-giving spirit of a real Christianity, even these months of agony and loss will not have been in vain.

[The Universalist Leader]

When an experience of any sort is ended, it matters very little whether it was sweet or bitter, whether it filled our heart with rapture or gave us cause for sorrow, whether we longed for it to pass away or wished that it might last forever. The only question of importance is whether it has made us better than we were. Has it made our conscience more sensitive to distinctions between right and wrong, and enlarged the sympathy through which we make the happiness of other lives our own? If it has done this, we are more than compensated for any pain that it may have inflicted. If it has done the opposite of this, we have paid too great a price for any pleasure which it has afforded us.

[Western Christian Advocate]

Prayer is religion at work as a directive force, preventing evil, effecting good, bringing healing to the sick, rescuing men and women from moral evil, bringing light and salvation to those that are oppressed. Mark it, then, as the highest expression of Christian faith today, that we believe in prayer as a directive force. This is assured to be reliable whether applied to the exercise of the individual soul or to the intercession of a group. Witness Christ's great intercessory prayer. Study his parables of the importunate widow, the friend at midnight, and many of his passages on prayer. It is surely evident that the New Testament teaches us to believe that we have within our reach a power for getting things done which we have not appreciated,—prayer.

[The Living Church]

Deep within us stir the childlike, beautiful, faith-full things. Good desires lie beneath the accumulated rubbish of the worldly; and where these good things abide, the Holy Spirit of God strives with us and speaks. He is speaking when the heart moves us to kindness; when the voice of a fellow being would rouse us to good; when the beautiful word or the melody or the good deed of another finds response within us; when sin-sickness fills us with agony; when we would show forth again the likeness to Himself in which He created us. How can we please Him when we walk in the vanity of our minds, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in us? But if we will become again as little children, seeking true life in the inner man, the Holy Spirit will in all things direct and rule our hearts; and we shall taste the fruits of the Spirit—peace, joy.

[Rev. W. E. Orchard, D.D., in The Christian Commonwealth]

We have to win back for ourselves and for others a great faith in God. Faith must be rebuilt, not to suit culture and civilization, but to insure for every man an open way for his soul to the presence of God; and while that will need better intellecutal and social expression than the past has known, it will need, above all, the example of lives rich in saintliness and charged with divine power.

Every one will surely see now that unorganized opinion and unexpressed ideals which cannot be mobilized at shortest notice, are powerless before the forces which evil can immediately put on the field. This will mean that we cannot afford to be merely discontented with the church. We must build—and as fast as we can—one universal church, able to appropriate and give expression to the divine will, and relying, not upon might or power, but upon the Spirit of God.

[The Continent]

Christ did not tell us that the people who feel right about him should know of the doctrine, whether it is from God or not. He swung the whole matter of assurance on obedience: He that doeth the will shall know of the doctrine. The only safe emotions about Christ come out of obedience to him. If you are in doubt about any vital thing of the faith, the first thing to do about it is to see that you are in the kind of fight that gives your soul a chance to be healthy.

[The Continent]

War shall cease at last when deceit and tyranny and the towering vanities of puffed-up lust for power have been trampled down forever, and a pacified world has come to wish and choose a life where each conform his own deed and purpose to the welfare of all. In that rational world there will be no wicked war, and therefore need be no righteous soldiers to frustrate it.

[The Congregationalist and Christian World]

The call today is not to the exceptional man in the church, to the theologian, to the minister, to the missionary pioneer, but to every man who bears the name of Christ. It is the call to give fairer, more constant, and more convincing expression in daily life to the Christianity we profess.