[New-Church Messenger]

The Word represents the Lord as being in a secret place. The dwelling-place of the Most High is spoken of as a secret place, and it is said that the Lord makes the darkness His dwelling-place. The question is asked, Why does the Lord hide Himself from man? Why does He dwell in a secret place? Why are His ways in secret? If He desires us to know and follow Him, why does He not clearly manifest Himself and His ways? Is it likely that one who loves us will clothe Himself in darkness and hide in secret places, and make His ways "past finding out"?

Is it not surprising that such questions as these should continue to arise, for that the Lord should hide Himself from any one is contrary to enlightened reason. It is a good sign of the times when it is perceived that one who loves us cannot consistently hide Himself from us, and that one who desires us to follow His ways cannot make them past finding out, in the sense that we can never know anything about them. It is not the Lord who makes the darkness round about Him; rather the erring ways of men, the wrong notions concerning God, are that darkness. The darkness is in our own uninstructed minds, and we ourselves are the authors of that darkness. God is light and dwells in light, but when we turn from that light through rejecting it, it can be but darkness. Again, the ways of the Lord are in secret, because they seem so impossible to us, because they are so different from our ways.

[The Christian Register]

For one mighty collapse of the time we should take intense satisfaction,—the collapse of the idea that God brings about great evils, and that, however wicked and cruel and needless they are, we must accept them as His way of bringing about good. This idea, it is true, is still entertained. There are men whose throats will not choke, whose intellects will not falter, whose sense of humor will not rise, as they mouth the wretched commonplaces of this disgraceful and absurd theory of Providence; but such men are few, and their hearers in overwhelming numbers will do some keen and uncomplimentary thinking of their own. They will marvel at the comatose state of mind of men who can show such helplessness, and they will call on their common sense and their reverence to demolish such folly and blasphemy.

What is against God's will surely cannot have been ordered by it; what is disobedience certainly cannot be rechristened and given divine title; what is so plainly and flagrantly against all His orders cannot be furbished forth as wearing the uniform of God's commands. The facts are too monstrous to be held up longer by a silly, inane notion of God's will as anything that may happen by the chance and device of wickedness. The mechanical and arbitrary theories of Providence and God's will have collapsed. All men can see their ruins. No argument is needed. There are the pieces, the fragments, never to be reconstructed. Now more people than ever will go to work helping God's will to be done, turning man's will away from what it has done to what it ought to do.

[The Christian Work]

It is something of a question whether a Christian has anything to do with his rights in any form or not. There is not the slightest indication that the Founder of Christianity was ever concerned with them. He was much exercised over the rights of others, but there is no passage in the gospels, so far as we remember, that would indicate that he ever worried over his own rights or gave them even a thought. Indeed, the testimony is all to the effect that it mattered not what happened to him so long as other people got their rights. Once, when his accompanying disciples wanted him to call down fire on a certain city and assert his rights, he rebuked them, and intimated that he was not here for that sort of thing, but to get rights for others. Once when Peter drew his sword to assert his Master's rights, Jesus told him somewhat sharply to put up his sword. The idea of rights seems simply never to have occurred to Jesus. He was here to see that his brethren in all ages got rights, and he forgot his own.

[Zion's Herald]

The world has a rather plentiful supply of impatient idealists, people who except the millennium to come by the passing of a few resolutions or the turning of a crank, but the real need is for practical idealists, who show their faith by their works, who are glad to make progress slowly rather than not at all, and who, while earnestly laboring for the right, manifest a considerate patience toward those who do not see eye to eye with themselves regarding the methods to be used in converting ideal into deed. It is possible, though perhaps not usual, to combine the fine, even fierce, ardor of the high idealist with the calm and sagacious policy of the eminently practical man of affairs.

[The Universalist Leader]

The habit of finding the faults in people and the evils in experiences, easily becomes a slavery which narrows life, and makes an otherwise very satisfactory person most unsatisfactory. There is more health in the simple food which satisfies than in the luxuries which breed discontent. Happiness awaits the one who passes from one genuine satisfaction to another, though little discontents border his pathway. It is wise even to be sometimes satisfied with self, however foolish it is to be self-satisfied.

[The Standard]

Let us see to it that there is something more Christian to Christmas than simply the name itself; rather, that in its entire observance it breathes forth the message of him who on that holy night came into the world, in lowly manger lying, the babe of Bethlehem. Let us ring in again the Christmas that points back to him of whom the angels caroled: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord."

[The Congregationalist and Christian World]

Good it is, that all the world over many are praying who never prayed before, and many who prayed before are finding unprecedented comfort and strengthening in prayer. Out of a terrible world situation will arise a new conception of prayer and a wider employment of this approved method of better understanding the heart of God and of coming into sympathy with His purposes of good for all His human children.

[The British Congregationalist]

In the midst of the abstract and intricate study of theology it is so easy to forget that only by the childlike spirit is the kingdom of God entered, and only as this spirit pervades the teaching of the pulpit will the real kingdom of God be extended in the world.

[The Universalist Leader]

No church can live which lives unto itself alone; it must either grow or die. The growing churches are those which have given themselves in a whole-souled way to the extension of their faith.