[The Christian Advocate]

When Jesus said to his disciples, "I am among you as he that serveth," he expressed a social ideal (and magnificently illustrated it in his whole life) which is fast coming into recognition as the best regulative principle for the complex relations of modern society. To serve humanity in all that one does, is an ideal for the commercial world which, if made generally operative, would redeem our competitive system from its grasping insincerity and greed. Let the accumulation of riches be a consequence of service rather than the result of a specific effort to amass a fortune, and there will be little complaint on the part of even the discontented, and no objection from those who are fair.

There is no necessary iniquity in becoming rich; there is vast evil in becoming rich through the misfortunes or ignorance of other persons. It does not seem impracticable for a merchant to choose for himself the ambition to be a Christian man, selling Christian goods for Christian uses, at Christian prices. If business cannot be brought to such a test as that, it has no right to be called a Christian business, whatever may be the religious professions of the men who conduct it. This principle of service through wealth will not only safeguard the gainer of riches from sordid ambitions, but it will direct the use of his accumulations.

[The Christian World]

The God of our heaven must become the God of our earth, the knowledge of our Father must become a demonstration of our brotherhood, the pattern of the mount must become the tabernacle of the wilderness, the passion of the soul for God must become the inspiration of our life for our fellow men. The world is calling out today for real service from men and women who can go into it with a true religious spirit. Recent social developments are calling for voluntary workers to make them effective; voluntary workers who need to begin with the great conviction that all lives are sacred and hide within themselves divine possibilities, and that the worth of humanity lies beneath all its differences and divisions. Workers are needed who have a heaven of light and love and wisdom overarching their world, and who are willing to go forth in the faith of high ideals to render service to humanity, to establish on the earth the kingdom of God and His glorious will. Moments in heaven are granted to most men, and the world would soon be different if they would let the God of those moments govern the ordinary life.

[Rev. R. J. Campbell, M.A., in The British Congregationalist]

There is today, unless I am greatly mistaken, a strong craving evidenced on every hand for a truly authoritative divine word to our age and to the individual soul. Confronted as we are with a new and portentous social situation, and with a new apprehension of the mystery surrounding the problems of human life and destiny, in fact, a more intense realization of the utter inability of either science or philosophy or both together to get behind the phenomenal universe and lay hold of reality,—in a word, with a reassertion of the claims of the soul as distinguished from those merely of the senses and the mind,—we are hearing once more the expression of the wistful desire for a religious authority, foundational, indefeasible, inerrant, and all-sufficing. Am I right in this? A new age demands a new word, and recognizes its own insufficiency to utter it. The infallible church theory has broken down, so has that of the infallible book, and the supposedly infallible reason is following suit.

We are like inhabitants of a storm-swept isolated island, content to live in a cave on the shore till unusually high tides invade our security and drive us to seek shelter in the woods. But the shelter is imperfect; the rains and the winds search us out; wild creatures prowl around us and dismay us by their presence; trees get uprooted, or their branches are not strong enough to bear what we put upon them. So we betake ourselves to a new refuge, buildings erected by our own hands, each man for himself, with the rough tools and slender materials at our command. Alas! these are no more permanent than our previous homes. One sudden tempest and they lie open to the sky, stripped roofless and bare. There is nothing now to be done but to await the coming of fuller resources from the mainland beyond the horizon, and begin again, this time more stably and solidly. This is exactly the position we find ourselves in, religiously speaking, today. The cave of an ecclesiastical system has become untenable; the diversified forest of sacred literature is after a while found to be no better, if indeed as good; and finally, the individual reason proves just as helpless as a dwelling-place for the soul.

[The Continent]

A thousand times modern unrest repeats the ancient complaint: "This is an hard saying; who can hear it?" It is the revolt of insurgent souls unwilling to be held up to the high, fixed points of God's righteousness. But Jesus changes no hard sayings. The only way to obliterate these lofty demands is to resolve God into a vaporous concept of the human mind. Then He may be made over every morning to suit. That, some people are trying to do. But the religion of the Bible is the religion of a God fixed and final. Morecover, it is the religion of God's incarnate revelation of Himself in Jesus our Lord—likewise fixed and final.

Jesus Christ is not merely an ecstatic dreamer, standing midway of the rising centuries, pointing the way by which he trusted that humanity would rise. Instead, Jesus is the immortal torch-bearer, standing through all ages at the summit of the road, showing with eternal authority the one way home to God. He himself is Way, Truth, Life. In this he must be unalterably true or there is no Christianity. Religion might be left without this, but not Christianity. One changeless reality back of all reality—God; one infallible revelation of that reality—Jesus: these are ineradicable axioms of Christian faith.

[The Christian Intelligencer]

Never was there more urgent need of preachers with a living message. We cannot prescribe to the letter all that this message must be. To be living, its main theme and object must be Christ, who is Life; but no one can control the intellectual history and spiritual struggle of another. God has His own way with different types of men. Woe be to those, however, who bring no light, who drag their doubts into the pulpit, who spread religious confusion. Woe be to those also whose technically orthodox message is merely the dead echo of a living past. We must preach the Christ of history, but the Christ of history must be to the preacher the Christ of personal experience. Carlyle says, "Perfect ignorance is quiet and perfect knowledge is quiet, but the transition from the former to the latter is a stormy one." We do not want the serenity of ignorance in the pulpit, nor do we want the buffetings of inner storms; we want the calm assurance of perfect knowledge of Christ as Saviour and Lord, and it is not for any one to prescribe iron rules of method to one who truly knows his Lord.