[The Christian Intelligencer]

It is a hopeful sign that thousands of Christians are again taking up the neglected Word. The disposition to know the mind and will of God is the precursor of surrender and obedience; and these in turn precede every great religious awakening. It is a comfort that the darkening skies of human life are shot through with light at some points. The imagination loves to picture Christians all over the land bending over the sacred page of Scripture and on their knees in prayer. The scene, which harmonizes with the facts, warrants the faith that our deliverance draws nigh.

[The Christian Work]

If Christians of all complexions would mobilize their beliefs around a pure, growing love for their one Lord, they could control civilization. Not sentimental effusions, which are something worse than bad taste, but warm, vital convictions about Christ, and what he was and did, and how he has saved to the uttermost and can save to the end, from the baser self, the mental sloth, the moral stagnancy, the spiritual dearth, the spurious adoration of the bloody sword of tyranny and them that use it,—these are the articles of a transforming creed. They express a love for him which neither stains the conscience, nor stultifies the mind, nor hardens the heart. It is a love filled with lucidity, communion, triumph. By it the men who trod the hills of Galilee with Jesus reshaped their proud, unbending world. It will give to all our teaching and our ministry a double power.

[The Universalist Leader]

What occurred in the storm on the Sea of Galilee is typical of the constant service for which the disciples of Jesus were indebted to the greatness of their Master's faith. In sharing his undertaking to transform the world's religious life, they had embarked with him upon a wider sea than that which separated Galilee from the country of the Gadarenes. Tempests of persecution assailed them; and the trials which they encountered were like the countless billows of a wind-swept ocean. Not once, but many times, they must have turned to him with the despairing cry, "Lord, save us: we perish." And always it was the serenity of his spirit, manifested alike in word and deed, that breathed peace into their troubled souls, and caused them to feel as secure in the heart of the storm as if their voyage had been beneath a cloudless sky and over tranquil waters. When they saw that his confidence remained unshaken, they ceased to be afraid, and waited patiently with him until the winds ceased their raving and the billows sank to rest.

[The Christian Commonwealth]

In spite of nineteen centuries of church teaching, the average man has very little idea either of what "a Christian ought to know and believe to his soul's health," or of what he ought or ought not to do if he would inherit the kingdom of heaven. Our generation has to discover afresh the Christian idea of God. In attempting to do this it will instinctively follow the other great current of Christian thought which flared into it from the eastern world, and think of God as visiting His people, as becoming man among men, in order to save man from the fate of being merely himself. However we may construe the historical facts, Christianity remains essentially an incarnational religion.

But the fatherhood of God toward all men, which Jesus taught in the Lord's Prayer, was narrowed by the creeds to the fatherhood of God toward Christ alone; and the doctrine of the incarnation has never yet come to its own. The church has been so busy safeguarding the divinity of Christ and explaining the efficacy of his death, that it has had no time to teach the truth for which those doctrines stand,—that every man may become a son of God, and that all love and all self-sacrifice redeem the world. Thus an unreal and unnecessary barrier has been set up between theology and religion, the official doctrine of Christians and their unofficial experience.

[The Congregationalist and Christian World]

"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." This is the absolute, irreversible, and irrepealable law of the Christian life. Whoever is disobedient to it is disloyal to Christ, and so far useless or hindering in the work of his kingdom. But practically, when we come to study the application of this irrepealable Christian law, we are confronted with the fact that in the complications of our human life our neighbor quite often is our enemy.

Christ himself both experienced and foresaw this difficulty, but he did not turn out of his way to avoid it, either for himself or for his followers. In the realm of personality the law of love is a law which admits of no exceptions. He did not make light of the difficulty; he insisted on the universal application of the law. It is one of his most striking advances upon the teaching of the church leaders of his own time: "Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies." That is the law of the obedient Christian life yesterday, today, and forever.

[The Hibbert Journal]

Now one effect of the war has been (this, I think, may be said with confidence) to challenge many of our preexisting notions of human nature and to confuse greatly our vision of the world. We do not quite know what to think, what to say, about either. Our anthropology is at sea in one direction; our cosmology in another. The war is the work of human nature; it originated in human nature, and is carried on by human nature. What comment, then, on human nature, what light on its "value," its position in the hierarchy of being, is offered by this, the latest of human nature's works? "By their fruits ye shall know them."

[The Christian Register]

No necessity rests on the promoter of liberal opinions in religion to disregard the feelings and points of view of those who maintain doctrines he rejects. No requirement of courage and candor obliges him to stalk rough-shod over the convictions of others, especially when they seem absured; for in most cases there is something underneath them which is as precious to the progressive as to the conservative. A reputation for slashing brilliancy in exposing the errors of others, and for disregard of proprieties of consideration and courtesy in scorching them, is not attractive.

[Rev. Adam J. Loeppert, D.D., in Western Christian Advocate]

It is not just to blame the true church of God for having failed to prevent war. It is paganism that is to blame, pagan encroachments, pagan distortions of Christianity, but not Christianity itself. Perhaps to some minds these statements seem to be a mere attempt to cover up the faults of actual Christendom. The shortcomings of professed Christians are too evident for such efforts ever to be of any use, even if it were desired to make them so. It is important, however, to bear in mind that if the churches are bad, the world is worse; and that the blemishes of the church are caused by the encroachment of the world-spirit.