[The Christian Intelligencer]

The contrast between the apostolic church and the church of the present day in the matter of finely finished services, beautiful edifices, inspiring music, and useful adjuncts, is sufficiently patent to all. The conditions of persecution and hardship which then prevailed are almost infinitely removed from the "flowery beds of ease" of modern worship. But those early days were days of power, of spiritual grasp, of tremendous courage, of abounding joy, of wonderful achievement, and of supernatural conquest for God. Many churches today would scarcely dare contend that their spiritual life and vigor could be spoken of in the same breath with the divine energy of those early Christians.

[The Christian Register]

It is in the interest of the permanence of creeds that they should seem not to be permanent, that they should be capable of growing and changing, putting off old forms and taking on new forms, receiving and casting off, getting rid of doubtful and disputable things, and simplifying into the things found to be reliable and vital. To this tendency all the churches are confessing; all are showing some signs of realization that truth is the only foundation of a creed instead of a creed being the foundation of truth, and that the oftener a creed puts itself into line with truth and shows that it can live with new and fewer words, and even without words, since our strongest religious constitutions are ever unwritten, the more people will trust in it and incline to believing instead of denying.

Then we can all think alike in one creed at least, the creed of creeds, the belief in believing, and in making belief honest and deep, so that the love of God shall be with all the mind and all the heart and so with all the life.

[The Christian Commonwealth]

True spirituality is to reconsider and revalue everything human from the point of view of its highest meaning and destiny—sub specie ceternitatis (in the light of eternity), as the philosophers say. That this gives power, freedom, happiness to the individual; that it enables him to find unexpected beauty in ugly things and goodness in unpromising material; that it provides a refuge from the troubles and difficulties of life, is as certain as anything in the world. Nor need it be a strained or unnatural attitude so long as "Spirit" is widely interpreted, and the fruits of the Spirit recognized, as all the saints have recognized them, in the humblest virtues and the most ordinary ways of life. Here is the ground of the true symbolism, which finds in all human concerns hints and beginnings of divine truth.

[The Christian]

We are not surprised that so many are turning to systems which seem to offer more solid comfort than an adulterated and emasculated gospel, which too often is all that the churches have to offer. This is indeed their hour and the power of darkness. But is not the professing church largely to blame for this? Does not the ultimate responsibility rest upon its officers who teach these things, and its members who love to have it so? And do not these present days—which for all we know may be the ushering in of the day of the Lord—call us all to honest self-judgment in this same respect?

[The Christian Work]

Men everywhere are writing, and everywhere men are speaking, and in every land men are working to hasten the day when war shall be no more. What goads them on in this arduous quest? Why do they toil in order to accomplish an apparently impossible thing? I know of no explanation so reasonable as this: They hear the song of the angels! It haunts them day and night, and they say, "Woe is me, if I do not do what I can to bring the world into a happier day!" If it were not for the angels, those spiritual forces which rain down on us from the skies, we should not be so disturbed by the woes of others, and our hearts would not cry out in such pain in the presence of war. It is because men wage war while the angels sing peace that we are all distracted and unhappy, and anxiously look around seeking for something which we can do.

[Rev. Charles E. Jefferson, D.D., LL.D., in Broadway Tabernacle Print]

Christian Science is a protest against the awful materialism of our age. When it started forty years ago, a little band of English writers had made it difficult to believe that Christ worked miracles. John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot by their inimitable style caught and held the attention of the world and breathed into the minds of men on both sides of the sea a distrust of all stories of the miraculous. Even ministers of the gospel were affected by the atmosphere in which they lived, and in many a pulpit there preached a man who did not emphasize the mighty power of God.

It was at this crisis that the Founder of Christian Science arose, and in defiance of the opinion of her day not only claimed all the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth as genuine, but asserted that just such mighty things can be done today. Her teaching was a protest against the entire materialistic conception of man.

[The Universalist Leader]

If we are immortal we shall exist as long as God does; and He will never let us alone until He has had His way with us. The injury which sin inflicts is not the alternative to the practice of righteousness, because there is no alternative. It is like the awakening from his fevered dream of unhallowed pleasure to the retribution of cold and hunger and loneliness that caused the prodigal to say, "I will arise and go to my father." What God now commands He will forever insist upon, for "he is in one mind, and who can turn him?" Through all the joys that reward our virtues, all the retributions that scourge our vices, He says to us, "Be ye perfect in all righteousness;" and He will keep on saying it until the command is obeyed.

[Western Christian Advocate]

After all, there is but one masterpiece of human character; but one composition in which there is no discord; but one man by whose perfections any clear-sighted, honest, earnest soul can measure himself. "Not failure, but low aim is crime." It is our shame, not that we fall so far below the character of Jesus, but that we fail so wretchedly in our aspirations and resolutions to be like that beautiful, fascinating, irresistible person whom the world unites to applaud and so few follow devotedly. He who alone has scaled the utmost summits of life, and who walks those shadowy and cloud-piercing heights in the freedom and power of a manhood which he wants each of us to share, calls men to come after him and promises us the victory because he himself has overcome.

[The Methodist Times]

Speaking generally, the war is teaching the world the tremendous power, for good or bad, of spiritual and intellectual ideas, as well as the marvelous effectiveness of education in propagating them.