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August 25, 1909. "THE
ue to come until the opportunity at home
equals the opportunity here.
They are going to be citizens with all
the rights and privileges of the oldest inhabitant.
What kind of citizens? This is
for the Church to answer. The public
schools will teach them their duty to the
country. Who is to teach them their
duty to God? The Church must do it.
There is none Other_ "One mllllnn Imml
grants means one million opportunities,
and one million responsibilities." The
Assembly's Committee is now preaching
the gospel in six nationalities in as many
languages. Our great Church this year
is spending $7,500 on this foreign work.
We should at least spend $25,000 if we
would do our share. Never was a work
more successful.
The Expanding Frontier.
Into the great South-west settlers from
other states and homeseekers from other
lands are going at the rate of a million
a year. In the early settlement of the
nation our fathers built their houses, and
then the church close by. Today it is
different. The church comes last if it
comes at all. The gospel privileges in
this new country are totally inadequate
for the multitudes who need them now
as never before.
Louisiana, on of the oldest states, yet
a part of this new country, is fast coming
to be recognized as a field rich in promise
and white with harvests. Possibly no
state in tjie union is more missionary in
character and presents greater opportunities
for gospel triumphs.
Texas, "which would hold all the people
on the globe and give each family
more than half an acre of land," is a prize
well worth the effort of any church. Here
are hundreds of communities entirely destitute
of the gospel, waiting the coming
of the missionary., Oklahoma, the young
est synod, is destined to be one of the
strongest?a state that In twenty years
has grown from a territory, sparsely settled,
to a great commonwealth with a
population of 1,900,000. Within the
bounds of this synod there are scores of
towns without a church and opportunities
for denominational expansion without a
parallel.
Arkansas, Missouri, New Mexico and
Arizona tell the same story. The only
question is: "Are we going to enter these
open doors and do our share in the evangelization
of this great country and save
it for our Church and the Kingdom of
God?"
Why Home Missions?
mu * 11
i uest? lauib art; a pai tiai answer. AM
these conditions represent adverse forces
drawing us away from the Kingdom of
God. They press upon us and challenge
the power of the Church for their salvation.
America is not a saved land and
It Is folly to assume that it Is. No reflex
influence theory of missions will meet the
need. There must be a complete occupation
of every part of the land by all
the institutions and agencies of the
Church of God. This must be done for
the sake of our country, for the conservation
of the Church, and the results al
ready gained.
"To the nation as to the man, to be
without God is to be without hope." Upon
Home Missions depend the salvation of
the unchurched millions in America, and
the salvation of America itself.
; PRESBYTERIAN OF THE SOUT
SOME LESSONS FROM HISTORY.
By E. C. Gordon.
The country has recently been treated
to an exposition of some teachings that
are said to be current in some of the
great schools of the land. The designed
outcome of these particular teachings is
to overthrow the Christian relieion ami
the morality of which it is the chief foundation.
We are gravely told by these
university professors, so it is said, that
we have outgrown Biblical Chistianify,
and now need to formulate a new Christianity,
according to their teaching.
There is nothing new in all this, as
students of history very well know. When
Paul at Athens preached Jesus and the
resurrection, some of the university professors
mocked. Doubtless this was
true also at Tarsus and in other learned
cities. Paul kept on preaching, and the
university professors and their mockeiy
passed &wav hn* phriotu^u.. 1?J
? , 1, .avmuu; out VIVKU.
It st^ll survives, strong with the strength
of the strong Son of God.
Most of us know of the conditions in
western Europe at the beginning of the
Sixteenth Century. These conditions
have recently been widely discussed. The
apathy of the church, united under one
earthly head, the revival of learning, set
forth with all the arts of literature and
oratory, excited the gravest fears in the
minds of the devout and earnest Christians.
It seemed as if Biblical Christianity
would be ground to powder and scat
tered to the winds. But these fears were
not realized. God raised up Luther, Calvin
and others. They preached Jesus
and the resurrection, the great doctrines
of man's sin and of God's grace in salvation,
and Christianity survived.
The religious condition of r.ront
ain in the middle and latter part of the
Eighteenth Century is not so well known.
It was indeed most deplorable. The great
doctrines of man's sin and of God's salvation
by grace had been shelved. Infidelity
was rampant. A barren, formal
orthodoxy, a dead morality, occupied the
attention of the pulpits of the church. All
parties in the church seemed to have
agreed on one thing only; to do nothing
for the salvation of sinners. There were
no Sunday-schoolB, no Bible Societies, -no
city missions, no foreign missions, no
evangelists. Crime and vice of every
sort were flagrant in all classes of so
ciety. Since the times of Luther and
Calvin, the level of gospel preaching had
never been so low and the level of immorality
had never been so high.
But Christianity did not perish. God
sent forth some successors of Paul, an
nnnfltlo r\f Tfionu M? At- *
vuiibi* ior ine raitn or
God's elect and for the truth which leads
to godlikeness. These men held tenaciously
to the Holy Scriptures as of divine
authority, and as an infallible rule
of faith and practice in religion. They
took the great doctrines of sin, and salVoHnn
~%M ""
uunu Hum tuts Bueir. iney preached
them with great unction and power
wherever they could get audiences; even
amidst obloquy and persecutions of all
sorts. They taught the doctrine of native
depravity, of salvation by God's
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H. l7
grace through faith in a divine and crucified
Saviour. They emphasized the
necessary and inseparable connection be
tween saving faith and sincere, persistent
and successful efTorts after a pure and
holy life.
The results need ever to he hnmo
mind by both infidels and Christians.
These great preachers of Biblical Christianity
saved Great Britain and North
America from a dominant infidelity, from
a dominant Romanism, from a prevalent
and destructive immorality, from despotism.
In the closing years of the Eighteenth
Century, France, weltering in the bloodshed
during the Reign of Terror, found
that neither atheism nor infidelity could
help her. Then a number of influential
men undertook to found a new religion
on scientific principles. Their creed
consisted of two doctrines: the existence
of God, the immortality of the soul.
Tneir moral code consisted of two duties:
love to God, love to men. Their
worsnip consisted of prayer, praise, the
exposition of the two great duties, and
placing flowers on altars.
No religion ever started under fairer
auspices, or with more flattering prospects
of success. Biblical Christianity
had been formally abolished. The religion
that defied reason and worshipped a
harlot had been found wanting. Men of
the highest learning and purest philanthropy
gave this new religion their influence
and patronage. The cathedral
church of Notre Dame and eighteen others
in Paris were placed at its disposal
by the government. Its manuals were
seui ionn over France free of expense
by the Minister of the Interior. But this
religion did not flourish under the fostering
care of the State and disappeared at
the first breath of opposition. Napoleon
Bonaparte blew on it, and it died.
The lesson is this: Preach the great
truths that gather about the Cross of
Christ: Man's sin; his native depravity
and innumerable actual transgressions;
his helpless, hopeless condition in and of
himself; all this, true of the fine gentleman
and lady as well as of the criminal
and vile true of the millionaire as well as
of the pauper, of the university professor
as well as of the ignoramus of the king
as well as of the peasant. Hence the
need of God's sovereign grace, of a divine
and crucified Saviour, by each and
all.
Christianity is not, was not, designed
to be self-propagating. It needs God-sent
men and women, who live and teach it
so as to give others a full knowledge of
it, a full knowledge that leads to godliness.
If the attitude of the infidel university
professors shall lead to a general revival
of true Gospel preaching in Christian
pulpits, preaching addressed to the
rich, the learned, the powerful as w?ii
as to the poor, the ignorant and the
weak, there need be no fears felt for
the Qospel, which is the power of Qod
unto salvation to them that believe, or
for the Church, which is the pillar and
ground of the truth.
Lexington, Mo.