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December 29, igog. THE PRESBYTER! ular services of the sanctuary. They are heard every Sabbath in towns and villages and rural communities throughout our land. Their influence in refining character, in maintaining exalted ideals, in developing and confirming faith, in dispensing the great truths upon which happiness and success in life are founded, is immeasurable. To no class of men does a nation owe such a profound debt of gratitude. Upon none is it so dependent for the stability and loyalty of its cuizensmp. And yet no class is more self-denying and heroic. The average minister is the character builder of his community and he is building with the materials which (jod has provided in his gospel of redemption for the lost. He is doing work that is to endure through all the crises of coming ages. His teachings are the rock upon which the Church is founded. Yet with his sublime message and his solemn, exalted mission, how. inadequately does the world recognize and how feebly does it acknowledge its debt of gratitude to him. So it has ever been. The gospel works like leaven, with an unseen, unmeasured fnrro ,J xiii. <igiii ?Ji me woriu is often seen with carnal eyes while its source is unknown. The force of this leaven and the brightness of this light are being evidenced by the extraordinary zeal of both the ministry and laity in evangelizing the world, both at home and abroad. TO BE DISCOUNTED. Magazine attacks upon the Bible, the Church and the Christian fnifti " ? ? ,a.iu die very common. Almost every one of those that are catering to popular tastes has something of the kind in almost every issue. Several things ought to be remembered in connection with these attacks. The first is that the proprietors are simply trading upon the innate prejudices of men. They are not printing these articles for the good they will do. They are in the business of publishing for the money that is in it. If they should think that this class of articles does not pay, they wouiu speedily shut them out. Ridicule of religion, depreciatory remarks upon the faith, sharp and cutting attacks upon the Bible and theological truth have been popular in all the ages. That they are so, accords with the statements of the Bible itself. "The carnal mind is enmity against God." But keen-eyed business men have seen how this fact might be turned to good account. They have made it pay. They have used it to sell their products. Another thing to be remembered is that the writers of these articles are, as a rule, the least qualified of all people to discuss the principles or facts in the case. Neither by training nor by sympathetic scholarship are they qualified to pass judgment upon what they decry, and they are absolutely wanting in the judicial spirit which is the first requisite to careful analysis of conditions or correct discrimination between error and truth. They are either prejudiced judges, expressing their own nredil#?rtioric /-> " g .?ptiiu^-rt-iiners WHO get so many dollars for so many pages of attack along popular lines upon faiths which the popular mind so dislikes that it will pay for the attack. A year or two ago a young woman went the rounds of the churches to test the "stranger welcome" problem. She was 4- , IAN OF THE SOUTH 3 well paid for doing it. Her test was a fraud. She was not a stranger to be taken care of, to know from experience and response to actual needs and stranger nooci what the churches were doing, but was a masquerading spy who deserved more than ajl the coldness that may have been shown her. And precisely the same may be said of those other writers who, having exploited the cities and the trusts, at so much per page, and sorry pages most of them have been, arc now devoting themselves to attack upon the Church. TIlP hnrrpnnpcc ?11 f 1 ? _ vi uiv^v. niiacKs, in ciii umcr ieatures except the enmity which they display, is a marked characteristic of them. They seldom show anything beyond the most superficial knowledge of the great matters with which they deal. They read, as to their information, almost invariably like second-hand affairs. TIipv nrn ?*-* 11 1 " A ' r ' ~ a. v. >>i an macs generalizations irom tne smallest kind of isolated cases or from the testimony of extra small mind or minds puffed up with arrogance and intoxicated with their own vagaries. To be alarmed by these ebullitions, therefore, is to be almost as silly as they are. Instead, the true believer may remember that such attacks, such prejudice, such ignorance. suen nasxy generalization are as old as the faith itself, with the one added feature of modern times that the exploitation has been made to pay! He may discount every one so heavily that there will be nothing left of it visible except its enmity and lack of disinterestedness. _Jk PIONEER WORK THIRTY YEARS AGO. In the "Herald and Presbyter" of December, there is an article by the Rev. Henry B. Gage, that specially u.t.av.is uui diicimuu. ne was a co-laborer with Rev. Sheldon Jackson, in the "wild West" during the seventies and onward. He was familiar with the work of that veteran home missionary and was a home missionary himself. Verily, in those days it was the "wild West." In those times the conductors on the railroad trains would warn their passengers, at meal times, "not to wander away from the depot," saying, "I can protect you within the depot limits, but not beyond." And we Saw two passengers who disregarded the warning and went abroad, come back to the train, twenty minutes later, without watches or money. But the gospel was made for just such times and just sucn men. Mich were the dwellers in Pisidia, towhom Paul preached, and where Timothy was reared and these two pioneers hesitated not. They sat down together with a government map, and began to study where population was sure tocentre. They were at Denver, then a city of four thousand npnnlp A roM.wl ? ' r ,?!* >.. luuuuu inciii wcic opportunities tor populous towns, but not any towns. These two men noted the passes that led through the mountains and decided that towns would spring up at the mouth of each of these. They noted the fact that the country was larcelv n V O "V ? desert because of the lack of water, and yet there were streams that could be used for irrigation and they felt sure that towns would develop in the neighborhood of these streams. Thus the two men, in the early seventies plotted out the field. The Poudre river was such a stream. They "put a