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August 16, 1911] THE.
have heard the trumpet tones of Dr. A. W. Leland,
Dr. Ben Palmer and 'our Girardeau.' The
galleries in those days were filled by the black
people?negro women on this side, the men on
that. Daddy Jacky sat in the front gallery, never
taking his eyes from the preacher. And when he
came to die (it was told me) your father stood
by him to the end and caught the words 'Mars'r
Hibben I'se a ransomed sinner mos' home; my
boat mos' reach shore, and Mass'r Jesus stannin'
ready to ground her."
"Thank ^ou. H. It is very pieasant to
r>nmo hnolr nn/1 liom. ~i *- -4-1?
uuu licm liUCOC SLU1ICH UUUUt lilt:
church of my fathers." But I did not tell him
that for the last hcur I had been receiving wireless
messages from the spirits of the past, and
in spirit had heard again, as if echoing from the
walls of eternity, the Hymn, which I had often
heard afterwards rrt?m my father's lips and life
Exalt the Son of God?
The sin atoniny Lamb.
Redemption in his blood
To all the world proclaim;
The yeir of Juonee is come;
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.
S. L. B.
THE PRESENT AGE.
Today 1 took down from one of my book
shelves a little volume entitled: "The Old Puritanism
and the New Age." It is further described
as, "Addresses before the Woburn Conference
of the Congregational Churches at Maiden,
Massachusetts, April, 1903." The second address
is by Charles S. McFarland, Ph. D. Some
portions of this address describe the present age
so accurately, and so strikingly set forth the
spirit of it that 1 copy them for the benefit of the
readers of the Presbyterian op the South. Of
course there is another side. Dr. McFarland
himself says: "Had I been called to speak of
good things and advances of our time I could
have done so warmly. But I am here to urge its
dangers." None, I think, can deny that he has
well set forth some of these dangers in the paragraphs
quoted.
"The generation to which we are called to
proclaim the truth is one of appalling indifference
to the deeper issues of human life and
destiny. Men and women are little concerned
about their eternal souls. It is not an age of
great and profound sense of moral obligation
and responsibility, but of easy-going disregard.
It has little of the snirit of hnmhlf> Ann foam mi
but much of arrogant self-complacency. It blindly
refuses to tremble for itself. It is self-satisfied,
with too little capital for its self-satisfaction.
It lives in time and sense, and ignores eternity
and spirit. The Almighty is patronized. Jesus
Christ is ignored in His divine Saviourhood, his
Holy Church is neglected, and His disciples and
apostles condescendingly tolerated by a growing
mass of men and women who have less and less
use to make of them or their sacred message.
They think they can conserve an adequate moral
character and nature, and tell themselves they
are doing it, without worshiping God or directly
seeking his grace and strength. As to the issues of
eternity, they will get through somehow."
"Ours is not a serious age. In the pulpit itself,
light-weight and flippant entertainers have
their day. The church must minister amusement
rather than religion. "With the sense of
obligation the sense of privilege has departed,
and many men and women, when they come to
church at all, do it and speak of it as though
they were conferring a favor upon the church,
upon the preacher, and upon the Almighty.
Heavenly treasures are unsought, and materialism
rules. Mr. Rockefeller is fervently de
PRESBYTERIAN OF THE 81
nounced by men who are trying their very best
to be Rockefellers. They have not time to go to
church. The family hearthstone is no longer a
sacred altar, and the father is no more the priest
of God in the home. The mighty movement, the
animation, the ceaseless energy of the time, is in
the realm of material things and to gain possessions
of the earth. There is a correspondingly
growing apathy on the side of religion. As ministers
of the gospel we wait and long in vain for
some one to come, sometime, to talk with us
about some great, deep and profound spiritual
interest. And it grows difficult and dangerous
to dare to go to them. The fact is, our age is
dangerously near the experiment of trying to
get on without religion and without God. "We are
moving merrily on over the surface of an ocean
deep with unseen and forgotten perils."
'4 It is not so much a flagrantly bad, as a lounging,
careless, heedless and indifferent time. Men
are serenely strolling over moral paths, and gayly
tripping on the edge of the eternal solemnities
of human life. The age lacks deep moral
force and conviction. It has corrected some of our
fathers' faults, but has less moral power. It has
lost in fortitude. The fathers went to the house
of God with the Bible in one hand and with a
musket in the other to defend their wives and
children. Their sons cannot be gotten out of their
soft beds to go to church without pointing muskets
at their heads. They braved the angry waters
of an ocean for the sake of truth and religion.
Their offspring will not go to hear the truth or
seek religion be the Sunday morning sky relieved
by a cloud the size of their hand, and dare not,
for religious worship, brave an April shower.
They sat for hours and listened with intellectual
alertness and spiritual earnestness to a sermon
on the attributes of God. Their sons and daughters
must have sermonettes, not more than twenty
minutes, and not tnr? doon
, vtvuj/, plUi.VUJtlU Uf llll>eilectual."
"If it be true?and who will say it is not
true??that we are wanting in our fathers' virtues,
is it not altogether probable that we need
their daily bread, those articles of faith which
inspired those virtues? The ultimate article of
the Puritan confession was, 'I believe in God.'
That belief was no vague and shadowy thing.
They believed in a sovereign God. They believed
in an Almighty God. This is the supreme article
in every faith. The gospel is outgrown, the Christian
pulpit is superfluous, the Church of Christ
goes out of existence when the truths of the
gospel, the vocabulary of the pulpit, and the
constitution of the church do not contain the
words, God, Sin, Judgment and Redemption.
Strong moral manhood never was, never is, and
never will be without these conceptions and
convictions.''
"THY WANT AS AN ARMED MAN."
The Christ was going about amongst men;
was seeking to do that for which He came, and
He went over into the country of the Gerasenes
and here performed one of His acts of kindness
that reflected His love and that also gives to us
a picture of mankind in any and every age; that
shows the satisfaction of man in his surroundings,
whatever they may be, the wish of man
* V - ~ '
ior an uncnangea order of things, the belief
that whatever is, is right.
There might be a different ending to this
story had the Christ been a man of commanding
presence as we wish ordinarily to think of him;
had He been a man to whom all turned instinctively
and who was recognized at once as a
man of authority, but as he was merely an ordinary
looking man, one who fitted perfectly in
with the scenery, the common*, every day appearance
of that primitive life, and who was no more
0 U T B (771) 3
to the Gerasenes than any other Galilean we get
u picture of natural man obeying that most
natural instinct, the instinct of self-preservation.
"They were holden with great fear," and that
does not mean that they anticipated a shortage
of swine, that their cupidity was aroused and
the men from the city wished to protect their
friends and customers in the country, but that
they were afraid of a change in the order of
things and anything that changed men's
thoughts from the routine grind was bad for
business. "They were holden with great fear,"
not because there were a few demoniacs in the
wuuiry, xioi ueoause mere was a scarcity Of
swine, but because one had appeared who might
so change things that buying and selling might
be retarded as men gave time and thought to
the signs and wonders of the Almighty God.
The bogy of panic. Men are scared back by
the cry of financial distress and are afraid to
change the accepted order of things. They are
not over-anxious because one man loses property,
nor because one is possessed by a demon, nor yet
additional expense to themeslves because of these
things. Nor are men deterred ordinarily by unexpected
expense if that expense only is incurred
in the maintainance of existing conditions,
but woe be to that cause which may turn
men's minds from the accepted channel, which
may change the routine of thought and of business.
Men will stand expense for prisons and
officials; expense greater than any reformatory
measures; they exclaim, "What difference does
a demoniac make? or any number of demoniacs?
they are the ones to suffer, and society must be
protected, so we will fasten them with chains."
Men will pay expenses, even to the worth of
many herds of swine to protect society, but
when the means are presented to them whereby
society may be cleansed, "They are holden with
great fear."
There is no hope for change, considering the
world as a whole, when men care more for self
than for their fellow men; no hope when each is
striving to go higher in the world t.han any
other; no hope for a radical change when tlie
desire for personal advancement is the strongest
human desire; when each man iiatters himself
with thu "
?- uenux uiai some day he may
surpass ail others or many others and thereby
binds himself to the wheel, when men go round
and round with the endless turns of the wheel
of fortune and have given mind and heart and
soul to hopes of financial gain and advancement
and honors beyond the others of their fellow
men j when the realization is keen within men
that even those without ability have won wealth,
that as it comes sometimes even by accident, as
men have discovered mines, so some day even
the lowest on earth may be the highest, that
some day "We" may tower above our fellows
financially.
There is the rainbow?at t.hA fnnf J*
? ?? iu it ia laic
wondrous pot of gold! surely if 1 follow it I
may find it, and I will build my pyramid of
wealth, and, standing on it, looking over less
fortunate men's heads, exult in the words of the
multitude, 'Look, there is one of the great; he
shows above the heads of the crowd.' " And
this man says and this man thinks, and this
man desires more than all else, merely that ^ ^
he may build a little pyramid of wealth and J
stand on it and be hailed as one greater than
others, as one that has proved himself great. ^ ^
"I am," man wants to say, and I am, man '
wants to believe, and he seeks to prove it bv f ^
holding to existing conditions, whereby he may
become great enough to say, "I have made my(Contiued
on page 11.)