Newspaper Page Text
May 22, 1912] THE.
Editorial 1
respite the claims of some, and the intense de>irc
of the dissatisfied to overturn present methods
to try new schemes, the Southern Church
i.x doing well. In every department of activity
.die has developed to a degree calculated to make
all who love her happy and grateful. It is no
time for experiment with new schemes. It is a
time for continued work, not for experiments.
The special need of Protestants just now is
llint they do not go to sleep. The Romanists are
contributing to their own undoing, by their en
onoachments, and endanger those whom they appose
only as the latter allow themselves to be
careless and off their guard. The people need
only to be kept posted concerning the effort which
is making to get the Roman yoke on them.
The church is rich in governors. Two who
bear that title having graced the chair in
Xorth Carolina and South Carolina, Glenn and
Ansell, are commissioners to the present General
Assembly. The present governors of Virginia,
Mississippi, and Kentucky are of the same faith,
while recent ex-governors of Georgia, Tennessee,
Florida, and Virginia are numbered among our
people. And the Presbyterian governors have
all Ik en among the finest that the several states
have ever had.
Almost the first act of the General Conference
of the great Northern Methodist Church, now in
session in Minneapolis, was to throw itself into
the very center of the political struggle of the day
by a resolution declaring that President Taft,
Secretary Wilson, and Secretary of State Knox
"have forfeited nil oloimo nn fVio futuxa
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chise of the Christian and sober manhood of the
nation." This resolution is based upon these
men having ignored appeals that no government
official should attend the Brewers' Congress held
in Chicago last October. The Taft side will
wonder if the Roosevelt side worked this.
Come on now and let us settle another problem.
A conference is to be held in July, and in North
Carolina, worked chiefly from New York, to tell
us what we ought to do on the "rural problem"
as it relates to our section of the country. Five
"outstanding questions" will be "assembled and
discussed, and the results are to be published in
a volume which will be "quite a formidable document
for use generally in the forward movement
of country life in general." Here is a fine opportunity
to get a good store of advice from
outsiders and people who live at a great distance.
Tf you do not wish to be regarded as behind the
times, get into the procession!
A correspondent of the New York Observer
VPTV 111?1+1 vr nalvn %? ? T> ~ ? C-Xl li - *1
-(kuui ij. liic xvuinau vxniiioiicH, wno are
so vigorously contending for the retaining of
their religions garb in the government schools for
the Indians, would tolerate, would approve of it
if a principal of one of the Indian Schools were
a Masonic knight, and were always to wear, while
on duty, his hat with its plume, the Masonic
apron with its signature, his knightly sword, and
all the rest of the panoply of his order. The
correspondent well adds that the outcry that
would he raised would be heard from one end
?f the land to the other. "Whenever the garb
'a so complete and conspicuous, as in the case
of nuns and friars, that there is no seeing the
wearer except with the garb, the better the wearer
may he in character and the more efficient as
a teacheT, the more complete and inevitable is
he result of that kind of sectarian propaganda."
PRESBYTERIAN OF THE S
Votes and
One ef our strong and consecrated ministers in
the Synod of Texas has been called away from
the scenes of active and fruitful service to the
rest that remaineth for the people of God. Rev.
Dr. A. W. Wilson, of Dodd City, died at his
home on May 5, at the age of seventy-nine. He
was well known and greatly beloved and exerted
a wide influence as a preacher of the Gospel and
a Christian of high character and consecrated
life. Dr. Wilson was a native of Tennessee;
graduated at the University of Tennessee in
1870; was ordained by the Presbytery of Holston
in 1873. As stated supply he served the
churches of White Pine, Russellville, Liberty
Hill, Bonham and Dodd City in Texas, and was
later an evangelist of the Presbytery of Paris.
He spent much of his life in Christian educational
work, having been President of Rogersville
Female College, Tenn., Elmwood Seminary, Mo.,
and was Professor of History in Austin College,
Texas. At the time of his death he was
serving four churches in the Presbytery of Paris,
by which Presbytery he had been elected a commissioner
to the General Assembly now in session
in Bristol, Tenn., in the church in which Dr.
Wilson was ordained fifty years ago.
If the light that shines farthest will be brightest
close at hand, then the light that is brightest
close at hand will shine farthest! There can be
no difference between these two statements. The
more foreign missionary interest the church feels
the more home missionary interest it will have;
and the more home missionary interest there is,
the more foreign missionary interest there will be.
Light travels so rapidly that while there may be
an actual order of time in the movement of its
rays, so far as practical results are concerned no
one need be disturbed as to the question of where
those rays shine first. Farthest and brightest,
brightest and farthest, they are all one.
Some of the old masters were better skilled in
art than they were in the knowledge of Bible
truth. As a consequence some of the masterpieces
of art are travesties of inspired history
and doctrine. But there is a painting of the
Holy Family, by Corregio that discloses a fine
spiritual and doctrinal conception in the mind
of the artist. A strange, beautiful light falls on
the group. It is not the light of the sun that illumines
the picture, but the light that beams
from the face of the Babe, from whom it falls on
the face of the mother and the faces of all the
rest. Tt is an allegory wrought unon canvas.-, hut.
it declares in language not easily forgotten, a
central truth upon which we build our eternal
hopes, the truth that the Master of all masters
declared when he said, "I am the light of the
world."
A wise and eminently successful missionary
said he was not in the work because of the destitutions
of heathen lands; he knew that his work
could make but a faint impression on the immense
aggregate of ignorance and immorality
universally prevailing; and if compassion for the
perishing heathen were all, he would long ago
have abandoned the field. But his Master's command
was the mighty, abiding impulse to hi3
life-work and was more than sufficient. Such
is the just attitude of the Church toward its
entire work. Destitutions appeal to us and afford
a scriptural motive for consecrated service,
but not the supreme motive nor the most potential,
nor is itssufficient. The Master's command
is th- final word that supplies the warrant for
mission enterprise and the guarantee of its success.
OUTfl (565) 9
Comments
A WISE WIDENING OF EFFORT.
The Laymen's Missionary Movement, through
its secretary in New York, calls for one million
special workers next year, and will start out to
try to develop them. The same movement in
our own Church, at a recent meeting of its Executive
Committee in Chattanooga, urged "a
simultaneous, every-member, every-church campaign,"
"working for the enlistment of two
hundred and fifty voluntary workers to present
the whole matter of missions before every conwri
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D.^e..i.vu, "iiu a ?wal lu View OI fri,iJUU,UW ior
all the benevolent causes of the Assembly and
the bringing in of 50,000 souls into the churches
in 1913 and 1914. We like exceedingly well that
Chattanooga proposal, in that it has widened
the Movement, most properly, as one looking to
the development of all the benevolent causes of
the Church. This is to be most heartily commended
and to be seconded all over the Church
by the most earnest endeavor. It removes much
c-f the objection which may have been made or
felt in the past, and will, we are sure, greatly
stimulate that which has been heretofore the
special object of the Movement's activity no less
than all the other departments of our Church's
activity.
As to the numerical aspects of the case, we
do not feel altogether the same confidence. Spiritual
results are not to be figured upon, and
numerical ambitions are sometimes unwholesome
and disappointing. The goal set in Korea, for
instance, a year or two ago, was not reached.
The effort was not a failure, for splendid results
were certainly achieved. The prayers and efforts
of the workers there and the interest and
prayers of the supporters and helpers here were
not in vain. But the failure as to numerical
hopes was a disappointment and a discouragement
to many. Should our Church reach the
numbers and amounts named in the present
resolution and appeal, well and good, but the
duty will by no means end there. So also, it
may be doing nobly even though it falls far short
of them. The nrnner thincr /In en with
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our might what our hands find to do, and let God
take care of the results.
By far the larger proportion of the popular
skepticism of which we hear is mere echo. People
who are themselves incapable of thinking out for
themselves anything that is profound or that
deals with first principles, catch up the expressions
of others whose notions fit in with their own
predisposition, and go about the world prating
of what they personally know nothing, pretending
that they are wise and intelligent and
thoughtful, whereas they are in the boldest sense
"agnostics," "understanding neither what they
say, nor whereof they affirm." Pin them dowi:
to any formal statement or proof, and they are
usually found incapable of either.
T/oyalty to one's own church and seetarinnism
are not necessarily hound together. As
ore looks at the splendid history of Princeton
Seminary, which celebrated its centennial last
week, would one ever accuse that institution
of being narrow and sectarian? And yet how
splendidly loyal it has been to its church and
that church's faith and traditions. Some of
the finest men whom she has ever trained
have been for other churches. The head of
one of the greatest theological schools of our
Methodist brethren, Dr. Tillett, of Vanderbilt
University, was trained for his work at that
loval Presbyterian institution, and if we misla!
e not, also one of the leading bishops of
I he same church.