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August 14, 19121 THE P
Editorial I
Where one has but little power or authority,
it amounts to very little if he use it sometimes
indiscretely. But when one has vast power, how
important that he use it with great wisdom and
kindness! It is because there is so much deficiency
in these last qualities that men do not like
to entrust too great authority to their fellow
men. The demoe.rn.fie smirif on
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from the autocratic, is an instinct of self-protection
against unwisely exercised power. It is the
unwisdom rather than the power that is feared.
Rev. Frederick E. Shearer, D. D., of New
York, died at the Presbyterian Hospital of that
city on July 20th. Dr. Shearer has been an occasional
contributor to the columns of this paper
and his articles have been most valuable, always
sounding a true evangelical note and witnessing
for the faith once for all delivered unto the
saints. In the recent contests in New York
Presbytery with the revived ancient heresies entrenched
in Union Seminarv. Dr. Shearer miwte
a valiant stand for truth. He was numbered
with a helpless minority, but the principles for
which he stood are imperishable and his witness
given by voice and pen has not been given in
vain.
It has been pretty hard in the past for the
deliberative bodies of the Church to abstain from
intermeddling with the affairs of the State, and
it will require ceaseless vigilance in the future.
In 1910 when there was a warm political campaign
in progress in Pennsylvania the United
Presbyterian Synod adopted a resolution denouncing
one of the candidates for governor and
urging insistently that another candidate should
receive the suffrage of all Christian voters. There
is some talk of closer relations between ourselves
and our United Presbyterian brethren. If union
should ever occur we may imagine the flurry in
ecclesiastical circles when the General Assembly
should engage in the discussion of a resolution
urging all loyal Presbyterians to vote for a
particular candidate for governor in one or in
several of the States in the South or North.
Here is the reproduction of a scene which in
its essentials has been witnessed many times before:
August Strindberg was regarded as
Sweden's greatest dramatist and poet. Ivast May
he died in Stockholm. In his youth he bad been
religious. In later years he became '' rebellious,
unbelieving, revolutionary." During his last
sickness he called his daughter, Greta, to him,
took the Bible whioh had laid during his sickness
constantly by him on a table, pressed it to
his heart and said: "I have finished my life;
my account is olosed; now all that is personal is
wiped out." Then pointing to the Bible, he
added, "That alone is right." A Contenental
newspaper described this man as "one of the
most universally striking and characteristic per sonages
in Teutonic lands." Through his brilliant
literary life he had resisted and fought
against truth, but when brought to honest communion
with self and conscience he said of the
inspired Book, "That alone is right."
It is good news to the lovers of temperance
and every Christian virtue that the Senate Committee
on Judiciary has reported back to the
Senate the Kenyon Bill with the recommendation
that it be passed^ The provisions of this bill require
that liquors shipped from one State or territory
to another shall be subject to the laws and
police regulations of the state into which ?hey
art shipped. The liquor interests have succeeded
RESBYTERIAN OF THE 8 G
Votes and
hitherto in preventing such action by the committee.
It is believed that the bill will be approved
by the Senate and that it will achieve a
like success in the House if it can get past the
House Committee and be brought to a vote.
Nine-tenths of the reputable voters of the coun
try favor the passage of such a bill. The Supreme
Court some time ago decreed, under the
guise of a judicial decision, that the laws of a
state were inoperative against liquors brought
into its territory from other states.
It was well understod between the late Professor
James, of Harvard, and some of his friends
who might survive him, that he would endeavor
to communicate with them from the spirit world.
Accordingly they have been on the watch for
sigs or words from him ever since his death.
It seems now that their hopes are at last realized.
Some of them have accepted as veritable a communication
sent through a boy who has developed
mediumistic powers, addressed to Professor
Hyslop, Secretary of the American Society for
Psychological Research, saying, "I want you to
give Hyslop two pairs of pink pajamas and a
black necktie for Christmas." Professor Hyslop
is of opinion that the incident cannot he surpassed
in evidential value to any one who really
and intelligently understands the problem. And
so the immortal spirit of Professor James is now
deeply concerned about the color of Professor
Hyslop's pajamas! And this is the sum total of
his communications from the spirit world in
nearly two years of abode there!
The more human nature is exalted in the
estimate of men the less do they think of the
character and work of Christ. Those who believe
that we are saved partly by our goodness
and partly by grace are weak in their views of the
atonement and of Christ's kingly office. The
Unitarian teaches that men are saved by the
development of self and they deny the Deity
of Christ. When Rev. Reginald Campbell was
in this country last year he was asked to state
the difference between what he called "the old
and the new Christianity." He said "the issue
was not about the status of Jesus, but the status
of men that, "we are of one substance with the
Father and possess the essentials of Divinity,
that human beings are individualized Divinity
or Deity." This means that Christ does not
possess a natnre different from that which every
human being possesses. We may well beware of
thinking lightly of the sacrificial character of our
Lord's death, that we have redemption through
his blood, that in him dwelleth all the fullneas of
the Godhead bodily."
It is curious to note the self-contradictions
which error is ever prone to devise. In a Uni
tarian paper, The Christian Register, we find an
ardent defence of the use of crucifixes *.nd images
in the ornamentation and worship of
churches and a round denunciation of the
sixteenth century reformers for banishing these
instruments of superstition and idolatry from
their sanctuaries. The reformed sentiment of
America and England which excluded and continues
to exclude such symbols from the churches
is denounced as "blind fur?." Yet The Register
is accustomed to condemn just as ardently, the
doctrines for.which the crucifix is supposed to
stand, and if it would express itself would pronounce
the worship of the Virgin Mary and ine
invocation of images of saints as the rankest
superstition. The apparent significance of this
endorsement of Romish image worship is that it
DTE (943) 9
Comment
affords opportunity for expatiating on the alleged
coldness and austerity of so-called Puritan
worship. A given type of radical error will
often make alliance with error of an extremely
opposite type for the sake of attacking or misrepresenting
truth to which all error is antagonistic.
"And the same day Pilate and Herod
were made friends together."
The great campaign for the highest offices in
the land is now on hand. Happily it will not
be long. It will be long enough, however, to
show of what stuff men are made, and to what
extent they value and appreciate their privileges.
Citizenship is a privilege, of the very highest
order, and a responsibility measured by i/ts
height. No man is a good citizen or has any
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doctrines which may prevail unless he has done
his own part faithfully and well to maintain
what he regards as right principles and to elect
good men to office. And the good citizen owes it
to others than himself to be thus faithful. His
country, his family, and their future, as well as
his own interests, demand that he give reasonable
thought to all matters pertaining to this
citizenship and especially to the use of its franchise.
To the end that the latter be rightly exercised,
he should devote careful study to the
leading problems of public policy, and above all
that he be not swayed by blind partisanship. The
thoughtful, earnest, prayerful Christian citizen
is the highest type of citizen that the State
knows, and its greatest security against wrong
and loss.
In view of all the history of the two churches,
the Northern and Southern Me+hn/liot anA
especially of the agreements with which the
division was made, confirmed later by two formal
judgments of the Supreme Court of the United
States when certain property interests became
involved, and in view of all the present conditions,
the pushing of the former into the te?Titory
of the latter is both unseemly and against the
interests of Christianity rather than for these
interests. This pushing into the territory of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, South, is just now
being dene more vigorously than ever, and especially
in the spending of large sums of money
to maintain Northern churches in this territory
and in the placing of bishops in two of the larglargest
Southern cities. In one of the latter, Atlanta,
a Northern bishop is set right alongside
of a bishop of the Southern Church. In the
other, New Orleans, it is a well known fact that
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planted there during the days of the infamous
Ben. Butler and by one of his associates when
"the beast" ordered all churches closed in which
the ministers would not pray for the success of
his side. This one church bore the very name
of its founder for many years, until it realized
that it was almost too heavy a load to carry. It
then changed its name, but could not change its
history. The New Orleans Christian Advocate
states that in eleven years' work, up to 1909, the
net gain in the Northern Church in Alabama was
only 325, in the white churches, and that in all
of the eleven white conferences of the Northern
Church in the South the gain in the same eleven
* years was only 9,000 as against the Southern
Methodists' gain of more than 300,000.
Jesus Christ was the great commoner. Great
men of all times have been lovers of the common
people.