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shouldering their way towards the object sought,
rudely pressing and pushing everything aside
that seems to be in the way hindering them, rather
than using gentle methods to remove difficulties.
Some of the ways in which amendment might
be made are in connection with personal greet
ings, hospitality, social visiting, attention to the
old and infirm, regard for women in public and
private life. A hasty handshake and a careless
and curt "so long" as men meet and part do not
tend to develop or cement friendship. The passing
of large hospitality, due, as many think, to
the disorganized state of our domestic service, is
more due to the hurry with which we live and
our modern day disinclination to be hampered
or delayed in our ordinary business by the attentions
which should be paid to guests. Men
are ceasing to know how to be either guests or
hosts these days. When occasionally we meet an
old time host we usually see almost total in
ability on others' parts to know how to be correspondingly
considerate and decent guests.
Social visiting, reduced to mere conventional
calls, card-leaving, or the like, cannot take the
place of the old time gatherings of evenings, or
informal dinners and sociable rather than social
suppers. Ask the old men and women how often
nowadays they hear of those glorious "parties"
which as children and young people they used
to attend, fifty, sixty years ago; and ask them if
there is anything in modern life that stands out
with the same distinctness and beauty and
pleasure as those simple gatherings of yorel
And how careless men have become, in their
present haste, of the aged and weak and of
womanhood! At the crowded street corner, of
an evening, when the cars are filling, or on the
great railway trains, how few hold back until
that lame old man, or that slow, trembling, white"lJ
loilw <?nto am on/1 fin/la a onmn'ff?T+.?V?lft
uuiiru uiu iau t, gvw" uuu ? ???.?
place, or until the younger woman has an opportunity
to find a seat! Deference has disappeared,
old time chivalry that considered the
aged and the poor and womanhood has almost
vanished, and with their disappearance the most
refining and elevating traits of personal character
and conduct.
Especially in religion is this hurry of the age
to he deplored. It makes men impatient of the
quiet, unobserved, sometimes very slow processes
of spiritual development. It wants the service
cut short, and not too many of them, and the sermon
curtailed. It is impatient of doctrinal instruction,
which requires time and thought and
care in both giving and receiving. It turns processes
into mere machines for producing certain
results and commercializes all the phases of life.
Beauty and grace and sweetness are sacrificed
upon the altar of utility. Will it pay! becomes
the great inquiry of life. Surely it would do all
of us good to hear the Master's invitation to come
aside a little while and rest ourselves I
HERETICS?WHENCE THEY COME.
The Southern Presbyterian Church has been
blessed for many years by absence of heresy
trials. We do not all think alike, even on some
important doctrines. Yet there is no broad
church ism, or laxity of belief current among
our people. In fact the Church has been so
busy with questions of polity and practice, that
we have not had time or desire to swing abroad
into the field of unorthodoxy.
Differences have arisen over administrative
policies. Some leaders have been retired, others
have taken their places. Some personal toes have
been stepped on, but on the great fundamentals
we have stood as one man.
We still believe in an inspired Bible. In a
Divine Saviour, In an atonement on Calvary.
PRESBYTERIAN OF THE SO
In the Sovereignty of God. In the fact of the
supernatural. In a Final Judgment and Heaven
and Hell. Why should any man disbelieve or
doubt? Are not some things to be considered
finished and fixed. Has not the mind of the
Spirit been expressed clearly enough?
The great fundamentals of almost every
Science are fixed. Nn OT1A nrcniPa a rru inc-f fVia
sum of two and two 'being four. No one doubts
Kepler'8 Laws. The facts of consciousness are
final. A man would have scant consideration
who would doubt or discusB these things.
Yet ever and anon some free lance enters the
lists against truths as true and fixed as the Stellar
System. Some one proclaims himself "A
discoverer of truth." To disagree with him subjects
one to the charge of opposing the truth.
Why fight the battles over again. To do so is as
puerile as the battles of the Civil War, as fought
at the reunions of today. Many men are upset
by the old heresies of the ancient days revamped
ji J x* a _ ^
ana reiuroisnea.
Do we not often takes these heresies too seriously.
And waste much time and brain-force
and printer's ink in exploding things that are as
harmless as a last year's fire-cracker.
There is too much apologetic preaching. Too
polemic a gospel proclaimed. We ought to pass
on from these first principles unto perfection not
laying again these foundations of our fixed faith.
We rejoice that our Ohurch is too busy preaching
a positive gospel, too busy calling on men
every where to repent and turn to God?to waste
time battling with the wind-mills of modern
heresy. This happy condition of our church is
due to a large extent to the clear-headed and
spirit-filled men who occupy our chairs of theology.
What else can we expect from such teachers
as Strickler, Webb, Whaling, Rosebro and
King?
The young men of our Ohurch sit at the feet
of nr? wTiasp minrl is in /Innht niVwwf llio
trmat fundamentals. They know how to impress
the truth on the plastic minds, and under their
teaching not only will the germs of error be
killed, but the truth will grow vigorously.
Why should we allow our candidates to seek
other Seminaries. Should they not be encouraged
and required to attend the Seminary nearest
and receive instruction under these choice ment
They will certainly not come back to us with the
germ of heresy. There is a tendency in human
nature to think the far off is the best. Young
people often mate on this principle, and sometime
find ont their mistake too late.
So some of our candidates imagine other Seminaries
than ours furnish greater advantages.
Do they? I doubt it. Sometimes they furnish
things we do not want and whicto we spend a lifetime
getting rid of.
Our own Seminaries can teach about all we
can learn, and more than most of us can master.
Heretics do not come out of our Seminaries!
This happy state of affairs is due to the fact that
we are largely imbued with missionary spirit.
The Church that is spending its energy proclaiming
the Gospel at home and abroad, is not
SDt to hunt uu heresies Thev dn not tfenrVrnate
in such soil. Heretics do not come out of families
of old-farihioned piety as a rule. Keep the
altar-fires burning and the germs perish. Keep
the aggressive forces of the Church on the flringline.
and the imagination will not rove abroad to
pull poisonous flowers.
Preserve the home and the home refusion. The
most deadly heresy is that of the heart, not of
the head. a. a. p.
Wherefore take unto von the whole armor of
Ood. that ye may he able to withstand in the evf
day, and. having done all, to stand.?Kph. 6:13.
U T H [September 18, 1913
BEWARE OF FALSE PROPHETS.
Some time ago Dr. Eliot, former president
of Harvard, published a lecture on "The Religion
of the Future," which drew considerable
comment and approval from journals and "cDntributors'.'
of the more skeptical type. Of all
men of modern times he has probably had the
longest and most successful career as an educational
and religious charlatan. He is the doctor
of divinity who excluded the Bible from his
five-foot shelf of best books. Recently a correspondent
sent to the editor of the United
Presbyterian the subjoined extract from Dr.
Eliot's lecture asking what it means:
"In brief, the religion of the future will not
be based on authority, either spiritual or temporal
; that in it there will be no personifications
of the primitive forces of nature; no identification
of any human being with the Eternal Deity;
that its prime object will be service to others and
contributions to the oommon good; that it will
not be gloomy, ascetic or maledictory. The new
religion will not attempt to reconcile men and
women to present ills by promises of future
blessedness, either for themselves of for others."
The reply to this inquiry is so crisp, and so
adequate in its exposure of the quackery of the
paragraph quoted that we reproduce it in full,
as follows:
We are very much afraid our correspondent
will have to wait until the Day of Judgment for
an interpretation. Not even Dr. Charles W.
Eliot knows what he's talking about. He is one
of those foggy morning dreamers who has crept
under the covers with a lot of "critical" bedfellows,
and is "seeing things." *The words of
the quotation are arrant nonsense.
"The religion of the future will not be based
on authority, either temporal or spiritual!'' That
means that the religion of the future will have
no hasis to rest on, no authority, no foundation
of any kind. It will be a castle in the air, turned
upside down. It means that there will be no religion
whatever, if it means anything, for a religion
without authority is inconceivable, except
to visionaries.
"There will be no Dersonification of th? nrim
itive forces of nature; no identification of any
human being with the Eternal Deity." The first
clause is unintelligible. He is trying to blow out
a candle where there is none. The second clause
is possibly intended to say that there will be no
Christ in "the religion of the future." There
will still be, according to this oracle, an "Eternal
Deity," 'but there will not be anybody associated
with him. He thus snaps out the entire
Trinity as a chameleon would a gnat. The
Eternal Deity will have to come down into this
world and start in alone, and do what good he
can. There will not be any "human being"
identified with him in any work of good, not even
Dr. Eliot, the prophet of this bright and hopeful
outlook for the human race!
4 4 Its prime object will be service to others and
contributions to the common good." The re
ligion of the present, with Jesus Christ at its
heart, is already doing that, and has been for
ages, and without the good that it has done to
others, the scholarship of which Dr. Eliot boasts,
would be on a par with that of the Hottentot, and
leaders of their fellows would rank with aboriginal
chieftains whose mission was to scalp
thelir betters and fill their worthless stomachs
with the toil of oppressed women.
"It will not be gloomy, ascetic or maledictory."
That is probably a dab at the Catholics,
or some of those old bare-footed Carmelites, and
we will let him and the pope have it out between
them.
You will notice that this is to be a "religion
of the future." That's a safe prediction. "The
future" is "so" definite! The future is next
Sabbath, when the bells representing the
"present religion" will be heard ringpng from
Hell-gate to Golden-^ate; it is next fall and
winter, when the churches will be filled with
evangelists, preachers and teachers telling of the
salvation of the One who is "identified" with
the "Eternal Deity;" it is next summer when
the Presbyterian churches will have a new pentecost
at Atlanta; it is next?but what's the use?