Newspaper Page Text
Items of Interest Gathered Here and There
'Religious "Editors in Their Ohm Defense.
Religious editors of the country have been
aroused by the recent taunt of a secular paper that
the denominational journal has a diminishing rea
son for existence. According to the secular view,
treated in our issue of November 9, the spirit of
denominationalism among the people is growing
steadily weaker, and so consequently is the demand
for its special organs. The Sunday School Times
(Philadelphia) discovers, however, that there are
804 religious publications in the United States
today, against 581 that existed twenty years ago.
Only four of these periodicals of the earlier date
circulated 100,000 or over; today that figure is
reached by 36. To give the matter the benefit of
light and shade this journal particularizes as
follows:
“Os this 36, it is possible to trace, from publish
ed reports in N. W. Ayer & Son’s American News
paper Annual, the varying circulations of 26 during
the last few years. Nine of the 26 have a smaller
circulation today than they had at one time or
another during the last six years; 17 show their
largest circulation today.
“In other words, the total number of religious
papers today is almost half as large again as it
was twenty years ago. The 100,000 class today is
nine times as large as it was twenty years ago.
Less than 1 per cent of the religious papers of
twenty years ago circulated 100,000 copies; 4 1-2
per cent of the much larger number today have
that circulation. And the largest circulation today
is seven times as large as the largest of twenty
years ago. These facts do not look as though the
field of the religious paper had disappeared yet.
But the total number of religious papers has been
slightly decreasing in the last five years.”
Dr. James M. Buckley, the brilliant editor of
The Christian Advocate (New York), is able to
discover a multitude of reasons why the denomi
national press is a necessity. Being a Methodist
and the editor of a Methodist paper, he finds
considerable occupation for journals of his
Church within the sphere of its complicated
polity. “The church press should, and to a large
extent does,” he asserts, “expound and defend the
doctrines of the Methodist Episcopal Church against
honest or malicious misrepresentation”; further,
it explains to the people the machinery of our
Church,” and “causes the moving of the machinery
of the Church to be understood.” With the
enunciation of so much of a strictly Methodist
function the writer goes on, in. Zion’s Herald
(Boston), to mention other aims and enterprises
of the church press not exclusively applicable to
his own particular denomination. Thus:
“It exposes dangerous innovations before they
root themselves, and it promotes every new propo
sition which bids fair to be helpful and can be
incorporated with the spine and nerves of the
basal system. If you can not incorporate the re
form with the basis of the structure, you will make
something that, to take a figure from the Old
Testament, has in each foot a mixture of clay and
iron, partly strong and partly weak
“The church paper can say many things which
a pastor could not say without friction. It can
talk about choirs, fairs, pews, socials, 'renting
property for questionable uses, conduct of Sunday
schools, how to get rid of a superintendent who
has outlived his usefulness or become a crank. The
paper can discuss all these things; but if a pastor
did it, publicly, in most instances he would suffer
as disagreeably as did the President when he went
into the minutiae of spelling and coining.
“If properly edited, the religious paper in each
number has something especially adapted to inter
est children and youth, and thus maintains a hold
upon them until they become men and women,
when, if interested in the Church, recalling their
early acquaintance with the paper, they introduce
it especially to their own children. The church
paper also furnishes reading suitable for the
Sabbath
“It affords the Church the means of raising up
The Golden Age for January 23, 1908.
competent writers and spreading their reputations,
and opens a door for the free expression of
opinion
“It exposes gross superstitions, such as some
of the distinctive notions of Dowie, the potential
and financial realities and metaphysical dreams of
Mrs. Eddy, and the bewitching assertions and im
aginings of Mrs. Tingley, Mrs. Besant, and Mrs.
Pepper
“It exposes villains imposing upon people in
the guise of ministers or reformed scoundrels of
various sorts, and, while advocating true Christian
perfection, it warns the Church against any who,
under a cloak on which is written ‘holiness,’ in
sinuate the ideas or gratify the lust of unsanctified
human nature
“It presents religion to its readers, not as some
thing wholly mystical or ceremonial, but under the
forms in which it is taught in the Holy Scriptures
■—the doctrinal, the practical, the devotional, the
emotional, and the ecclesiastical.
“It reports and urges revivals. The mere re
ports of revivals around him will stir a lazy or
encourage a timid pastor. If he will not stir or
be stirred, it will induce the saddled church to
ask for a change
“It urges pastors to be their own evangelists,
and, though recognizing worthy evangelists and aid
ing them in their great work, it properly charac
terizes the spurious or the avaricious peripatetic,
temporary ‘rain-maker’ instead of promoter of a
time of refreshing from the presence of the Lord.
“The existence and influence of the church press
are the chief protection against tyranny on the part
of high officials, intrigues looking toward secession,
or the neglect of officials to perform their duty.
“It also publishes all the achievements of the
Church, the special efforts of self-sacrificing lay
men, and the unusual results of ministerial effi
ciency. As neither church nor state can long
flourish if it cease to revere its founders, and as
the good pass from earthly scenes, the church
press records their virtues and their deeds.” —The
Literary Digest.
A Hacking the Hill Hoard.
Pittsburg has been known to the world outside
its boundaries, it is said, as a city of bill-boards.
That city itself, though it does not believe it has
a monopoly of the evil, has begun to take steps to
curtail it. It endured the presence of a bill-board
forty feet long and twenty feet high directly oppo
site its Carnegie Institute; but when La Fouche’s
canvas entitled “The Bath,” which received the
first prize at the International Art Exhibition last
spring, was reproduced .on a bill-board as a sub
ject “to inspire enthusiasm in modern plumbing,”
Pittsburg began to rebel against the desecration.
The example of this city is recommended to others
by Clinton Rogers Woodruff, in The Craftsman
(January), where we read:
“How-can we make our cities in themselves
works of art, if we permit the profanation of the
sky-line and the elimination of-dignity through the
unrestrained and unregulated use of bill-boards?
Cities spend tens and hundreds of thousands for
beautiful buildings, for parks and parkways and
playgrounds, and then allow the bill-poster to use
them as a background for his flaming advertise
ments. Is it right, is it fair, to those who get all
their conceptions of beauty and art through public
means, to have the poster placed on a parity with
such undertakings? And yet, what other conclu
sion can the untutored mind reach than that both
are equally artistic, both are equally desirable, or
why should they be permitted to continue in this
juxtaposition? Have we any right to talk of tak
ing expensive measures to make our cities beau
tiful as long as we allow the unrestrained poster
in our streets and suburbs?”
“The blight attacks the country as well as the
city,” exclaims the writer, indignantly. He goes
on thus to survey the evil and to state some of
the means taken to allay it:
“The bill-boards flaunt their loud color, their
ugly vulgarity, their frequently suggestive or in
decent pictures and stupid caricatures in the face
of every passer-by on city street and country lane,
and beside the railroad which skirts the substan
tial farm or lovely country seat.
“The bill-poster, to quote an indignant Cincin
nati observer, who has been aroused by the vigorous
campaign inaugurated there by the wide-awake
Business Men’s Club, ‘has disfigured and concealed
the natural and the artificial beauty of the land
cape —and there is no other landscape comparable
with that which the bill-boarder is striving to hide
from Cincinnati, with large degree of success. He
has affixed his disfigurements on trees, fences, gate
ways, and walls so as to affect the amenities of
public parks, promenades, streets, and avenues. He
has sought the neighborhood of churches and of
schoolhouses. He has scores of miles of disfigure
ment and blotches in Cincinnati, and he goes scot
free of taxation on his exceedingly remunerative
investment in bill-boards.’
“In Great Britain, where the campaign against
objectionable advertisements has been carried on
for fifteen years, success is about to crown the pa
tient efforts of a group of public-spirited men, of
which Mr. Richardson Evans has long been the
leader. In the discussion of the bill now pending
in the House of Commons, the Earl of Balcarres
declared, while the measure was on passage through
the House of Lords: ‘What we claim is that the
landscape does not belong to the man who chooses
to pay a few shillings for it per annum, but is an
asset of the people at large. The same principle
applies to open spaces and places. The sky sign
is a most objectionable form of advertising. There
is the flash sky sign which dominates the whole of
the Embankment. A well-known hotel has a big
illuminated sign which flashes down the Mall into
the very windows of the sovereign in his palace.
Such advertisements are merely seizing the oppor
tunities of the taxpayers’ expenditure on space and
utilizing it.’ ” —Exchange.
A Virginian ’s Tribute to Robert E. Lee.
No man ever commanded more absolutely the love
and trust of his soldiers than Robert E. Lee. Their
devotion was not that of the reckless followers of
Napoleon. It was like the love and trust of chil
dren for a father. He rode and walked and talked
among them like a farmer with his sons. They
knew his great mind planned for their safety as
well as their glory; they knew he was faultlessly
brave; absolutely free from personal designs; that
his heart and soul was wrapped up in them; that he
shared their triumphs and their sufferings as truly
as if he were a private soldier.
Lee’s place in the Virginian heart is next to
Washington, whom he much resembled —in some
things even ahead of Washington. There was more
love in Lee’s composition than in Washington’s.
I count it an inestimable privilege that I knew
this great man —not as an equal or an intimate, of
course, but as a very humble and a very insignifi
cant young person who was allowed to touch the
hem of his garment.
I knew all the other great military leaders of
that period—Grant, Johnston, Sherman, Sheridan —
had many opportunities to observe them in publie
and in private. None of them impressed me as did
General Lee. Possibly I was partial, but I do not
think so. About that war I am a philosopher. It
was inevitable, and the men on both sides were
equally sincere and equally entitled to respect.
Neither victory nor defeat decided the question
who was the greatest soldier. History must decide
that upon the facts, viewed without bias when all
passion has subsided.
With the same satisfaction I feel that I have
viewed the Rockies, Niagara, the boundless billows
of mid-ocean, the starry vault of heaven amidst in
animate things; I thank God that I was permitted
to see Robert E. Lee among men. All these repre
sent the best that nature can produce.—From “Gen
eral Lee As I Knew Him,” by John S. Wise, in The
Circle for January.
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