1925
Judging from programs and notices of summer conferences and conventions, world problems were squarely faced and frankly discussed before many gatherings during July and August. Chautauquas and summer conferences, especially those under religious auspices, are doing much to direct public opinion in America. Many of the great questions which were discussed before the early conferences, twenty years ago, such as temperance, woman's suffrage, and child welfare, have since become national issues, or national policies. The issues presented to the gatherings during the past summer will help to shape the policies of our day and of the future.
Among the questions discussed was that of World Peace. A certain class of politician, demagogues, and those who would profit out of the war business, have obstructed all movements toward permanent peace thus far. Sane, constructive programs kept before the intelligent people who attend summer conferences will eventually overcome the retarding efforts of these obstructionists. The dominant note on this question seems to have been: The will to peace. All methods thus far have failed, and other methods may perhaps fail; but if we can get the nations of the world to will peace, we will have peace; because peace is possible of attainment by human effort when that effort is rightly directed by human will.
Other questions of national or world-wide importance were discussed by able speakers before summer gatherings. The race problem came in for its share of treatment. The housing conditions of the negro in the large cities received much attention. This is a situation which is becoming more and more acute, and calls for Christian thought and prayer. It is not a one-sided problem. When a negro family moves into a new neighborhood it means that the property of the white people living in that neighborhood immediately depreciates. The negro in most instances has no desire to either push himself in among the whites, or to injure property values. He simply wants to better his living conditions, and to get into a community where his family may escape the evils surrounding many of the neighborhoods where negroes are compelled to live.
Another problem which is usually linked with the negro — lynching — received consideration. This shameful crime, which has for so long blackened pages of American history, is gradually being controlled, but there is much work yet to be done by Christians. We who shudder at the bloodthirsty cruelty of the mob which crucified our Saviour must not permit ourselves to look with complacency upon the blood-lust of our fellow-citizens.
Another angle of the race question discussed during the summer was the relations between Christians and Jews. Jewish rabbis lectured before Christian audiences, and Christian professors lectured before Jewish audiences upon this question.
The Federal Council of Churches has a committee on race relations. Dr. Alfred Williams Anthony, chairman of this committee, says: "Ideas of neighborliness, and the exchange of courtesy and hospitality through groups of various races and classes have made progress."
When we approach the problems of life in the spirit of Christ we will find a solution.
—The Sunday School World, Oct. 1925, p. 470.
Showing posts with label 1925. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1925. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
"I Will"
1925
Among all of earth's creation man alone is able to will. Two of the mightiest words that he can utter are: "I Will." Man is never really and truly man until he uses his right and power to will.
But man's power to will is limited. By the use of his will he may lengthen his life span, but he cannot will not to die physically. Some have tried it, but in due time they went the way of all the earth. Others may try it, but none will succeed in overcoming this "last enemy of man" by defying him. Death has been overcome, and may be overcome by all, but victory lies in surrendering our wills to Him who alone was able to conquer death and the grave.
We can only will what we have power to accomplish. We might wish that each day had sixty hours, so that we could do all that we so much desire to do, but we cannot will these extra hours to our days. Most parents wish that their children would follow safe paths, but no parent can will his child's life.
In point of time our wills are even more limited. Jesus showed the inability of man to will the future when he spoke of the man who was in trouble because his fields brought forth so much. The man said that he knew what he would do. He would pull down his barns and build bigger ones. But Jesus said: "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be?" James spoke of the foolishness of the man who planned on the morrow to go into the city and trade and get gain when he could not know what the morrow would bring forth. And James' conclusion was that all men ought to say: "If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that."
We can say, as did the Prodigal, "I will arise, and go to my father." This is an act which can be performed this present moment. We can say, "I will not commit this sin"; or "I will begin this service for the Master now." In such matters our will is supreme, but it is only supreme if we will to do it now. No one can will to become a Christian at some future date. The young man who says, "I will accept Christ when I am ready to settle down," is not willing to become a Christian. By his decision he wills to reject Christ.
Christ's servants are those who will to serve Him: He has no other kind. We may feel that He it was Who chose us, and not we who chose Him; yet, until we will to belong to Him we will never know of His having chosen us. He calls for laborers for His vineyard, and He commands us to go and preach the gospel to all nations, but no one is laboring for Him in any field except those who will to do His will. Christ has no conscript laborers; He has no hirelings, working merely for the pay; He has no geniuses or master minds, working in His cause because of the glory such work will bring to them. All His laborers belong to one and the same class, and all are on an absolute equality. They are those who will to do the Master's will.
Our wills are limited, but in all that is of vital worth to us they are supreme. We need to strengthen them by exercising them Within the sphere allotted to us for their exercise. When we stand at the end of life's day we cannot make excuses for unperformed tasks by saying that we meant to do them. Meaning to do them sometime is willing not to do them in the only time that God has given us.
We think and speak of the neglected fields in rural America. But God has not neglected them. He called, but those whom He called willed not to go. He is calling still. We can serve Him in these fields now. It is all a matter of will. In this, as in all other matters, the mightiest use that we can make of our wills is to say, "Lord, not my will, but Thine."
—The Sunday School World, Oct. 1925, p. 470.
Among all of earth's creation man alone is able to will. Two of the mightiest words that he can utter are: "I Will." Man is never really and truly man until he uses his right and power to will.
But man's power to will is limited. By the use of his will he may lengthen his life span, but he cannot will not to die physically. Some have tried it, but in due time they went the way of all the earth. Others may try it, but none will succeed in overcoming this "last enemy of man" by defying him. Death has been overcome, and may be overcome by all, but victory lies in surrendering our wills to Him who alone was able to conquer death and the grave.
We can only will what we have power to accomplish. We might wish that each day had sixty hours, so that we could do all that we so much desire to do, but we cannot will these extra hours to our days. Most parents wish that their children would follow safe paths, but no parent can will his child's life.
In point of time our wills are even more limited. Jesus showed the inability of man to will the future when he spoke of the man who was in trouble because his fields brought forth so much. The man said that he knew what he would do. He would pull down his barns and build bigger ones. But Jesus said: "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be?" James spoke of the foolishness of the man who planned on the morrow to go into the city and trade and get gain when he could not know what the morrow would bring forth. And James' conclusion was that all men ought to say: "If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that."
We can say, as did the Prodigal, "I will arise, and go to my father." This is an act which can be performed this present moment. We can say, "I will not commit this sin"; or "I will begin this service for the Master now." In such matters our will is supreme, but it is only supreme if we will to do it now. No one can will to become a Christian at some future date. The young man who says, "I will accept Christ when I am ready to settle down," is not willing to become a Christian. By his decision he wills to reject Christ.
Christ's servants are those who will to serve Him: He has no other kind. We may feel that He it was Who chose us, and not we who chose Him; yet, until we will to belong to Him we will never know of His having chosen us. He calls for laborers for His vineyard, and He commands us to go and preach the gospel to all nations, but no one is laboring for Him in any field except those who will to do His will. Christ has no conscript laborers; He has no hirelings, working merely for the pay; He has no geniuses or master minds, working in His cause because of the glory such work will bring to them. All His laborers belong to one and the same class, and all are on an absolute equality. They are those who will to do the Master's will.
Our wills are limited, but in all that is of vital worth to us they are supreme. We need to strengthen them by exercising them Within the sphere allotted to us for their exercise. When we stand at the end of life's day we cannot make excuses for unperformed tasks by saying that we meant to do them. Meaning to do them sometime is willing not to do them in the only time that God has given us.
We think and speak of the neglected fields in rural America. But God has not neglected them. He called, but those whom He called willed not to go. He is calling still. We can serve Him in these fields now. It is all a matter of will. In this, as in all other matters, the mightiest use that we can make of our wills is to say, "Lord, not my will, but Thine."
—The Sunday School World, Oct. 1925, p. 470.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Life Beyond Death
1925
Easter's Revelation Has Opened New Vistas
Natural Science Silent in the Presence of the Great Belief and Expectation
Easter brings completion to the sciences!
All the secular sciences conduct man as far as death, and there they stop. The door of the tomb is a wall, tall, strong and insurmountable by them. Geology, geography, astronomy, chemistry, physiology, biology and its other divisions bring us on, with an always increasing precision, to an understanding of life's functions and activities, up to that point. There they drop us, for beyond death natural science has not learned to travel. It has no formulae to express anything on the other side of the closed door of death.
And after much bruising of brain, and vain beating of hands against that obstacle, it confesses itself beaten, it has come to an impasse, it declares that because it cannot pass, that there is no passage, nothing beyond — the tomb is the end of all!
Either that, or it accepts the Easter miracle — as it must, if it will be fair towards evidence, towards historical revelation and towards theology, "the queen of all the sciences" — and acknowledges that Easter's revelation crowns all human knowledge, and opens before it new, endless vistas for exploration and future progress.
It would be a sorry conclusion to all science if it brought us only to an ending in the corruption, the annihilation of death. And an unsatisfactory ending! For the great majority of mankind never has, and never will believe that the closed tomb ends everything! Life here is too full of inequalities to make that just! The analogies in nature, which find no definite ending for anything else but life, help to prove it untrue! And justness and truth are the keystones upon which natural science builds up all its theories to arrive at ultimate fact.
Science, which is perhaps the projection of the ripest and best of humanity, needs Easter.
For Science cannot avert death! Men live to their threescore and ten, or beyond that for a few years of labor and sorrow, as they did in the Psalmist's days, before science had traveled very far along the roads of development. But since Easter rolled away the wall from the tomb, science may now claim to bring men onto the threshold of a new and glorified life, the resurrection life. The tomb is now but an episode in lives which were — always were — immortal.
Easter shows the tomb is open on the other side from us — open onto a new garden of Edenic soul life, the Paradise of God. And someday it is to open on our side also, and let those blessedly resting ones out into renewed bodily life, which cannot be bound between a birth and a death.
For one man actually, undeniably went through the tomb into that Paradise, and came back at Easter with an everlasting, undying body!
Just as the little crocus looks up stiff and straight, as a prophecy that all the temporarily dead bulbs and roots and seeds will arise in their own time.
Science teaches the imperishability of matter, and it is true logically endowed when, advancing a step, it teaches also the immortality of man.
Then there is but another step onward, to a grateful acknowledgment of the truth taught by the well attested fact of the Resurrection, that as He rose so shall all our dead also arise at the great Easter, which shall fulfill the promise of all the Springs!
It is the mission of the Church, which is His body here and now to complete the thus inspired teaching of the natural sciences, and show us that everyone who really desires so to do may spend eternity along with its King and Owner, after the last Easter has opened forever the tomb of death! — Montreal Family Herald.
Easter's Revelation Has Opened New Vistas
Natural Science Silent in the Presence of the Great Belief and Expectation
Easter brings completion to the sciences!
All the secular sciences conduct man as far as death, and there they stop. The door of the tomb is a wall, tall, strong and insurmountable by them. Geology, geography, astronomy, chemistry, physiology, biology and its other divisions bring us on, with an always increasing precision, to an understanding of life's functions and activities, up to that point. There they drop us, for beyond death natural science has not learned to travel. It has no formulae to express anything on the other side of the closed door of death.
And after much bruising of brain, and vain beating of hands against that obstacle, it confesses itself beaten, it has come to an impasse, it declares that because it cannot pass, that there is no passage, nothing beyond — the tomb is the end of all!
Either that, or it accepts the Easter miracle — as it must, if it will be fair towards evidence, towards historical revelation and towards theology, "the queen of all the sciences" — and acknowledges that Easter's revelation crowns all human knowledge, and opens before it new, endless vistas for exploration and future progress.
It would be a sorry conclusion to all science if it brought us only to an ending in the corruption, the annihilation of death. And an unsatisfactory ending! For the great majority of mankind never has, and never will believe that the closed tomb ends everything! Life here is too full of inequalities to make that just! The analogies in nature, which find no definite ending for anything else but life, help to prove it untrue! And justness and truth are the keystones upon which natural science builds up all its theories to arrive at ultimate fact.
Science, which is perhaps the projection of the ripest and best of humanity, needs Easter.
For Science cannot avert death! Men live to their threescore and ten, or beyond that for a few years of labor and sorrow, as they did in the Psalmist's days, before science had traveled very far along the roads of development. But since Easter rolled away the wall from the tomb, science may now claim to bring men onto the threshold of a new and glorified life, the resurrection life. The tomb is now but an episode in lives which were — always were — immortal.
Easter shows the tomb is open on the other side from us — open onto a new garden of Edenic soul life, the Paradise of God. And someday it is to open on our side also, and let those blessedly resting ones out into renewed bodily life, which cannot be bound between a birth and a death.
For one man actually, undeniably went through the tomb into that Paradise, and came back at Easter with an everlasting, undying body!
Just as the little crocus looks up stiff and straight, as a prophecy that all the temporarily dead bulbs and roots and seeds will arise in their own time.
Science teaches the imperishability of matter, and it is true logically endowed when, advancing a step, it teaches also the immortality of man.
Then there is but another step onward, to a grateful acknowledgment of the truth taught by the well attested fact of the Resurrection, that as He rose so shall all our dead also arise at the great Easter, which shall fulfill the promise of all the Springs!
It is the mission of the Church, which is His body here and now to complete the thus inspired teaching of the natural sciences, and show us that everyone who really desires so to do may spend eternity along with its King and Owner, after the last Easter has opened forever the tomb of death! — Montreal Family Herald.
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