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(116-117) moles and bats of a godless, Christless scholarship that burrows in the holy ground of Sinai and Calvary alike, finding there only cammon dirt. ‘* Alas! It is only too true that the heavenly city which our Puritan fathers yearned for and sought with prayers and tears has become to many of their Christian descendants a frigid city of ice palaces, built of pale negations, cold, cheerless, shining in a pale winter sun with an evanescent glitter of a doubtful and unsubstantial intellectual worth. ‘The full, rich, glorious Christ of Catholic Christianity has been dragged from his throne by these ‘advanced thinkers’ ——God save the mark!—and reduced to beggary. A pale, bloodless, emaciated Syrian ghost, he still dimly haunts the icy corridors of this twentieth century Protestantism, from which the doom of his final exclusion has been already spoken. ‘‘Then in their boundless arrogance and self-assertion they turn upon those of us who still cry with Thomas before the Risen One, ‘my Lord and my God,’ and tell us that there is no middle ground between their own vague and sterile rationalism and the Roman Catholic Church. If this be so, then for me most gratefully and lovingly I turn to the Church of Rome as a homeless, houseless wanderer to a home in a continuing city. ‘¢We are hungry for God, yea, for the living God, and hence so restless and dissatisfied. The husk of life’s fruit is growing thicker, and its meat thinner and dryer every day for the vast majority of our people. In many and important respects life was brighter in the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ than it is today. The seamless robe of Christ is rent into hideous fragments and trampled in the dirt. “‘It is not all good that we have inherited from our Puritan and Pilgrim sires. We have been talking about civil and religious liberty as if that were the only thing in the world. Noting the use the average man and woman makes of this boasted liberty today, one is inclined to think it would be far better for them if they had less liberty and more law.’’— Boston American, PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA ‘‘There are others beside economists who have turned to psychology in order to explain great movements, economic, socialistic or governmental. The master of them all is Gustave Le Bon, author of the famous study on the ‘ Psychology of Crowds.’ In that work are the full explanations of such phenomena as this country is now witnessing in the everincreasing hostility to corporations, corporation managers, bankers, capitalists and men prominent in affairs. There is usually, unfortunately, a basis for the fearful antipathy which is finally engendered among the ‘crowd’ against the leaders. But this antipathy, small in the beginning is fostered and cultivated by pure reasoners and demagogues alike, until each offence, big or little, is magnified into some monstrous crime. Calm men are converted into ravening wolves, reasoning creatures lose their sense of proportion, mere suspicion becomes confirmation of dreadful offences and men are condemned unheard and excented unshriven. The French Revolution is a case in point, a psychological demonstration, and the spirit of one is developing now.’’ * * * There is truth in the above clipping. We are not defending thefts great or small, but readily agree that publie indignation is apt to be unjust—not only in including the better with the worse, but also in showing no mercy on the erring, even though it would be conceded that the majority would have done the same if they had possessed the opportunity. We cannot suppose that the rich of other lands are superior in morals either. They may have seen less opportunity. or have not been exposed to such a searching public examination. However, all this is exactly what the Bible led us to expect. A revealing from the housetops and a consequent breaking down of the respect of the masses for the upper classes, whose wealth is more and more coming to be recognized as illegitimately secured. Thus is our present Lord guiding in the affairs of earth toward the great climacteric of selfish and embittered anarchy—the predicted ‘‘time of trouble such as was not since there was a nation.’’ We agree, then, that G. Le Bon is quite correct in his declaration that crowds and classes are often moved en masse to do things that would not be considercd by them as individuals, and that the experienecs of the French Revolution will be duplicated throughout Christendom. Thank God that we can see a silver lining to this cloud: that it will be followed speedily by the rise of the great Sun of Righteousness to heal and bless and enlighten ‘‘all the families of the earth.’’ ZION’S WATCH TOWER ALLEGHENY, Pa. GET THEM TO STUDY MILLENNIAL DAWN The Westminster Teacher publishes with implied approval the following item from the columns of The Baptist Teacher :— A LAMENTABLE LACK ‘*Never were there so many Bibles in the world as there are today. And never was the Bible so much praised. Never were there so many Sunday schools as now, and the one great purpose of the Sunday school is the study of the Bible. Yet even among the teachers in our Sunday schools the ignorance of the Bible is nothing less than deplorable; the proportion of gray heads among them is comparatively very small. The great majority of them are but novices in the Christian life, and they have enlisted in this service not because of any special fitness for it, but because there was a lack of teachers, and their youthful zeal prompted them to enter a door that seemed to open up a field of usefulness, But their zeal was not according to knowledge. They were utterly unfurnished for so responsible a task. They have been doing the best they could—poor things! . . . How few of our Sunday school teachers have any conception of Scripture truth in its entirety —in its glorious symmetry! How few of our Bible school teachers have any definite knowledge of the way in which our Bible, as we have it, came into being—of the canon of Scripture, of the proofs of the authenticity of the Scriptures, of the meaning of the inspiration of the Scriptures, of the relation of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, and the meaning of all this hullabaloo that has been lately raised about the ‘higher criticism.’ When confronted with questions raised by modern skepticism they are dumb and ashamed because of their utter ignorance. And these questions are apt at any time to be raised in the very classes that they teach. They have never had the advantage of any theological training, and why should they be expected to answer them? ‘Now something ought to be done to remedy, if possible, this lamentable Jack, and that teachers themselves should first be taught, so that when they come to teach they should not ‘mutter and peep,’ but speak with no uncertain sound, and not only know, but know that they know, and so be able to render to every man that asketh them a reason for the hope that is in them.’’ A PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER’S POINTED CRITICISM OF HIS CREED The Toronto Evening Telegram gives the following as the language of Rev. Dr. Carter in regard to the Westminster Confession of Faith:— ‘‘The Westminster Confession in fact says that God is a monster; modern theology says that he is not. Tamerlane built a pyramid of two thousand men of the garrison of Herat, laid in brick and mortar, and history calls him a monster for doing it. Lord Jeffreys presided over the ‘bloody circuit,’ in which he condemned 700 to execution, and he stands scorned and by himself on the scroll of England’s Chancellors. But Tamerlane and Jeffreys were sweet souls compared with a God who could condemn a whole race to endless torment for a single sin. ‘Readers of ‘Lorna Doone’ will remember how the robber Doones of Bagworthy looted a farmer’s cottage and found a little babe in its cradle. One of them called to his comrade to have a game with him. He tossed the infant to the other, who caught it upon the point of his pike. We call these men fiends, but they were bright angels and seraphs compared with a God who could send millions of infants to eternal torments. ‘*The moral sense of the people is shocked by the shillyshallying of the Presbyterian Church as to the Confession. The present connection of the Presbyterian Church with the Confession, if it were not so serious, would be a farce; being so serious, it is a crime. A sham theology is sure to make a sham religion.’’ GETTING READY FOR THE MILLENNIUM Our amazement is excited by a proposition to convert twofifths of the area of the United States from arid lands into fertile farms. Yet this stupendous enterprise is seriously entertained by the youngest division of our government. It contemplates nothing less than the ultimate solving of the 50,000,000 acres of waste comprising the great American desert. The undertaking will involve the expenditure of $1,500,000, but it will create $2 350,000,000 worth of taxable property, and will provide homes for 3 000,000 of our future population. This is the prospective goal to which the bureau aspires, and its engineers declare that it is attainable within the present half-century.—Merchants’ League Advocate. [3976]