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May 1, 1909 of my thirty-six years been spent in the newspaper, printing and publishing business, which enables me to draw a fair idea of your burdensome duties while serving the Lord in so many different capacities. However, I am impressed that it would be unwise on my part to further delay writing you, hence this letter. We have a small class here which elected me teacher. Will you and the Bethel family remember me daily at the throne of grace? I want more of the holy Spirit and the spirit of a sound mind. I want to teach with understanding. Fifteen years ago I joined my wife and the Methodist Church. I know at the time my wife was the principal magnet, although I firmly believed the Lord would come my way and in due time make me as happy as my brethren professed to be. My blessed Redeemer did not give me the sweet assurance I expected, and after two years I withdrew with more noise and confusion than I commenced with. I resolved to never enter the building again and that resolution has not been broken. I took up Darwin, Hume and Ingersoll. These were later discarded for Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed. None of these things satisfied my hunger for Truth. Then came the Book of Mormonism, which I read with considerable enthusiasm and finally passed it up to a Baptist preacher. About this time Mrs. Eddy made her little bow in my community, beginning with my wife’s mother, a very bright and well-disposed lady, whose wealth and social prominence added no little to the Eddy Idea at this place. I studied the proposition hard, but was not permitted to see the point. One day one of the Lord’s faithful, Bro. C. S. Livingston, of Enterprise, asked me if I would take pleasure in the Truth if I knew it was Truth. I told him I would. Then he gave me Volume 1 and asked me to go to my closet and pray for help to understand that book. If there was a God I wanted to know it. Besides I was in the middle of a campaign for an important county office and the election was only six weeks THE WATCH TOWER (143-147) ahead, and I wanted to please Brother Livingston and get his vote. I went on to my closet and tried to pray. It was the first time I had tried to communicate with the Lord in ten or twelve years. My petition was short and remarkably stupid, but the Lord certainly looked at the spirit in which I approached him and not the eloquence or multiplicity of words. One week later I retired from politics forever, thank the Lord. My friends urged and threatened, but I retired from the race. Five weeks later I had read the six volumes, Tabernacle Shadows and several WatcH Towers. I went out on the streets and wrangled with every preacher and Sunday School teacher I could find. I thought I was going to be a power among my friends and politica] followers. But alas, it is sad to relate. They say, and believe, “Much study has wrecked his mind, for a truth he has paresis!” I have been zealous for the Lord and the doctrine of the Kingdom. On every suitable occasion I pour out all the hail at my command; but they won’t listen. If they can’t slip away they will try to change the subject—sing, do anything except listen. Not one grain of wheat can be traced to my energies. The real pillar of the Baptist Church at this place for twenty years, Brother J. J. Morris, accepted the Truth four months ago and Babylon charges me with his ruin and destruction. Would to God they told the truth, but they do not; as usual, they err; the Lord did it. And now, since he is not grinding at their mill, they say “he always did have cranky notions.” Enclosed you will please find “the Vow,” our Vow. All the “Israelites indeed, in whom there is no guile,” will take the Vow. The more I see of it the more I am impressed that it is the Lord’s sieve. Please send us a Pilgrim. The friends want an Alabama Convention at Texasville in the summer. Remember us daily at the Throne of grace. Yours in the One Hope, W. M. BaILey. THE NEWSPAPER EVANGELISM The number of newspapers publishing Brother Russell’s sermons weekly continues to increase. We advise these be given the preference and every way encouraged. If any paper cuts down the space below three columns or fails to Vor. XXX BROOKLYN, N. Y., MAY 15, 1909 publish the sermon, write the editor a kind card telling of your interest in the sermons and that you subscribe for his paper largely on account of the sermons. If you subscribed through us drop us a card of explanation also. No. 10 VIEWS FROM THE WATCH TOWER ‘BLASTING AT THE ROCK OF AGES’’ For the past twenty years we have been sounding the alarm against the infidel tendencies of the colleges and seminaries of Christendom. We have pointed out that Higher Criticism of the Bible and the Evolution Theory are taught in practically every institution of learning of higher grade than a Grammar School and that even in these the seeds of infidelity are being sown in the class books and studies, though not openly lectured upon. In these twenty years we have counselled parents that it is better to give their children less education than to risk the complete wreck of their religious instincts and faith in God and the Bible. Our views were thought to be extreme and rarely heeded. Now parents are writing us of their sad mistake—that the faith of their children is irreparably lost, because they refuse to read the only thing which would enable them to regain the ground of faith lost, namely The Divine Plan of the Ages. Finally, when the new manhood and womanhood have been thoroughly inoculated with the poison of infidelity others are awakening to the situation; as, for instance, Mr. Harold Bolce, who writes in the “Cosmopolitan,” and Hon. H. S. Blake, who has started a good warfare in Canada, We give below John Temple Graves’ note of alarm. He says:— Out of the curricula of American colleges a dynamic movement is upheaving ancient foundations and making an open way for a revolution in the thought and life of this people. Those who are not in close touch with the great colleges of the country will be astonished, in most cases indignant, to learn the creeds that are being fostered by the strong men in the professors’ chairs. In hundreds of classrooms there is a scholarly repudiation of all solemn authority, and it is being taught daily that “the Decalogue is no more sacred than a syllabus”; that “the home as an institution ig doomed”; that “there are no absolute evils”; that “immorality is simply an act in contraven tion of society’s accepted standards”; that “democracy is a failure and the Declaration of Independence only spectacular rhetoric’; that “the change from one religion to another is like getting a new hat”; that “moral precepts are passing shibboleths’”; that “conceptions of right and wrong are as unstable as styles of dress;” that “wide stairways are open between social levels, but that to the climber children are encumbrances”; that “the sole effect of prolificacy is to fill tiny graves,” and that “there can be and are holier alliances outside the marriage bond than within it!” Every quoted sentiment is from the spoken or written word of some one of the leading and famous professors of the great colleges. And the colleges carrying such new and revolutionary creeds are not the minor schools, but those vaster seminaries such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton (shade of Jonathan Edwards behold it!), University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, Columbia, Syracuse, California, George Washington, William and Mary, Northwestern, the universities of New York, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Cornell, Brown, Leland Stanford, Union, Nebraska and others. In each of these great institutions some professor, neither infallible nor inspired, but a free thinker rioting in the mere license of opinion, and some, alas, hungering for the notoriety of the utterance, are flinging down daily doctrines like these, not to strong and mature men capable of discrimination and accustomed to disputation, but speaking from responsible stations to youthful and undeveloped minds which are accustomed to receive what comes from the scholar in the chair of authority as the unchallenged gospel of the time. “Meat for strong men and milk for babies,” has no restraining influence upon the riot of opinion among these socalled professors of today. If these men really believe the monstrous conceptions which are stirring the age to unwholesome revolution against the doctrines of the ages, they should at least voice them first in serious councils of their peers, and submit them solemnly and primarily to an arena in which [4393]