All Articles For DeBoer, P.

What is the proper place of the Sunday School? That is the question which we shall seek to answer in this paper. We might understand our subject to assume that the Sunday School does indeed have a place and consider it only to be our task to discover what this place is. We may also take the subject a bit more broadly, and then it demands an answer also to the question, Does the Sunday School really have a place among the covenant youth? In the more general sense we have looked upon the subject. Among the children of the...

Healthy, intelligent, helpful co-operation is necessary wherever and whenever two or more persons or groups are called upon to work together toward the accomplishment of a joint task. This is a well-known fact and admitted as an established truth by everyone that stops to think only for a moment. In our large industrial plants, for example, all the departments must interrelate, they must coordinate their work. Efficiency demands that nowhere along the line of production should there be any interruption. If one part of the production line comes to a halt it not infrequently brings the entire plant to a...

Just what is the goal and end we seek to attain in the matter of Christian instruction? What is the one dominating aim of the effort expended in the matter of Christian education? Such is the question in answer to which we shall first of all have something to say about the aim as such, and then secondly treat of the realization of this high ideal. The Aim Itself Aim is always an important matter. The gunner on the battle front understands this full well. He must know what the objective is before he can train his gun on that...

By “our mission work” we naturally mean the mission work our Protestant Reformed Churches are at present engaged in. We might in a sense properly call it church extension since its positive purpose is the establishment of Protestant Reformed Churches wherever there are or come to be, groups of believers that are of one heart and mind with us and wish to confess with us the truth of God’s sovereign grace as we are committed to it. Although as Churches we look forward to the time when our mission work can be extended to include labor among the “unchurched” and...

I don’t know just where Edna. St. Vincent Millay was standing when she penned the beautiful description, “All I could see from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood; I turned and look the other way, And saw three islands in a bay.” I said that I did not know where she was standing when she wrote this beautiful description. I do know however that to see exactly that scene you must stand where she stood. You cannot stand on one of the mountains or on one of the islands and see that whole scene as she...

The United Nations are today engaged in an all our struggle of life and death with the Axis Powers to destroy German Nazism from the earth. All of us sincerely hope that ere long the bloody warfare may be brought to an end and the dominion of National Socialism in its present farm banished as well as vanquished. But will peace mean freedom from fear and want for all men in all lands? That is one of the peace aims pointedly agreed upon by the two heads of the governments of the United States and Great Britain. The sixth point...

Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is the best known of all Calvin’s works, and is worthy of reading and study to this very day. The first edition of the Institutes were written by Calvin when he was about twenty five years old. Several times Calvin rewrote it, until some years prior to his death it appeared in its present length and form. The Institutes were written in Latin, but also in a French translation which Calvin himself supplied. The Institutes gained a wide reading public from the very first, and became the handbook of many theological schools is courses...

God has not willed that we should come into the world as mature men and women, ready to take a full- fledged place in life. Adam and Eve never had a childhood or youth. Their offspring, however, born into the world as helpless babes, must pass through a long period of growth and development before they attain maturity. This long period of development that finally emerges into manhood or woman hood may again itself be divided into two sharply distinct periods: childhood and adolescence. It is the latter period, that of adolescence, that we are interested in in this article,...

Our nation is at present engaged in a mighty struggle with Japan, upon the outcome of which the supremacy in the Pacific and Far East depends. Since Pearl Harbor and the warfare in the jungles of the Pacific Islands, we have a new interest in this powerful enemy that for the moment dominates the Far East. What Is Japan’s Religion? Japan, of course, is not a Christian nation. Not even nominally so. The western nations are known as Christian nations. We realize that this is only nominally true, that as a whole these nations are not imbued with the Spirit...

Japan and its horde of eighty million people con­fined to a space not larger than the state of California, is in no sense of the word a Christian nation. The number of nominal Christians, prior to the present war, was approximately half a million, which is only a fraction of the total population. If it is borne in mind that this small fraction includes Catholics, modernists, etc., it -is quite evident that the actual number of true Christians is indeed small in comparison to the mil­lions of people that inhabit the islands of Japan. Man who was made in the...