Vol 20 Issue 14

The Lord moves in mysterious ways, His will and counsel to perform; and separates us from our earthly relationships, as with a silent voice. And in a fleeting moment, the past becomes but history, and all the future plans undone. For the Lord is calling! And His faithful servants respond in the words of childlike Samuel: “Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth!” The work of thy kingdom must carry on. The bonds of faithful labor, in love, communion of saints, and friend­ships, through tangible relationship, must wait; till realized in its fullest perfection, in that glorious king­dom of our Lord...

That the heading of this article is put in question form means to indicate that as far as our Church Order is concerned there is no answer to this question. If there were an answer in the Church Order we would not at all be so presumptuous as to place the heading in question form. It is immediately obvious to us that this question pertains to the very important matter of Christian discipline. Such a question naturally is vital to every believer who seeks the welfare of God’s kingdom here on earth. Very important ought it to be to us...

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...

Perhaps some of our readers consider this a some­what peculiar subject. The very title may create some inquisitiveness as to the contents of the article. The Minister and Himself. The reader must, however, not read this subject in the wrong light or from a wrong viewpoint. This article is not a report of the self-examination of a minister, nor a minister’s confession of his many weaknesses and sins. Such an article would not only be out of place but would also fail to present the peculiar distinctiveness between a minister and the common Christian. From that viewpoint the minister is...

The “Half-Way Covenant” was an expedient adopt­ed by New England churches in the seventeenth cen­tury to allow baptized persons of moral conduct and orthodox belief to have their children baptized but forbidding them the right to partake of the Lord’s Supper. It has been the rule to baptize those infants one of whose parents was a church member. When such baptized persons grew up and married but failed to join the Church, the question arose whether their children should be baptized. This question whether such as were church members by birth only were en­titled to have their children baptized was...

Asceticism is from the Greek askeoo, to exercise, to strengthen through exercise. By the heathen the word was used by gymnastic exercises but by the fathers of the early church of moral self-discipline. Yet it would be a serious mistake to define asceticism simply as moral self-discipline. For moral self-discipline—the mortification of members which are upon the earth, the crucifixion of the works of the flesh—is a Christian duty enjoined by the Scriptures. It forms a part of the true conversion of man, the other part of which is the quickening of the new man, the sincere joy of heart...

The central idea of an officebearer is that he is God’s friend-servant, authorized to function as God’s representative, as His vice-regent, in the visible world. In this general sense of the word Adam in the state of rectitude was very really an officebearer, for in virtue of the covenant relation in which he was placed by his Creator, he was God’s friend-servant. For, as we have seen before, the covenant of God with Adam in Paradise was not a sort of pact or agree­ment, did not consist in “condition, a promise, and a penalty,” but was a living relationship and...

Personally, I am inclined to take the position that the distinction between “sequent conscience’’ and “ante­cedent conscience” is erroneous, that is, I am of the opinion that one cannot properly speak of “antecedent conscience,” and that, therefore, conscience is always sequent It is true, of course, that man is a rational, moral being, and that he has the power to distinguish between good and evil, so that he can make, and actually does make this distinction whenever he is confronted with alternative courses of action, alternative that is from a moral viewpoint, and that, too, antecedent to the actual choice...

For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God. . . . I Pet. 8:18 For Christ also hath once suffered for sins! O, there can be no doubt about it, even though wo repeat it with fear and trembling, our Lord is not the only one, though He be the Chief, that suffered for sins. He suffered for sins also. . . . Our Lord may not be, He must not remain the sole sufferer for sins. Or rather: because He suffered for sins once, we, too, dare...