Note and Comment by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Mar 24, 1904

Note and Comment

By L. A. S.

THREE steel trusts—one American, one British, and one German—have agreed to divide the earth between themselves, each agreeing to keep out of the others’ sphere of interest in the world’s markets.

It is believed now that the great Baltimore fire was caused by a lighted cigar. A special committee appointed by the General Loss Committee of the insurance companies, has made a report affirming this opinion. “The report states,” says a Baltimore dispatch, “that the fire must have been due to some one dropping a lighted match or a cigar or cigarette stub through a cracked or broken deadlight in the sidewalk. This fell on inflammable material, and it smoldered for hours, creating heat and smoke, which, after the doors had been burst open by the firemen, caused flames and the later explosions which resulted.”

AMERICAN missionaries at Ping Yang, China, have refused to accept an invitation extended by the United States government to seek safety on board the American war-ship “Cincinnati,” which is now at Chemulpho. The State Department has made it clear, to the missionary societies in this country, says a Washington dispatch, “that in case of actual war it can not undertake to employ the United States army and navy in expeditions into the interior of a country which is the scene of war. If the missionaries remain after a proper warning, the United States government can not remove them, and they must take their chances with other civilians.”

THE centennial anniversary of the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society was observed in London, Sunday, March 6, by services in St. Paul’s cathedral. Speeches were made by several eminent men, among whom was Justice Brewer, of the United States Supreme Court, who referred to the “destructive criticism” which has attacked the Bible within recent years, coming from a professedly Christian source. Such criticism the eminent jurist does not approve. The New York Sun makes note of the justice’s position, and speaks of the effect of this criticism upon the church’s activity in missionary work. It says:—

In neither Europe nor America is there now a scholarly authority of the highest class who is satisfied to limit his Biblical criticism to the “correcting of wrong translations and arranging in chronological order the matchless truths of Scripture,” to which Mr. Justice Brewer would confine him. The critics most respectfully heeded by the theological world of to-day are examining the Bible in the very light from which the justice would remove it—“as a crazy-quilt of untrue history, distorted science, weak poetry, impracticable morality, and vague foreshadowings of the unknown and the unknowable.” It emerges from their tests simply a human literature of people in an early stage of intellectual evolution. Its stories and its miracles become mere legends and symbols. The most this criticism will admit is that the Bible “contains a revelation,” not that it is a revelation.

What will be the consequence? At the second centenary of the Bible Society will there be a record of Biblical distribution like that of the century now past? Will heroic missionaries continue to devote their lives during the next hundred years to efforts to bring the Bible to every living creature as the one lamp of light let down from heaven itself? A justice of the Supreme Court may reject the new criticism as iconoclastic and destructive, but what force will his dictum have against the weight of the authority of Biblical scholarship?

Fortunately the return of the great Missionary who once came from heaven to earth will put an end to this destructive criticism, and avert the coming period of missionary paralysis which the Sun foresees. L. A. S.