The times change. And although God is the same, yesterday, to-day, and forever, and moral principle and piety are ever the same, yet the times changing into the rapid speed of our day, demand that Christians should arouse to action and occupy positions that will give them the best possible advantages. We do really like the spirit of the following from the Methodist for Sept. 2. What T. De Witt Talmage says of the Big Methodist Tent may stir some of our tent and camp-meeting men, who need more of the dash of Kilpatrick in order to keep up with the spirit of these railroad, telegraph, phonographic times:— “We found the track of the Methodist tent all the way across the Continent. Mormonism never received such a shot as when, with Brigham Young and his elders present in the tent, the party of wide-awake Methodist ministers preached righteousness, temperance, and Judgment to come, in great Salt Lake City. The effect of those few days of faithful talking will never be forgotten. Hardly a service is held in the Mormon Tabernacle that an effort is not made to combat the sermons of the itinerants. In the two occasions when we were present in the Tabernacle, all the speakers felt called upon to answer the Big Tent. It was evident that the monster of sin had been speared, and the wound rankled. We have never seen the brethren of that religious storming party, but we hail them through these columns for the glorious work they have accomplished in Salt Lake City! It was the first gleam of light that some of the bondmen of the great religious despotism have seen for many a year. If the Methodists had stayed a few days longer, and gone around the walls of that Jericho blowing the ‘ram’s horns,’ I do not know but that the brazen superstition might have fallen in thunder and wreck, leaving many of the elders desolate, with only ten or fifteen wives apiece.” “Might not the Christian church of all denominations learn a lesson from this religious crusade? Our great ammunition wagons are so clumsy, and our big guns so unwieldy, that the enemy often has us at disadvantage. I think a squad of flying artillery, perhaps, might go forth and surround the foe. We want more men in the religious world with the bold dash that Kilpatrick and Stonewall Jackson had in the military. We glorify the policy of ‘fighting it out on one line if it takes all summer,’ but forget what a little Christian stratagem did when Gideon’s three hundred men flung the pitchers and hoisted the lamps!” “If the great West waits till churches can be organized, built, and paid for, the majority of the present generation will perish. Oh, for more big tents! Four long stakes and a big piece of canvas, and four or five Christians on fire with zeal, have proved themselves able to shake Brigham’s Tabernacle that cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” “There is such a thing as too much deliberation in religion. The game gets away from us while we are loading the gun. The Methodist church, like the Presbyterian and Baptist and Episcopalian, has, of late, felt the tendency to settle on its lees, and build granite churches, and whittle its old-time hallelujahs down to a quartette, and hand the people up to Heaven with delicate kid gloves, which, at the least strain, split in the back. I would not give one of the backwoods Methodist meetings, where I used in boyhood occasionally to go and stand at the door, afraid to go in—for they had fifty persons converted there in one night—for a hundred precise churches where they preserve their religion from spoiling by keeping it on ice.” “Thank God for the Big Tent! It reminds one of the days when Grimshaw and Wesley made a gospel raid into Roughlee, and the wild mob slung dead cats at the head of George Whitefield preaching on the commons. We want a flashing up of the old-time Christian heroes. So afraid is the church of sensation that it goes into stagnation. It costs from one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build a church in which to get a few hundred people to Heaven, when those two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, rightly applied, would build gospel advantages for ten times the number.”