p. 11 | LITERARY NOTICES

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 30, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 26.

LITERARY NOTICES.

“PAUL AND HIS FRIENDS:” A Series of Revival Sermons by Louis Albert Banks, D.D., pastor First M. E. Church, Cleveland, Ohio. Cloth, 12mo, 347 pp. Gilt top, cover design by George Wharton Edwards. Price, $1.50. New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Company.

This is volume three of a series of revival sermons, the two preceding being entitled, “Christ and His Friends,” and “The Fisherman and His Friends.” “Paul and His Friends” contains thirty-two sermons which were preached in the First Methodist Episcopal Church, Cleveland, Ohio, during January, 1898, in a series of evangelistic meetings. The themes had been selected two years before, and illustrations had been gathered during all that time; but each sermon was finally outlined and dictated to a stenographer on the day of delivery. A most gracious revival is said to have accompanied their delivery.

While the reader may not agree with the Platonic theology now and then expressed in these sermons, he will be impressed by their originality, earnestness, and practical character. Here are some of the suggestive titles: “The Voice of God,” “Kicking against the Goad,” “A Cry for Help from Silent Lips,” “Burning the Bridges in the Rear,” “Obedience to the Heavenly Vision,” “The Emphatic Date in Human Life,” “The Squandered Birthright,” “A Friend Who Never Fails,” “The Sword that Cuts Both Ways,” etc. It is a helpfully suggestive book to

the Sunday-school teacher and Christian worker. Here is a passage taken almost at random from the first sermon:—

“People who live on their record never amount to much. The dead line runs through that hour of a man’s life in which he is satisfied with himself and looks with self-complacency on what he has accomplished. It is the hungering, thirsting soul for which there is waiting still greater abundance.”

Again from the second sermon:—

“The Bible is a whole. You can not carve it in pieces and take out here and there a section to suit your taste or inclination. Blot out the Old Testament, and the New Testament is untranslatable; but keep both together, and it is the simple story of God’s conversations with His children.”

Would that more of the religious books of the world were like this.