It is well known to our readers that the church federationists are endeavoring to regulate denominations and religion and legislation, not only throughout the country, but in mission fields as well. It proposes to reach that stage of effectiveness where it can tell a small church to leave a certain field to the others. The Baptists protest against it. For instance, The Baptist Chronicle of January 13, published in Alexandria, La., under the heading, "The Baptist Program," declares:
"The time has come when Baptists are amply able to make out their own program. They have pandered long enough to the wishes of others. There is no place in the commission for them to make a division of territory in the world-wide work of evangelism. There is no place for a division of responsibility, and the work is so insistent that there is no time for quibbling. Baptists have received a commission to the whole world. They are responsible to Christ for the giving of the whole Gospel to every creature in the whole creation, and their Master's command is too imperative for them to while away the hours in inter-denominational love-feasts."
The Chronicle declares that to yield to this means "the loss of what was gained by the Reformation." Further it says:
"We want no entangling alliances with other denominations. So long as there is a field in the foreign world which we can not enter because of agreement with other denominations, just so long are we bartering our birthright for a mess of inter-denominational pottage."
And we wish to say that these are our sentiments too.
The contention of The Word and Way, another Baptist journal, of Kansas City, Mo., is that the Baptists who are in harmony with the federation idea are not representatives of Baptists, but "misrepresentatives."
Two Departures
Along the same line with an article in our last issue on "The Alarming Drift in Christendom," we note an editorial in the great Methodist paper, The Christian Advocate, of December 2. That editorial is headed, "Does This Surprise?" It cites the report of a superintendent, or presiding elder, whose district covers three thousand square miles, with one hundred thousand population, thirty-seven churches, thirty-eight additional preaching appointments, and he reports that "the class-meeting in that district is no longer any considerable factor in the life of the people; that of eighty-eight societies in the district, seventy are entirely without the class-meeting, and for the most part even the appointment of elders. He found that of the eighty-eight societies, forty-three have no prayer-meeting or other devotional meeting which corresponds to it. On the other hand he says that out of 279 churches or preaching places of all denominations sixty-three are without religious service, and most of them wholly abandoned. This is an an erage of one such abandoned church to every seven miles square of the district."
In the same vein take the following from The Delineator of the current month. A clergyman who has had many years' experience writes at length on the departure of the church, from which we quote:
"The fundamental doctrine of the kingdom of God and the spiritual life has lost its proper emphasis, and we are living under the belief that the spiritual life is spontaneously generated and develops along with the unfolding of the moral sense, and that the religious element is simply induced by Christian training, which may or may not be necessary, only as the case requires. We have demanded that the spiritual life shall give itself to the investigations of psychology, which has declared that Christian faith is simply a moral force operating in human life under the direction of the will. That spiritual crisis called conversion is becoming more and more infrequent, and men and women are knowing less and less of that experience in which our fathers claimed that they were 'born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.'"
All of which emphasizes—and a multitude more of testimonies might be cited—that Christianity is departing in two great things. It has substituted doubt for faith; it has substituted the philosophy of self-salvation for salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ; and by that very thing it has left itself open to every delusion and deception of the devil in these last days.
The Education of Our Girls
Some months ago we referred in this department to the teaching which is laddled out to our young men in the various universities as set forth by Mr. Harold Bolce. Mr. Bolce was ridiculed, but nevertheless his statements have been demonstrated. This is in evidence everywhere. In the February Cosmopolitan Mr. Bolce has an article entitled "The Crusade Invisible," the beginning of a series deal-ing with the most remarkable phase of the conflict between college teaching and orthodox authority, and the effect of such instruction upon the minds of the young women now attending our colleges in increasing thousands. The editor declares, "It will shock the conservative to learn that these educated young women are repudiating ancient and even sacred authority, while on the other hand they champion the doctrine that the human race is divine and destined to assert dominion." The editor further says: "The friends of higher education regard this crusade as the greatest force in the Christian centuries. They believe that it means a new civilization and indeed a new Christianity;" and yet they are told that this teaching declares that "it is absurd for humanity to stake its hope of salvation on much of what the Christian world has accepted as inspired writing." "Make your soul worth saving and it will be saved;" and again, to the scientific mind there is no "historic certainty that Jesus ever lived." "The Genesis of this earth is not explained by a single creative act, but implies a process extending over the immensity of geological ages;" that the "popular idea of the Exodus around which has clung not only romance but the record of the revelation of God to man, has no foundation in fact." They are told that all the Gospels have been worked over, Mark like the others. It is said to them, "We possess no real knowledge of Moses, who was not a man, but an idealized epitome thrown back by the latter age upon a superstitious, heroic past." Of the declaration that the New Jerusalem will descend out of heaven it is said that this would be "only a celestial show with no more spiritual significance than a splendid circus."
11But all this means of course the repudiation of Jesus Christ as well as the repudiating of Moses. In the words of Christ Himself, "For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me: for He wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writing, how shall ye believe My words?" There is but one source of divinity, and that is Jesus Christ. Through Him we may become "partakers of the divine nature." Apart from Him we are without God and Christ in the world.
