RELIGION UNCHANGEABLE
Farmers once plowed with a forked stick, and now with the steel gang-plow. But Julius Cæsar said, nearly twenty centuries ago, that a soldier should have a pound of wheat per day, and the German Government allows the same pound of wheat per day to its soldiers, for their day’s march. Gone Julius Cæsar’s forked stick for raising the pound of wheat. The Italian plows with a steel mole-board, but he still wants his pound of flour for his hunger. Gone also the old offerings in the temples, and the old creeds, and the old views of the Sabbath. But man still sings, and prays, and struggles with temptation, and weeps, smiting upon his breast, and is forgiven, and dies. This religious nature of man abides unshaken; the credal leaves fall off; but the tree grows on. That vital growth is called religion—the life of God in the soul of man.—N. D. Hillis.
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RELIGION VERSUS BUSINESS
The improvement of Egypt in the control of inundation by the great Assouan dam of the Nile has unfortunately drowned and is destroying the magnificent temple ruins on the island of Philæ. That only hurts a sentiment of antiquarian reverence and makes bread for many poor. But if our rush of business drowns out our family worship, and tires us too much for a second Sabbath service, it may cost us more than its gains are worth. We need to remember that our life is sacred, for we are the temple of God. (Text.)—Franklin Noble, “Sermons in Illustration.”
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RELIGIONS CONTRASTED
Seventeen hundred years ago a Christian teacher gave a description of an Egyptian temple, with its porticoes and vestibules and groves and sacred fields adjoining, the walls gleaming with precious stones and artistic paintings, and its shrines veiled with gold-embroidered hangings. “But,” he says, “if you enter the penetralia of the enclosure and ask the officiating priest to unveil the god of this sanctuary, you will find a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent—a beast—rolling on a purple couch.” And a modern writer asks us to contrast this with the temple of Jehovah at Jerusalem. Here, too, you would find a gorgeous building, a priesthood, altars, and a shrine hidden by a veil. Within the veil stands the Ark of the Covenant, covered by the mercy seat, sprinkled with the blood of atonement, and shadowed by the golden cherubim. Let that covering be lifted, and within that ark, in the very core and center of Israel’s religion, in its most sacred place, you find, what? The two tables of the moral law. There, in a word, you have the contrast of the two religions. The moral law, enforced by the belief in the one true God—that is the religion of Israel—and that religion was interpreted, fulfilled, and consummated by the revelation of the Christ.—Thomas F. Gailor, “Student Volunteer Movement,” 1906.
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