The study of stones and minerals is of material interest to the little child. He never goes where they are that he does not gather them. His hands and pockets are full of them. Why does he like them? Because of their form and color; and the small child delights in simply handling them. But this natural interest, like all others, wanes when it is not exercised. As evidence of this loss of interest, I have only to call attention to the well-known fact that very few people indeed know anything of consequence about stones, hardly the names of even the commonest. Could any little stone tell its history, it would be an interesting story. Two stones lying side by side might tell very different stories indeed, as to how they came to be where they are. But all stones would have to agree in one point if they should tell the story of their life; and the point of agreement would be that they all came from under the ground. When the Lord created the earth, He made it very beautiful. The mighty mountains towering toward heaven were not rough and ragged as we now see them, but were rounded and beautiful. Because of sin, the Lord destroyed the world that then was and its inhabitants. He chose a great flood of water as a means of doing this work. The fountains of waters were broken up, and great storm-clouds poured their contents on the earth for many days, continuously. The crust of the earth was broken; mountains disappeared, and others were lifted up where before there were none. Mighty rocks of all kinds were thus brought to the surface, and in place of the even appearance of the earth's surface before the Flood, it became jagged and rough as a consequence of the great force of the waters of the Deluge. So the rocks of the earth, which were formerly hidden beneath its surface, are now visible. This rock formation does for the earth what the bones do for the body; that is, it gives and maintains the earth's shape. It is by the action of the mighty force of the waters of the Flood that great forests were buried beneath the earth's surface. These forests of wood, through the action of the earth, have taken on a mineral form; and the various kinds of coal are given by the Lord for the use of man.
It is not only the action of the waters at the time of the Flood that has brought the rocks which we see to the place where they are, but the centuries of heat and cold and storm have also had a great part in this work. Not only have they had their work to do as to the place where the stones are now to be found, but they have had much to do in the matter of the present shape or form of the stones.
Now in the study of rocks it is not necessary that we should undertake a study of books. We can begin by classifying in a simple manner the stones which we find. They may be classified as to hardness, form, luster, weight, or specific gravity, tenacity, etc. In speaking of this matter of classification I may use some words which may not be familiar to those who have not been studying this subject; but a little use of the dictionary will, I think, make their meaning clear.
I may add here that for many parts of our country this study which I am now suggesting can not best be made at once, because of the condition of the ground. But this subject comes in at this point in this series of science studies, and can be of use a little later to those who have not now collections of stones which can be studied. Many, however, have these collections now in their homes, and to such this study may be an interesting one, even for midwinter. I also want to suggest that a record be kept of the observations made on stones. As I said in the article on meteorological records, the making and keeping of such records has a great value in itself, if the observer continually aims at accuracy.
While these studies will be of value to the parents and younger children, there are in many homes older brothers and sisters who can take up this work to the profit of the whole family, and at the same time be laying the groundwork for efficiency in teaching others.
In the division of stones as to hardness, we have first those which are VERY SOFT. These can be scratched by the finger-nail or very easily by an iron. Then the soft which can not be scratched by the finger-nail, but may be by a knife. Next the hard, which can not be scratched by a knife, but which will themselves scratch glass. Then the very hard, which will not only scratch glass, but will as well scratch quartz. And lastly the adamantine, which can be scratched only by the diamond and itself and not by any other substance. These divisions are so simple that any child of five or six can readily make the classification, and find pleasure in so doing.
Of the very soft minerals there may be named the Talc and Gypsum; of the soft, the Calcite and Fluorite; of the hard, the Apatite and Orthoclase; of the very hard, the Quartz and Topaz; of the adamantine, the Corundum and Diamond. There are of course many other minerals which might be named and classified according to their hardness. Stones of the same size often differ very greatly in weight, and it is a very profitable feature of their study to weigh them and also to find their specific gravity. The specific gravity of any object may be found by weighing it first in air then in water, and by then dividing the weight in air by loss of the weight in water, for it always weighs less in water than in air.
As to the tenacity of minerals, they are brittle, maleable, sectile, ductile, flexible, and elastic. Few stones possess other of these qualities than brittleness, but other minerals, such as iron, copper, aluminum, etc., possess the other characteristics spoken of. In the classification of stones as to form, they will be found to have surfaces which are grapelike; to be in rounded masses; to be porous; to be composed of small crystals, which are often not seen without the aid of a magnifying glass; to be in layers. There are other forms, but these general ones will suffice for elementary study. The streak or color of a stone can best be found by drawing it over a piece of ground glass or a file. In the classification of minerals as to luster, they are metallic and non-metallic. Of the non-metallic there are pearly, as in the pearl and mica; vitreous, as in glass; resinous, as in sulphur, sphærite, and resins; pitchy, as in cannel-coal; silky or satiny, as in satin spar; greasy or waxy, as in serpentine; and dull, as in chalk.
Generally speaking, I do not believe in emphasizing the matter of classification in science study, for it tends to take the mind away from the life of the object under study to the peculiar form or characteristics which are involved in its classifications; but in the simpler studies of minerals the most natural and effective means is to classify. The habit of observation of minerals thus established will lead to more critical and deeper study.
FREDERICK GRIGGS.
So. Lancaster, Mass.
THE GIRL IN SCHOOL.
By Mary Wood-Allen
[Mary Wood-Allen, M. D., in Co-Workers’ Monthly.]
TO THE majority of parents education means book learning. The etymology of the word shows us that its primary meaning is “to lead out.” Unfortunately school education is principally a matter of pouring in instead of leading out.
As the girl is a triune being, made up of spirit, mind, and body, it is quite necessary that her training should be in some degree devoted to the development of the physical. For the body is in truth the instrument through which the real personality must express itself. If the instrument be defective, the expression must be hindered. In order, therefore, that the girl shall have a good bodily instrument, it is important that she shall not be cramped or hindered in physical development by being sent to school too early. If she could have ideal home training, it would be better not to put her to the study of books before she is nine or ten years of age. This, however, would necessitate much wisdom on the part of parents, or the securing of home teachers who understand how to “lead out” the natural capabilities of the child.
Before confining the eyes to the study of the printed page, they should be trained to observation of natural objects. The girl can be not only instructed but interested in the acquiring of knowledge. She can be taught form through observing the cloud shapes, trees, leaves, in fact all visible objects; and through these same objects she can be taught to judge of size and relative position. She can be trained to judge of distances or measurements, so that she will say so many “inches” instead of “about so long,” or so many “rods” instead of “as far as from here to there.” She could learn fabrics, their material, and where and how they are made. There is a world of material things which can be made to teach her many facts of practical value. Then, too, she can be taught expression through the hand; as one writer says, “We have five senses through which we receive impressions; but only two methods of expression, the tongue and the hand.” There is no more valuable method of education, leading out the capabilities of the individual, than manual training.
The little girl should not be put to the use of the needle at first; for both eyes and muscles must first learn the larger things before being brought to skill in finer and more minute work. As a very little child, she may learn the use of the dust cloth, or wield the small broom; she may be taught the use of the saw and hammer and nails until she disproves the accepted theory that her finger nails are the only ones she can be sure of hitting with the hammer. She can learn order and system very early in life, and to assist in the household duties. The three-year-old can place the knives and forks on the table, and put away the napkins after a meal. She can learn to keep her own playthings in order, to pick up pieces of paper from the carpet, or arrange the chairs when they are in disorder. As she grows older, she can learn much of chemistry in the kitchen by observation or by actual experiments; she can study botany by means of gardening; zoology by the observation of the domestic animals. There is no more fascinating study than that of birds. She can learn to distinguish them by their song as well as by coloring.
The world will become a much more interesting place if the child is made familiarly acquainted with trees. An aquarium can make her acquainted with small water animals; and a home-made terrarium may be a fascinating means of window study of various little living creatures. She can learn much of history through stories that are told her. And she11can enter school at ten years of age a well-educated girl, yet having no practical acquaintance with books, tho she ought to be able to read. As she has already gained so much practical knowledge, she will be better able to understand the relation between book learning and life itself.
It is quite important that the life of the young schoolgirl be so arranged that she will secure plenty of sleep. This necessitates early going to bed, and precludes all hurtful dissipation. It is questionable whether any girl should do any night studying before she is pretty well developed physically. This, of course, will mean that she is not pushed and crowded according to the regular machinery of the school, bearing in mind always that the physical health is the foundation of all power of accomplishment. The health of the schoolgirl should be closely watched; and if at any time it seems to be declining, she should be removed from school. But the anxious mother, and probably the girl herself, will say that would mean falling behind her classes. This is probably true; but the grades are not the eternal verities, and the passing examination not an essential always to good scholarship. If we could instil into the mind of the girl the desire to know instead of an ambition to be promoted, we would do her the best service. It is usually the nervous girl who is very ambitious, and she needs to be held back rather than crowded forward.
As personal experience is always more satisfactory than mere theory, I may be pardoned here for relating my own method of dealing with my daughter.
When she was about thirteen, I noticed that she was very much concerned for fear she would not pass examination in Latin. She conjugated Latin verbs during meals and talked them over in her sleep, until I said that I thought it was not worth while to kill a living girl for a dead language, and that she should stop the Latin unless she could take it without nervous strain. I assured her that I cared nothing about examination; all I asked of her was to learn her lessons each day; and if she failed in examination, I should not be in the least distressed. Feeling thus mentally relieved, she kept on with her Latin, learning the lessons daily without mental strain, and of course passed her examination satisfactorily. I made it a point every spring, when I saw her beginning to manifest languor or irritability, to take her out of school for the rest of the year. She never went through an entire school year until her senior year in the high school; still she did not fall behind her classes, and one year she was advanced three months ahead of her class. From fourteen to fifteen, she was entirely out of school, occupied in household duties suited to her health and strength, and the result of this careful supervision was that when she entered college, she was in good health, able to take her full college work, and do the necessary night study.
I believe this would be true of the majority of girls of the ambitious, nervous type. The girls with slower minds, and more phlegmatic temperament could bear a little more pushing. The main thing in the education of every young girl is to remember that book learning is only a small part of education; that without physical health, book learning is of very little value, and that a desire for knowledge will insure a better education with less school training than a mere ambition to pass examinations in order to “get through.”
REMEMBER THE BURDEN.
By Marian Davis
The burden that comes with our birth,
Burdens of sin and pain,
’Neath which the human soul, unhelped,
Doth strive in vain;
The burden so many a child
Unmarked doth bear alone;
With impulse blind, and will at strife,
In its new-found life.
The struggle we can not see,
Nor the working understand,
Of the waking mind in a stranger-world,
This shadow-land.
O, tender then, be our mien
Toward the little wayfaring one.
Be ours to aid in the stress and strife
Of its new-found life.
Be ours to lighten the load
For the children’s shoulders weak;
Let heart of love, and voice of cheer,
Of courage speak.
So oft ’neath careless mien
Its fear would the heart conceal;
The love whereby the soul doth live,
Fail not to give.
MARIAN DAVIS.
A BEAUTIFUL HOME-LIFE.
A TEMPERANCE speaker relates, in Young People, a bit of experience that is as interesting as it is suggestive. She was to speak at a certain small town, where she arrived in the afternoon. At the station the visitor was met by the president of the local Woman's Christian Temperance Union, a soft-voiced woman with a young face beneath silver hair.
As the two ladies were riding along the shady street, pupils from the public school began to throng the sidewalks.
At a crossing a bright-faced boy stood waiting for the ladies to pass, and lifted his cap with a courteous gesture and sunny smile.
The hostess leaned from the carriage with a pleasant greeting, and the gray cap covered the brown curls again as they drove on. “One of your Sunday-school class?” ventured the speaker.
“No,” replied the hostess; “my only son, Harry.”
As they approached the home, they nearly overtook a young girl of about fourteen, and a middle-aged man, walking briskly. The man was listening in a deferential way to the girl's merry chatter. At the gate they paused; the man lifted his hat in a parting salutation, as he held the gate for the girl to precede him; then bowing, he passed on.
“This is our home; that is my husband.”
“And you have another guest, or is the young lady a caller?” asked the speaker.
“That is our Margaret, our eldest. She and her father are great chums.”
That evening, at the daintily appointed tea-table, the youngest child, a bashful girl of seven or eight years, had the misfortune to drop and break a fragile piece of china. Her face crimsoned with distress, and the violet eyes lifted to her mother's face were large with gathering tears. The speaker winced, dreading discordant notes where all had been harmonious. “I hope they will not send her away in disgrace—poor little thing!” her thoughts ran.
But even as she thought, with perfect courtesy the mother spoke the same conventional words of reassurance which she would have used had the honored guest broken the cup. Seeing the quivering lip of her cherished child—her guest from God—she added softly, “Mother knows you are sorry, dearest. Just let it pass, and overcome it,” while the father, with ready tact, engaged the speaker in conversation.
The speaker was charmed. That evening, walking with another white-ribboner, she could not resist saying, “Your president seems wonderfully blest in her children.”
“Yes, but she has anxieties as well as the rest of us,” was the unexpected reply. “Margaret has grown so winning that even the college boys would walk round by the high school to walk and talk with her, until her father quietly happened to be returning from the court-house to his office, past their house, every time. Yes, it does take his time; but he is queer. He thinks that is one of the things his time is for. He thinks it pays.”—Selected.
THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME.
If you are so fortunate as to have the “old people” in the house, see to it that they have the warmest and sunniest corner, and a goodly portion of the best that can be afforded of comfort, convenience, and beauty; that aged blood may be kept warm and cheerful; that failing limbs may have restful repose, and that the dim eyes that have watched over you and yours through so many toilsome years, may see around them the ever-present evidences of faithful and grateful care.
There is nothing in the world more pathetic than the meek, timorous, shrinking ways of certain old people—we have all seen them—who have given up their old home into younger hands and subsided into some out-of-the-way corner of it, to sit by fireside and table henceforth as if they were mere pensioners—afraid of “making trouble,” afraid of being “in the way,” afraid of accepting half that is their due, and going down to their graves with a pitiful, depreciating air, as if constantly apologizing for staying so long. There is no scorn too deep and sharp for the sons and daughters who will accept this attitude on the part of those to whom they owe so much.
Sometimes, to be sure, people grow old with a bad grace. They become embittered by misfortune or affliction; or are peevish and unreasonable under the goadings of ill health. All the more do they appeal to great gentleness and faithfulness. Let it be borne in mind that we, too, are hastening on toward the sunset of life, and that it is possible that we may ripen into very uncomfortable old people, to demand much more of patience and devotion than we, as children, yield.—Woman’s World.
THE SONG OF LABOR.
[Labor is not the curse; it is one of God's means of triumphing over the curse. Ed. S. of T.]
Work, work, work,
In meadow and mill and mart;
Work, work, work,
Till the dews of labor start;
Where the sailors launch their ships,
And plow the waves apart,
Work with a song on the lips,
And work with a prayer in the heart.
Let the dreamer lie at ease,
And gaze at the bright blue sky,
Lulled by the murmuring bees,
As the summer winds go by.
Tho the skies be cold and gray,
Be this thy heart's content,
That thine is the sweeter day
In useful labor spent.
Better to delve all day
With the blessing of peace at night,
Than to fritter the time away,
With fingers idle and white.
For labor is God's good gift,
Tho it be the curse of the fall;
And the hands that struggle and lift
Are the noblest hands of all.
—Youth's Companion.
COLD ICE AND WARM ICE.
The college professor asked the rest of us whether ice was colder in winter than it was in summer. Now, to the rest of us, ice was ice; and therefore we could not see how it could remain ice and be either colder or warmer. Then the professor explained the thing in this fashion:—
If a thermometer is buried in ice in summer, it will indicate 32 degrees. If you throw a piece of ice into boiling water, and leave it there until it is almost gone, what is left will still be 32 degrees. Ice can never be gotten above that temperature.
But while ice can never be warmed above 32 degrees, it will go as much below that as the weather does. An iceman, delivering ice one zero day in January, was asked whether his ice was any colder than in July. He thought not. But, as a matter of fact, a piece of summer ice, if he had had it, would have been something of a foot warmer for him, as it would have been 30 degrees warmer than the air of the bottom of his wagon.
Mixing salt with ice makes it much colder. The ice in a wine-cooler goes down to about zero. This is why the point zero on our common thermometers was fixed where it is. It was supposed to be the lowest point which could be reached by artificial means. Since then we have reached about 383 degrees below zero by chemical processes.
Ice will cool down with everything else on a cold night to zero or below. What should prevent it? On a day when it is just freezing, a block of iron, a block of ice, outdoors will stay at 32 degrees. If the weather grows warmer, the iron will warm up with the weather, but the ice will stay at 32 degrees and melt away. But if the weather grows colder, the iron and the ice will cool off, and one just as much as the other.
As the ice grows colder, it gets harder and more brittle. There can be no hickory bend on a skating pond on a zero day, for the ice then is too brittle. [This is not true, for the higher temperature of the water below thin ice prevents the extreme brittleness. The first frozen ice of the winter, it matters not how low the mercury, is the most elastic. We have tried it. Ed. S. of T.] Slivers of ice dipped into liquid air become so hard that they will cut glass. Water thrown on ice in the arctic regions will shiver it like pouring boiling water upon cold glass. This is because the ice is so much colder than the water.—Beverages.
HOW A PICTURE MADE EIGHT SAILORS.
A MOTHER in New Hampshire reared a family of eight boys. They all left the homestead and went to sea. She was heart-broken. The preacher visited her home, and she poured into his ears this life sorrow. She could not understand why they had all gone to sea and left her. She could not understand the mysterious work of Providence. Her heart was desolate, the home forsaken. And she said her boys had never seen the ocean until they were grown. She asked the preacher to explain it.
He looked around the room, and over the mantel he saw a splendid picture of a great ship under full sail, every white wing instinct with the message of foreign nations. The waves that dashed against the bow spoke of a thousand shores that had been washed as around the world they swept.
The preacher said to her: “Why, madam, this is the explanation. Your boys became sailors because this picture told them of the ocean and led them around the world.” The very pictures on your walls, every inch of tapestry—these are sacred. They make and unmake character. Guard them well. The foundation of every great man’s character is laid in these primal hours of life.—Brotherhood Star.
MAN ENRICHED.
By Wm. Covert
ALL the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found in Jesus (Col. 2:3); and by beholding Him, the child of faith is changed into the same image. He secures in his own soul these treasures. 2 Cor. 3:18. This wealth through the life of Christ becomes incarnate in the believer. The great riches are silently but surely duplicated in the one who steadily beholds Him. A new creation is wrought, and the divine nature in Christ is implanted in His children.
Eternal life in Christ is more than a question of longevity. The quality, the privileges, and the associations must be considered in determining the worth of a soul. “They shall be as the stones of a crown, lifted up as an ensign upon His land.” Zech. 9:16.
The redeemed are the royal diadem of the Redeemer—even the priceless badge of His kingship. In Jesus the saved of Adam’s race are lifted up to “the Head of all principality and power.” Col. 2:10. They are made more to Him than angels. They are closer than cherubim or seraphim. “O how great is Thy goodness, which Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee; which Thou hast wrought for them that trust in Thee before the sons of men!” Ps. 31:19. No celestial being can ever know so close a relationship to Christ Jesus as the soul which is saved through His blood.
How One Life May be Affected by Another.
A little while ago I met upon the highway an aged couple who wished to be directed on a journey. Looking upon their countenances, it could readily13be seen that they had traveled life’s road together for many a year. The influence exerted by each over the other had wrought within their whole being a likeness that made the twain a unit life. A half-century together on the same thoroughfare had cast their features into a similar mould. Every little incident had done its part, and all the principal events had combined to make them one. As they sat in their carriage, clad in garments colored in one dye, canopied with hair whitened by a like number of frosts, and with corresponding wrinkles made through a long set of mutual cares, the picture was an impressive one. Meditating upon it, the scripture came forcibly to mind which says, “We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image.” 2 Cor. 3:18. He who looks by faith upon Jesus becomes filled with His likeness.
Every act in life has its influence. The company one keeps has a part to act in shaping the manner of life. It even forms the destiny. The words, the deeds, the thoughts,—all these leave their impress and bear fruit. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue; and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.”—Solomon.
Froude has said that “no man is what he would have been if Luther had not lived.” W. M. Punshon wrote: “O, it is a terrible power that I have—this power of influence; . . . it speaks, it walks, it moves. It is powerful in every look of my life. I can not live to myself. I must either be a light to illumine, or a tempest to destroy.”
The stone tossed into the pond has its effect upon the whole body of water; and the water in turn affects the neighboring vegetation differently by being disturbed. As it is agitated, it sends out its moisture, which settles upon every leaf, twig, blade, and seed-pod in the vicinity, and all get a little more of life.
As the Lord Sees.
Multitudes are born into the world every day, and for many there is a welcome. Almost as great a number pass away, causing untold sorrow in many a home. But while no one person on earth knows of all these experiences, God understands them all. He says, “All souls are Mine.” Every individual is really and personally the Father’s. God’s family is exceedingly large. His care is for every one. His desire is to save every soul. He willeth not the death of any. No one comes into the world or goes out of it unnoticed by Him. He loves all alike, and has the same desire to save one that He has to save another. He wants all to come to repentance and live. He alone can pass an impartial judgment, for He only knows the full significance of all the things, great and small, that have influenced a life. His view is the only complete and perfect one—that which sees all sides and parts at the same time.
It should encourage us to know that the Creator, while knowing all that is, all that has been, and all that is to come, has done so much to save a soul. This is the only reliable way of finding out the estimate God puts upon us. Wm. Covert.
THE EASTERN CHURCH
By Henry Otis Dwight
(Condensed from “Constantinople and Its Problems,” by Henry Otis Dwight, LL. D.)
On visiting the cathedral attached to the Greek patriarchate at Constantinople, the traveler is shown the throne occupied by the patriarch on certain high feast days. It is a massive armchair of some heavy wood, richly colored by age. The Greeks declare this to be the veritable throne used by St. Chrysostom when he was bishop of Constantinople; a relic marvelously preserved for the comfort of the faithful through the vicissitudes of fifteen hundred years.
The Eastern Church has actually had bishops upon the episcopal throne of the city, from Chrysostom down, in long and unbroken succession. Feuds of mingled political and theological origin shook the throne of the Byzantine Empire long before it fell, for such feuds are mere incidents of its unbroken story. Turmoil and dissensions and anarchy have many times made the streets about St. Sophia slippery with the blood of priest and statesman; the great dome itself has echoed with the clash of arms and the angry shouts of zealous Christians [of course the word “Christian” is used in a very general sense] ready to hurl epithets and missiles, or to ply cudgel and knife, in discussion of such questions of popular interest as the natures of Jesus Christ, the title of mother of God for the Virgin Mary, and the propriety of using pictures or images in worship. But through all this noise and strife, orthodoxy has not been rent asunder, nor lost its hold upon the people. To-day, as fifteen centuries ago, the patriarch of Constantinople is the “Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church,” if a creed is what feeds life.
No branch of Western Christendom, with its small areas of unruly kingdoms, was so intoxicated by the possession of power as was the Eastern Church when it captured the imperial throne of the Roman Empire, with sway over vast regions in the East. It was as a supreme political power that it had to lay down principles of world-wide scope, which emperors had commanded it to define. It fell into theory to the neglect of practical affairs because of its responsibility to fix principles which underlie the ruling of a world.
The flavor of uncounted wealth and unlimited power then tasted by the clergy, has ever remained in memory as the type of the kind of success toward which Christian pastors must bend their efforts. Under guise of a laudable desire to establish the kingdom of Jesus Christ upon a proper foundation, imperialism then supplanted Christ as the central figure of the church. To this day the Eastern Church has never lost its dream of supremacy in actual combination with the civil and political forces of the world. Its prelates still confuse Church and State in an inextricable medley of aspirations such as marked the later Byzantine history. And from a political rather than a religious point of view they deal with the questions which our modern life brings within reach of their somewhat limited vision.
The Patriarch of the Greek Church at Constantinople, in his official robes.
The dealings of the Eastern Church with Islam, under the virile energy of which it fell into servitude, illustrates its development as a political power.
When the Turks took Constantinople, the sultan quickly and shrewdly declared a policy which continued in a certain degree the partnership between the church and the government. The patriarch of Constantinople was maintained as the supreme ruler of his people, and the office of “grand logothete,” the official charged under the Greek Empire with conveying the requirements of the church to the emperor, was continued as the channel of communication between patriarch and sultan. To this day the Greek patriarchate has its grand logothete at the Sublime Porte, and its imposing guard of Turkish soldiers to attend the patriarch when he rides abroad.
The essence of such an alliance between the Mohammedan sultan and the Greek patriarch must be political. Its unspoken but irrevocable condition must be the consent of Christianity to remain a political organization, without the attributes of spiritual aggressiveness placed by Christ upon the conscience of His followers. Neither sultan nor patriarch at the time of this compact took into his thought for an instant any possibility that Christians might attempt to win Mohammedans to Christ. Christian liberty of propaganda was surrendered for the sake of political power. The two elements of the Eastern question of our day were then established,—a ruling Mohammedan power which openly demands universal political supremacy, and a subject organization equally claiming universal supremacy as a political power, and equally striving, tho secretly, to forward that claim. This dream of supremacy has never been lost by the hierarchy, which views itself as heir to those disciples of Christ who demanded dignity in a political organization for the glory of the Lord.
A single illustration of the standpoint of the Greek clergy will tend to make these statements more clear.
A quarrel a few years ago with the Bulgarian Church in Macedonia formed the occasion for the adoption by the Greek Holy Synod at Constantinople of a measure intended to force the Turkish Government to grant the wishes of the Greek patriarch. The bishops of the Holy Synod ordered the closing of all Greek churches throughout the country, and then told their astounded parishioners that the measure had been forced upon them by the Turkish Government. The fact of the case was that because the Turkish Government refused to restore the Macedonian Bulgarians by force, as if literally sheep, to the fold of the Greek shepherds, the Greek patriarch had resigned.
The closing of the churches was merely a politician’s stratagem, expected to goad the people into violent outbreaks by leading them to suppose that the Turks were denying them their religious privileges. The Turkish Government issued an emphatic denial, thus turning the wrath of the Greek rabble against the priests. But the whole discussion of the outrage centered upon the value of the measure as a political expedient. For the people know too well that their interests require politics to outweigh religion in the councils of their leaders. The spectacle of the largest Christian Church of Turkey sportively suspending divine services for weeks, as a political measure, proves to every Mohammedan, beyond cavil, that Christianity is a lie and a folly beneath contempt.
The idea that obedience to God consists in observance of rites and ceremonies, and has no relation to moral conduct, is firmly fixed in the minds of the common people in each branch of that church. Worship is understood to be recital of certain forms of words at appropriate times. Faith is assent to creed. Piety is ascetic attention to forms of worship and to fasting. Manliness is determination to crush an enemy, and humility is a groveling, cringing spirit.
A few years ago a band of robbers captured a Vienna express train in the province of Adrianople, and held for ransom a number of European passengers. After a ransom of about $40,000 had been paid by friends, the prisoners were released. They gave a lively account of their life in the mountains while the robbers were eluding pursuit and negotiating for the ransom. The most curious part of the story related to the great piety of these robbers, who were members, in good and regular standing, of the Greek Church. Every day they read prayers and the lessons of Scriptures with great unction. They doubtless ascribed to this pious observance their success in getting the ransom and escaping capture. At all events none of them suffered loss of social standing or fell under the discipline of the church for their crime. Neither the robbers nor the Greek clergy saw anything in the enterprise inconsistent with spotless purity of character.
ONE THOUGHT.
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The time may dig the grave of creeds,
And dogmas wither in the sod,
My soul will keep the thought it needs—
Its swerveless faith in God.
No matter how the world began,
Nor where the march of science goes,
My trust in something more than man
Shall help me bear life’s woes.
Let progress take the props away,
And moldering superstitions fall;
Still God retains His regal sway—
The Maker of the All.
Why cavil over that or this?
One thought is vast enough for me—
The great Creator was and is,
And evermore will be.
