The Interlinear Translation of the Hebrew Old Testament; with the King James Version and the Revised Version Printed in the Margins for Ready Reference, and with Explanatory Textual Foot-notes, Supplemented by Tables of the Hebrew Verb and the Hebrew Alphabet. By George Ricker Berry, Ph.D., of the University of Chicago and Colgate University, Department of Semitic Languages. Part I.—Genesis and Exodus. Cloth, $4.00; half leather, $5.00; divinity circuit, $6.00. Hinds & Noble, 4, 5, 13, 14 Cooper Institute, New York City.
This work has been well characterized, “A New Old Testament.” It is just what has been long desired by clergymen and Bible students. It will be welcomed by every one who sees it. The publishers design to finish the work, and to render to students of the Old Testament the same service they have rendered to students of the New by their “Interlinear New Testament.” To tell all of its excellencies would necessitate more than this column. The Hebrew text is clear and beautiful, and the English distinct and easy to the eye. The English Bible student as well as the Hebrew student will find it a genuine help. We gladly welcome it, and appreciate the efforts and expense put forth by the publishers in their great undertaking. We shall anxiously look for the parts to follow.
The New Illuminated Holy Bible, Self-pronouncing; with Marginal References, Concordance, Maps, and Numerous Helps. Nearly 600 Original Illustrations. American Bible House, New York and Philadelphia, 1898.
This Bible is not offered by its publishers with the claim that it is superior to all others in all respects. They clearly admit the excellence in type and helps of other Bibles; but in this Bible they present an additional feature of real worth, namely, helpful illustration. These illustrations are introduced into the text of the Bible so as to make them illustrative of the Bible story. Most of the pictures are intelligently and beautifully designed. Some of them are from photographs of great paintings, and some from photographs of the actual landscapes. The helps, while not cumbersome, are excellent, and are written by eminent men. The maps, eight in number, are good. The copy before us is well bound and one which any teacher would prize.
What a Young Boy Ought to Know (Self and Sex Series), by Sylvanus Stall, D.D. Nearly 200 pages. Price, $1.00. Vir Publishing Co., Hale Building, Philadelphia, Pa.
This, like the author’s book, “What a Young Man Should Know,” treats a difficult subject in a delicate way. There are few, very few, parents who can do this; but the great majority avoid the subject, avoid the questions of the child as to the origin of life, till the child has learned it from a low, base source, and has laid the foundation of his ruin. Dr. Stall’s little book treats the subject of the origin of life, the dangers, the uses and abuses of sexual organs, in a simple, lucid style, and earnest, Christian tone, with scientific accuracy. It may be placed in the hands of a young boy old enough to read; but, better still, it should be read with the boy by parents who have his good at heart, and may thus come into closer touch with him. We hope it may have a wide circulation. It is one of the good voices saying to sinful humanity, and saying to them betimes, “This is the way, walk ye in it.” But parents must co-operate.
Making Home Happy. By Mrs. L. D. Avery-Stuttle. 206 pages, illustrated, bound in cloth with illuminated colored cover, 50 cents; paper, 25 cents. Review and Herald Publishing Co., Battle Creek, Mich.; Chicago, Ill.; Atlanta, Ga.
The book presents before us in its seventeen chapters a typical home, cheerless and comfortless, of a great change wrought in that home, and of the efforts put forth by various members in making it such a home as every true home must be, a happy home. It is full of good Gospel teaching and helpful suggestions to every household. May its teaching help to make happy and happier many a home.
The Legal Revolution of 1902. By a Law-abiding Revolutionist. Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, Ill.
The book is written from a supposed view point of fourteen years from 1898. It attempts to picture changes and reforms which took place while the country was passing through an industrial revolution. Its object is to show the people that they have within themselves the power by wholesome legislation to right all their grievances where such exist. It is an evidently honest attempt to point out a better way. But the best-laid plans of mice and men are often frustrated. Price, $1.00.
Voices of the Morning. By J. A. Edgerton. Bound in illuminated back and side title; price 75 cents. Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, Ill.
This is a book of poems, which might be called almost wholly songs of labor, many of them decidedly socialistic and revolutionary in sentiment, yet singing of a better time, to be brought about by the brotherhood of man. Some of the sentiments of the book are voiced in expressions like these: “Smite the tyrant, the oppressor, robber, and despoiler;” “Down with mammon, up with man;” “Down with kings and priests and gold, up with God, Humanity.” The aim of the author has been to “voice some of the longings of the great struggling masses,” and he has. But he does not give us the remedy. This is found in individual faith in Christ.
“Hebrews and the Rights of Conscience,” by Elder F. C. Gilbert. It is an appeal to the Hebrew people in behalf of Religious Liberty. Its earnest words should appeal to every liberty-loving Jew who reads English. We hope it may have a large circulation. Only 2 cents a copy. Address the author at 45 Waverly Street, Everett, Mass.
For the story of the siege of Santiago de Cuba, as it affected the people directly involved, on either side, in their personal safety and comfort and their daily lives, there is no document yet published equal to the October number of McClure’s Magazine. Mr. Stephen Bonsal, in an article entitled “The Fight for Santiago,” describes the campaign as it affected the American soldier, writing from his own observation and experience, while for the experiences of the panic-stricken and half-starving people shut up in the city of Santiago we have a very remarkable diary kept by the British consul at Santiago, who was all the time in the closest relations with the Spanish authorities, and was expending—as it later proved—his very life in relieving the general suffering. Mr. Bonsal’s article is very fully illustrated—partly from photographs taken in the field by himself, and partly from drawings by W. J. Glackens, the special artist for McClure’s with the army of invasion. Ten cents a copy.
Among the excellent articles in the October Good Health are “The Fallacy of Tonics,” by the editor, Dr. J. H. Kellogg; “The Campaign in the Tropics,” by F. S. Oswald, M.D.; “Infant Feeding,” by Dr. Kate Lindsay, and many other good ones. Price, 10 cents a copy, $1.00 a year.
WANTED
A FEW young ladies and gentlemen for the Training School for Nurses at the Garden City Sanitarium, between the ages of 20 and 30. Must be in good health, and Seventh-day Adventists in good standing. Two years’ course, with first-class instruction. The institution is thoroughly equipped in every department, with graduate nurses of both sexes at the head of departments. Course begins November 1. Address, L. J. Belknap, M.D. Supt. Garden City Sanitarium, San Jose, Calif.
PROGRESS IN BACTERIOLOGY.
THE science of bacteriology is comparatively new, but great advances have been made in it since its inauguration by Professor Koch in 1881. In an address before the Royal Institution of Great Britain Professor Klein declared that so far has the study of bacteria developed that it is now possible not only to count, but also to weigh, them. A postage-stamp seven-eighths of an inch long and three-fourths of an inch wide would carry 500,000,000 of the typhoid fever bacilli, and if the layer were made a tenth of an inch deep, there would13be 2,000,000,000,000. If fifteen drops of bacteria were let fall into a cup of broth, they would produce in twenty-four hours 80,000,000. The degree of refinement manifested by the bacteriologist in his researches is shown by the statement of the same authority that it is now possible to detect one part of sewage when contained in 500,000 parts of water.—Christian Advocate.
FRANCES E. BOLTON
By Frances E. Bolton
NATURE’S MEANING. No. 5.
WHEN we enter a stranger’s house, we look about for indications of the person’s taste and character. We judge something of the individual by the environment. The books, pictures, embroidery, arrangement, all tell something of the life-story. Poverty may cramp expression; sickness, sorrow, discouragement put a check to the manifestation, yet the reader of human nature will find the traces of what is within.
The works of God in a juster sense tell His nature. To study His works that we may know Him, love Him, and thus become changed into His image, is to do the same thing that all nature urges upon us. The whole duty of man is to love God with all the heart and our neighbor as ourselves. This greatly simplifies life, lays off its rigorous burdens, and brings us to Him who gives rest unto the soul. It puts us in an attitude of listening to, looking for, following of, one leader. He who bade us consider the lilies of the field, the fowls of the air, and directed us to nature, leads in pleasant and holy pathways, beside the still waters, and into the green pastures.
Both Old and New Testament abound in figures from nature for the teaching of spiritual truth. One need go no further than his door-yard to find a field of spiritual instruction. Is it uncultivated? Is the soul untilled? “Break up the fallow ground” in your garden, and ask the great Gardener to teach you how His plow will prepare your heart for divine seed. He will make “the wilderness like Eden,” and “the desert like the garden of the Lord.” Go through the processes that insure fertility to your dooryard, and find how God will make your soul “like a watered garden.”
The seed breaks in the darkness and in the silence, and comes up gradually, first the bud, then the blade, then the ear. Looking on the miracle of growth, shall we not take heart, and trust that, tho we hear no explosions in our souls, yet the great Miracle-worker is causing His own Word to flourish within?
We have in the burial and death of the seed, the symbol of the death of Christ and of self. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.” The death process is silent, discouraging, painful, but not hopeless. When all is lost, all is gained. He that loseth his life shall find it. The seed springs up in a new life, more radiant, more fruitful. No longer bound within by that which nourishes itself alone, it lives for others. Christ came from the grave, to ascend on high, to make intercession for us before the Father, and to pour upon the world the pentecostal life. And we also, like the seed in the death damp, shall come up, maybe as silently, into a fuller, more spiritual life, even from the grave of all that we have known in the past. Our death is a daily one. Every day forgetting the things that are behind, we must press on. It is so with the plant. The leaf must be forgotten, even sacrificed for the bud. The bud withers and drops away for the fruit, and the fruit ripens, and forgets the tree that bore it for a higher mission of sacrifice. We lay down the life of yesterday for a fuller, better life to-day, all along growing up into the likeness of God-like sacrifice.
Nature’s teachings can not be merely theoretical. They must be lived to be understood. The teaching must be in experience. Blessed are the children who from their first years learn the lessons of Christ, beholding in nature the outworking of God’s life and love. In the light of God’s Word, nature becomes a divine teacher, and all through her paths, we trace the shining footprints of the Son of God.
FRANCES E. BOLTON
CRATER LAKE, OREGON, SHOWING WIZARD ISLAND. This lake is the site of an extinct, or supposedly extinct, volcano.
TOO QUICK ON THE TRIGGER.
By Helen A. Steinhauer
“Papa, the boys take my bicycle away from me,” said a little Scandinavian boy of ten or eleven to his father, who was assisting a neighbor with an unaccommodating stovepipe. The child’s tones were calm and deliberate, and his face thoughtful, not in the least ruffled.
A moment’s pause, and the father as quietly replied, “Well, let them have it part of the time.”
This was doing to others as we would have them do to us, and the moderation of the speakers pleased me. Under similar circumstances I fear most American lads would have come in, cheeks aflame, eyes aglow, and shouted angrily:—
“The boys take my bicycle away from me, pa. I wish you’d make them quit it.”
And I incline to think that the average American father would have returned, with considerable asperity:—
“Tell those boys that I say to let your bicycle alone or I’ll attend to their cases.”
As I pondered, I wondered whether we Americans as a nation are not too quick on the trigger. It also set me to thinking whether Christians of all nationalities do not too often forget to let their moderation be known to all men.
“Charity suffereth long, and is kind,” and there is ample opportunity for its exercise even in the smallest affairs of life. Constitutional phlegm may prove an efficient restraint to its possessor, but is not better still the Christlike spirit, which “is not easily provoked”? Let us, therefore, “be slow to wrath,” for “he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.”
The wise man tells us: “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.” “He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding, but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.” “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.” “Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words? there is more hope of a fool than of him.” “Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from troubles.” “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty.” “Go not forth hastily to strive, lest thou know not what to do in the end thereof, when thy neighbor hath put thee to shame.” “He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears.” “It is an honor for a man to cease from strife; but every fool will be meddling.” “Make no friendship with an angry man; and with a furious man thou shalt not go; lest thou learn his ways, and get a snare to thy soul.” “The beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water; therefore leave off contention, before it be meddled with.” Proverbs.
HELEN A. STEINHAUER.
38 Walter Avenue, Battle Creek, Mich.
TRUE WORTH.
By Alice Carey
True worth is in being, not seeming—
In doing, each day that goes by,
Some little good—not in the dreaming
Of great things to do by and by.
For whatever men say in blindness,
And in spite of the fancies of youth,
There's nothing so kingly as kindness,
And nothing so royal as truth.
—Alice Carey.
HER NARROW LIFE.
By Inez E. Barr Cornish
[By Inez E. Barr Cornish, in Union Signal.]
The wind upon the prairie in western Iowa is very businesslike in its methods. It is, indeed, so very thorough and practical in its chosen vocation of shaping and shifting snowbanks or throwing clouds of dust into the air, that all travelers, when possible, give it unquestioned right of way by seeking shelter from its rude blasts.
During one of its recent furies young Mrs. Nellie Brown, while awaiting her husband’s return to dinner, drew her chair near the comfortable heater, and, taking a paper from a stand near by, read with deep interest a sketch from the pen of a gifted writer, who pictured the grandeur of old ocean, as witnessed by her in a late visit to its shore. The paper dropped from Nellie’s hands. She leaned her head wearily against the chair-back, while tears sprang to her eyes. Her life seemed so narrow—this homely, every-day life!
“If I could but have money and leisure to travel and see some of the wonders of nature and art; to witness with my own eyes God’s handiwork in mountain, valley, and sea; to stand on the very ground where He stood in the Holy Land, I feel that I could then spend my life in profitable service for Him—work that counts for Christ.” Thus she thought, discontentedly.
“It is hard to be so poor,” she remarked, half audibly, smiling at the absurdity of the thought, “that one can scarce maintain herself a true Christian. I could not give a subscription to the missionary cause this winter unless I denied myself a new cloak, and it seems as if people snub me for looking shabby. This has made me angry and resentful.”
Nellie’s naturally cheerful countenance resembled an April day as her wounded pride found vent in tears, altho there was the suspicion of a sunny smile in the appearance of the usual dimples around her mouth, as a sense of the ludicrous got the better of her.
A loud knock at the door caused her to hastily wipe traces of emotion from her face. Responding to the rap, a young foreigner, a pedler, stood panting for breath as he put his heavy pack inside the door, and, seating himself on the nearest chair, said briefly: “Bad wind. Tired.”
“Yes,” assented Nellie pleasantly. “It must be hard traveling on foot to-day.” Then, noticing how wearied he was and that his dreamy brown eyes were sad, added, “It is just noon; will you have dinner with us?”
A look of surprise and gratitude fitted over his swarthy face as he replied, “Yes, thanks; very kind.”
“Where are you from?” asked Mr. Brown, who had entered shortly after the stranger.
“Damascus, in Syria,” was the prompt reply; “came when I was sixteen.”
Nellie was lifting vegetables from the stove.
“From the old world of the Bible,” she said with surprise, looking upon her guest with augmented interest. “Tell me about your home,” she continued. “I long so much to see those interesting places.”
The pedler raised his dark, intelligent eyes to the fair face of his hostess.
“I vill try, ma’am, tho I not much speak your language.” Then he told, in his quaint, broken way, of the fruits and scenes of Damascus; of Bethlehem and the manger—claimed by the monks of the convent located there, to be on the very spot where Christ was born. He then spoke of the political situation and the school system of that land, making comments favorable to our own country in contrast with it.
“What is your religious belief?” was asked, as he finished speaking.
“Greek Cat’olic,” was the reply. “We not believe like the Cat’olics here. No pope; and t’e priests marry.”
The meal ended, all returned to the sitting-room, when he asked: “Vat vill I pays you? Shall I pays you in towels or somet’ing?”
Nellie paused a moment. She was thinking of language so simple that this stranger in a strange land should readily comprehend it. Then she said quietly:—
“We do not want pay for your dinner. We believe in the same Jesus whose manger cradle you say you have seen. This makes you our brother. When you were tired and hungry we were glad to give you rest and food for His sake.”
The young man’s face actually turned pale with emotion. He seated himself on the couch as if overcome.
“Do you know,” he said brokenly, “I am here ten year, all alone. No one before this did said to me, ‘Jesus,’ or take my hand to said, ‘Broder.’ Lady, I t’ank you. T’is country to me vill seem so tiffrent now. Ven I sit by t’e roadside to rest, I vill t’ink, In t’is new world I am not alone, for one did said to me ‘Jesus’ and ‘broder.’”
The statement seemed almost incredible to Nellie. “Where,” she asked herself, “is Christian America’s proud boast now, with her multitude of churches and myriads of Christian workers, that a mere boy of sixteen years should seek her hospitality and wander through her streets and on her country roads for ten years with not a soul to extend the hand of fellowship, or comfort the homesick heart by pointing him to our common Saviour? Surely there is a wide field of missionary work at the very door of the most humble worker.”
Her guest moved toward the door, then turned with a hesitating yet deferential manner.
“Vill t’e lady tells me her church?”
Nellie spoke the name of her church, adding, “All Protestant churches do work for Christ.”
His answer was very earnest: “Ven I stops over Sunday in a town, I goes to your church, ’cause you did said ‘Jesus’ to me. Sometimes,” he added—and there were manly tears in his eyes—“I t’inks I dies for kind word—for some one to have interest in me.”
Nellie was awed at the intensity of his feelings. She thought of how she had longed to stand on holy ground; surely this was holy ground upon which she now stood, for it seemed that God had chosen her, weak and unworthy as she was, to be instrumental in leading this poor wanderer, this homesick soul, into a haven of rest.
The young people’s meeting of the next Sunday evening was spoken of by many as “so very interesting.” It was Nellie’s turn to lead, but her shabby cloak did not have any place in her thoughts as she commented earnestly on the text, “Let your light shine,” urging her young friends never to lose an opportunity to speak for Christ, or do a kind deed unto the least of them “in His name.”
Correctionville, Ia.
Heralds of His Coming
Heralds OF HIS COMING, by Milton C. Wilcox, shows conclusively that Christ’s coming is very near. 25,000 already sold. Price, $1.50 per 100.
PACIFIC PRESS PUB. CO.
Oakland, Cal.
39 Bond St., New York City
18 W. 5th St., Kansas City, Mo.
The Fairbanks-Morse Gas and Gasoline Engines
Fairbanks Galvanized Steel Windmills
Fairbanks Standard Scales
Send for Illustrated Catalogues to
Fairbanks, Morse & Co.
310 MARKET STREET
San Francisco, Cal.
When you write, please mention the SIGNS OF THE TIMES.
NUT BUTTER NUT MILLS AND NUTS
Health is wealth. Eat pure foods. Buy them of us or Make them yourself. Write for prices of Nut Butter, Nut Roast, Nut Meal, Maltosia, Maltol, Malt Extract, Almond Butter, Crackers, and other health foods, Nut Grinders, Roasters, Blanchers, Shelled Peanuts, Roll Bakers, Gem Irons, etc.
Knapp Brothers
407 E. Burnside St. E. Portland, Ore.
When you write, please mention the SIGNS OF THE TIMES.
Healthful Delicious Nut Foods
EASILY and cheaply made in any household by the use of our complete equipment for grinding and emulsifying nuts. The production of our mills is unsurpassed. Full directions and a booklet containing many valuable nut food recipes, free with each mill.
NUTS
Shelled and unshelled, of all kinds at reasonable prices
For further information, catalog, price-list, etc., write to
JOSEPH LAMBERT
Battle Creek Michigan
When you write, please mention the SIGNS OF THE TIMES.
