"_, Wash., Aug. 9, 1906.
To Mrs. _:
"Endless Prayer Chain.
'O Lord Jesus Christ: We implore Thee, O, eternal God to have mercy on all mankind. Keep us from sin by Thy precious blood, and take us to be with Thee eternally. Amen.'"
"This prayer was sent by Bishop Lawrence recommending it to be rewritten and sent to nine other persons. The one who will not do this will be affected by some misfortune. One person who paid no attention to it met with a terrible accident. He who will rewrite this prayer for nine days and send it to nine other persons, commencing the day this is received, will, on or after the ninth day, experience great joy. At Jerusalem during the holy feasts it was said that he who would write this prayer would be delivered from every calamity. Please do not break the chain."
The sender of this letter writes to the sister who sent it:
"The above was sent to me by a friend, and I think if every one will earnestly pray over it, it would deliver our country from much evil.
"From Mrs. ____."
Now the only Bishop Lawrence that we know in this country is Bishop Lawrence of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Massachusetts. We question very much whether he gave the prayer. Certainly there is nothing particularly commendable about it, either in its comprehensiveness or clearness. We question still more whether he ever sent it out to be repeated in this way, and still more we question whether he has had anything to do with the threats or promises connected with it. The very promises attached to the mere mechanical repetition of it and the foolish threat or anathema pronounced upon him who disregards it is on a par with a thousand other medieval and pagan superstitions. The apostle Paul has told us to pray "for all men." 1 Tim. 2:1. And we think this authority is as good as any human authority now; but he has connected with it no such dire threatening of calamity as is appended to this alleged prayer of Bishop Lawrence. There will be thousands of Christians who are praying for every one and everything the spirit moves them to pray for who will pay no attention to this prayer-form sent out so widely over the country. We beg to assure our readers that they need expect no such blessing from the mere repetition of it, and they need not fear the calamities threatened. This diversion breaks the chain, but let no one be alarmed; the Good Book tells us, "The curse causeless shall not come."
Cuba’s Rebellion and Foreign Control
Cuba is again in rebellion. The situation is a perfectly natural one; rebellion seems to be indigenous to the island, just as it is in all countries where the original owners and their descendants have been and are being driven to the wall. Spain oppressed the people of Cuba for many generations, and the simple natives knew no way of relief but through physical rebellion. At last, by the assistance of the United States, they secured a nominal independence and an outward cleaning up. But during this process a wily, silent foe crept in. It was hidden in the folds of the Stars and Stripes. The Cubans have apparently awakened to the fact that their rich island resources are passing under control of foreigners. These are not all Americans, some of them are English, etc.—but they came in while the United States Government was in control. The Cubans are not skilled in the art of "frenzied finance;" they can not defend their rights in such a contest, nor do they know how to develop fully their home resources. They are at the mercy of skilled competitors under their nominal independence, as verily as they were formerly at the mercy of Spain. Knowing no resort but that of physical rebellion, many of them have taken to the field against their government, which they claim is conducted in the interest of the men who are robbing them through the mediums of business enterprise. The end will probably be sooner or later, annexation to the United States—the result prophesied and desired by those who are fast absorbing the natural wealth of the island republic. There can be no such thing in this world as an independent government by a people who can not maintain it by military and naval force. The small ones only exist by sufferance of the large ones, and this sufferance will exist only as long as the federated strong governments deem it consistent with their own interests.
Good Common Sense
Good Common Sense.—President Hopkins, of Williams College, at the last commencement in that institution, delivered the baccalaureate sermon. He condemned bigotry, but says that our danger is not so much from bigotry and intolerance as from easy-going indifference to all truth. He declares: "Better give a diploma to Mr. Feeble Mind than to Mr. Fickle Mind, to Mr. Narrow Mind rather than to Mr. Double Mind. There is more hope for them. Better a bigot in a professor's chair, all aflame with one good thought, one high purpose, than a broad-minded, fickle philosopher wandering entertainingly and aimlessly around the border lines of all fields of thought, murmuring his speculations of maliferous, unintelligible phrases, but arriving nowhere and building no strong structure of truth on any living rock. This is he of whom the Scriptures speak, 'the blind leading the blind.'" And he declares truly that such a man is not a bold discoverer, but a drifting derelict. It may be needful to throw away our charts of discarded channels, but it is never safe to ignore the north star.
San Francisco’s Reconstruction Challenges
"Progress," a paper published by the Southern Pacific Company, of San Francisco, tells us that there are thirty thousand men engaged in the work of reconstruction in that city, but it is a grossly inadequate number. There is need for many more the wages are higher than in any other city on earth. The great work of reconstruction goes bravely on, tho hampered by strikes and demands for increased wages. Property owners are also forced to face considerable advance in the price of all building materials. And this puts it very mildly. If conditions go on as they have been going for the last month or two there certainly must come a collapse, and it may be safely said that very few permanent buildings will be erected in San Francisco. A new Palace Hotel will be built on the site of the old at a cost not to exceed $3,500,000, with furnishings costing perhaps $700,000 more. It will be constructed as fire-proof and earthquake-proof as human skill can make it.
Murder and Unequal Justice
Comparisons are odious, it is said, but here is one that is being passed around, and is worthy of a moment's thought: "Last year London, with 6,000,000 of people, had twenty-four murders. Every murderer was arrested, and yet the policemen carry neither clubs nor guns. Of these murderers, four committed suicide, four were sent to the insane asylum, and the rest executed. Chicago, with one-fifth the population, had 127 murders, only twenty-four arrested and barely one executed. For every 100 murderers convicted in this country, two are executed by the state, three are lynched, and ninety-five imprisoned for awhile and then turned loose. During the last twenty years, 2,289 people have been legally executed for murder, and during the last half of that period of twenty years, 2,648 men, women, and children—guilty and innocent—have been lynched."
Cancer Increasing in France
A despatch from Paris, dated September 1, declares that every year thirty thousand persons die of cancer in France, and the number in Paris alone is four thousand. Instead of diminishing, the disease is constantly increasing. Usually it attacks only those over forty years of age, but nowadays it attacks many young people. It seems to attack all the organs of the body, whereas formerly it was limited to two or three at the utmost. The authority for this statement is Dr. Borrelle, in a communication to the Academy of Medicine. He declares that the disease is communicated in many cases through food.
Accident on the Southern Pacific
By Editor
An accident occurred on the Southern Pacific Railroad near Ventura, Cal., on the 16th ult., which resulted in the injury of forty-six passengers. The train was running at a rate of fifty miles an hour, to make up lost time. It seems that humanity never will learn that lost time can not be made up. Men are often deceived by an imaginary gain of time that has been misspent, but whatever the apparent gain, it is always at great cost.
A New Church.
By Editor
A church has been organized in the Middle West called the "Church of Humanity," starting out with a membership of one hundred. These one hundred, it is said, have learned the "truth about God." They have applied for and received certificates of graduation in the knowledge of God and life membership in the Church of Humanity. The promoter of this intimates that he had a pretty hard time in hunting the one hundred members. The "truth about God" as they hold it is that there is no such thing as God, that "God is a myth;" and they want to "save" others to that same blank and awful negation. They print their first hundred names, and, sad to say, there are nearly a score of women in it who subscribe themselves as utterly rejecting Christianity, the religion which has lifted woman from the degradation of a beast or a slave to the position she now occupies in civilized countries. These people think they are saving others from idolatry in inducing them to believe that there is no God and that Jesus Christ is a dead man. They say we are worshiping a man-made god. Granting all that they believe in this respect to be true, what worse is it to worship the God of the Bible than to worship self? For that is in reality what these people are doing. They are setting themselves up as God, each one the sum of his own ideas, his own desires, his own passions, and his own knowledge, as the highest of all tribunals, and the end of it all is blank nothingness. They have placed the limit of their minds upon their own conception alone. Nothing, nothing have they to lead them out beyond themselves. There is an old saying in a certain Book of a class of people who are "ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." When the calamities predicted by the Man of Nazareth, whom they call "a dead Jew,"—calamities that come in consequence of man's sins,—occur, many of those who have received their certificates of graduation will be pleading for mercy to something beyond themselves. We do not envy them their knowledge, or belief, or assurance, or wages.
The Church and Civil Power
When Christ has promised all power to His church, and that church seeks the aid of the civil power, is it not clear evidence that she has forsaken the Living Fountain for the broken cisterns of men which can hold no water, and that she is doomed to die?
Poor France
By Editor
Poor France.—Always ready for revolution, she is now torn by distracting religious and social agitators. On a plea for greater liberty, she has attempted a separation of church and state, yet through the influence of the church and socialistic propaganda she has recently passed a Sunday law, which will eventually lead to closer union with the church and to religious persecution. In the meantime, Pius X. does not seem to be uniting France very fast. More on this next week.
To Our Correspondents
By Editor
To Our Correspondents.—About the first thing one wishes to know on receiving a letter is who it is from. We receive from time to time letters and articles from persons who do not sign their names. These we do not have time to consider. What they say may be good or it may not; we can not take time to tell. If what one says is worth saying, if you are willing to own it, sign your name. If you want your name to go no further, it will not be made known through us. But if you wish your letter or article considered at all, you must give your name.
The Manchuria and Mongolia Stranded
The large Pacific mail steamer Manchuria, which ran onto the rocks on the coast of Oahu Island, Hawaiian group, August 20, has been released and taken to Honolulu. The cost of the mishap, it is said, will be half a million dollars. The ship cost two million dollars two years ago. Simultaneously with this news comes the intelligence that the Mongolia, a mate to the Manchuria, built the same year, is stranded upon a reef of Midway Island, about eight hundred miles northeast of Honolulu. The steamer left Yokohama on the 10th ult.
Climbing Up Some Other Way.
The Burning Bush is a tremendously radical holiness paper, and its cartoons are by no means works of art, but they do at times present some striking lessons which are worthy of notice. For instance, the number of August 3 has a cartoon which illustrates very well the Institutional Church, and the various devices that have been adopted by ministers of all denominations nearly of getting people into the church by some other means, rather than by preaching the old-fashioned Gospel. Heaven is represented as being beyond a wall great and high. The strait gate is presented before us through which one can go only by leaving his sin behind. Various ladders are placed up against the wall, and men are endeavoring to get access to heaven by climbing these ladders and still holding on to their bundles of sin. One ladder is labeled "Free Hospitals," another "Prohibition," another "Civic Reform," (a tremendously short ladder), another "Working Men's Homes," and so on; while underneath is the Scripture: "Strait is the gate which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." Crude as this illustration is, it teaches a tremendous and needed lesson; there is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ. He who saves not in sin but from sin. And there is no other way but that expressed in His teaching: "Ye must be born again."
A Missing Link
A "Missing Link."—That is what a New York daily calls Ota Benga, the little African pygmy, now in New York City. We do not know why he is so called, unless it is that he is different from "civilized" people. For instance, New York with its great sky-scrapers did not greatly impress him. "Nothing wonderful," he said of the great structures, "if any one wanted to build them." He had seen bigger things—the mountains, the ocean, the sky. He is wanting in some of the habits of civilization. He abhors raw meat, likes tomatoes, and is disgusted with tobacco and liquors. He is very clean and dignified in his person and habits; he washes his own clothes. The whole animal show in Central Park Zoo was amusing to him; he had seen larger elephants and giraffes in his own land. He is said to have wonderful control over the animals, the baboons, apes, etc., by the sounds he utters, one of the divine marks of the primitive dominion given to man. He has learned the value of petty grafting in his constant demand for "tipping." Is this an evidence of the "missing link" nature?
A Youthful Russian Policeman Killer
Among the students just arrived in St. Petersburg, to attend the university that is to be reopened in October, is a youth of eighteen years from Warsaw, who boasts of having killed sixteen policemen and soldiers. Why he is at liberty is not stated. That is one of the mysteries of the Russian situation. Ordinarily he would be in prison, or in Siberian exile, or dead.
Work From Life
God does not demand work that we may live, but He gives life that we may work. In other words we work from life, not for life. We get life by faith.
The Liberal Soul
"The liberal soul shall be made fat; and he that watereth others shall be watered also himself."
Hongkong Storm Disaster
A Hongkong despatch of the 18th inst. says that a terrific storm broke upon that harbor that afternoon, lasting two hours, destroying much shipping, and causing considerable loss of life. "The harbor is literally strewn with wreckage, and the streets of the city are blocked with debris." Over thirty vessels of various nationalities were destroyed or seriously damaged, besides a fleet of nineteen deep sea junks that were washed ashore on Stone Cutters' Island. Also numerous steam launches and lighters were foundered, and most of the wooden piers on the water-front were demolished. The military quarter was also seriously damaged, temporary quarters being demolished. The island of Hongkong is a British colony in the China Sea, separated from the China mainland by a narrow strait. The city of Hongkong has a population of about 275,000, and is a very important seaport. A later despatch states that about five thousand Chinese, many of whom lived in boats, lost their lives at Hongkong and in that vicinity. A second storm on the 20th inst. also did considerable damage.
How Did It Get There?
By Editor
We mean that fish which swallowed Jonah. An esteemed contemporary, in telling the youth a story about Jonah, makes the fish a mighty helper to Jonah in reaching Nineveh from the waters of the Mediterranean. We are told that the fish carried Jonah clear around to Nineveh. A unique specimen this fish must have been; instead of going around Africa, it seems to have been anticipatory of nineteenth century engineering. It "sailed past Suez, through the Red Sea, around Arabia, up the Persian Gulf, and into the high waters of the Tigris," on which was situate Nineveh, a distance of about 4,500 miles, traveling at the rate of more than sixty miles an hour, day and night, without rest. Now, please tell us more. Was there an ancient Suez canal of which history says naught? Or did this denizen of the sea possess the power of land locomotion? If the latter, how do we know that he did not proceed directly across country to Nineveh? We would like more information.
California Relief Fund
The liberal-hearted in Massachusetts still have over half a million—to be exact $549,980.01—in their fund for California sufferers; but they do not propose that it shall be handled the way a great deal of the charity fund is reported to have been. They propose that it shall not be given to boards or committees, but to the needy, and have therefore placed its dispensing in the hands of Mr. Jacob Furth of Seattle, and Col. Wm. D. Sohier of the Massachusetts Association. This will make nearly a full million collected by that Association, and presumably the latter sum will meet more of the need.
Charity and Imposition
Charity is always liable to imposition. This has often been demonstrated in San Francisco since the disaster of April 18. It was emphasized during the frenzied run on the Hibernia Bank two weeks ago. The papers say that a considerable number of the people in the line, with bank-books in hand, were regular pensioners on the relief funds. They have had money in bank while drawing their living steadily from the funds contributed by generous people from far and near, for the assistance of the needy sufferers. Covetousness is a human trait, and is not confined to any special class.
Floods in Behar
A press despatch from Lahore, India, says: 'Floods have devastated a large section of the Behar district. Whole villages have been obliterated, great areas of crops have been destroyed, and the indigo crop ruined. There are nine feet of water in the low lying lands. The inhabitants have sought refuge in the hills.'
The Great Salvation
The "Great Salvation" is salvation from sin. It is the "great" salvation, because it is a great saving. Man's loss because of sin was utter, absolute, hopeless, unless a salvation could be provided greater than all the loss. This salvation is provided in Jesus Christ. It meets every need.