In a world which has learned to respect nothing so much as military strength, defeated Turkey can not hope for much tenderness. Already it is beginning to dawn upon the political schemers that they could make good use of certain portions of the Turkish dominions in Asia. And if they should decide to enrich themselves in those quarters, they will know how to lay upon the victim all the blame for the painful necessity they feel themselves under. Says the Nation:
“If Turkey insisted on being yet more decisively crushed, and antagonizes the powers which have given her good and friendly advice, she will discover that while a process of amputation has relieved her of her European problems, the question of Asia has suddenly become acute. Since first the war began, the more conservative currents in diplomacy have striven to avoid that complication. But it presses with increasing urgency. The German ambassador, tho he used the language of friendship for Turkey, has very emphatically staked out a claim in Anatolia and uttered the ‘Noli-me-tangere,’ which warns the rest of the world that Asia Minor is for Germany ‘a place in the sun.’ In France, the financial group which ‘studies’ colonial problems with a rather naive attempt to imitate the procedure of a learned society, has revived the traditional French claim to Syria. Russia long ago claimed the Armenian provinces as in some sense her political sphere of interests, and she has been able to reserve them hitherto by frustrating every proposal to build railways in them or through them. We suppose that if any formal partition of Asiatic Turkey into zones of interest or influence were to take place, Mesopotamia and Arabia would fall to this country.”
Nations Prepare for Aerial Armageddon
Seven of the big nations of the world have appropriated this year $24,140,000 for the building of military air-ships and giving training in their use. France has appropriated $7,400,000; Germany, $5,000,000; Russia, $5,000,000; Great Britain, $3,500,000; Italy, $2,100,000; Japan, $1,000,000; the United States, $140,000. Present indications are that the nations will soon be called to expend as large sums in building navies of the air as they are now expending in building their navies of the sea. The nations of this earth are mad with the craze for war. The prophets have long foretold it, and the great war of Armageddon is the climax to the program.
Wood Alcohol
The Journal of the American Medical Association notes two different firms which have been prosecuted for placing on the market productions containing wood alcohol. One of them bears the distinctly pretentious label, “Gran Liquore Della Stella Elixir Tonico Stomatico;” but it contained 20.46 per cent of methyl alcohol, and 8.08 per cent of ethyl alcohol by volume. “The Lucea Produce Wine Company,” composed of certain individuals, was prosecuted under the criminal act. Another person was sentenced to serve a term of seven months in the New York County penitentiary for doing the same things. Wood alcohol is poison.
The Air-Ship and Suicide
The air-ship furnishes opportunities for suicide as well as for getting killed; for a German military officer, a few days since, shut off the engine of his ship when he was six hundred feet in the air, and was dashed to the ground and instantly killed. It was supposed to have been an accident until a letter he had previously written disclosed that he had chosen to commit suicide by the way of the air-ship. If the men and women who are committing suicide could only find the real joys of the Christian, and have the hope of immortality in their souls, the gloom that drives them to suicide would all be swept away.
For Religious Freedom
A despatch from Rome under date of March 15 declares that a papal encyclical, issued on that day, refers to the United States as “the ideal country for religious freedom;” but if ultramontane ideas ruled in America, there would be no religious freedom save for the Papacy, and that is a religious freedom which has freedom only for those who espouse it. True freedom recognizes the right of the other man. Freedom in America was not born of the Papacy, nor of papal principles.
Extravagance
A New York paper has a cartoon of a great, precipitous rock named “Extravagance,” at the foot of which is a sea swarming with sharks. Down the sheer cliffs men and women are tumbling, to be food for the monsters. Underneath is the forceful warning: “If you fall off the cliff, remember that you have been warned many times. When you slip down the precipice of Extravagance, the sharks are waiting for you in the Ocean of Ruin, and it is then too late to save yourself.”
Those Unwritten Letters
By Anon.
AMONG sins of omission, a very unenviable prominence attaches to the letters that were never written. We ought to have written; the old friend had a claim to which reason and affection alike subscribed—and yet we failed. We did not mean to fail; we fully intended to write, and there was no reason why we should not have written—and yet—we failed.
What a world of heartache and lonesomeness lies back of those unwritten letters—what a world of unselfish affection seemingly unrequited! and what a world of light and joy those letters would have ushered into human lives! It does not cost much to light a candle; but on a dreary night, that light may mean a vast increase of happiness. It does not cost much to write a letter; but to some lonely and discouraged heart, that letter may be a big candle on a very dark night.
Why should a letter mean so much? Ask the father or mother when they are watching for the letter from the far-away child. Ask the youth in the big city who has come to make his fortune and who does not intend to fail, but who somehow finds the very bigness of it all the most lonesome thing in the world, and whose heart seems ever to recur to the old farm home so far away. The letter is the bridge over which the heart travels home.
It is a mistake to value a letter at its face value. The value of the letter does not usually lie in the finely formed letters, the correctly spelled words, and the neatly turned phrases. Sometimes we have known a letter that had almost every possible fault from the technical standpoint, but to the reader it breathed the atmosphere of heaven itself, for it came from one whose fingers indeed might blunder and whose knowledge might trip, but whose heart had never known disloyalty and whose love had never known change. It seems a strange kind of irony that, perhaps, the bulk of our letters are those which make but little difference. If they had never been written, the world would be little the loser, and yet these letters do not fail to get written; but the letter which counts, the one which would enrich this poor world, is the one which somehow does not seem to get written.
Why is this the case? One reason seems to lie in the very fact that it is an exceptional letter, it is not demanded by business, it is not an ordinary letter which says little and perhaps means less, but one which in the very nature of things means all and14more than it says, a letter which speaks from one heart to another.
How many such letters do our readers owe to their friends at this very time? We are confident that in many cases there are letters which ought to have been written years ago—and they are not written yet. To some of us it is something of a trial to write a letter, but the trouble does not lie in the mere difficulty of writing, but rather in the difficulty of deciding to write.
Should we not have some time set apart for this work, some altar to friendship, if you will, and regularly attend to its sacred duties? Most of us, perhaps, do not realize just how much that letter may mean to our absent friend, but we know it will mean a good deal. May it not be that we have grown careless, and that our hearts are not just as true as they should be to our friends? Montesquieu tells us that there are two classes of people who are apt to become hard-hearted, the extremely happy and the extremely unhappy. May it not be with many of us that life is so full of happiness that we have ceased to care just as much as we used to how it goes with our friends? Has our happiness hardened our hearts? If so, we need swift repentance. Somewhere in our little world some heart is waiting wearily for our message of love and cheer. No other pen but ours can write the words of helpfulness; shall we not heed it and quickly respond? Write those unwritten letters.—Anon.
This Planting
By Clara Edna Rosencrans
By Clara Edna Rosencrans
BORDERING the back yard of the Mission Home is an old, discolored, weather-beaten board fence. Time has dealt very unkindly with this fence, fretting away its once trim timbers, leaving notches and general unevenness. The dwellers across the vacant lot have chosen to knock off several boards, in the process of shortening the route to the near-by meat market and restaurant.
Over this fence—out of the filth, the coal cinders, and the refuse that cumber that vacant lot—clambers a wild vine, beautiful in the midst of its homely surroundings, lifting its sprays heavenward, and clinging for support to the ugly old fence. Its life began away back in the early autumn days of last year, when a little seed was blown from somewhere and found a resting-place here. The sun shone warm and bright then; but soon the bitter, biting frost came, rubbish from the restaurant was piled upon our little seed, and it went to sleep. Perhaps if it could have thought, its thoughts would have been that life for it was over—that never again would it see the light; but the God who created it, had His own plans for the little seed.
Early in the spring, before we came to the Mission Home, strange processes began to stir in the heart of the tiny black germ. The warm rain fell upon it; the sun cast its ardent rays into its earthy bed; the dark, ugly covering burst; and, lo, from out their warm wrapping came two tiny green sprouts! Slowly they unfolded baby leaves, which drew their life from the uncongenial, fetid soil, and crept up over the rough boards, covering them from sight. Here the birds came to sing in the early morning, and here the active family of the old black cat that lives in the rear of the restaurant found a happy romping ground.
Looking at that vine this morning in the rays of the early morning sun, every spray doing its utmost, every leaf drawing in solar brightness and giving it out again in vivid life, our heart read a parable of the goodness of God, which we will pass on to the readers of the SIGNS:
The world, when first it came from the hands of its Creator, was pure and good—beautiful, noble, fruitful. Like the fence when first built, it was made to fulfil a well-defined purpose; but like the fence again, its beauty has been marred, its strength is gone, not by time in this case, but by the tempest of sin and sorrow. Death has depleted it, and evil has left its mark upon it, till great gaps are made which nothing in this world can close. It is ugly, unsightly, impure. In its soil, cumbered with weeds, foul with sin and uncleanness, the seed of God's love was dropped. For years—nay, ages—it lay dormant. The chill frosts of indifference, the cold north winds of adversity, seemed utterly to have blighted and killed it.
But at last came the springtime. The early rain fell in warm showers; the vivifying sunshine of the Holy Spirit shone upon it—shone upon the chill soil—and the germ broke from its covering and came forth to radiant life. Up and up and still higher it reached toward the sunlight, covering the unsightliness and sin of a lost world with beauty and light. Vine of the Lord's planting, it will go on growing in breadth and sweetness, until at last it shall cover the earth “as the waters cover the sea.”
Many of the boards are still uncovered by the vine, their ugliness and deformity still seen; but the green of the branches rests the eye, and makes a spot of loveliness in this otherwise unsightly back yard. So the love of God, the fragrance of the Christlike character, the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, and all their kindred graces—make this old world a place where men can dwell. But far more—ah, transcendently more—beautiful will it be when a new and splendid structure is built upon the ruins of the old, and the vine has spread its fragrant branches over all its breadth. “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God.”
A Good Time
By Obadiah Oldschool
WHAT strange ideas some people have of enjoyment, and how strange the ways in which they seek it!
A good time—how can we have it except in getting good or doing good? A good time can not be mere pastime; for pastime is the waste and squandering of time. As well call a spendthrift a good financier, as call one wise and happy who spends the golden hours of his earthly probation in mere amusements, tho he may call them innocent.
A good time is not a time of excitement merely. It may be enjoyed as quietly as the dew falls or the sun shines. An old man in the poorhouse, with a book in his hand, was asked, “What are you doing?” He looked up a moment from the printed page, and replied, “O sir, I am sitting under His shadow with great delight, and His fruit is sweet to my taste.” The feeble, friendless pauper had a good time with God and his Bible.
People sometimes have a good time in very strange places. Paul and Silas sang hymns in the dungeon at Philippi, with their backs raw and bleeding, and their feet fast in the stocks. They praised God that they were counted worthy to suffer for Him. And in that prison, before morning, they witnessed wonderful displays of divine grace. I have no doubt they looked back upon that as one of the happiest nights in their lives.
The angels have a good time in heaven. But it would be as dull there as a prayer-meeting, to the lovers of carnal and worldly pleasure. They could find no enjoyment in those songs of praise, which roll like the sound of many waters around the throne. They can not appreciate the beauty of holiness and the blessedness of the pure in heart who see God.
Hence it is of the utmost importance that we try to interest ourselves and others in that which is truly good—that we cultivate on earth those sources of enjoyment on which we must depend for happiness in heaven.—Obadiah Oldschool.
Messages of Hope
UNMISTAKABLY the signs of Christ’s coming as outlined in His own words found in Matthew 24, and recorded in Luke and elsewhere in the New Testament, are multiplying. There is joy and hope for those who will thus be led to a careful study of the Word. The following series of beautiful Bible study pamphlets take up subjects of vital interest in a clear, easy way, to assist in personal study, and to use in interesting others in the Scripture. Every Christian should be supplied with these.
The Sure Word of Prophecy
Outlines chapter by chapter the book of Daniel, and refers especially to conditions at the “time of the end.” 10 cents.
The Saints’ Inheritance
Beautifully describes the home of the saved, and tells how that home may be gained. 10 cents.
Matthew Twenty-Four
Connects the conditions of to-day with a verse-by-verse study of Christ’s prophecy. 10 cents.
Christ Our Advocate
Explains the whole sanctuary question, the 2,300 day period, and the judgment. 10 cents.
Christian Science and Divine Healing
Is it in harmony with the Scripture? Investigate this subject in the light of the Bible, as here set forth. Price 15 cents.
The Lord’s Day
Traces the Sabbath institution through the patriarchal, the Levitical, and the Christian dispensation. Shows God’s everlasting purpose in the Sabbath. 10 cents.
The Spirit World
Traces the growth of Spiritualism, showing the forms in which it is seen in our day. Throws God’s search-light of truth upon this doctrine. 10 cents.
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The Children's MISSIONS NUMBER of “Our Little Friend” Will Contain
By Editor
Our Little Friend
Interesting articles, dealing mostly with the children, their customs, manners, etc., in the following countries: China, India, Japan, Korea, Africa, South America, and Mexico. These articles are actual facts, written by those who are now, or recently have been, in these respective fields.
Home Missions.— What has been, and what may be accomplished in the home field. Several interesting articles telling what the children in the home field have actually done, and suggestions as to what they may do.
Missionary poems and recitations, and plenty of interesting pictures. How many copies will you sell for missions?
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A Valuable Magazine
By Editor
Our readers will especially appreciate the May number of the Signs of the Times Magazine, now ready for mailing.
A PARTIAL LIST OF ITS CONTENTS
Stormy Winds and Devastating Floods;A Sermon by President Woodrow Wilson;Heralds of the Morning;The Coming Conflict;Joaquin Miller and Spiritualism;Prophecy on Spiritualism;The Same Old Sophistry;The Power That Rules the World;Prepare War: Wake Up the Mighty Men;The Warning for the Times;Labor’s Seductive Enemy;Police Graft;Violence;Nature as an Artist—The Infinite;Explaining the Mystery of the Seed;Why This Difference in Sabbath Observance?Bible Reading: First-Day Sacredness.
Only wish we had the space to outline briefly each article. But we do want to say that the Bible reading is the best we have ever seen in brief presentation of the subject. A winning way to present these texts so often used to show the sacredness of the “Christian Sabbath.” It is worth many times the price of the magazine.
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SIGNS OF THE TIMES MAGAZINE
Mountain View, California
The Tariff and the Money Power
THE present Congress is taking hold of the tariff problem with considerable vigor. The claim is made that the tariff will be greatly reduced on many of the necessities, and on some of them it will be removed altogether. It is hoped that this will greatly reduce the cost of living that has been the subject of so much discussion during recent years.
The big moneyed men, however, are saying that if it is done there will be thousands of people thrown out of work and hard times will be the result. All of which goes to show that the world is in the grip of the money power, and it is possible for them to create hard times at will. We have a notable example of a panic created overnight in the year 1907. The money power will continue to wield this weapon until they have done it once too often. The day is coming when they will start a panic that they will never be able to stop.
If you ask how we know this, we have only to say that the infallible Word says: “Know this, that in the last days grievous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of self, lovers of money.” 2 Tim. 3:1, 2. Note carefully what this text expressly says. We are to “know” that when we reach the “last days” there will be “grievous times,” and those grievous times are due in part to the love of self and the love of money that have taken possession of men’s souls. Another apostle, in speaking of the same time, says:
“Come now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver are rusted; and their rust shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. Ye have laid up your treasure in the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth out: and the cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived delicately on the earth, and taken your pleasure; ye have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned, ye have killed the righteous one; he doth not resist you. Be patient therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord.” James 5:1-7.
This scripture from James also tells of conditions that will exist in the “last days.” And he discloses the fact that the rich will be called to “weep and howl” for the “miseries” that are coming upon them. The prophet-apostle goes further to tell of the distressed cry of the laborer, and of the conflict that is coming as the result. The gold and silver is rusting from its inactivity in relieving distress and suffering; and in addressing the rich the text says, “Their rust shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire.” In order to make still greater hoards, panics are started and all kinds of oppressive measures are resorted to. And while this is going on, the discontent rises higher and higher, and finally the break comes, and the miseries are visited as foretold.
The money question is one of the great issues of the age. But why can men not see that a clear view of the situation was had by the prophets hundreds upon hundreds of years ago? And since they have so clearly revealed the situation as it is to-day, we may safely trust them to enlighten us regarding the outcome of it. The exhortation to be patient “till the coming of the Lord” shows unmistakably what great event will come in to cut short these strifes and miseries of earth.
The Baptismal Formula
Some one sends us a tract which declares that Acts 2:38 is of God and Matt. 28:19 is of the devil, and if the baptismal formula of the two texts is the same, “God and the devil are the same.” All of which is based on simple ignorance of the meaning of baptism and the meaning of the so-called formulas given. For the expunging of Matt. 28:19 there is absolutely no authority. Any other text may be as readily set aside at the demand of a defective creed.
