1 Corinthians 1

1 Corinthians 1:1

PAUL TO THE Corinthians, Chapter I. An Outline of Sermon. THE The sacredness of his calling!“Paul, called to be an Apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother” (1 Corinthians 1:1).The sanctity of Christ’s body—the Church!“Unto the Church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that in every place call upon the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours” (1 Corinthians 1:2).The spiritual benedictions desired!“Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:3). He rejoiced in their intelligent testimony!“I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ; That in every thing ye are enriched by Him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge; Even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you” (1 Corinthians 1:4-6).He approved their premillennial hope.“So that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:7-8).He reminded them of His faithfulness who brought them into fellowship.“God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:9). He pled for unity of spirit and speech.“Now I beseech you, brethren, by the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you. Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptised in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you, but Crispus and Gaius; Lest any should say that I had baptized in mine own name. And I baptized also the household of Stephanas: besides, I know not whether I baptized any other.

For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the Gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect” (1 Corinthians 1:10-17).He made Christ central and all-sufficient.“For the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:18-25).He declared God’s use of the humble vs the proud.“For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in His presence. But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:26-31).

1 Corinthians 1:18-24

THE STATE THROUGH ITS SCHOOLS 1 Corinthians 1:18-24I AM to speak to you today on what I regard as the most important subject now before the world for consideration. I realize the apparent extravagance of thus describing any single subject, but you may be my judge as I unfold this theme—“Sovietizing the State through its Schools.”Nellermoe’s Bill presented to the Minnesota House of Representatives in February, 1923, was a deliberate, and even open attempt to sovietize the University of Minnesota, knowing full well the final social and political effect of poisoning this educational fountain; and it is not forgotten that that bill died on general orders by the narrow margin of a single vote, 61 to 62, and but for the intellectual ability and moral convictions of one man, it might be the law of that commonwealth at this moment.This, however, is but a straw in the wind, for while I am primarily interested in the State of Minnesota, I am also pleading the cause and presenting a subject that concerns every state in the Union; in fact, that involves every government of earth.If any one cares to question my motive in what I say on this special theme, let me remind him that I have no historical background that should produce in me the least prejudice upon this subject. I am the son of a farmer whose fortune was not far removed from poverty. Manual labor was the most important school of my life, and hardship was, in youth, my daily instructor. The years have not removed me far enough from either to create in me the spirit of the aristocrat or tempt to the sins of special privileges. By birth and breeding, I am a friend not alone of the manual laborer, but more especially of the poor and oppressed.And yet this unbreakable tie does not bind me to silence about the threat that now hangs over every nation of the earth, and in spite of all opinions to the contrary, endangers beyond description. I speak ofTHE MENACE OF THE SOVIET It is well, I am sure, to pause in this discussion long enough to explain some terms that are oft upon our tongues, yet employed by many without understanding. The Soviet government is supposed to be a government by the people, but it is executed through most remote representatives. The community elects its representatives; the county chooses again from these community representatives; the State or Province from these county representatives, and the Government from these State or Province representatives, so that something like five elections must occur before the leaders are reached, producing a system of government that makes practically impossible a recall or reversal of an endless order. The term Bolshevism means, “A rule by the majority”, but strange to say, it has absolutely lost its significance as a word, because it now represents the rulership of the minority in Russia; and out of that country, in its practical and potential expression, and out of Germany in its theoretical and even its theological aspects, this threat of the nations, the menace of the Soviet, is come.The movement was conceived in class hatred. It cannot be justly said that this hatred had no occasion. On the contrary, czarism in Russia and the conscienceless oppression by the rich and privileged classes in other countries, clearly accounts for the rise and progress of the whole product known as “bolshevism.” It is impossible to take lands of inexhaustible resources and set over them unjust rulers, enact oppressive laws, execute the will of the higher classes by a ruthless military system without producing the exact result that has ruined Russia, where in twenty provinces, in 1911 and 1912, twenty million peasants were without bread and eight million of them were receiving government rations, without finally effecting a political state unendurable and a rebellion indescribable, if not unthinkable.Popular opinion is wont to lay Russia’s present wretched condition to the rise of the “Red”, and only thoughtful men clearly apprehend that the crimson flag is the fruit of foolhardiness on the part of the “Rich”. When the working day in Russian factories was from twelve to fourteen hours, and the compensation not sufficient to sustain the lives of the toilers and their families, they produced and often rendered a song:“Damned be the lives of miners, Just as prisoners in prison; Day and night the candle smoulders, And we carry death on shoulders.” The axioms of Scripture are more stable than any assertions of science, and all history is replete with illustrations of the Biblical truth that they that have “sown the wind * * shall reap the whirlwind”. Solomon wrote, “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender”, but “He that soweth iniquity shall reap vanity”.The fact remains, however, that any movement born of class hatred is, by its very nature, nondesirable, even dangerous. The attempt of ignorant masses to throw off the yoke of potentate and conscienceless oppressor is seldom or never accomplished without the accompanying danger of coming under the hand of a new potentate whose oppressions will far exceed that of the old. That is exactly what has taken place in Russian rule. Lenine, notwithstanding all his professions of “the rule of the people”, in an address to the All-Russian Soviet Congress, said, “How can we secure a strict unity of will? By subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one!

Today the revolution in the interest of socialism demands the absolute submission of the masses to the single will of those to direct the labor process.”That sentence shows how society comes again to autocracy, but to an autocracy of an unbelievable, brutal type—to an autocracy of ignorance; and from the oppressive rule of the rich to the more oppressive rule of the politically ambitious; from the brutality of the man who has some conscience to the greater brutality of men who have neither conscience nor God.This movement has been characterized by inhuman cruelties. Twenty-five years ago George Kennan stirred the civilized world by his eloquent portraiture of Czar oppression, while Tolstoi’s books wrought an intellectual revolt against the same, reaching every continent and profoundly moving every civilized country.

The deportation of political offenders to Siberia, the chain gang system that reproduced in a thousand facts the experience of Tabert in Florida, brought the very name of Russia into contempt, and made her ruling classes the subjects of universal spite; and yet, bigoted and bloody as was that reign, it was tame beside the slaughterhouse of Sovietism. A friend of mine, a great Lutheran preacher, was telling me a few days since of how eleven of their Lutheran ministers had been martyred in Finland; how forty-one of them had been murdered in the Baltic Province; how one of these was tortured beyond description, his tongue torn out, his body mutilated and nailed to a tree, swords driven in under his arms, and an inscription tacked over his head, “Now, damn you; preach your Gospel if you can!” And yet even such brutality and butchery fades when one finds that under this same rule the land has been confiscated; banks, mills, factories taken over; public debt repudiated; murder legalized; arson, public and private pillage —unparalleled in history—advocated; industry paralyzed; commerce ruined; assassination reaching into the thousands, either by starvation, death or chaos, and throughout the length and breadth of the land the fundamental principles of liberty and civilization abolished. One writer says, “In sentiment, Bolshevism is an appeal that Lazarus shall be fed at the rich man’s table, but in practice it is a brutal savagery which, like a wild beast, tortures and kills to vent its bestiality.”The “New York Times” says, “The French Reign of Terror was a mild and moderate exercise of authority by a government leaning culpably to the side of mercy, when contrasted with what is going on in Russia.” The same paper writes of Lenin, “When his brief hour ends, he will have the satisfaction of knowing that he did more harm to the human race than was ever done by one man in any such short time since history began to be recorded in the tombs along the Nile”.But enough of its brutalities! Let me remark, however, before I finish discussing the menace of the Soviet, that it is the sworn foe of the Christian faith. Bebel, whose writings have had as much to do with the origin and growth of that particular form of socialism which finds expression in the Soviet, as any other, says, “The idea of God must be destroyed. Atheism is the true route to liberty, equality and fraternity.” Its known repudiation of the Holy Scriptures, its organized endeavor to destroy religion from the minds of men, its adoption of social codes that are antipodes of the Decalog—these are facts that have been flared in the face of the world.

The “Literary Digest” recently remarked, “There seems to be no question outside of Soviet circles that the vicar general of the Roman Catholic Church in Russia was butchered to make a Bolshevik holiday”, and the murder was not an affront to the Catholic faith only, but it was an expression of Soviet atheism and of the determination to drive every thought of religion from the minds of men, and supplant the spirit of worship by a scornful skepticism, and an acknowledgment of God by an atheism that derides His very existence. There isn’t a single one of the civilities of the Christian civilization that this rule cares to retain.

They have deliberately attempted to destroy the family, to governmentize all women, and compel every babe that is born to be a bastard.This is the move that hasAMERICA AS ITS The Soviet ardently covets the world’s controlling continent. However much of his philosophy he brought from the evolutionary hypothesis of Germany, he chose Russia as the stage on which to enact his Darwinian drama, “The survival of the fittest”. Into his choice entered the consciousness that Russia was a great world continent; that its natural resources were not only untried, but largely unknown, and when pilfering time came, it would prove itself a prize worthy the pirate’s pains.Having come into the possession of that country at a time when it was exhausted by war, and in a way that paralyzed its every industry, it was natural enough that Lenine, Trotsky, and all other ambitious leaders, should lift their eyes to America, to fields already white to the harvest, to covet them.There are those among us who do not believe that this propaganda is marking progress in our midst. Such men are either ignorant of modern movements, or wilfully indifferent to the evidences about us. Lenine himself, speaking in Moscow, said, “The power that has crushed Germany is also the power that will in the end crush England and the United States.” And that power is planting its dynamite at many American points, and placing its largest charges at our educational centers, and calmly waiting the time when it can light the Darwin fuse and witness the demolition. Henry Campbell Black, in his notable address on “The Menace without Our Gates”, or “Bolshevism’s Assault upon American Government”, reminded us of how this movement has made its power felt in every part of the world; in Roumania, and all the Baltic Provinces; in Switzerland, where it created a high breed of intrigue; in Portugal, where recent outbreaks were the consequence; in Scandinavia, where kings found it difficult to cling to their thrones; in Finland, where it has fruited in the foulest way; in Denmark, where though less successful, it is both aggressive and confident; not to mention its ravages in Germany, its rise in France, its recent successes in England, and finally, its increasing powers in America.The I.

W. W. has long represented this sentiment here, and new organizations under varied names are now giving more concrete form to it.

The State Socialist Convention in Illinois a while ago demanded that the American Government should recognize the Bolsheviki of Russia. The State Socialist Convention in Minnesota adopted resolutions endorsing the policies of the Bolsheviki in Russia, and the State Socialistic Convention in New York greeted with joy and confidence the Russian Soviet Republic. The Pennsylvania State Socialist Convention cabled to Lenine and his cabinet, “Your achievement is our inspiration.” There are hundreds of papers being published in America today that have one objective, and one only, and that is Sovietism, and there are thousands of professors in the universities of this country whose writings and teachings alike are a deliberate attempt to put over this same Soviet program in the states. Some of these were brought to the surface during the war and divorced from positions; more of them have surreptitiously retained those positions, and in the name of “Evolution” are so carefully laying their socialistic explosives as to do what Bouck White said he learned from his Seminary, how to “blow the Government to bits.”In America these Soviet emissaries are a multitude. The majority of the leaders have had either their entire course, or their post-graduate work in German Universities. They have brought back from these infidel centers a materialistic philosophy that knows no other god than Nature.

Pantheism is their only theism, and by that they do not mean a personal God, manifesting Himself in facts and forms, but an unconscious and blind force at work, not only in the world but in the universe, the general direction of which follows the law of Darwin’s suggestion, and knows neither Divine control nor Deity existence. The Attorney General of New York affirms that the secret agents of Lenine are found in that State, and back of them is a fund of $500,000.00 to be used for propaganda purposes.

The statement was made that these agents had been circularizing in shops and factories, and that many secret meetings were held, culminating in an open session of three days in the Lyceum Building. The chief purpose of this convention was said to be to absorb into the Bolshevik Movement members of the Industrial Workers of the World, all anarchists and radical socialists. At the Department of Justice at Washington, it was admitted that a code index of more than two thousand red agitators existed in Chicago, Philadelphia and other large centers. There were over 500,000 followers of this revolutionary program found in New York alone; while they have dared, even under the eaves of the Washington Capitol, to hold their open meeting and ardently affirm their plan to overthrow the present democracy and bring in the Russian regime, leading Senator Thomas to declare, “Our Democracy is found in greater danger today from the forces let loose in Russia than it was when Germany took up arms against Great Britain and France”, and Senator Weeks to insist that “the American people do not understand that the real purpose behind this propaganda is the overthrow of this Government, and that until they do understand, it cannot be stamped out.”The method of the Soviet is as surreptitious as his object is sinful. In Russia, having captured control, he fights in the open, and brazenly demands of the world’s nations recognition. In all countries where a strong central government exists, his methods are secret, his approach surreptitious, his purpose red revolution.

A witness called before the Senate committee testified, “I have information given me in Petrograd that already the agents of Trotsky and Lenine have been sent to this country, and that they have in operation a central bureau of propaganda. This propaganda is as insidious as false, and I am amazed that our people have not taken it seriously.” When the war was over and our boys were returned to the States by the millions, many of them failed to find immediate occupation, and these secret agents stealthily attempted in a thousand instances to render them dissatisfied, critical and rebellious.

The American Legion was the Rooseveltian answer to that secret sowing of discontent.This all leads me to the main point of this discussion, the place where emphasis must be put if we are either to appreciate the meaning, or mark progress in our opposition to the same, namely,THE SCHOOL IS ITS MEDIUM The Soviet recognizes the controlling power of education. When I was pastor in Chicago, my intimate friend and co-laborer was Dr. Carl S. Martin. He rendered a good service to both history and literature by his “Life of Wendell Phillips”, the man whose ministry has had much to do with the framing of American ideals, and whose indomitable courage cut away the foundations of a slavery system, and let that slimy institution crumble in one colossal heap. Phillips stands in the front rank of American orators.

His lecture on “The Lost Art”, his oration on “Daniel O’Connel”, are masterpieces, both; but the one speech that passed his lips, that lives and throbs because it struck a note so true as to be eternal, was, “The Scholar in a Republic”. With a genius peculiarly his own, a literary style that lacked in nothing, Phillips swept the gamut of human interest, and stirred in the slumbering spirits of all talented lads a sure consciousness that education ended in control.

Quite eloquently did he say, “There is something more valuable than wealth, more sacred than peace, as Humboldt says, ‘The finest fruit earth holds up to his Maker is a man’. To ripen, lift, and educate a man is the first duty. Trade, law, learning, science and religion, are only the scaffolding wherewith to build a man. Despotism looks down into the poor man’s cradle and knows it can crush resistance and curb ill will. Democracy sees the ballot in that baby hand, and selfishness bids her put integrity on one side of those baby footsteps and intelligence on the other, lest her own hearth be in peril.”If any man imagines that Sovietism has no intelligent representatives, he knows not whereof he thinks or speaks. Her outstanding leaders today are those professors in our modern universities who are naturally materialistic in their conception of the universe, and who in their devotion to the Darwinian theory dare to dethrone God in the presence of His worshippers.

Raymond Robins is an outspoken socialist, and he is a thousandfold more acceptable in the average university circle than is the most eloquent of conservative Christian orators.Professor Nearing was born in America, bred in our schools, and became a leading university professor; yet “The Times” names Mr. Nearing a Bolshevist.

You know perfectly well what men have led this movement in Germany, and how from the position of Professor Liebknecht and his confreres, have accomplished not only an overthrow of the German Government, but influenced all Russian thought. I have purchased lately five books, four of them employed as text-books in the State University of Minnesota, and one in North High School, Minneapolis: (1) “Criminology”, by Parmelee; (2) “Sociology and Modern Social Problems”, by Ellwood; (3) “Social Psychology”, by Ross; (4) “Social Evolution”, by Chapin; (5) “American Social Problem”, by Burch and Patterson. Every one of them denies the Christian faith, feeling that the defense of Darwinism is not sufficient without so doing, and some of their sentences are the most sacrilegious and scornful that I have ever seen in print. Chapin says, “The brute mind was gradually converted into the intelligence” (p. 108); “Morals are nothing but the conviction implanted by the social group in the minds of its members of the propriety of the manner of life imposed by it upon them” (p. 118); “So in the individual and in the social mind was born at last the idea of self, or personality, as a conscious life, soul or spirit, dwelling in the body, but distinct and separable from it.” This quotation he follows with a discussion that shows he has no confidence whatever that the soul is immortal, and likens the Christian faith to the Indian’s conception of dreams, the Algonquin’s “shadow” or the Salu’s “ghost” (ps. 265-266). Burch and Patterson, in their volume, “American Social Problems”, used in High School, make morality and religion mere animal evolution, talk of the time when man was incapable of determining what was moral and immoral, thereby sweeping out the Decalog and all the other claims of Divine Law. (Let me say that the North High School has one professor who refuses to hold recitations on certain chapters in this book.) Charles A. Ellwood, professor of Sociology in the University of Missouri, whose book is also used as a text-book in Minnesota University, teaches that religion is not a revelation, but grew out of ancestral worship (p. 117), and that “the family is being created by the very conditions of life itself”, failing to recognize the Divine authority for the same, and that “nature has developed in man intelligence” (p. 69), refusing to give God the glory.But to mark progress in infidelity, one needs to read Ross on “Social Psychology”.

He holds the experience of conversion to scorn; he accounts for it on hypnotic grounds (p. 16); explains Divine healing on the ground of mental suggestion (p. 27); also insists that this may explain the miraculous element claimed for the life of Christ; says that in “saintly visions and revelations one is influenced by auto-suggestion” (p. 28). On the same ground he explains “the apostles and evangelists”, and the expression of “prophecy”, the creation of “powers and persons” (166-7).

The gift of tongues is held to some scorn, inspiration to an equal amount, as is also the guidance of the Holy Spirit (p. 167-8), and he thinks “the two main sources of all these phenomena are the subconscious and the social environment” (p. 68). The great awakening in colonial days, the great revivals of 1800, 1830 and 1858, were only the result of “social suggestion” (p. 70). The extensive prayer meetings of 1873 were “a mental contagion” (p. 71), on a level with the Dutch mania for tulips that took place in 1643, the “Ho, for Texas” movement, the California gold fever, the negro exodus, the Klondike rush, all-of-a-piece products of the “mob mind”. He expresses his fear of going fishing with “a prayer meeting Christian” lest he take “a fit and turn the boat over”. He holds the holy communion of the Christian to scorn and sees in it “an ancient rite”, and, by a sacrilege unthinkable, “where primitive man eats his god”. He says, “The archaic spirit of religion is attested in the settlement of disputed points by appeal to the Bible” (p. 272).

It is little wonder that in the debate between Harvard and Yale, the defender of Sovietism proudly quotes from Professor Ross in the following words, “The current notion of the second or Bolshevist revolution is that it was the work of a handful of extremists who captivated the Russian masses with their idea. Under the pitiless pelting of facts, I have been driven to the conclusion that this is untrue; the robbed and oppressed masses moved toward the goal of their unfulfilled desires like a flow of molten lava that no human force could calm or turn aside.”Professor Ross reduces the teachings of the Bible to a level with “wizardry”; speaks of a “chosen people”, evidently meaning Israel, as “a legend” of “an ethics basing its norm on human nature and the nature of the social organization”, and as “superseding the alleged commands of Deity” (mark the adjective, “alleged commands of Deity”), the precepts of ancient sages, the customs of the fathers, and edicts of Mrs.

Grundy”. In other words, Mrs. Grundy and God’s commands are on a common level with Professor Ross (p. 293). On page 298 he reduces the Divine right of kings, the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, and the Ptolemaic system to a level of the same absurdity. On page 305 he says, “Put together all the effects of all the atheists who have ever lived and they have not done so much harm to Christianity and the world as has been done by the narrow-minded conscientious men who persecuted Roger Bacon”. On page 336 he says, “The piling up of innumerable points about the text of the Pentateuch impeaches eventually their Mosaic authorship.”But I bring you the climax when I quote from Parmelee on “Criminology”.

To him “spirits” are “hypothetical beings” only (p. 16), “alleged beings” (p. 17). He says of Jesus Christ cursing the fruitless fig tree, “This is like the child or savage who trips over a stone and then strikes it in anger because it hurt him.” He says of the Christian religion, “It was derived from Judaism; the magical notion of the uncleanness of sex has been combined with and has reenforced the ascetic ideal of propitiating the Deity by expiation and purification through chastity” (p. 23).

He believes that certain serious mistakes have been made in the introduction and execution of penal laws, “due to the mistaken conception of Christians that sin is transgression of the Divine Law” (p. 33). He doubts if “irreligion is a potent force for crime” (p. 107). He speaks of the Hebrew Yahweh, our God, as a “stern and vengeful God.” He writes, “The Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins possesses this evil influence because it disseminates the grossly erroneous notion that repentance absolves a person’s responsibility for the immorality of his past conduct. It would be difficult to find a more anti-social and immoral religious doctrine” (p. 109). He declares, “The dogma of the forgiveness of sin still gives currency to the effect of an act that it can be wiped out by repentance and remorse alone, or by the absolution which follows penitential acts, despite the fact that the biological and psychological sciences have taught us that the effects of any act, whether sinful or otherwise, upon the organism and personality, are indelible” (p. 114). He affirms, “Religion and science are irreconcilable” (p. 113).

He declares that “nothing in human culture is more archaic than religion, because it professes to teach absolute truth, and to inculcate immutable rules of conduct; consequently religion has always been a powerful force for repressive legislation, and therefore a prolific cause of evolutive criminality.” He raves against the circumstance that the Christian religion has been officially recognized in America as the national religion (p. 471 f). He declares that it is a piece of affrontery and a violation of the constitution when the courts declare this to be a “Christian nation”, of constitutional rights or religious freedom which it is their special duty to uphold.

To quote his exact language, he says, “Disrespectful mention of God, Jesus, and other alleged supernatural beings, is prohibited in various parts of this country, in spite of the fact that these beings are reputed to be strong enough to defend and avenge themselves. In this fashion is violated and the fundamental and inalienable human right of free speech, and the courts are furnished the power to interfere, if they so desire, with the spread of liberal ideas and the refutation of archaic beliefs” (p. 476).February 15, 1923 edition of the “Manufacturers’ Record” says sanely enough: “We cannot maintain government and discipline in human affairs by statutes or by police power. What keeps mankind in order is the conviction of a hereafter and a belief in the principles of right and wrong taught at the mother’s knee. Once a great body of the citizenship acts’ on the assumption that there is neither Divine purpose in the universe nor Divine Laws that must be followed; life resolves itself into a mere brutal struggle for existence. Evolution has well-nigh wrecked every land that has adopted it.“Civilization can stand, in a measure, economic breakdowns and financial debacles, but when you break down and destroy man’s temple of reverence, his regard for holy things, his belief in religion and his hope of eternity, you simply rend asunder the very foundation on which society rests.”If your children are to be taught, from four to eight consecutive years, such God-denying, Christ-repudiating, Bible-scorning theories as are in these text-books, let us approve these text-books and insist that they be retained in the teaching curriculum of University, Normal, High schools, and even grades. If we are ready for that, let us applaud the atheistic teacher who tells our children that “it is foolish to believe in God”, “a mental dereliction to believe in the Deity of Christ”.

Let us cite to them Van Loon with his villainous infidelity and parade H. G.

Wells as a great authority and quote from him these words: “The Socialist no more regards the institution of marriage as a permanent thing than he regards a state of industrial competition as permanent”, and assign his reason, “Socialism repudiates private ownership of the head of the family as completely as it repudiates any sort of private ownership. Socialism in fact is the state family; the old family of the private individual must banish before it, just as the old waterworks of private enterprise, or the old gas company.”When the family is gone, and God is dethroned and the moral codes of the Bible are held to be no more binding than a deliverance of East Indian dervishes, our own loved country will come into the present Russian experience; infidelity, mental and moral; rapine, plunder, robbery—these will be universal, and as we look back to the days when our fathers lived and loved, wrought and rejoiced, because they believed God, we will have a comparison that will involve a contrast as deep and strange as the contrast between hell and Heaven.The “Literary Digest” of March 22, 1919, carried an article entitled, “Bolshevism’s Heaven on Earth”. It reminded its readers of the fact that the Soviet Government commissioned futurist artists to paint sky blue the entire Theater Square in Moscow, and to suspend snow-white lanterns from the trees in imitation of clouds, a symbol of “the heaven on earth”, employed to celebrate its advent to power; but once that advent was working, the same magazine declares that Russian fugitives laid before the Overton investigating committee, facts that made “life look like a nightmare in a lunatic asylum.” Poverty, sickness, distress, starvation, churches converted into theatres where harlots and profligates held nightly revel, homes into houses of death where a battalion of Chinese executed the will of the Soviet Government in the destruction of lives out of number; the invention of cruelties such as have not existed since the days of Nero; and yet this is what some men are preaching, and some professors are teaching. God forbid that we should be silent while America is thus being menaced and the immortal souls of all men are being thus imperiled.