192 So-called Hebrew Charities--merely Sectarian.

"For those who have been through the agricultural school there are almost always places waiting, places where they are wanted to take charge of dairies or some other work about a farm. One of the graduates of this school is now an assistant professor at the New Jersey State Agricultural College at New Brunswick.

“On March 30 a class of thirty students in the Woodbine agricultural school will be graduated, and the managers of the Fund will go down to Woodbine for the occasion.

"The Fund also lends money sometimes for the construction of houses where there is prospect of numbers of the people it wishes to help finding work. And occasionally it builds factories which it rents for a dollar or other nominal sum for the purpose of inducing men able to operate the factories to establish themselves in some particular place where the people it wishes to help may find work. This nominal rental is for a limited period, and if for that time or at the end of it the factory owner is paying out a specified sum in wages, with the prospect that the wage-earners may continue to find occupation there and make headway, the factory building is made over to the owner without cost."

All this, however, be it remembered, is purely and intensely sectarian work; not so broad as racial, not even for Jews as such, but exclusively for professors of the Rabbinical faith, the most bigoted and intolerant of all religious sects in the world, doubtfully excepting the Mohammedan. No Jew who diverges in the least from the traditional tenets can share in Hebrew charities, general or local. A Christian Jew is to them an outcast from the pale of humanity, and an object of the only persecution for conscience sake that is known in America at least.

But the example of munificence and wisdom in method, sectarian and narrow though it is in spirit, ought not to be lost on the Chrstian world. God forbid that we should ever imitate the inhumanity that excludes its own flesh and blood from charity on account of religious or irreligious differences. But here is a variety of Christians, peculiarly precious by nature to our Lord and all His brethren, for whom no place is allowed or provided on earth. When will 'Christianity' become Christianized or humanized enough to do for proscribed Jewish Christians what is done by Jewish institutes for Jewish unbelievers?

Some Hebrew scholars tell us that the phrase of promise, "the seed of the woman," means the seed of the woman alone-virginborn.

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Conviction, Repentance, Conversion,' Modern. 193

The leading article of this number is placed in the department Evangelization of the Jews, to which it relates as a passage from the current lessons given to the large Jewish Bible Class at No. 424 Grand street, New York. The selection of this passage is prompted by the singularity of the view therein taken of the reception of Jesus, the Messiah, by the Jewish people, and of the position of the Separated or unbelieving Jews from that day to this, relative to the vast posterity of Abraham that are mingled with other believers throughout the Christian world. The Separated Jews are unconscious of their excision from their race at large, and the Christian world has failed to see it. Perhaps it is incredible that such a fact could escape the notice of innumerable pious students who have pored over the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, these many centuries past. Possibly, again, it may have been noted in a corner of some commentary or history, and fallen into oblivion as not worthy of respect. Here and there a private reader may find use for it now, as introduced on page 217 of this number "SALVATION."

*

*

CONVICTION, REPENTANCE, AND CONVERSION NOT

SUPERSEDED,

BUT DEEPENED BY SPIRITUAL PROGRESS.

Among causes of the general decadence of spirituality in the churches where it once prevailed, none is more notable or oftener noted than the present rarity of pungent conviction and repentance of sin, and of profound conversion or change of heart, in those who are received by evangelical churches into full fellowship. Conversion, as the basis of church-membership, has been practically reduced to a purpose to lead a Christian life. Much is made by anti-supernaturalists of the "turning" (corrected version) so often spoken of in the New Testament as a fact and also as a requirement and a condition of grace. It is treated as if it were in itself an effective introduction into the kingdom of God; thus substituting a sinner's impotent resolution to "turn over a new leaf" for that regenerating operation of the Holy Spirit (Jno. i:13, iii:3, 5) without which, as Jesus so emphatically taught, and as all who have tried it have found, it is impossible to enter into the kingdom of God.

Much is said of a necessity for adapting Christianity to the age. We believe, on the contrary, in adapting the age to Christianity, as the proud age of classic Greece and Imperial Rome was adapted, by the miraculous power of the Spirit and the Word. Since that period there has been but too much theoretical adaptation of Chris

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194 Conviction, Repentance, Conversion,' Modern.

tianity to the crude reasonings of men. It had to be, in the development of philosophical theology by the human mind; and we are not through with it yet. Nicodemus wanted to know "how," and successors undaunted by our Lord's discouraging reply to him have insisted on being wise beyond that which is written, in defining and timing the inscrutable process of regeneration. The notion that one can do nothing but wait and wrestle in prayer for it, is one of those dogmas, and one that has already given place to the Lord's own instruction to follow Him without delay while waiting on the work of the Holy Spirit. But from the harsh, illogical and unscriptural treatment of the inquirer, presumption now turns to an opposite method fundamentally false and fatal; quite dispensing with that mysterious experience which was formerly assumed to be prevenient and instantaneous.

There may be various other changes from traditional crudities to the pure teachings of Divine Inspiration, which will adapt our representation of Christianity to the special wants (not the views and inclinations) of a more critical age. For instance, if the present age needs a Christian Positivism, instead of blind faith imperfectly certified, (as we believe it does) there is nothing to hinder, and everything to demand from the Church, a positive demonstration of Revelation as a Divine Fact, and also as scientifically impregnable Truth in its particulars. That was originally the foremost motive and endeavor of this publication. Besides this, however, in the development of "SALVATION," at once as a public work and as a personal experience, we find further new conceptions of it demanded by the modern conditions of human life and mind. And while too often an examination of the proposed adaptations of Christianity to the age reveals altogether retrogression from the spiritual and supernatural, to the dead plane of outward social and economic relations; on the contrary, the new want of the Church and the world now unfolded, is a far more spiritual and supernatural life than the Church at large has ever been able to receive or to recognize.

Going back to sin and repentance-those first and fundamental realities in former religious experience—we know that the stern old preaching (and, alas, its mighty results in great part) has passed away under the refined moral ideals and practice of modern church-going society. It is still as good as ever for people who are visibly and consciously wicked. "Some men's sins are

Conviction, Repentance, Conversion,' Modern. 195

open beforehand, going before unto judgment;" and the Spirit and the Word find consciences into which to strike that conviction and despair, as of lost souls, which cannot be assuaged but by an enrapturing view of the atoning sacrifice and regenerating grace of Christ. Not only in the barbaric and the semi-barbaric purlieus of wickedness is there this kind of consciousness of sin to be awakened, but also it lurks in good society under some respectable reputations, as a record of concealed iniquity admitting of no palliation in an awakened conscience. There is a great default in preaching that forgets concealed wickedness and dares not probe it; and the searching old-fashioned preaching of it is a continuing necessity for all time.

But alone it does not meet at the same time the prevailing condition of souls in the congregation, or in the Church, where the operation of Christian civilization has abolished practices of wickedness and produced the clean, honest, truthful, chaste, kind, blameless lives that we love to recognize and to assimilate ourselves to by association. What shall the preacher say to them of sin, repentance, and conversion? They know not how to apply such terms to themselves unless in a negative, intangible and imperfect sense.

Hence, again arises a real modern necessity for adaptation. Not a superficializing and minimizing of sin, repentance and conversion, to meet the condition of those who seem to us and to themselves to be almost good enough for heaven already. On the contrary a more profound research of spiritual sin is called for by the improved condition of morals where they are most improved. Otherwise, our truly good neighbors, in the congregation and in the Church, can never truly know themselves sinners and great sinners before God, never profoundly repent, nor even experience all that is meant in the Gospel by conversion and regeneration.

Now we come to the question, What is spiritual or essential sin of which the most innocent child can be by the Holy Spirit profoundly convicted and oppressed?

We are told that "sin is the transgression of the law." True: but what law? We are simply at an infinite shortcoming of the meaning, if we think only of the moral law; or of the finest ideal of conduct that the mind can frame. That is the law which "entered that offence might [manifestly] abound" and "that sin by the commandment might become [prove] exceeding sinful." Of

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196 Conviction, Repentance, Conversion,' Modern.

such law-transgression the souls we are now dealing with are as nearly free as the young man whose moral beauty Jesus looked upon and loved, but who was unwilling to follow Him. The law of the Spirit of the Life that is in Jesus Christ is that intimate ultimate law from which we are all, babes and all, utterly fallen and alien, essentially opposite to God, and by nature incapable of holiness and of eternal life. That seems not so much, to lay against poor human nature, until we lay it alongside the absolute dispossession of Self, that we see in Christ before God and among men. Only then we can say, "Now mine eye seeth THEE, O God! wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." That life or quality that can be only in God and God's offspring, and which was never seen in the world until the Son of God revealed it, is the irreducible minimum (as well as the maximum) of goodness, with which to compare and judge ourselves. To be alien from this life of God, is to be Sin impersonated, with all its most exceeding sinfulness potentially present. So long as Self retains place, in any of its most allowable shapes, and is not wholly merged in love, as it was and is in Christ and God; so long we find in us the veritable "root of all evil," ineradicable; like Job we can repent in dust and ashes, and like Paul exclaim, O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death !— and though walking in all uprightness of conduct and purpose, realize that we cannot 'convert,' but must be converted. For, to discover this ideal is to despair of it, and to exclaim, "Who then, can be saved?" But Jesus answered, With men this is impossible, but not with God. And it is our assurance, that "this is the will of God, even our sanctification." Instantly, now? Some say so, but not the Lord. Those who may attain most progress, in the flesh, towards the life of God, will most feel their distance from it as immense and humanly impassable. We dare not condemn the profession of any, for we know not what God may do; but as little dare we accept any human consciousness of "having attained” the goal of perfect love and the selflessness of Christ.

"CHURCHES."

It is a painful type of blasphemy exceedingly prevalent in these days, to call anything a church (House of the Lord) which organizers of anything whatever find it popular and profitable to decorate with the Name that is above every name, while desecrat