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dication of lack of interest by the people. The Christian Century tells of a man who made a survey of the attendance at the lodges of the fraternal orders. He found the attendance tenfold worse. One lodge with 700 members had thirty-five present. Another with 500 members claimed an average attendance of thirty.. The Amer ican Legion of the observer’s town had 1,100 members and an average attendance of sixty, while his church had 1,200 mem bers and an average attendance of 445 in the morning and 206 at night. The prayer meeting had a much higher aver age than the lodges. In a smaller town or in rural communities the church aver age would have been still larger, as a rule. Add the fact that fraternal orders serve social, welfare or business needs, while the churches serve primarily a spiritual quest, with the surrender of self as its condition, and you have an other evidence of the uniqueness of the drawing power of the gospel of the Son of God. Even on the low ground of crowd-getting, a preacher had better exalt Jesus Christ.—Western Recorder. Old Time Practical Sermons Christ’s sermons were practical. The teachings of the prophets and judges of old, were practical, being the words that God had given unto them, to tell the peo ple what to do to please God and warn them of judgment to come should they fail to put God’s commands into practice. And so in the case of the early church, questions arose, and God by the hand of the different Apostles, answered those queries by an assortment of letters, which gives to us today the ideal of Christian living. The people in these days are groping, stumbling, calling for guidance, hungry for the truth. One writer says, “The Christian preacher is the only man in civilization for whom all business ceases in order that his message may be heard and pondered. Before him sit on Sunday, men who have paused in the vital tasks of modem life to learn what
is worth while and what is the goal of all their work. They cannot be content to hear how men were good in the eighth century B. C. They want to know what is goodness now in this present age, w'hat Christ would do if He were here, what His teachings mean when applied to the concrete tragedy in which they are in volved.” Truly then, “ should not the shepherds feed the flock” with the old time prac tical religion?—Fidler. Preach the Cross The preacher of the Gospel is called apd set apart to his holy office that he may open and unfold the nature and sig nificance of Christ’s redeeming work in its saving, cleansing, transforming power, thus bearing his testimony to the. efficaoy of the Cross to cleanse from all sin. The Cross is enshrined at the very heart of the New Testament, it is of the very es sence of the Christian religion, it em bodies the good news of the Gospel. To such an extent is this true that it is im possible to preach the Gospel as set forth in the New Testament without giving the Cross the central and commanding place. Pascal points out that as there is one, and only one indivisible point from which a proper view of any picture can be ob tained, every other point giving an im perfect impression to the beholder, so there is in theology, one, and only one, correct point of observation, and that point is the Cross of Christ. It is at this point the preacher requires to 'take up his position if he is to magnify the love of God and bring release to sin-burdened souls. To ignore the Cross in our preach ing, or minimize its primacy and potency in God’s scheme of redemption, is to make light of the Divine love, and, so far as human effort can, divert its heal ing stream from a sin-sick humanity. The burdened soul is set free at the Cross, the weary and heavy-laden find rest under its shadow, the longing soul
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