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T H E K ING ’S BUS INESS Those who are looking for and working for a revival in some other way than through the preaching of Bible truth in the power of the Holy Ghost would do well to study history and learn how the historic re vivals in the Church have come. Every revival since
Historic Revivals Result of Sane Bible Study
Pentecost has come in the same way, viz., through the study of one Book— the Bible—and the truth of that Book being brought home, first of all to the hearts of a few men by the power of the Holy Ghost and then through them being brought home to the hearts of great communities. Some words written by Prof. James Orr, D. D., some time before his death in his book, “The Bible Under Trial,” are very significant: “The present age has abounding faith in ‘scholarship.’ When a scholar speaks about the Bible, let no man peep or mutter. And I should assuredly be the last to seem to throw any slight on sound and accurate scholarship. Let scholars be fought by all means with the weapons of scholars.. “But it is very much to the point to observe that it has never been by learning, by philosophy, by science, by 'scholarship, that the Church has been revived and saved in eras of great religious laxity and abounding in fidelity. When Jesus introduced His religion into the world He did not choose ‘scholars,’ but humble, simple-minded men, attached to Himself by a living faith, and endued with power from on high, to do it, as witnesses to His words, works, and resurrection. ‘The base things of the world, and the things that are despised, did God choose, yea, and the things that are not, that he might bring to naught the things that are.’ (1 Cor. 1:28). “So when- we come to the later age of the Reformation, what brought the remedy for the unbelief and spiritual evils under which that age groaned? Not scholarship or science, but the discovery in Scripture and faithful proclamation of the living Gospel of the grace of God by Luther and his fellow-reformers, men who had felt its power in their souls. “And once more, what rescued the Church from the torpor and death of the negation of the eighteenth century? The deliverance came, not from philosophy or learning, not even from the works of able apologists like Butler, but from the tides of the Spiritual Revival that swept over Britain, and were felt in other lands under* the preaching of such men as White- field and the Wesleys. This it was which gave evangelism the victory once more oyer indifference and unbelief, and breathed the new breath of life into society which introduced the era of missions to the heathen, Bible dif fusion, home evangelization, and the innumerable social reforms of the last century. It is to a like outpouring of the Spirit of God upon His Church, and to the same divine energy manifesting itself in holy lives and practical work, far more than to learned confutations, however valuable these may be in their place, that we must look for the overthrow of the forms of un belief that life up their heads among us today. The owls vanish when the daylight reappears.” Many persons today are looking- for a new light to dawn through science, philosophy, psychology and sociology, and if history teaches anything, it teaches that if we are to have new life and therefore new light, it must come in the same way that it always has come—in the illumination and power of the Holy Spirit.
The secular papers are making much of what they call “The Pope’s Prayer for Peace.” It is said that Pope Benedict has ordered to be recited in all the Catholic Churches in the United States on Passion Sunday, March 21, the following prayer:
Amusing Blunder Made by Pope
Benedict
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