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THE KING’S BUSINESS and not in our environment, or our possessions, we can rejoice always (Phil. 4:4). We can have, too, the fullness of joy that comes from untiring service and fruit-bearing (John 15:11). We wish all our readers, not merely “A Happy New Year,” but far better, a Jdyous New Year, and the wish need not be an empty one. It remains with each of us to say whether it shall be a year full of joy or a year full of misery and failure. Certainly it will be a year of opportunity—larger opportunity than we have ever known before. A prominent Christian worker, who has just-returned Is Man Godlike from a work of eighteen months in the trenches with or Brutelike? one of the contending armies, bears witness to the fact that the men at the front load their guns and fix their bayonets with the hardest bitterness and fury in their hearts, and express the same in words, towards the men they are attacking. They even gloat over the death of their fellowmen. Have not the doctrine of the idealization of man, the teaching concerning the divinity in man and the worship of culture, received a death blow in the sights, sounds, and glaring brutal facts of the present war? Is not the scriptural doctrine of natural depravity fully born out by the facts in the case ? Surely nothing but a new birth can change these conditions. The president of a theological seminary asked the The Honest Search writer a few .summers ago: “Can you suggest to me After Truth. some good books dealing with the premillennial view of Christ’s second coming? I believe that this doctrine is coming into greater prominence in the thought of the church. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that we are nearing a point of cleavage in the Christian church, and that point of cleavage will hover around the postmillennial and premillennial view of Christ’s coming. I want to be ready for it when it comes. I must confess I have not studied this doctrine from the premillennial point of view. I know I ought to, and I am determined to do so.” Was not this presi dent an honest seeker after truth? Was not his attitude commendable? Did he express the attitude and position of many others in this day towards this doctrine ? It is granted that there are great and good men, equally scholarly and consecrated, maintaining divers views on this doctrine. But no man, on either side, is an honest seeker after truth who is entirely ignorant of the other side of the question. A friend told me a few weeks ago that his teacher had warned him against two pernicious heresies which he should shrink from as he would from a deadly poison. One of these heresies had to do with some gnostic view of Christ prevalent in the early church; the other was the premillennial view of our Lord’s coming. We ask, candidly, is this an unprejudiced and fair attitude to take towards any phase of truth? Is this the kind of instruction that young men preparing for the ministry should receive? Of course, there are some Christians who run wild on the doctrine of the premillennial view of our Lord’s coming, and preach and speak as though there were nothing else in the Bible but that. That may be one extreme. But is it to be condemned as much as, or more than, that spirit which refuses to look into this view of the Lord’s coming at all? Let us be honest and sincere in our seeking after truth. Let not the postmillennialist despise the premillennialist, nor the premillennialist set at naught the postmillennialist, for they both belong to the same Lord and are looking for the coming of the same Christ.
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