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"Some great cause, God's new Messiah"

MESSIAH PULPIT

NEW YORK

(Being a continuation of Unity Pulpit, Boston)

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Entered at the Post-office, Boston, Mass., as second-class mail matter

NOTE.

Rev. Dr. Savage being still unable to occupy his pulpit, Rev. E. E. Hale, D.D.. preached on Sunday, January 29. Dr. Savage will resume his pulpit work as soon as possible, and will then continue the series on "Immortality."

PEACE ON EARTH.

"On earth peace, good will toward men.'

LUKE ii. 14.

THE Song of the angels is taken fairly to express the hope and aim of the Church of Christ. He has no title more tender and true than that of "the Prince of Peace," though he himself said so sadly, "Think not that I have come to bring peace, but a sword," though his triumph was to be won when the blood flowed from his side, drawn by the spear of a Roman soldier.

In our great festivals, as on Christmas morning or on Easter Day, if we dare, we are glad to sing Milton's hymn:

"Nor war or battle sound

Was heard the world around.

No hostile chiefs to mutual conflict ran."

And our prayer to God is always that the sword may be sheathed, and men need study war no more.

But, in face of this hope,—yes, and prophecy,— we have to own that even in Christendom the general belief and practice is the other way. Men will laugh in your face when you say, "The lion shall lie down with the lamb." They will repeat the old jest that the lamb will be inside the lion. They will sneer at talk of universal peace, as being only the dream of poets and of prophets. "The men who swing on rainbows," they say, "the sonneteers, the sweet singers,— they are the men who prattle about lambs and kids and doves, and swords beaten into ploughshares." And this sneer of the " men of practice," as they love to call themselves, goes

so far that in average talk you find the recurrence of war spoken of as a regular necessity. As in our Spartan times, the mothers of our Israel assembled their families in springtime, and gave to each member a dose of nauseous medicine, to the weak that they might be made strong, to the strong that they might not be sick,— you are coolly told that once in a generation there must be a drawing of blood. It is like Dr. Sangrado in the novel. What people called in old times the "bad humors" must be drawn off, and this means bloodshed. You hear this in the pulpit. You hear it in common talk. It works its way into senates and councils.

Within a month, in a large assembly in a university of years of honest fame, a professor said to me, confidently, "Why is it that every century is more warlike than any before?" And I had to answer, "Because it is not so." I had to remind him that the people of the United States had had scarcely eight years of war in this nineteenth century, against thirty-four or five in the century before. In the same two centuries, England's contrast, in general European wars, is fourteen years of war, with Napoleon and afterwards with Russia, against nearly fifty years in the century before. In face of figures so distinct as these, that easy phrase that men make war more than ever finds way in conversation and even affects public policy and education.

But, in truth, all the time the civilization of the world advances, commerce advances, education advances, the Christian religion advances. And commerce, education, civilization, and Christianity mean peace. Prophecy is more and more intelligible with every year; and prophets know because prophets are poets if you please - that all their prophecies of the twentieth century will fail if it is not a century of peace.

"The

Of a sudden the time comes, and the clock strikes. present moment would be a favorable time to find the means for insuring durable peace to all people."

"To all people." "Durable peace." "The present moment." Whose are these words? Is this some dreamy poet swinging on a rainbow? Is this some coward lover wanting to play with Neæra's hair? It is the leader of the largest army in the world. "Let us have peace," as the great solsovereign of the largest

It is the Czar of Russia.
What is the present

dier of America said. It is the territorial dominion in the world. "The present moment," he says. moment? It is the moment when that nation which best represents modern life has crushed by a single blow the only state which was left to represent bigotry and tyranny and savagery. America has crushed Spain, and is arranging the terms of permanent peace between the new and the old. The miserable blunder of King James the Fool of England, after Elizabeth had crushed the Spanish Armada, has been atoned for, and that business has been finished. The new has asserted itself, and feudalism is at an end. To-day has spoken, and yesterday is nowhere.

This moment, then, is the moment to insure durable peace, "the present moment."

The czar's proclamation is carelessly spoken of as simply a proposal for disarmament. It is criticised with sneers, abuse, ridicule, or indifference, mostly by people who have taken the precaution not to read it. In truth, however, it begins: "The preservation of universal peace and the reduction of armaments make the ideal to which all governments should direct their efforts." It ends with a prayer that these efforts may be united in one focus. That is the striking figure of the appeal which the czar makes for a formal consecration of the principles of right, on which rest the security of government and the progress of the peoples.

The czar takes pains to show that now for twenty years every important treaty has affected to seek this object,"general pacification," or, in a more literal rendering, "the peace-loving tendencies." He now proposes a confer

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