Some of our friends have been sending us a number of things relative to the hastening apostasy of Christendom-all showing the drift of that great body of men who, while fond of clerical titles and honors, are fast developing the Judas character, and bringing themselves under the awful denunciation of Jude 11, " Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core."

One of the selections sent us is from an issue of the New York Press of March 11. It reports a sermon by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst in the Madison Square Presbyterian Church on the previous day. It reports him as saying,

" The kingdom of God is the world's hope, and its only hope. It is the center from which are emanating the influences that make life worth living. You are not asked to subscribe to any scheme-we have too many schemes ; nor to kneel down and burn incense to any memory or antiquity-we have too much museum. If you do not relish the gospel miracles or credentials of the Man of Nazareth, count them out and frame your thoughts and your passion of wonderment to the incomparably vaster miracle of the present and increasing intellectual moral and spiritual bloom. That is miracle enough to win you to the kingdom of God if you are willing to be won.

" The Holy Scriptures are an attempt to give us a partial history of the current of divine influence as it flowed through centuries. They show the movings of God along the track of time, and the slow, irregular, but nevertheless actual, inclination of human thought and purpose into the confluence with those movings, till eventually perhaps the stream of human purpose and life shall become perfectly merged in the current of divine thought and ambition,

"The Bible interprets for us, by a few scattered illustrations, the way in which divine impulses are operating in the direction of their ultimate end, and the kind of response those impulses elicit from human hearts.

"That is what gives the Bible its value as a history. It may not be any more accurate as a record of events than are some histories. It specially consists in this, that it is written from a different viewpoint from that of the average historian, and by men more fully endowed with the ability to distinguish the divine ingredients of historic events.

"Without impugning the significance or denying the interest of anything contained in the past chapters of the world's religious history, and without belittling the record that is left to us of the relation in which in times past God has stood to men through the agency of law-givers and prophets, and, above all, through the person of Christ, the thing we are called on to believe in to'-day is the God of today; not the topography of old Jerusalem, not the form of belief with which others have believed in Him-Abraham, Isaiah, Paul, Luther, or Wesley-no scene of conviction wrought out either in the councils of the church or in the strivings of our own individual brains, but in God as we have by the divinely-quickened intuitions of our hearts come to know Him and to trust Him."

Here, then, is the measure of the value which is set upon the word of God, and upon the Lord Jesus Christ, by this professed defender of the faith, in a so-called Orthodox pulpit. And in his congregation there seems to be not a single protesting voice-not one who, roused to indignation, stands up to denounce such traitorous words. All are dumb; and while a few, perhaps, fear there is
something wrong, and go away feeling some dread in their inmost soul at this wholesale removal of the dividing lines, the many probably call it a fine sermon. What a triumph of Satan! what a fulfilment of the prophecies of Scripture!

"In union there is strength" is the principle of this world, and these men of the world think the Kingdom of God has nearly come because they see signs of union in a divided Christendom. It makes little difference to them if that united Christendom of their delighted vision worships stocks and stones, wax figures and St. Peter's bones, the Virgin Mary and Mrs. Eddy, whether Christ is what He claims to be or whether it is all false-all these are trivial matters with these great and large-hearted men.

Not so with God, and not so with faith. God has set Christ as Center and Object of His affections and purposes. The least claim of that Christ is of more importance to God and to faith than all the doing and writing of men. All combinations of men where the claims of Christ are disregarded are but confederacies to be driven to the winds before the Kingdom of God can come.

Nay, more :" God requireth that which is past." The crime committed against His Son at Calvary is yet an unsettled controversy between Him and the world. The world has not yet repented of it, and both Jew and Gentile must yet face it before that Kingdom, so desirable indeed, can appear.

Until then it is but the kingdom of banded men, of Socialism, whose issues are yet to be in rivers of blood and judgments of God. " For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows." (Matt. 24:7,8.)

"The Lord is my light and my salvation; … the Lord is the strength of my life " must still be the heart
language of all who cherish anything for God on the earth-who still love that unity and the testimony which pleases God, and which carries on the "Philadelphia" state to the end.