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The sermons of Mr. Moody have not been so fully reported in the daily press that we are justified in making extracts from them. They are, however, the same in tenor and in substance with those with which the public are familiar. The title of Mr. Moody's early volume of sermons "Glad Tidings"-fitly covers his subsequent preaching. His entrance upon evangelistic work marked a new era in the history of Evangelism. Previous Evangelists had alternated in their presentation of motive between the conception of the sovereignty of God coupled with the doctrine of the special gift of the Holy Spirit, and the conception of human responsibility declaring itself in the immediate and decisive act of the will. Here was the difference between the school of Dr. Nettleton and President Finney. Mr. Moody was a disciple of neither, but virtually established a new school by the commitment of himself so unreservedly to the conception of the love of God. "God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." That was his message, his gospel; and it was new to the degree in which he abandoned himself to it. The safeguard to his preaching lay in its intensity. Preaching the mere goodness of God might have been weak and dangerous, but preaching the compassionate, suffering, long-suffering, sacrificing, agonizing love of God soon proved to be, not weakness, but power, the power of God unto salvation. It was almost immediately seen that this use of motive was entirely compatible with the deepest and most solemn view of sin. And as it has now been tested by years in experience and outward result, we doubt if many Christians who have been observant of the effect of the method are disposed to go back in the presentation of motive from the gospel to the law.

Mr. Brooks's conception of God's relation to man is somewhat broader and more elevated. More stress is laid upon the coöperative element in salvation, upon the work of God in and with man, and the consequent result, not simply in deliverance or rescue, but in a perfected character, in oneness with God. Here is his message, with its clear and inspiring gospel :

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"The unit of power on the earth is not man and is not God. It is God and man, not two but one, not meeting accidentally, not running together in emergencies only to separate again when the emergency is over it is God, and man belonging essentially together, God filling man, man opening his life by faith to be a part of God's, as the gulf opens itself and is part of the great ocean. Oh, how the history of the world has lost this truth! Now with a faithless manhood which felt no need and claimed no presence of Divinity, the fight against misery and sin has been carried on. Now, thinking that God would do it all, and that man had no place in the great work, an impractical religion has stood by and waited for a miraculous cleansing of the earth which never come. Some day the perfect power, God using an entirely obedient manhood, man

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perfectly obedient and only asking to be used by God, these two together, not two, but one, God in man and man in God, shall come, and then the world's salvation draweth nigh, nay, is already here!”

In the remarkable series of Lenten sermons preached at St. Paul's on successive Monday noons to business men, Mr. Brooks confined himself entirely to the single passage from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus sets forth the doctrine of freedom through the truth (John viii. 31–36). The following extract must suffice to illustrate the fullness and the urgency with which he declares the all-sufficient power of God waiting upon man and working for him and with him, whether man is fully conscious of it or not:

"And there is the real secret of the man's struggle with his sins. It is not simply the hatefulness of the sin, as we have said again and again, but it is the dim perception, the deep suspicion, the real knowledge at the heart of the man, that there is a richer and a sinless region in which it is really meant for him to dwell. Man stands separated from that life of God, as it were, by a great thick wall, and every effort to put away his sin, to make himself a nobler and a purer man, is simply his beating at the inside of that door which stands between him and the life of God which he knows that he ought to be living. It is like the prisoner hidden in his cave, who feels, through all the thick wall that shuts him out from it, the sunlight and the joyous life that is outside; who knows that his imprisonment is not his true condition, and so with every tool that his hands can grasp, and with his bleeding hands themselves, beats on the stone that he may find his way out. And the glory and the beauty of it is that, while he is beating upon the inside of the wall, there is also a noble power preying upon the outside of that wall. The life to which he ought to come is striving in its turn, upon its side, to break away the hindrance that is keeping him from the thing he ought to be, that is, keeping him from the life he ought to live. God, with his sunshine and lightning, with the great, majestic manifestations of himself, and with all the peaceful exhibitions of his life, is forever trying, upon his side of the wall, to break away the great barrier that separates the sinner's life from Him. Great is the power, great is the courage of the sinner, when through the thickness of the walls he feels that beating life of God, when he knows that he is not working alone, when he is sure that God is wanting him just as truly, far more truly, than he wants God. He bears himself to a nobler struggle with his enemy and a more determined effort to break down the resistance that stands between him and the higher life. Our figure is all imperfect, as all our figures are so imperfect, because it seems to be the man all by himself, working by himself, uutil he shall come forth into the life of God, as if God waited there to receive him when he came forth, the freed man, and as if the working of the freedom upon the sinner's side had not something also of the purpose of God within him. God is not merely in the sunshine; God is in the cavern of the man's sin. God is with the sinner wherever he can be. There is no soul so black in its sinfulness, so determined in its defiant obstinacy, that God has abandoned his throne room at the centre of the sinner's life; and every movement is the God movement, and every effort is the God force, with which man tries to break forth from his sin and come forth into the full sunlight of a life with God. Do you not think

how full of hope it is? Do you not see that when this great conception of the universe, which is Christ's conception, which beamed in every look that. He shed upon the world, which was told in every word that He spoke, and which was in every movement of his hand, do you not see how, when this great conception of the universe takes possession of a man, then all the struggle with his sin is changed, it becomes a strong struggle, a glorious struggle? He hears perpetually the voice of Christ, 'Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. You shall overcome it by the same strength which overcame with Me.'"

And this extract, to show the conception of sin which follows from the conception of the work of God for man's redemption. No thought of sin is more awful than that of sin as it passes beyond the reach of man, and even of God:

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"Oh, this marvelous, this awful power that we have over other people's lives! Oh, the power of the sin that you have done years and years ago! It is awful to think of it. I think there is hardly anything more terrible to the human thought than this, the picture of a man who, having sinned years and years ago in a way that involved other souls in his sin, and then, having repented of his sin, and undertaken another life, knows certainly that the power, the consequence, of that sin is going on outside of his reach, beyond even his ken and knowledge. He cannot touch it. You wronged a soul ten years ago. You taught a boy how to tell his first mercantile lie; you degraded the early standards of his youth. What has become of that boy to-day? You may have repented. He has passed out of your sight. He has gone years and years ago. Somewhere in this great, multitudinous mass of humanity he is sinning and sinning and reduplicating and extending the sin that you did. You touched the faith of some believing soul years ago with some miserable sneer of yours, with some cynical and skeptical disparagement of God and of the man who is the utterance of God upon the earth. You taught the soul that was enthusiastic to be full of skepticisms and doubts. You wronged a woman years ago, and her life has gone out from your life, you cannot begin to tell where. You have repented of your sin. You have bowed yourself, it may be, in dust and ashes. You have entered upon a new life. You are pure to-day. But where is the skeptical soul? Where is the ruined woman whom you sent forth into the world out of the shadow of your sin years ago? You cannot touch that life. You cannot reach it. You do not know where it is. No steps of yours, quickened with all your earnestness, can pursue it. No contrition of yours can draw back its consequences. Remorse cannot force the bullet back again into the gun from which it once has gone forth. It makes life awful to the man who has ever sinned, who has ever wronged and hurt another life because of his sin, because no sin ever was done that did not hurt another life. I know the mercy of our God, that while He has put us into each other's power to a fearful extent, He never will let any soul absolutely go to everlasting ruin for another's sin; and so I dare to see the love of God pursuing that lost soul. where you cannot pursue it. But that does not for one moment lift the shadow from your heart, or cease to make you tremble when you think of how your sin has outgrown itself and is running far, far away where you can never follow it."

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We believe that the ministry at large has far too little sense of the present power of Christianity as a gospel. It is no longer commonplace when it rises to this height of reality. Christianity is more than a doctrine, more than ethics; infinitely more than the series of so-called scientific propositions under which the way of salvation is ostentatiously set forth in some quarters; it is glad tidings, if it can only be so apprehended; and as truly glad tidings to the nineteenth century, and to a Christianized community, as it was to those who first heard it from the lips of apostles, or to those who now hear it from the lips of the missionaries of the cross.

LETTERS AND LIFE.

This Department of the "Review" is under the editorial care of Professor A. S. HARDY.

LIFE FROM A TOKYO POINT OF VIEW.

It is difficult to appreciate the wonderment with which Japan first saw Western civilization. We visit this Eastern people with interest, fascinated by the courtesy and gentleness of their manners, by the delicacy and suggestiveness of their art, by the quaint and picturesque in their social life. But they look upon the West with wonder, stupefied by our immense armies and navies, by the Titans of machinery which pant in our workshops, by the brilliant array of our arts and sciences, by the strange union of the complex and the ponderous, the subtle and the massive, which characterizes our civilization. Imagine all those devices of to-day which annihilate space, conquer time, economize labor, harness Nature, — imagine all the principles of chemistry, physics, mechanics, and mathematics which underlie these devices, brought suddenly to the eyes and within the reach of the Middle Ages, and we get some idea of what is meant by what we call the opening of Japan to the world, but which is far more truly the opening of the world to Japan. For a few decades ago Japan was in her middle ages, not figuratively but literally; not only without press and wire, and rail and steam, and electricity, and all that constitutes the material scaffolding of modern society, but a completely feudal state, with the customs, habits, laws, superstitions, arts, political organization, of a twelfth century.

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The wholesale adoption by the Japanese of Western civilization surprises us because we are apt to associate them, perhaps on account of their long seclusion, with their eastern neighbors, the Chinese, so indifferent to pro gress, content with the technical processes of the past, a self-satisfied race of merchants, with little genius for industrialism. Far less reserved than the Chinese, by nature borrowers and imitators, apt in the arts and manufactures, distinctly patriotic and athirst for knowledge, the Japanese are at work in the line of their national traditions. It is the rate, rather

than the fact, of this transformation, which is astonishing. The superficial results have been largely accomplished, an army, a navy, with arsenals and dockyards, a postal service, a railway system, steam communication by sea, and lighthouses, telephones, gas and electric lighting, a press, educational system, parliament, and bureaucracy. So far as these are concerned, Japan may well boast of doing in years what for Europe required centuries. But in achieving even these results she has encountered the difficulties which arise from ignorance and inexperience, with all their progeny of credulity, shallowness, over-haste, and rash judgment; the difficulties which beset the child who assumes that in donning a man's clothes he has become a man. And, having to struggle first with her inordinate appetite, she has now to wrestle with the secondary processes of digestion and reflection. To Europeanize Japan is no easy task; for Japan is not a little bowl which can be emptied into, and absorbed by, Christendom in a day. She has her past, with its fixed traditions; a national life which, however modified originally by contact with India and China, is the outgrowth of national needs; a political and social organization which, however quick to follow the national instincts of imitation, preserves all the inertia inseparable from a long and slow development. Having adopted, the graver question arises, how to assimilate. Statistics and facts which exhibit only the mechanical superposition of Europe upon a civilization alien to it in every particular, form the basis of many hasty predictions and false impressions. It is an easy matter to order silk-looms from Lyons, a pottery plant from Limoges, and electric engines from America. It is easy even to educate a body of mechanics to the use and care of modern machinery; but it is more difficult to create, in a people destitute of any inherited fund of mechanical genius, however skillful in securing small ends by simple means, that faculty of invention, so distinct from mere ingenuity, which in this age of competition is more essential to the success of the machine-shop than a technical knowledge of its details. How to improve is more important than how to "run." It is creditable to the energy of the government to have brought together within twenty-five years the matériel of a formidable navy; but it is impossible within that time to realize, from a race without a past of nautical enterprise, without foreign commerce, colonial possessions, or the wealth and industries necessary to the maintenance of a large naval force, the conditions essential to high naval efficiency. The difficulties of national education are immense. To send an embassy abroad, to investigate the school methods of Europe and America, to organize and set in operation a system of universal education for both sexes, is the least of them. Having transplanted the fully developed tree, it is hardly too much to say, without roots, the problem is to make it bear fruit. Consider on this point, says Professor Chamberlain,' what the situtation

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1 Things Japanese.

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