North Carolina Newspapers

ORGAN GF THE NORTH CAROLINA CONFERENCE, M. E. CHURCH, SOUTH. ESTABLISHED IN 1555 RALEIGH, N. C, SEPTEMBER 6, 1899. New Series. Vol. 1, No. 29. RALEIGH Organ ( i . ... . . UST1AN ADVOCATE. g lorth Carolina Conference. ' -kia' at Raleigh, N. C. natter in the post-office at Raleigh. P. D. Editor. WATSOX, Business Manager TEMRS OF SUBSCRIPTION. One Year, Si.50. 1 Six Months, - Cash in Advance. .75 of tlie gospel and wives of deceased 1 1i ,-v-i .-i1 iiypntc will r(&lvo tlio preachers in the North Carolina Conic-' :r,-r free. for 1 1 or.-- i i . i, ,- i x i - i ,or;- tion has been paid. Change in label a receipt. nTi ires is ordered changed, both old and e.-j. r.-.at be given. -;r r.ionev, be sure to state whether it is subscription. ; letters and make all checks and money -.- v.i to the RALEIGH CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE. MAN AND A MAN. Of all objects that have come within range of the world's intelligence, none has received more nttpntirm thin mo,-, himself. KvPr nrv rA wwi J Pra'ers even in a political convention. of vociferous applause." This happened out in the wild and wooly West,1' and we are glad that it was not here. We like for our preachers to be able to offer fervent his nostrils the breath of life, he has been the centre of study and discussion. With one, he is but little removed from the brute; with another, he is a bright winged "son of the morning" With this one, his existence is that of the ephe mera, which is born at sunrise and dies at sunset ; with that one, his life has a con- But we are so glad that we have no preachers in the sunny Southland who are in the habit of "bringing dewn" the convention. Seriously, we think such a scene as that described above is enough to make an angel weep. Reading sanc timoniously a short political speech, and calling it a prayer, and addressing it : ::t : r r . 1 crowd of exdt icai dissolution ana extends into eternity. KIND BUT FOOLISH. EDITORIAL d politicians, is an act of onrprnmor inn nmnv tliAnriPc nvo Kcoh I 7 J PAnnpttinofmn sf PnH P 1 -111 . . wuuviliUULluu Vi VJUU iormea gooa, naa, ana indirrerent. -Much time has been wasted and much thought, expended in the attempt to define man. Among the most ancient definitions is that given by Plato, who defined man as a "biped without wings". The old cynic, Diogenes, consumed this definition with fervid sarcasm, when he stripped a fowl I of its feathers, and threw it into the midst THE TRUE SIGNIFICANCE. uestiou of the Twentieth Cen- Ingersoll had few kind words for min isters of the Gospel. He mercilessly at tacked them in his lectures, accusing them of ignorance, dishonesty, and hy pocracy. He poured upon the noble calling the vitrial of his sarcasm and j of Plato's scholars, with the remark, then impaled it on the sharp point of his j in.it is i laiu s man. oicii lists cts ; 5UCIlllriOllS Wit. well as philosophers have given their definition. They have located his origin i 3 : , r..ii. -u r .i. national ruim iunx ueiore uie j in nothinr and made his definition noth There is inspiration m the idea; inspiration in the success of the ing. The world cannot improve upon the yveiuent. The different branches of vethodisui all over the world have joined j hmds and hearts in the great work of I -'vW behind the cause of Christian ! Incation the impulsive force, not onlyj millions of consecrated hearts, but mil vis of consecrated dollars. The enterprise will succeed. Soreheads Mosaic definition which represents man as made by God out of the dust of the ' God. His memory, now that he is gone, is treated very tenderly by the men whom he maligned. Some have gone so far as to intimate that he may be enjoying now the "fullness of iov" in the presence of ground and having in him the breath of God. Old-fashioned, but true. A defini tion made by God himself. Yet man is a complexity which will never receive a simplification on this side the Hereafter. It is useless to discuss the question, "What is man?" Too much time has ;1 croakers must keep out of the way. i been wasted in sucll a discussion The innv.ilse is heaven-born ; the motive is charged with the dynamics of God ; the '.vork is attended with the strength oi trkh and the music of love. The re ;i:lt is assured. Let Methodism rejoice. But. beloved, what will be the signifi cance of the success of the movement ? Will it be the acknowledgment that Meth odism is true to the-sacred interests com- mtea to ner : Will it De a But there is a question for whose an swer the world is hungering. It is, "What is a man?" Happily for us the definition is concrete, visible as weli as apprehensible. We have only to look withl spiritual eyes at Jesus Christ, "the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" to know what a man is in the true and absolute sense. In him all ex- new equip-1 cellencies were united. He is the one for her victorious march through nonn for the aes He should be seri- enturv." ies, ana mncn more. ! ri,. 0,-,11,. -.aa tm-.;c ;c nccess of this movement will prove j one Antecedent to that consummation lly of the fears of those who, with j when we snall an come in the unity of f the denominational collegre audi rA nntr, a nPrftman nntnthp measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." :d, The fact speaks eloquently for the Christian character of the preachers. They were reviled, and they reviled not agBin. Instead they have covered the grave of the agnostic j.vith flowers, and built for him a home in Paradise. Who can say that preachers 4re resentful? While we speak a good for their spirit of charity, we must condemn their maud liu sympathy, lack of judgment, and for getfulness of Scriptural truth. There are unnaimed heroes " Christ on whom these admiring ones could more appro priately bestow their praise, and for whom they could build monuments and mansions in the skies. If Ingersoll's life on earth bore any resemblance to the life promised in Heaven, we have misread the facts. officer. The other is, that in the begin ning of the conversation in which the so-called confession is embodied, Dreyfus protests his innocence. Du Paty de Clam, the coadjutor of Esterhazy, has been exemined, but his evidence has not been made public. Bertillon, the in ventor of the authropometic system, made himself the laughing-stock even of the Judges in his attempt to prove that Drey fus is the author of the bordereau. His evidence was completely overthrown by other experts. What will be the out come no one knows, jf Dreyfus should escape conviction, it will not be through any lack of desperate efiort on the part of the Judges to bring about a different result. It must be remembered that the acquittal of Dreyfus is aquivalent to the conviction of the Army. The news from Cuba is not cheering:. The payment of money to the Cuban soldiers has been suspended on account of the dishonesty on the part of some soldiers, and the difficulty in determin ing who tlie parties are to whom the money should be paid. The payment of the " three million dollars " has been a dismal failure. There is a spirit of restlessness among the peo ple at large. In some quarters, the spirit of revolution can be plainly felt and seen. It is possible that the Uni ted States may face in the course of a few months a state of things similar to that in the island of Luzon. The Cubans will have to be left to themselves no mat ter what will be the result, for the United States will have to carry out the philan thropic plans, at the expense of lives. In the meantime, the war against filth and social disorder is being pressed to a re markably successf ul issue in the 'cities and towns. If this government do no more for Cuba than to clean it from filth, a : great work will have been accomplished have done great things in the earth, even though they have not been rich toward God. Yet, is it not true that most of those who possess genius are so consti tuted that instead of being men of ten talents they are conspicuously narrow in their capacities? Some men minister to some one side of man's nature, often su premely well. But the old distinction is forced in upon us by their lives. They were great poets, painters, soldiers; rarely so constituted that uniting several great faculties they can be called great men. Mr. Longfellow was reaching towards the truth when he said: "Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sub lime;" but he missed accuracy of state ment (which we do not often demand of poetry), in the universal form he gave his thought. Not "all," but oft he should have said. In the article referred to, there are fre quent quotations from two great men of our century, who came much nearer be ing ten talent men than any of those so called. These are" Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle. Both of these men had tragedies in their lives, but they were moral rather thad immoral tragedies. It seems to me that no one of any spiritu ality can read Scott's "Last Journals," without reading beneath the sad story of the bitter battle he was called on to wTage against a debt not of his own contract ing but for the payment of which he was bound the deeper story of a noble na ture once captivated by pleasure and greedy of worldly rank girding itself for ever grander triumphs in the arena where conscience strives with convention. When that noble heart ceased to beat it was more than the laying aside of a skillful pen; it was the last act of a life that had been full of strength, of lusty human effort, but wholesome, generous and un faltering in its allegiance to Him who gave much, and would require His own with usury. The Competence of Christ. tr.e r.r.al supremacy of the civil and pri ate educational institutions. There was U:n:e, and it mav be now, when certain r".e? boastfully asserted that, in time, in it:tr.v.Dns of the church would be ab soroeu by secular institutions. But such .-err.or.s are vain. There never was a ::rne .'"ken the denominational institu te filled with healthier life than "o-.v. The success of the Twentieth Cen Movement will prove that the Uuch BETRAYING EARS. Self-deluded, we are often unable to de lude others. Covered with the lion's skin, ,i ii. . ii - exnose to oiners uie lnouie enrb we -- 1 1 4. ., 4- i-l Wllicn we cannoL sec. uuc ui mc "newer" evangelists was inveighing in a late meeting against the iniquity of tak ing up collections. He said: "I never lifted a collection in my life. I have never suffered. People when they tell me good-Tye, often leave a dollar in my hand." The brother had found a more "excellent way." He did not "lift" col lections, but he succeeded in lifting many a penny from the pockets of the people. If he were not a member of his pecu liar class, we would be tempted to won der if he really thought that in the fore- ot Jesus Christ, the pioneer in ti;e work of education, the patroness dur :rr "ic centuries of all intellectual en-te-prises, the power house which generates "i brents which thrill and illumine t'erycivil and social department of life, is determined to continue unto the end her Scions inarch. We believe that the agitation of the Twentieth Century Movement will add sot only shekels to the treasury, but stu-;e-is to the rolls, of our denominational ;'tutions. Who does not rejoice at the ' prospects of Trinity College and other institutions of learning? These 'itions not only ought to live, but Will every ave 1 iare patronage. "''J USt StriVP irs brdn Tiin r l-mt'o Jat tiey should have? "!- evolution in Qnn DnminanK vet v,-v , comparatively bloodless pr., ,Ciral Jimmez, who wants to be bt freUt' 5las not 'et realized liis desires, flock;lm t,ne way ttiat insurgents are irk''? to 'lls standard, it can be safely that e soon te eiljovin& of t baia to De cnaractenstic offCSe Who wear a crown. Many Cuban Cfcrs ar e Oiiering him their services. Course of Events. going instance, he - was really the people? deceiving A "RADICAL" PRAYER. We take the following from the news paper report of a political convention re cently held : "In the opening prayer Very Rev. J. F. Kearney prayed most earnestly for tlie deliverance of the Filipinos from the "brute force" now being inflicted upon them. The prayer was radical and forci ble throughout, and brought forth rounds of most vociferous applause." This is a most wonderful exploitation by the world of a poor clericus, so -pliable as to be induced to make a "radical" prayer sufficient to bring forth "rounds The storm that raged along our coast wTas the most fearful witnessed in a half century. The first reports were bad, but it seems that the worst had not been told. Many lives have been lost, two towns were destroyed, and many boats have been wrecked. It is said that most of the bank ponies were drowned. The church buildings of the M. E. Church, South, at Ocracoke and Hatteras, respectively, were destroyed. Col. Julian S. Carr, with his usual liberality, gave a large check to the sufferers, but a greater part of the pro ceeds we learn wTas returned to him. Ten Talent Men. Affairs in the Transvaal are un doubtedly approaching a crisis. Eng land and Germany are too near to each other in South Africa. Oom Paul Kru-o-er is clear-headed and obstinate. Great Britain is sending troops to Africa every week. Tne reserves in Natal have been ordered to hold themselves in readiness to respond to a call for instant action. The Boers, also, are very active. They have placed an order for 14,000,000 Mau ser cartridges. Relations between the two nations are very much strained, and an outbreak should not be a matter to occasion great surpriso. (From the New York Observer.) A popular preacher of one of our great est cities, writing recently in one of our periodicals of large circulation, discusses the careers of a number of the greatest poets, painters and public men, under the title of "The Tragedy of the Ten Talent Men." Among those who are thus treated of are such English poets as Burns, Shelly, Byron and Poe, and such others as Andrea del Sarto, Napoleon and Cleopatra. I confess that it was with a shock that I read this article; it was interesting in itself; it refuted in a few7 well-chosen words the apologies that have been made both by themselves and others for the wasted powers of lives of high possibilities; and it drew a just and appropriate moral under the caption, "Greatness a pledge to goodness." But despite all this, I fel t a growing dislike for the title of the article. It was - a painful reversal of the truth. Just such a reversal as we meet with so often in the speech of those whose standard is purely worldly-wise. So that though I conceded the high purpose of the paper, I wish more and more that it had not in its title sacrificed truth to the trick of taking captive the ear. We concede readily enough that there have been tragedies in the lives of the ten talent men from the first, but not such tragedies of self-indulgence, of cru elty and of sin as stained the lives and wrecked the careers of these men of great brains and little souls. We cannot reckon any of these in the glorious com pany of those to whom the King com mitted ten talents. Not only so. Those ten talent men of whom the Lord speaks in the parable had no excuse to make such as have been made for Burns and Byron and the rest, but they with full hands met their Master, they heard His sweet words of commendation, they re- t t t ' fi-?-i1 rf "Hr'fiic i; ctill rlrnrrcrinor . , . . t1 -, T. mi if ceived further trusts, large and honora its length along the days. It will prob- L , . m . , , ' ably be a week before a verdict is ren dered. The most incriminating evidence given wti hin the last week was that Le-brun-Renault, who testified that on the duy of degradation Dreyfus had practi cally confessed guilt. There are two facts, however, which tend to weaken this evidence. One is that Renault did not report this confession to the proper ble, from His hands. When we lay the parable before us, and study its true meaning, do we not see that these true men of intellect, lead ership, genius, are rather one-sided men, and in fact, one talent men, who have hidden that talent in the earth ? Let us not, for the sake of a contrast, force this too far. We are ready enough to yield praise commensurate to their performance to all the great men who, being but men, The competence of Christ for his vo-cail-on, the mystery of. his person, the finality of the revelation which the world must owe to him and him alone, these are truths through which we must read everything in the gospel. Thy are the master light of all our seeing. It is a person who can say such things of him self who has, to use the convenient Ger manism which is still liable to be misun derstood in English, this self-consciousness who is the subject of everything the evangelists "have to tell. It is not an ordinary man of whom they write, one among the rest who can be distinguished only as being more truly and purely man than they. It is one who is conscious that he is alone among the rest, who can confront them as they cannot confront each other, who is really in some sense, in relation to men, in the same line with God. We do not know7 God unless we know Christ ; Christ belongs to the real ity in which God is revealed to man. It seems a pity to identify this truth, wdiich can be verified in experience with the Quicumqiie virft, or any such symbol. It provokes a needless antagonism to the New Testament teaching about Christ, and it does not contribute in the least to the understanding oi him. The same re mark would apply to what the New7 Testa ment tells us of the Holy Spirit. No one knows God truly who has not received the Spirit and had the Father revealed in the Son. This is what is meant by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one God. And this, too, is the catholic doctrine of the Trinity, the only doctrine of the Trinity which is generated by the New Testament and by Christian experience this, and not the formulae of the Athanasian Creed. The strong historical sense of Dr. San day's article is too much limited to his treatment of the evangelical documents; when it gets unrestrained play, it will prove more emancipating than he some times seems willing to allow. And the utmost freedom in relation to historical creeds will not affect in the least our pow7er to preach the gospel. There were no creeds when Jesus said : "All things have been delivered unto me by my Father. . . . Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." The British Weekly. The personal and practical test of Chris tianity is to try it. Pascal says : "Human objects must be known in order to be loved ; divine must be loved in order to be known." Christ may be known, and to know him is eternal life. 1 III i