Newspapers / The Christian Sun (Elon … / Aug. 28, 1907, edition 1 / Page 1
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ESTABLISHED 1844. GREENSEORO, N. 0., WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 1907. VOLUME L1X, is UMBER 33. All communications, whether for publica tion or pertaining to matters of business, should be sent to the Editor, J. 0. Atkinson, Elon College, N. C. SEEING THE JAMESTOWN. (Editorial correspondence.) Norfolk, Va., Aug. 24, 1907. Dear Christian Sun Readers: # I asked a friend once if he had ever heard Rev. Sam Jones preach'. He replied that he had at a distance and under great difficulties. On enquiring why the distance and why the difficulties, he said that the evangelist was holding a meeting near the banks of the Mis sissippi River and on the particular Sunday that he went to hear him, fish were biting fine and the disposition to fish overcame the great temptation to hear preaching, so he gave way to his native instinct and fished, though his temptation was satisfied in that he could hear preaching—afar off. Now it chances that the Jamestown Exposition is near the banks of about the finest fishing .grounds in this country and one who has the natural disposition to fish will with difficulty, I fear, yield to the temptation to see the Exposition. Some one said that George Washington-was a great man, but his mother was greater. The Exposition is great, but, when Spots and Trout bite in Hampton Roads and Ocean View the soul of a sensible person will be content to divide time between the great and that which is greater. Had you ever thought with what unlimited bounty a kindly providence had stored and stocked these waters? One of the first pic tures I remember seeing in the geography of my first school days was that of Indians in their canoes catching great hauls of fish from Chesapeake Bay. The Indian tribe is gone and this Exposition celebrates the 300th year since the white man began to drive them out and take possession, yet I have no doubt that there are more fish here now, and that greater quantities of them will be taken out this year, than were here when Captain John Smith and . Pocahontas indulged in their famous romance three centuries ago. Yesterday there were four great steaming fish vessels, dragging two long seins between them, manned with scores of fishermen and small boats, catching barrels of fish at a haul for the oil mills and fertilizer plants situated not far away. This says nothing of “pound” nets in numbers, and hundreds of men in small fishing whacks catching fish for the Norfolk market and the •express trade from this place. Of course it is conjecture, but I doubt not that there has been an average of more than a thousand pounds of fish daily from these waters for the past one hundred years—and still, the supply is bounteous, plentiful, unlimited. This is a provision of Providence little appre ciated by the millions who share its bounty and enjoy its beneficence. The Exposition is worth taking time and pains and means to come and see. In magni tude and in variety of buildings and exhib its, and in the expenditure of millions, it is not to be compared with Chicago or St. Louis. But what of that? No one person ever saw, even in a month’s stay, one-fifth of either of those, and no person in this busy year of 1907 is going to see one-tenth of this Jamestown. There was too much at Chicago and St. Louis. The volume and mass over powered one’s capacity to see and grasp. There is enough of the Jamestown to invite you to the conquest of comprehension. The situation is beautiful, the plan is admirable, and the execution is worthy, so that day by day, instead of fatigue and ennui, there is renewed desire to go and see again. The chief attraction and fascination for me—since I am neither an artist, a machinist, a me chanic nor a soldier—is the history in evi dence on every sideband taught in a thousand ways here—the history of our country’s an cient days, deeds and daring. Every build ing here writes or represents history. This whole out-lay is a sort of memorial volume to Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, their descendants, successors and the country they settled and developed. There is a hall on the grounds dedicated to History. With profit and delight/' one could spend a week in that small building looking at relics, ancient docu ments, precious heirlooms and colonial rec ords. From John Smith to George Washing ton is a period of our country’s progress and development too little known about and scarcely at all apprecaited—a period fraught with the most fiery and momentous events of all our history. That was a time that tried men’s souls and burned up the dregs of dross of a struggling, heroic people. That was a time when a brave race, by soibe sort of her culean effort, drove to their last lair a thous and fierce and barbarous tribes, subdued a wilderness, converted wild forests into fertile fields, and prepared a stalwart people to fight out their freedom and independence in blood and slaughter and death against the mightiest nation then or earth. We know too little of those early colonial days when a nation was in the making and a great Republic was in the pain and travail of an approaching birth. The Jamestown Exposition will certainly have served a most noble and profitable pur pose if perchance it may but emphasize the earlier periods of our national history and call us again to the means and methods by which a stalwart and sturdy race wsa made, and by which the mightiest republic on earth came to be in a three hundred years from a few struggling, starving colonists. The build ings here represent antique and colonial resi dences and architecture, and the effect is that of carrying you back a century or so to events you have read and about and wished, for the sake of your family and descendants, you had had a part in. (Some of us, you know, since we cannot be much of a living dog, wish for the sake of the living we were or had been a dead lion.) The States’ exhibits are very creditable. These are of present products for the most part. The fruits from West Virginia (apples especially), the cotton from Georgia, vegeta bles from Virginia, water melons from North Carolina, oranges, nuts, and grapeff from California, not only gladden the eye and grat ify the mind, but carry rejoicing to the heart and gratitude to the soul for the marvels, wonders and beneficence of this glorious and favored land. This land of America ought to build more churches, send more missionaries, do more for the gospel than any other land under the sun, for none is so favored, none so blessed of almighty God as this. Come to the Jamestown and see something of our rec ord and history in splendid, impressive, gor geous panorama—be grateful to the Giver of all good that He has so bountifully and abundantly blessed us. More anon. J. 0. A. PRIZE TO ELON COLLEGE STUDENTS. That is a high compliment which Dr. J. J. Summerbell pays our Southern Athens when he offers a prize of $75 for the best essay on the tenth commandment by an Elon student. Dr. Summerbell gives a prize also for the best essay on the first commandment by a student of Union Christian College of Merom, Indi ana. With the excellent collection of relig ious books in the Elon College Library, our young people liere ought to produce very creditable productions. As an incentive to scholarly research, this prize means much for our Elon students. But its greater meaning lies in the recognition thus accorded our in stitution by a man of eminent ability, wide reputation, and ripe scholarship. We of the South, who have longed and. labored and prayed that Elon College may be the institu tion it today is, thank God and take courage for the future from such recognition from such a source. Thank you, Dr. Summerbell. The situation in the Balkans is very per plexing. The trouble is between minor na tionalities. Servian .bands are raiding the Bulgarians in the northeast of Bulgaria, and they are also fighting the Greek marauders from the south, while the Turkish troops are keeping up war with all three. Meantime the Turks are making war also against Persia. Six thousand Turkish troops have crossed the line and have gone into Persian territory. Fifteen cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church have died in the last four years. ' *A DESTRUCTIVE CRITIC OF 2907. (To the Reader of 1907. Dear Brother: Although interested in the able writings of the higher critics of 1907, especially in their assumption of having dis covered something valuable, as if the “his torical method” were new in studying the Bible, I confess I became somewhat drowsy under their monotonous efforts to make the sacred writings seem to abound in misstate ments. But 1 gradually absorbed their genius and spirit, and seemed to become a destructive critic, though calling mvself a higher critic. While in this state of mind, sleepy though I was, I seemed to live rapidly through the centuries, century after century, until I found myself moving among scholars who dated their letters with the numerals, 2, 9, 0, 7. On seeming to be roused from a semi-con sciousness, and supposing that a thousand years had passed from the time I fell asleep under the dreary chanting about the mistakes of the Bible, I seemed to be walking among the fancied alcoves of my library, now in creased by the additions of a thousand years, and coming across the following correspond ence I give you the letters, believing that it may be interesting to the reader to observe how the reasoning of the future destructive critic (writing in 2907 of our times in the spirit in which the destructive critic of 1907 writes of Bible times) will make the condi tions of our generation to appear. If we of the year 1907 know something of the conclusions of the learned gentleman of 2907 to be false, whose letters I now reveal, or if his modes of reasoning are absurd, or if he lays stress on insufficient data in his logic, or, especially, if he is ludicrously given to denying the statements of eye-witnesses to the facts which we of our time know to be true, these faults must not be attributed to me: for I copy the letters and publish them exactly as I found them a thousand years before they were written. J. J. Summerbell.) Dayton, Ohio. •Copyrighted by The Christian Sun. All rights reserved. FIFTH Kinkade, New Zealand, 15, 9, 2907. My Dear Grandson, In my investigations concerning the year 1907, a thousand years ago, I myself discov ered among the ruins of New York, in the safe of a drug-shop, a number of papers. There were several thousand of them. They were not written in the language of the peo ple, but in Latin, and their meaning was therefore easily determined. As you know, thatf was an age of many sicknesses; and there was a trade or profes sion whose experts were trained to cure dis eases. They were called physicians. The age was so barbarous, that while thousands of men were trained to kill mankind, many others were trained to cure mankind. And the papers I found were the prescrip tions of physicians, which had been sent to the drug shop, and the medicines mentioned were sent to the homes of the sick, who were supposed to swallow them. The drug mer chants kept the prescriptions; and I found many thousands of them. A remarkable phenomenon was, that on every prescription, at the upper left hand corner, there was a character printed or written, composed of the capital letter, R, with an oblique line across the lower curve of the R, as though to cross out that part of the R. The meaning of this was for a long time impossible to discover. I searched among the ruins of the drug shops of Europe, back for many centuries, until I found that these prescriptions sometimes had the Latin word Rex at the upper left hand corner. That threw light on the subject. The R, with the lower curve crossed, was simply an abbrevi ation of Rex. Thus encouraged, I continued my search into still greater antiquity, until one day I found one prescription with these characters at the upper left hand corner: Jup. Rex. The meaning then was almost* certain; but I continued my search so needed by mankind, putting the historical method into use, until I found a prescription with these words fully spelled out: Jupiter Rex. Then I had the definite proof of what I had been for some years suspecting; that the letter R with the lower curve crossed was an abbreviation for Bex; and the word Rex, I which we all kndw is the Latin for King, was an address to the king (that is, a prayer to him), and that king was the Roman god, Jupiter. Each physician prayed to Jupiter when writing his prescription. But Jupiter was the husband of the goddess Juno. Hence, by the historical method we clearly arrive at the definite conclusion that the worship of Jupiter and Juno still pre vailed in America in the year 1907. Possibly journalists especially worshiped Juno, and physicians especially worshiped Jupiter. The light that my discovery threw on the conditions in America in 1907 made it easy to understand many other barbarisms of that age. Of course, you understand that in my pro longed search among the drug shops of Eu rope and America I found many other things throwing light on this besides the prescrip tions of physicians. But when I found that in America the worshipers were in the habit of offering burnt offerings I was really shocked. But this proof I must reserve for my next letter. Your affectionate grandfather, Higher Critic. Welcome to Strangers.—We often see this on our city churches. But the strangers some how don’t go to be welcomed. Their failure to go may be aeounted for in one of two ways —lack of interest on their own part or failure to be made to feel welcome when they have in the past visited such churches. A great deal has been written about the loss of religion by country people when they go to town and on the part of town people when they move from one town to another or to different sections of the same town. Now there must be a reason for this. Man is naturally a religious animal—there is in him a continual longing for a power, a person outside himself and higher than himself, for God. And the man who has religion would not surrender it for anything in the world. Why then this loss of religion ? From an investigation which has been made by Miss Toma A. Smith, a staff representative of the Ladies’ Home Journal, it would appear that one reason for this loss of religion is to be found in the fact that strangers are not made to feel welcome in churches where we find the sign, “Welcome to Strangers” ex posed to public view. Miss Smith has visited 150 churches North, West and South. In the current issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal she gives the results of her visits to 50 churches in New York, Boston, and Brooklyn. With a very few exceptions, her reception was stilted, if not repelling. Nor did she leave immediately after the sermon. She would linger in the aisles and was frequently the last to leave the church, and no one, not even God’s minister, had spoken a word to her. In short, she felt snubbed, unwelcome. We cannot prophesy what the result of her investigation of the meaning of such signs has been in the West and South. That will appear in the next two issues respectively of her magazine. We can only trust that the other sections of our common and beloved country have given the sign “Welcome to Strangers” an interpretation more in ac cordance with the Spirit of Christ. And if they have not, then we cannot lay the loss of religion at the feet of' the so-called losers. Brethren, this is a seAous matter. The sal vation of human souls is at stake. We must make strangers welcome at our churches or our churches will cease to grow, will eventu ally decay. Remember the fate of those to whom Christ said, “I was a stranger and ye took me not in.” Rev. John H. Barney, Clearville, Pa., is contemplating a visit south, as far as Elon College, N. C., where his son is in college. If there be openings for revival work, he would be glad to correspond with parties who may need his assistance.—Herald of Gospel Lib erty. Bro. Barney is well-known to our Southern brethren, being for many years a minister in our churches. Let all interested write Bro. Barney at once. Finding the vineyard uncongenial, the negro Holy Jumpers have jumped Richmond. . \ • \
The Christian Sun (Elon College, N.C.)
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Aug. 28, 1907, edition 1
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