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Show SCRATCHING FOR POPULARITY. Was there ever a time since Apostolic days when men, presumably learned, permitted themselves to be carried away by an unreasonable desire for popularity, popular-ity, like unto the days we are now living in? Denominational De-nominational preachers, university professors and magazine swashbucklers are diseased with microbes of popularity and are delving into Hindu, Chinese, Persian and Arabic literature with the hope of finding find-ing something new and startling. It is an age of religious iconoclasm, when all that our fathers taught us, all that the prophets revealed to us and all the religious traditions of the past, are ruthlessly ruth-lessly laid upon the dissecting table of irreverence and subjected to the knife of rationalism and deism. The methods of dissection contradict all established estab-lished rules of surgery and violate the first laws of even independent anatomy. It is confidenty asserted by many in high places of authority that we may retain re-tain our faith in Christianity though we no longer believe the ancient documents embodying the underlying un-derlying facts of our belief. In the same breath we . j are told to believe in Christ, but to discredit al most everything He is reported to have said or which is said about Him in the Sacred Scriptures. To normally rational men it would seem impossible impos-sible to dispute the claim that Christianity is a revealed re-vealed and historical religion. For the Protestant or the unbeliever the underlying facts are contained in a book which their fathers worshiped, as the equatorial negro his fetish, and which book they called, the Word of God, the Good Book or the Bible. Bi-ble. The Bible is largely history. The Christ of the Bible and the Christ, whom Catholics adore as the Son of God, is not the product of the imagination imagina-tion of our times, but a sacred person who lived in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago, and the records rec-ords of whose life were all written' in the first century cen-tury of our era. They were written by men who altered al-tered the course of human events for all time, who surrendered their lives in proof of the sincerity of their faith in the Resurrection and God-head of Jesus Christ, and who bequeathed to future generations gen-erations a legacy of good works and a heroism unparalleled un-paralleled in the annals of history. There are not in existence ten authentic sentences sen-tences recording the life and speech of our Divine Lord which were not recorded by his contemporaries and incorporated by them in their own writings in the New Testament. The only portrait which we have of our Blessed Redeemer was painted by those who had looked upon Him ''in life, listened to His words, broke bread with Him, saw Him call the dead from their graves and companioned for forty days with Him ! after He had risen from the tomb. That which they had seen and heard they have declared unto w xney were not m search of popularity, and we will accept their word rather than give heed to the men who are today denying Christ "come in the flesh" and trying to be somebodies. For us. to permit these modern critics inflated in-flated with their own importance, to erase the Anos- "7. WiU' ana 8UDSt"ute tor them their own opinions and the verbal vaporings of a proud mentality, men-tality, would be as absurd and suicidal as for the custolians of the Vatican gallery of art to allow' a house painter to remove the matchless paintings-of paintings-of Raphael and hang up his own daubs. Their attacks at-tacks on the Bible and revealed doctrines have not even the attraction of novelty to recommend them The pagan philosophers of the fourth century, Maxunus, Celsus and Porphyrius, the French and German rationalists of the eighteenth century and I thl Enhsh and Scotch scoffers of a later date, have exhausted the resources of free thought and of a perverted ingenuity in their attack on Christianity. Celsus, wath the effrontery of Lucifer and the au-dacity au-dacity of Martin Luther, wrote an infamous book against the personality and divinity of our Re-Werner, Re-Werner, marshalling, in his audacious - attack on Chrramty, all the arguments and sophisms now drawn upon by modern f reo-thinkerg. Eeadinir the introduction of his "Fair Statement one would think he was listeninff to Professor Elint cr David ttarr Jordan lecturing to humanity at lorcc. "r nm bound as a philosopher writes Colsu, "to take man out of their errors etc "The religion of " the future will be," etc, says Dr. Eliot. "Ttaum mind," Starr Jordan tells us, "is still bound with the shackles of a hide-bound creed," etc. And there you are. Will they never give us a rest ? |