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Show GLOOM. A street preacher with the gift of gab and a straggly beard held forth on our streets last week, presenting to a small-sized audience a harangue intended to lead men away from wickedness into paths of righteousness and uprightness. His talk was rather rambling, controversial and somewhat vindictive, and he seemed nettled that nnne of hia hearers would enter into any debate with him upon the subject of religion. He denounced hypocrisy, he condemned sham and with special eagerness sought to convince his hearers that the world was all awry. Numerous scriptural citations and quotations quo-tations from other sources were employed to show human deficiencies, and he charged the clergy of the Christian churches with exploiting and fostering foster-ing beliefs which cannot be logically defended. ' The street preacher is a type which periodically makes its appearance and departs again no man knows whither. The late Alexander Dowie furnishes fur-nishes an exception to the rule. He attracted a body of followers and built up a great colony, but his success may be attributed more to chance and a spectacular dialectic style than to a strong presentation pre-sentation of the truth. Personally we have no objection to the street preacher type. True, they are men of not well balanced mentality usually, and their views of the particular phase of the religious question to which they give attention are sometimes startling, yet we are impelled to enter a mild protest to the gloom which pervades their presentation of Christianity, Chris-tianity, no matter how unconvinced or ' convinced we may be of their sincerity or of the truth of their adroit sophistry. It may be stated as almost a truism tru-ism that when a man gets upset in his religious convictions he conceives it his first duty to upset everybody else. Thus the fellow who is convinced that God's footstool is a failure goes about with apologies for the handiwork of the Almighty, and every time he gives utterance to his dismal sentiments sen-timents his conviction becomes stronger. Failure has no attractions to anybody normally constituted, and to impute failure as the result of the creative work of the Author of the Universe is as near I I blasphemous as is the questioning doubt of unbelievers. unbe-lievers. In the first place, religion is a normal aspiration aspira-tion of the heart and mind of man. It has been pointed out by so many writers that among even the races lowest in our scale there exists a religious re-ligious instinct that there is no room for controversy. contro-versy. Christianity is the true religion, amply demonstrated by the progress and enlightenment which humanity under its benign influence has made. While there is much unbelief in the world, still the race, and even those doubting ones, are absolutely ab-solutely under the domination of the conditions which the church of God imposes. Mankind without with-out God could not progress. As we could not go some place without starting somewhere, it is evident evi-dent that our destination and our destiny must be fixed by something immovable, some power or force outside of yet intimately connected with man. This power guides the planets in their course, yet marks the sparrow's fall. This power is God, the Creator and Ruler of all things. What the Great God has wrought it is net for mortals to find fault with. He gave U3 the earth as a temporary habitation, and it is a good place to live. It is a cheerful place, too, if we can overlook the discomforts mankind man-kind imposes on itself. So in the presentation of Christian principles it is well to seek the positive and hold before the world the cheerful optimism which characterized the Son of God rather than the gloomy despair which has been written into the religion of mankind man-kind by mankind itself. The error of the street preacher type is too much pessimism, too much harangue, too much misinterpretation of God and God's work. Before entering into the solemn work of teaching, the type needs to learn to be a child of God, taught and schooled in the atmosphere of love which came down from heaven and surrounded surround-ed the ministrations of the Savior. Gloom is not religion. It is not any part of religion. Effective work of any kind starts in the joy of life which makes the birds sing and makes the innocence of childhood so admirably beautiful. |