The Newtown bee., 1900-05-04
 Year..

son, in the midst of great suffering being asked if he saw any special reason for the visitation, replied: sNo, but I am as we'll satisfied ss if I should zee ten thousand" "It was out of the cloud that the deluge came, yet it was upon it the bow was set. The cloud is a thing of darkness, yet God chooses it for the place where he bends the arch of light. Lest the gloom should appall us, he braids the cloud with sunshine and makes it the object which gleams to our eye with the fairest hues of heaven"
 Men are, and always have been, opin- ionated, and in nothing 80 strong as in their religious beliefs. Those who swag- gared about the cross, wagging their heads, saying: "If thou be the Son of God come down from the cross," were no more severe in their criticisms than are those who contend that their religious beliefs and observances are those only which God accepts.
 THAT CHALLENGE AT THE CROSS
 was the spirit of intolerance that has come down to, and which has been felt in great severity, in modern times. In the 17th century the Puritans fled from prosecutions in their own country, and sought freedom of conscience on the wild and barren shores of New England; and it is strange that the very men who had so recently brsved the perils of the sea and the priyations of bowling wilder ness should have begun their career with intolerance and persecution The non. conformists of England, during the reign of Elizabeth and the Stewards, wanted a purer form of religious worship than was adopted by the queen. They said: "If thou art the people Of God, come down from your high churchism, abridge your forms, put away your ritual and we will be brethren" George Fox believed his divine light was superior to all other lights, in fact the only true light; but this radical had his tongue bored through with an iron heated red hot in Puritanical fires,
 AAS ASkAS@SR3A Nh04@A S1S5 bO 011 OGA~ ers: If you would be of the true church, you must adopt our ritual, your minis ters must wear the surplice, make the Lords Supper exclusive, be good through Lent and maintain that the Episcopal order is essential to the constitution of the church. Calvin and his adherents say: If thou be the sons of God, come down from your beliefs and come to our religious standard of fore-ordinasion, and election-that God elects some to salvation and others to damnation re. gardless.of good or evil, ,as the foundation of divine arbitration. The Baptists march out that Damascus gate, up on to the highway of fdenominationalism where stand the crosses of all other evangelical churches, and they seem to think that the Baptist cross is the only true cross in the world, and so they say: If thou be the followers of Christ, come down from your crosses and come into the church through our initiatory rites, bap- tism by immersion, which ia the appli- cation of the candidate to the water and not the water to the candidate.
 The Methodist Episcopal church thinks she has the best religious system in the world. That there is little more effi- cacy in her cross than there is in all other crosses combined. That 1t was on the Methodist cross that the great victory over the fl ssh, the world and the devil was achieved. They believe that the sys- tenn of the Episcopacy and the presiding eldership,t the class meeting, full member ship from probation, pastoral itinsracy and altar service constitute machinery which does the largest amount and the finest kind Of work for God. They be- lieve that their communion atable repre-