davidaulloa/AmericanStories huggingface dataset:
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

bers. 1. e.. those who read the denomna- tional papers and know something of de- nominational history and prowess. These are party men and women. earnest and loyal, generally with one of two minis ters in their family history, guardian spirits of the old affinitiesi These are they who concentrate on the Sunday school and the prayer meeting fill various offices with steadfastness and are judges of orthodoxy and sermons. And yet they form but small proportion of the church membership and though their conviction carries the spineless indifference of the majority as a breeze carries autumn leaves.
 Now there Is undoubtedly spirit work ing on all these varioos clements, and a social pressure impelling them towards effective unity For so many years isn't it at least 23 or 24 since the Lam- beth conference 1.-the idea of unity, of the full reunion of Christendom. has been under discussion, and all elements have felt the motive and admired 1t. Indeed, one must go back much further all the way back to the Tractarian controversy in the middle of the last century, to discover how very deep the yearning for unity has been and for how long it has sought expression. The old Tractarian leaders were searching for comprehen- sive church, more satisfying in It's uni versatility than the episcopalian establish ment which hitherto was theirs. Hence that first Lambeth conference was legitimate offspring of the earlier move ment, was a resultant indeed of those forces known in England as High" "Broad' and Low church. Sidd by side, moreover, with the wonderful sue cess of the ritualistic or High" church movement, which notably vivif1ed and re- stored moribund village services, was the enormous spread of free church princi- ples, and the rapid increase of wealth and members and culture In the rank and file of those non-conformists, the hitherto greatly despised "dissenters."
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13
T HEBREW TRADITION-By J. C. Hidden, D.

the ancient Semitic systems of name formations.
 Of our authors work as wh ole there will scarcely be more than one opinion as to it's ability and learning To be sure, there are, here and there, points upon which cannot agree with his conclusions; and even as to the
 validity of some of his processes of reasoning l find myself In more or less serious doubt. But at all events the
 book is a red-hot shot thrown into the very citadel of the advanced" school of "divisive" critics, as represented by Wellhausen, Knenen, Driver and Cheyne. They will find it easier to sheer at 1t than to answer 1t.
 On page 2p our author draws flne parallel, with which I will close this short review:
 Tt was once the fashion to declare that all passages in Arabian poetry of the period prior to Mohammed, in which the word Allah (GodD, properly al-ilahu- the God; q. e.. the one God) occurred. must ipso facto be classed as later inter
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

eloquence of the Hon. Joe cost the dem- ocratic party the governorship of Ohio
 And so Randall beat Joe in the eau GUS and became the speaker of the Forty sixth Congress. Randall was al- ways for retrenchment and economy and to those ends he selected John D. c. Atkins of Tennessee as chairman of appropriations. He was an admi- rable man, true as the needle to the pole, and nature might stand up and say to all the world, Here Is an honest man." the salt of the earth and the noblest work of God.
 Atkins was born to public life. After serving in both houses of Tennessee s legislature he was elected a member of the Thirty fifth Congress. He served in the Confederate army and in the Confederate senate. Later he was a member of the national House of Rep resentatives 10 years. There was never a man who sought to serve his coun- try more faithfully.
 And speaking about Kentucky, I'll tell you an anecdote on "Old Bill' Morrison, one of the very great men
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

h7 HE Forty-sixth Congress. as were
 the Forty fourth and Forty
 \ fifth, was democratic in political complexion, though Uncle Holman, whom Charles A. Dana dubbed the Great Objector," and suggested for President, was defeated for seat. The ostensible paramount was the steal ing of the presidency by the party that, from inception to the present. has been the bastard issue of an incestuous Jason of the parvenue and the Phar- isee. That is where all this devilment that plaques this country comes from the republican party It Is Caught with the goods on."
 eWll, the paramount being the iniquity of the rape of the presidency, Sam Randall was elected speaker. Either John G. Carlisle of Kentucky or John F. House of Tennessee could have beat en him In the democratic caucus, but Morrison, man of iron will, selected Joe Blackburn, and got beat, because Joe had delivered himself of that hy- perbole abouts The who dallies himself and he who doubts Is damned" It Is tradition, perhaps history. that that
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

success is ignoble.
 Ignoble success is only successful fail ure
 Successful success-real success-is mo- ble success.
 At the age of 80 years Mrs. Amy D. Winship of Racine, Wis. has begun her second year in the college course al Ohio State university. "W-h-a-t!" you~say.
 Yes, at 80 years of age. A year ago she went to Columbus, took the exami- nations and was admitted.
 She took an optional course in liter ature, languages and science. This year she will study philosophy, sociol- ogy and literature. making a speciality of Shakespeare.
 And why not?
 She Is widow, has plenty of money and all her, life has regretted the fact that she did not have a college educa- tion.
 It is never too late!
 Sophocles wrote his masterpiece at 80. Goethe finished Faust" in his sgd year. Lord Lyndhurst made brilliant
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

fore the time of Abraham--the whole of Syria, Phenicia, and a great part of Arabia were under the direct influence of Babylonian civflization-an tnfiu- ence the permanent effect of which can hardly be overestimated, and from which the nomadic and semi-nomadic elements therein were certainly not ex- empt." See page 3S. 4
 Professor Hommel believes that great deal of valuable history is to be found In names. Indeed. a large part of his learned work Is devoted to this branch ot investigation. Hear him on this point:
 we have been able, for instance, to prove that the system of name forna- ton which we find in the South Arabian inscriptions was already in existence at the beginning of the second millennium before Christ, and that the numerous per- sonal names ascribed to patriarchal and Mosaic times were in general use at this very period q. G., 2000 years before Christi. and could not have been invented in or after, the time of the Kings. when totally different system of nomsncla- ture obtained-and thrown back into an-
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13
LIKE A MIGHTY ARMY-By George Eaves, D. D.

thinking out plans for federation The Rev. Charles Brown, who has so far been accepted as a representative man as to have passed through the chair of the Baptist union last year. is advocating tie enlargement of rural churches of that denomination, and the increasing of their usefulness by tine simple process Of ac- eepting as members such of their non- immersed neighbors as are desirous Of their fellowship. He goes further, and for the sake of the common liberty would permit the practice of infant baptism within such rural churches, though some other than a Baptist minister might be needed to administer that ritel But If my old fellow-student Is willing to go so far, and can carry the Baptists Of English villages with him therein, how much longer will 1t be before they will have made the next step and have bred a generation of pastors perfectly willing to go beyond MT. Brown and themselves baptise the babes? And yet these ad- vanced Baptists will be greatly to the front in the forthcoming worlds congress of the denomination. Clearly the whole of that congress will feel responsive to the movement towards effective unity. Clearly too, the inspiration of that move- ment is no mere vulgar lust for members, but a sincere purpose to meet the need of the whole church, especially of It's non-B Exquisite Nbranches and individuals.
 Perhaps the most striking instance of the same spirit yet developed on this con- tinent, outside of the remarkable Union project still developing in Canada, was the action of the triennial convention of the Protestant Episcopal church in Cin- cinnati. The resolution and message to other denominations unanimously adopted deplores that church's 'grief for our aloofness in the past and for other faults of pride and self-sufficiency which make for schism." The resolutions pave the way for great council on unity, in which uniformity is less considered. On all sides 1t may be said that the dream of
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

away into the unseen holy I should have
 had more enjoyment of him and made
 his days more pleasant" Would you? With the black cloud of certain be-
 reavement hanging over his head and yours. could you have enjoyed the inter yening days? Ask yourself that. Had
 you known the fatal day you would have 1, been a mourner all the interval. | Meroiful veil! The limitations of our knowledge save us. If we could read the horoscope of the future we might be appalled, by the revelations.
 If you could foresee what is to be. either your eagerness to enjoy the com ing happiness or your dread of the com ing sorrow would sadly unfit you for the sober duties of your everyday life. The secret of the future would put a great unrest in your life. And it might turn your brain. With such tremendous revelation 1t would be impossible to live your accus- toned life. Would you. anxious mother. really like
 to know the future of your baby? Do you say yes? f..S ..f .a.ssaH Suppose that vision of the days to come
 showed little white coffin! No what is to be Is wisely hidden. If the dread of an uncertainty some- times makes sore the heart within us. what would be the monstrous dread of a certainty? faith. As Whittier says: know not where his islands lift Their fronded palms In air. x only know cannot drift Beyond his love and care.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

tiquity retrospectively."
 This is one of the most powerful ar guments in the whole book. To us il seems unanswerable. Careful readers o1 the Bible may have been struck with the great number of personal names beginning or ending with the syllable "el." or with the syllable 'iah," or 'jah.'' Eli. Daniel. Michael, are examples ot the first Isiaiah, Azariah, Jeremiah, of the second; while the name Elijah com bined them both. The reason for all this is obvious The word ''EP' Is the He brew word for God. and 'Jah." or 'Iah'' Is the word for Jehovah" the covenant God of Israel.
 Now. the question, When were sucn words first used in the ancient his tory of ,name formations?" is one which evidently has a material bearing upon the religios history of the ancient Se- lnitic races. People who did not be- lieve in one God and did not worship the covenant God of Israel. would not name a child Samuel" nor Elijah. Such. in brief. is the general character of Professor Hommelrs argument from
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

Not only would uniformity kill much that Is living and valuable, but the united church would be the chief loser by such a killing. It is hard, for in- stance, to see that recent acts of union in the Presbyterian churches of Scotland and of these states would not have great lv improved tner speed by first becom- ing a federation in each instance. Jonah stuck in the whales throat.
 The same should have been said in South Africa where projected union movement has just gone glmmering, ap- parently because a common confession and organization was reclkoned prelimi- nary to practical partnership. At first the Dutch Reformed church. the Presby- terian, the Wesleyan Methodist, the Con- gregationalist and the Baptist churches sought corporate union. But the nation ality question was acute at the time, and the Dutch church declined to proceed. The Wesleyans discussed the proposals and declared for federation instead. A new basis of union was then laid before the other three bodies, a most excellent doctrinal summary of the evangelical faith, and the three church groups in yoived sent delegates to Kimberley to discuss the matter. There they had a vision of remarkable beauty, which chas- tened their souls; but though the polity then adopted was frankly Presbyterian, the general assembly itself, met at Johan- nesburg has "shelved the question for a generation" by a vote of 20 to fl. Not an hour passed by however, before the out side Christian public began to condemn the decision, and the mayor of Johannes burg, himself a Jew, told the preachers that they had made a mistake. Some thing was possible when for the sake of unity those self-sufficient people, the Bap- tists were willing to come under Presby- terian modes of polity! But the dominant feeling was that something distinctive, the Presbyterian personality, was going to be lost.
 In England the relatively large bodies of Baptists and CongregationaliSts are
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

In his simple and guileless way, and without an atom of malice, he said Randall is an honest man. I know that, but in his last days, the rich fcllSs of Pennsylvania made up a purse of tens of thousands of dollars and gave 1t to him and he accepted 1t. I am not that sort of honest man. No- body can give me anything other than for value received.
 Mckinley is an honest man; served with him long enough to know that but he got into speculative enterprises and failed for $100,000, and MT. AIark Hanna raised a fund and paid him out. am not that kind of honest man, either.'
 And thereby hangs a tale as we'll That right when "Old Bill' and I sat until the sun was in the heavens the next June morn he told me how as a frolic he had volunteered to fight in the Mexican war He related his experiences In the cam paign, and the story was immensely in- teresting. He told me about his oppos- ing with all his might the war between the states and that he had no idea of en- gazing in the struggle until first Bull
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

imagination, to start new questionings.
 to require perchance new definition of long-used catch words. Whatever others
 may mean by their confession of faith in "The Holy Catholic church," these
 English protestants, sectaries, if you will, and churchmen, too, were being com
 pelled to seek that church within their
 own bodies and even beyond, in other
 bodies dissimilar from their own.
 He would be very short-sighted and
 prejudiced person who would find in the
 present movement for the reunion of the
 churches a movement backward to the mediaeval ideal Rather, 1t is a move ment forward toward a something larger than any church, a prophetic anticipa-
 ton of conditions, social and political
 which will be ushered in more and more
 definitely with succeeding ages.
 One incidental proof of this is the new
 sense of variety as a necessary element of the reunited church. SuggesJ ons for
 unity have generally been disguised types of Jonah's sea-monster who sought in purblind way to establish unity with
 Jonah. But the prophet, though a run away prophet, was by no means a rene gade Hebrew, and his Hebrew psalter proved too much for the Gentle prag-
 matist. who forthwith sought the shall lows and yielded to the emetic! Convic-
 tions are hard to digest, especially the other mans convctionsl And when att tractive schemes have been unfolded for some one church to absorb all the others as a means of unity, this has been for gotten. An old songs says
 "If all the world were of one religion Many a living thing would die" Just sol Jonah must either leave the whales belly or succumb to his environ
 ment. Providentially the whale is forced
 to agree to that solution of a problem
 which is his as well as his guests.
 There will be more harmony between
 him and Jonah when Jonahs psalms are
 q =ghnra
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

TT is night, and without there Is
 a chill wind soughing about the x house corners; but within there is warmth and comfort. Would that l had the power to make the homes of the very poor as warm as my study IS this cold autumnal night. have come from a home of sickness, and am now at my desk, surrounded by hundreds of my old friends, my books. How dearly I love them, and what tides or associations arise as I look upon first one and then another. This one was presented to me by friend who passed a out into the spirit world long ago. an- other marks happy Christmastide; still another, some joyful anniversary; vet others the affection of members or parishes of other days; some l nave Inherited, and the greater number l have bought. Some of the most val : uable I purchased at old secono-nand hook shops taking them from their lowIy surroundings and giving them place among my most valued friends on my shelves.
 Nv hooks represent different lan- ages among the ancient tongues, He- brew, Greek and Latin; and among modern languages German, French, Spanish and, of course, English. I have a beautiful copy of Brandreth's Homer "cum notis apud" and few books re- moved therefrom Is a fine edition Of Don Quixote, in Spanish.
 Some of my book friends are very old. A few were printed in seventeen hundred and something. One contains the autograph of Bishop Heber, the au- thor of the immortal hymn, From Greenland's Icy Mountains" Although this volume is nothing like so old as many others, value 1t because of the good bishops signature.
 A number of my books were written by persons whom I have known for many years and whose warm friend ship I have long valued and cherished. I read them with keen pleasure and seem to be hearing my friends voices and looking into their eyes while so doing.
 My books form curious hodge,
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

speech in parliament on the eve of his seth birthday. Lady Grey became an artist when she was an old woman. Age is of the brain. Men and women, like certain trees, begin dying at the top. or course youth and healthfuiness are laregly conserved by attention to
 the physical side of nature; but. given q good constitution The spring of life Is in the brain. The mastery of the life forces is in the gray matter in the brain pan. If you excite the brain cells you quicken
 the circulation of the blood and thus
 nurture the vit9l organs. give supple ness to the muscles, pliability to the
 arteries, light to the eyes-in a word. healthfulness.
 So says science. Therefore if you would stay the forces that break down life keep young mind. Prevent habit and cus-
 tom from incasing your free spirit. Be
 captain on deck of your own vessel
 Master your body from headquarters. Mrs. Winship will live longer be- cause of her youthful purpose.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

WVHE singing of Christian hymns
 probably helps to keep alive the ~ poetic susceptibilities of the race in these hard-driving. mathematical days. Who can join in the more or less musical utterance of such words as, Lead Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom" or that wonderfully soul-clutch- ing line, 70, lovefhat will not let me go, without coming in some degree into sym pathy with those saintly poets and great men. Newman and Math eson? Hence 1t Is a serious loss to American Christianity that the choir has a monopoly Of the singing and that even the so-called service of praise has generally become irksome, or devolved on soloists and choirs. Is 1t because the average as- sembIy of intelligent people knows that it eanot sing that 1t stands mute. So far as 80 per cent of it's individuals are con cerned, when the audience stands to sing? Is 1t not partly because they one and all think of themselves as an ''audience" that Is listeners, not worshipers? And may there not be also a deep lurking suspicion that to sing, or try to sing the average hymn involves a sort of in- sincerity? Who really believes, for in- stance, such words as:
 When we asunder part
 It gives us inward pain?"
 AnQl even the more COlOrlesS eHpressloHS ot faith and love: Are they sincere? can they be made sincere? Who feels the poignancy of these Christmas words:
 Brightest and best of the sons of
 the morning
 Dawn on our darkness and lend us
 thine aid"
 Evidently the poets work Is first to rouse in men the sense of his own veracity before he can lead them to sing his words with self-respect. Worship Is largely a matter of mood of mental aloofness and self contemplation, self-deprecation-I mean, modesty and humility consonant with self-respect It is not every "wor- shper who worships. Nevertheless when a man sings the children's march
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

polations. At present, however, when thanks to the evidence of the later Sa- baean inscriptions-it becomes every day
 more certain that hundreds of years be- fore the time of Mohammed both Judaism and Christianity had taken root and found acceptance in various places in Arabia;
 scholars are beginning to abandon the hasty conclusions of 10 years ago in favor of the accepted opinion of the day. The
 same thing will happen in connection
 with the criticism of the Pentateuch.
 Had the beginning of the Israelite re- ligion really been mixture of fetichism and ancestor-worship. these beginnings
 would have left their impress upon the language, and could have been detected by the method of comparative philology. It becomes, however clearer every day that the Semites-and more particularly
 the western Semites-had from the be-
 ginning a much purer conception of the deity than was possessed by any of the
 other races of antiquity and critics of the Old Testament can no longer afford ! to shut their eyes to this fact"
The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13

success.
 And, looking back on his life, Senator Smith is free to say 1t was his mothers constant suggestion, which would not per init him to doubt, that made him what he Is.
 Here is a lesson, mothers:
 If you have a boy in whose future sue cess you believe. who is capable of suc- cess
 Make him believe in himself.
 Do not let him spend useful time 1T fighting doubts.
 If could only know!"
 What a desire we mortals have tc penetrate the mysteries of the future We are always trying to peer through the veil that thinly intervenes between us and the eternities, seeking to fathon the unknowable.
 The fortune teller and the palmist find their vacations because of that vain hope.
 God has hidden the future from mortal vision.
 And wisely 50.
 But some will say, of had only known my dear one was to pass so soon