The Birmingham age-herald., 1919-02-13
MEN, WOMEN
 AND THINGS

It is literally dollars or death,' as
 the cablegram puts it. This is the cry lands of the near east.
 Seventeen cents saves a life for day s5 for month and $60 for year. Do you want to get dividends, the best paying in the world, on your investment? If so God today gives you the chance to pay interest on our un- speakable debt to the holy land The worlds earliest stories of faith and faithfulness came out of Armenia , and Palestine, the very lands of the peoples so cruelty prosecuted for their faith at the present time. Today there is going on in Bible lands a persecution far more deadly than Noah had to en-
 dure There are terrible journeys, im- measurably harder than the one Abra- ham chose to take.
 The Armenians Syrians, Persians
 and Greeks. under the cruel heel of the Turk, have had their faith severe ly tested. The followers of Mahomet who hate our Christ and who would tear down the cross and erect the cres- cent. have driven His people out. killed their strong men, burned their villages, harried their farming lands. stolen their children. ravished their women
 
 guard into the desert where there is
 neither food nor shelter
 The importations of Belgians and French into Germany pale into insig nificance when contrasted with the horror and hopelessness of the ones ! carried out under the commands of the cruelest government on the face of
 the earth, by the hands of religious fanatics whose chiefest joy and greatest sport is in witnessing the sufferngs of the despised and despoiled follow CTS of the lowly Jesus who preached "peace and good will' while their great
 prophet relied on the sword.
 The Armenian and Syrian relief ilas become a well known phrase all over America, for we have read about it in the papers and ma gazines. we have heard about it from the pulpits and its appeal has echoed through all of our Sunday schools and then from time to time lecturers have come from abroad to tell us of what they have seen with their own eyes. None who heard Ambassador Morganthau can ever forget the pictures of abject woe
 and misery which he painted.
 To my dying day I will carry the sher. the returned missionary, who for
 more than score of years has seen the damnable work of the "unspeakabie Turk" and during the war the cool, organized villainy of Prussianism in partnership with the haphazard butch cries of the careless orientals-until he was forced to the admission that the | hirelinss of the 'blonde beast of Berlin" were more cruel than the hired assassins of the Sultan.
 We speak of a territory larger than | Armenia when we include the Bible | lands of the near east. We take in all l that country that we study about in 1 our Sunday schools It takes in Pales- tine, that whole reach of country in- cluding Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Naza- reth and Damascus. It reaches out to | the west and takes in the land of PauIs greatest work, where many Christian churches grew up and became strong,
 even in the face of great persecution. In talking about Armenia, Persia and Syria we are apt to overlook the fact that large body of Greeks havs | been at the mercy of the Musslumans and that they, too. have suffered un- 1 told indie mites and been put to death by the thousands The cities visited by the great Apostle to the Gentiles
 have felt the heavy foot of the con