544 And "The Jewish-Christian.” TREASURER'S REPORT, WARSZAWIAK MISSION TO THE JEWS IN NEW YORK. Months of August, September and October, 1899. Mission Rent, two months.. Janitor and Cleaning. Fuel and Lighting... Expenses of Dr. Patterson, counsel. Postage, Exchange and Printing.. Missionary Assistants. Charity Total Disbursements, three months. $ 200.00 39.30 9.16 10.00 4.56 333.90 31.00 1.00 628.92 Total moneys Received from August 1st, to October 361.21 Excess of Disbursements over Receipts (these three 267.71 Previous Excess of Disbursements up to July 31st, as 1,191.46 Total Excess of Disbursements to July 31st........ $1,459.17 AN IMPORTANT SUGGESTION TO DONORS. It is both just to the benevolent public and expedient for the Mission, that all donations and appropriations should appear on the books of the Treasurer, and to this end, they should pass through his hands, whether intended as personal gifts or for general expenses: (although the detail of donations is never published, but is reported privately to the donors, on a printed slip). The published reports of the Treasurer are the only means by which the benevolent can form any estimate of the actual necessities to which they wish to contribute. But these reports are useless, unless they are COMPLETE, and unless they are closely watched by donors to see whether their funds are judiciously and economically distributed, or otherwise. Donors should understand that there is no safer or speedier way to get special personal gifts into the hands they are intended for, than by remitting them (by cheque or postal money order-not in currency) to the order of the Treasurer; who is, for the present, Their obedient servant, WM. COWPER CONANT. No. 466 West 151st Street, New York. "Salvation." A Call for Determined Action. THE DUTY OF THE HOUR. "Can ye not discern the signs of the times?" "The duty of the hour" is a hackneyed expression, but it is one of immense significance at the present crisis in Christian Missions: a peculiar crisis, that confronts certain leading Christians, especially of New York, in their relation to 300,000 Jews gathered here by the Master to receive the Gospel and by thousands looking for it under the influence of the Holy Spirit. It was not always thus. Some excuses seemed pertinent that are now swept away. Hitherto, missionaries had "toiled all night and had taken nothing." One brilliant preacher had indeed gathered great audiences of Jews; but that seemed due to singular eloquence and personal force, and seemed, also, to suffice for itself. In the inscrutable providence of God, defamation was one day permitted to prevail and cast down the gifted evangelist. Warszawiak ceased to be a name to conjure with-so that it might give place to the name of Christ. Then, then, appeared "the sign of the Son of Man," in the sky of Israel!—and there it hangs in sight of all men today, as it has throughout the years of the eclipse of his once bright star. Do you see it, brethren? If not, go down to 424 Grand Street, of a Friday night, and explain, if you can without looking upward, the concourse of listening Jews whom no man draws together-for the absence of Warszawiak for weeks and even months at a time, has never diminished it in the leastJews, too, such as, lately, no man could have approached with the Gospel but at peril of personal outrage. What does this mean? Is it not awful, as well as marvellous, in your eyes? If not, perhaps you might strike out of your creed the item "I believe in the Holy Ghost." But you do believe: and The Duty of the Hour is to understand what the "sign" means for you in a special and peculiar imperative. True, you are busy already in the Master's service. Some of you feel that you have all that you can do, and that the utmost that is possible further is to give your "names" for this cause, and perhaps allow it to squeeze into some corner among the 546 The Duty of the Hour. incidentals of your parish, pastoral and missionary work. But the crisis calls for much more than that; no corner, but a large new place. Make room, make room for it! It is the crisis of Israel's redemption to be now begun-by us Gentiles, as the Word has said. It is the Lord Christ, as good as visible in it, calling "Follow Me!" If there is not room for this among the chief at least of your undertakings, room should be made for it at the expense, temporarily, of some other things that can better be deferred than this unparallelled opening of the Kingdom. Make room-make room! If you can give nothing better than dole and commendation in such a crisis as this, may God have mercy on you! There are yet other "signs of this time" set before you by special providences of God. When, through the summer of 1897, the Warszawiak Mission lay trampled in the dust and forsaken, its belongings cast into the street and carted away, and its late premises, at 424 Grand Street, leased and occupied by a firm of Jewish merchants-how did it arise out of its ashes? "The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no judgment. And He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor; therefore His arm brought salvation unto him, and His righteousness, it sustained him" (Is. lix:16). Some said, "It is a pity." One said, "By God's help it shall not be!" There was one secret prayer and vow; providentially answered in a wonderful way, enabling very poverty and weakness to lift up the tabernacle of Jacob that was fallen down, and to set it up until a few of its routed lovers were called back to its help. And so it has been still mysteriously upheld, amid the deadliest rage of enemies, until this hour in which the foes are overthrown and an era of glorious opportunity opens before the Mission; while its special support ceases providentially as it began, and it falls back upon your hands. Meanwhile, the God of Israel set a peculiar seal of Providence on the very spot where the Mission had been trampled down. The premises had been leased and occupied by a firm of Jewish merchants, for a Grand Street branch of their larger business elsewhere. Every present indication prescribed a new beginning of the Mission at some new and unknown stand. But suddenly the merchants found their plans providentially frustrated. After only two months of occupation, they were glad to surrender their lease to the Mission they had supplanted, which now returned to its A Call for Determined Action. 547 place, with renewed activity and success. Following this signal providence, the work of the Holy Spirit on the Jews immediately became manifest in the re-occupied sanctuary, as it is to this day, constantly overflowing with eager listeners, irrespective of who might be the speaker; though Mr. Warszawiak himself had left it, in November, 1897, for a long and ill-starred European tour; hunted there and hunted back, and hunted here again, until all but deprived of breath. Again: Besides the unparallelled opening of salvation to God's covenant people, by Providence and work of the Spirit, there are also helps now held out contingent on your effectual action. You already know whence a strong foundation will be laid down for the house of the John Hall Memorial Mission to the Jews, provided that Mission be undertaken responsibly, by an organization of a permanent nature, pledged to carry it through with measures not tentative and hypothetical, but determined. This done, hundreds hitherto passive in doubt or discouragement, will spring to join in a movement which they may "know is not in vain, in the Lord." Then, too, your organizing agent (already waiting for the work) will be able to fill this land and the English-speaking world with local auxiliaries holding forth the call of salvation to Israel, among the Gentiles, and gathering their offerings-"for their debtors they are" to multiply as well as strengthen and expand the tents of New Zion far and near. WORTHY OF NOTE. We often wonder at the extraordinary quality of a single number of a periodical, and have even been deceived, by such a phenomenon, into a continuance of particular attention to the periodical so distinguished, until experience proved that "one swallow does not make a summer" in periodicals or authors, any more than in the weather. The Homiletic Review is, indeed, often remarkable; but we note the October number as especially rich in several articles; among which, we would call attention to the forceful and ringing challenge of the so-called higher critics, by Rev. E. F. Burr, D.D., as in effect enemies of the cross of Christ, and destroyers, from the root, of the Bible and the Christianity which they profess-no matter how sincerely-to feel the profoundest solicitude to savefrom itself! Dr. Burr admits that there are conservatives who use softer words and smoother hands in contention with this foe, but "Some of us," he says-and we are with him-"incline to defend ourselves and our valuables with hard blows and steel gauntlets. Accordingly we do not hesitate to give the new criticism a bad name. We impeach it before God and man as a mischief of the worst kind. To us it is an ax smiting at the root of the Christian tree; the comprehensive heresy that includes all the heresies; the boastful guide that, hand in hand with rationalism and natural evolution, takes the straight road to infidelity and atheism and the midnight regions beyond. To be sure, all travelers on a road do not travel it to the end. All people slipping down a precipice do not go at once to the bottom: some catch at various outgrowths from the face of the rock and hang there precariously till they die; but many will find their way quite to the bottom whither all are heavily gravitating, and will die there-wrecks. So we say and so we think. Accordingly we regard the higher criticism as a menace to Christendom and humanity, and are immensely sorry to see it get favor in any degree and in any quarter." If any earnest defender of the faith would borrow a counter blast against the impossible concord alleged between the "higher criticism" as we have it, and belief in Christ or the Gospel of Christ, let him try the pages that follow the above extract. There is no middle space and neutral zone for compromise or parley with this "comprehensive heresy of heresies;" nor is this a time for ambiguous courtesies and indistinct or wavering lines, between the two sides of the mortal debate. Further, for solid ammunition, one may refer, in the same number of the same magazine, to the review of archæological exploration in Bible lands, by Lieutenant-Colonel C. R. Conder, England; himself one of the most successful explorers of material remains and monuments, and better still, a successful discoverer of the concord that prevails between genuine relics of fact and the recorded times of Hebrew history and Revelation. We should not omit mention of the remarkable sermon at Northfield, by Rev. B. F. Meyer, of London, on "Christians as rivers of living water" (John vii:38), published in the same number. |