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Published Weekly. Price $1.50 a year, or 5 cents single copy

"Some great cause, God's new Messiah "

MESSIAH PULPIT

NEW YORK

84337

(Being a continuation of Unity Pulpit, Boston)

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Entered at the Post-office. Boston, Mass., as second-class mail-matter

NOTE.

IN beginning my work in New York, I wish to say to the old readers of Unity Pulpit that the Messiah Pulpit may sometimes traverse fields already passed over in my Boston work. If so, it will not be forgetfulness or careless repetition. I shall not allow the shadow of the past to frighten me, but shall do the work which seems now to be needed. I trust, however, that no more repetition will be found than may rightly serve to make truth clearer or give it the needed emphasis.

M. J. S.

THE MODERN MINISTER.

My theme this morning is the "Modern Minister"; and, as my Scripture starting-point, I take from the fourth chapter of Luke the 18th and 19th verses:

"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

The man who has learned the great truth that the method of God with his world is the method of evolution, of growth, of slow and steady advance, has learned also not to look with contempt upon the past. He may not desire to return to the past. Indeed, he surely will not; but he has recognized the fact that, had the past not been what it was, the present could not be what it is. The present is the outgrowth of all that has gone before. And so he who truly reverences the present must also reverence the past as being equally the handiwork of the divine Creator and Lord of all. A rose expanding in beauty and fragrance on its stem, if it could be conscious and comprehend what it is and whence it came, could by no possibility look with disparagement upon the stalk or the root or the soil out of which that root has sprung. But for the soil and the root and the stalk, rough and coarse and ugly though they may be, the beauty of the rose itself could never have been.

In the light of this idea I wish you to note any apparent criticism or disparagement of the past in what I shall say this morning. I wish to refer to the ministry of the past, its ideals, its methods, its aims, not by way of ridicule, not in

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