Reconstruction Messages From a Seventh Day Baptist Pulpit in Wartime

of Bethlehem, and their heavenly anthems are drowned by the moan of mothers and the cry of children, the greatest sufferers of the awful conflict. We lift our eyes to look upon the pastoral picture of the peaceful shepherds and their silent sheep on the hills of Judea, and get instead a vision of dying men, and human bodies bullet-maimed and Bleeding. We pause to catch the fragrance of frankincense, the gift of the wise men of the East to the new-born King, and breathe instead deadly gases, the latest and most inhuman of all war's horrible instruments of destruction. Men are saying, "Christianity has failed, and the civilization she has been building for centuries has collapsed." Many have become skeptical: skeptical of a God who would permit such havoc of human hopes and ideals; skeptical of the race that with such slight provocation could revert over night to cruel barbarism. But in an atmosphere thus surcharged by the strife of arms and by the clash of conflicting ideals, the Christian minister dares to bring a messageof peace, founded on the prophecy of the angel, and grounded in the life of Mary's Son. "And of his kingdom there, shall be no end." At the time when the angel made this announcement, history had recorded the rise and fall of many nations. The theocratic kingdom of Israel had been rubbed off the map, and her people dispersed and expatriated. Judah was but an insignificant province of the Roman Empire. The Imperial City by the Tiber alrea...