“3. Worship should provide an opportunity for this ministry to assume vocal form, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who may thus use any worshiper.”
I recently received a letter from one of the most prominent religious leaders in this country in which he said: “This morning I attended the Old Friends’ Meeting here in Philadelphia and was much refreshed in spirit. I believe we must have more of the spirit of the Friends if we are to save North American Christianity.”
If meetings such as these have a real and timely message to-day, it becomes us to see that we do not lower our ideal and that we strive to achieve it more nearly in every meeting we hold. _For the Church needs a quiet place in which its members can together hear God’s voice and find afresh the message and the power to believe it. It needs to learn how to wait upon God._
One of the most notable features of the last century has been the progress of the democratic movement. Every one who has watched that movement must realize the great danger of the tyranny of majorities. It is true that this danger seems to most of us to-day a smaller one than the danger of the tyranny of a bureaucracy or of an autocrat. But, whichever way we look at it, it does not seem that we have found the true solution. Is it not possible that the pendulum has swung too far and that we have yet to discover the highest principle upon which a State may be governed?
In the new democracies of the East there is perhaps a greater danger, owing to the rapidity with which the new ideas have spread and the lack of an understanding of the deeper principles out of which they spring. Those who have closely followed affairs in the Far East will realize with what anxious eyes Japan has been watching the democratic movement in China, and how she would have given almost anything to preserve at least the name of monarchy for China. In India and in other nations the desire for an independent government and the rule of the people is outrunning the growth in ability to fulfil such functions. The spread of democracy and the desire for national independence is making itself felt, not only in the State but also in the young Churches in the Far East. On the one hand we have those systems of Church Government which are classed together as Episcopal, and in which the authority is vested in a comparatively few. On the other hand we have Churches which pin their faith to the old adage “_vox populi vox Dei_.”