“Who hath required this at your hand?”—In the Glasgow Herald for 6th December, 1941, the following advertisement appears, “Sunday Afternoon in Martyrs’ Parish Church, Monkland Street, 2 p.m. Pageant of Scottish History: The Cross through the Ages. Part II. Covenanters to Present Day. Scenes including the 1638 Assembly, and the Richard Cameron incident. Music by Band and Pipe-Major of the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles). . . .” We have quoted enough to let our readers know what some congregations, on a Sabbath afternoon, substitute for the Gospel of the grace of God. Several ministers are advertised as taking part in this God-provoking service, and thus one is reminded of the words of Richard Cameron, referred to above, in his sermon on Hosea xiii, 9, 10. “We must speak against ministers, and we must cry for the sins of the ministers of Scotland, that have betrayed the work of Reformation; and even gone beyond curates and bishops in betraying and destroying of it. The Lord will lay that woe unto their charge, which you may read through the whole chapter.” We have no doubt, if the vast majority of the ministers of Scotland in our day, will not return from their God-dis-honouring ways, but that those who took a leading part on the side of God’s truth in the Assembly of 1638, and Richard Cameron, and many others of past generations, will be swift witnesses on the Day of Judgment against them, and we are very much afraid that there are no signs of returning.
Catering to the Carnal Mind.—Dr. Harold C. Case, Pastor of the Elm Park Methodist Church, Scranton, U.S.A., in order to “capture the imagination” has designed a four-hour service for Sabbath evenings, which begins with games of ping-pong and shuffle-board, has music and book reviews, and at which supper of sandwiches, potato chips and coffee are provided for fifteen cents. Here we have a conglomeration which will please none so well as Satan, and which reveals the sad spiritual condition of pastor and people. Truly there is great need of an outpouring of the Holy Spirit to remove these tokens of God’s wrath.
Mixed Marriages in Canada.—We cull the following item from The English Churchman for 27th November, 1941. “The Sentinel, of Toronto, gives great prominence to an important decision of the Court of Appeal in Quebec, when ‘the court unanimously upheld the appeal of Rev. Canon E. S. W. Howard, rector of St. Martin’s Anglican Church, Montreal, against the decision of Mr. Justice Forest, annulling the marriage the clergyman had performed between Laurier Bergeron, a Roman Catholic, and Wilhelmina Kriklow, a Lutheran. The case was unique in that it was the first time that the officiating minister, who had married a Protestant and a Roman Catholic, had appealed the judgment annulling the marriage. He was permitted to do so because the judgment and the remarks of Mr. Justice Forest at the trial were a direct attack on his competence to perform the marriage ceremony. The case was also said to be the first of its kind considered by the Court of Appeal.’ The trial judge had held that a Roman Catholic is not legally married unless the marriage is celebrated in accordance with Roman Catholic law. The Sentinel adds that ‘It was noteworthy that the Appeal Court which handed down its momentous decision was comprised of five judges, four of whom were Roman Catholics, three being French Canadians.’ This decision should, if ‘upheld on appeal, make an end of the practice of following the Ne Temere decree, which it has now been decided does not apply to mixed marriages in Canada.”
German Inspired Godlessness.—Recently a friend sent us a cutting from the Daily Telegraph containing a letter under the above heading from E. E. B. May, Ellingham Vicarage, Northumberland. It reads as follows: “The deadliest blow ever dealt by Germany to this country was its destructive criticism of the Old Testament. This should have been stopped here from the start, but nobody bothered to stop it, and presently the vile thing got a hold. The result is that the supreme authority of the Bible has gradually become undermined and that is the explanation of all this flood of irreligion and godlessness now sweeping the country. I have myself seen a bishop of my own Church shaking his fist while he called high Heaven to witness that, in repudiation of what should have been his most sacred vow, he no longer believed the Old Testament to be the Word of God. In that case he has no place in the Church of England at all, and he is receiving money, and the Church’s money at that, for discrediting the very thing he is paid to uphold. Small wonder the average layman does not know where he is.” This letter gives us a sad picture, but nevertheless a true one, of prevailing conditions, not only in England, but in Scotland also. It was this destructive criticism of God’s Word, finding a place in the Constitution of the once-glorious Free Church of Scotland, which caused the Free Presbyterian Church to take up a separate existence; a distinction which is reserved for it alone among the many denominations in Scotland. We firmly believe that the place we have given as a nation to German infidel views of God’s Word is one of the chief reasons why God is contending with us by His judgments, and if one effect of this war will be that we come to abhor this destructive criticism as much as we abhor Nazi brutality it will be a token that the fiery ordeal through which we are passing has been for our good.
Daring Blasphemy.—As a generation we are hearing many marks that the fear of God is not before our eyes, but surely it would be impossible to get a clearer proof of it than the proposal of the B.B.C. to present an impersonation of the Lord Jesus Christ in twelve radio plays, entitled, “The Man Born to be King,” in which the voice of Christ is to be introduced by Robert Speight, a Shakespearian actor. We have no hesitation in characterising this as daring blasphemy, a flagrant breach of the Third Commandment, and repulsive to any who have a spark of true religion. We have repeatedly drawn attention in these Notes to the manner in which the B.B.C. is controlled by Roman Catholicism, and used for the propagation of that idolatrous religion, and though deeply grieved we are not surprised to find men whose religious beliefs compel them to look upon the Lord Jesus as subordinate to His human mother, taking such liberties with Him who is God manifest in the flesh. That Protestants in Britain are not taking the matter tamely is evidenced by the deluge of Protests which have been sent in to the B.B.C., and, incidentally, these Protests are indications that Rome has not got things all her own way. May they prove to be as the rumblings of the distant thunder before the storm, harbingers of that angelic announcement, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every unclean spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”
A War-torn World.—For years back men in high positions in the world have been boasting of the civilisation of the present age, and emphatically maintaining that the world had made great progress. It is to be admitted that progress was made in certain directions, for men “have sought out many inventions,” but alas! in this progress men neglected to take with them the only rule which God gave to direct us how we might glorify and enjoy Him, with the result that we are confronted with the sad spectacle of practically the whole world involved in war. In our so-called progress we not only forgot God, but openly rebelled against Him, thus virtually making a declaration of war on the Majesty of Heaven, with the result that He is raining upon us the hot thunderbolts of His wrath. Our beloved land which was to be found in the van of those whose progress took them away from God is now drinking deeply of the vials of that wrath, and there is reason to fear will drink deeper yet. May God give us to hearken to the advice, “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.”