The Pope’s Prayers.—In the daily press it is reported that the Pope, in a letter written to Cardinal Vannutelli, says to him that it is necessary to raise our prayers to Him in whose hands is the fate of nations, asking also the intercession of the Virgin Mary to obtain the cessation of the scourge of war. He concludes the letter by urging Roman Catholics to fast for three days in order to strengthen their prayers. If we are to wait until the Virgin Mary intercession will obtain the cessation of the scourge of war, the mighty nations at present in conflict will be wiped out of existence, and as for the strengthening of the prayers of Roman Catholics, one feels they stand much in need of strengthening, but the method suggested by the Pope and practised by the Church of Rome will weaken, instead of strengthen, prayer. It is deplorable that in the 20th century of the Christian era, and in the mightiest convulsion that ever shook the nations of the earth, that the so-called Vicar of Christ should turn away his eyes from the Lord Jesus, and look to a creature, however highly honoured of heaven she was, imploring her intercession.
“I perceive in all things ye are too superstitious.”—The correspondent of one of the London dailies, writing some weeks ago, says—”Athens is passing through a day of such religious excitement, one might almost say frenzy, as has not been seen for a long time. The wondering working ikon (image) of the Virgin, believed to have been painted by St. Luke, was brought to the bedside of king Constantine in the hope that it may effect a cure of his grave malady. He then goes on to describe the difficulty the police had in protecting the so-called sacred relic from the devotions of the frenzied crowds. The story was circulated in Athens that the king’s exertion in raising himself in bed to kiss the ikon, burst the abscess in the lung, which led to an improvement. Be this as it may, the light shed by these extraordinary proceedings alike on the royal house of Greece and the populace of Athens, reminds us of the words of Paul in addressing the Athenians of old—”Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.”
Calvin’s Austerity.—The impression in most minds concerning Calvin is that he was a man of great austerity, and that his outlook on life was severely cold, but Prof. Warfield, in a recent article in the Princeton Theological Review, gives us to understand that this is not altogether a true picture of Calvin. “His cutting satire,” he says, “was only one manifestation of a special talent for pleasantry which characterised all his intercourse. Laughter, he taught, is the gift of God; and he held it the right, or rather the duty, of the Christian man to practise it in its due season. . . . ‘I wish I was with you for half a day,’ he writes to one of them, ‘to laugh with you.’ In a word, contrary to the general impression, Calvin was a man of great freshness and jocundness of spirit, and so little was he inclined to suppress the expression of the gayer side of life, that he rather sedulously cultivated it in himself and looked with pleasure on its manifestation in others.” Calvin, evidently, was not the piece of cold, icy, and frigid humanity that his enemies would make us believe he was, but a real human being with real human feelings—a giant even among the great men of his time, and a saint of God who feared Him and reverenced Him as his chiefest good.