doomed. In his earlier years Mr. Moody
used to say often with his great earnestness that this was a doomed world,
and that the great business of life was to save men out of it.

But of late years there has been a distinct swing away from this sort of
preaching and talking. Everything we humans do seems to go by the clock
movement, the pendulum swing: first one side, then the other. Now we hear
a very different sort of preaching. This is really a good world. There is
some wickedness in it, to be sure. Indeed, there is quite a great deal of
it. But in the main it is not a bad world, we're told.

The old-time preaching was chiefly concerned with getting ready for
heaven. Now it is concerned, for most part, with living pure, true lives
right here on the earth. And that change is surely a good one. But it is
also the common thing to be told that the world is not nearly so bad as we
have been led to believe.

<u>Some Bad Drifts.</u>

It is striking that with that has come a change of talk about sin, the
thing that was supposed to be responsible for making the world so bad. Sin
is not such a damnable thing now, apparently. It is largely
constitutional weakness, or prenatal predilection, or the idiosyncrasy of
individuality. (Big words are in favor here. They always make such talk
seem wise and plausible.) Heaven has slipped largely out of view;
and--hell, too, even more. Churchmen in the flush of phenomenal material
prosperity, with full stomachs and luxurious homes and pews, are well
content with things as they are in this present world, and don't propose
to move.

And with that it is easy to believe what we are freely told, that there is
really no need of giving our Christian religion to the heathen world.
Those peoples have religions of their own that are remarkably good. At
least they are satisfactory to them. Why disturb them? They are doing very
well. This talk about their being lost, and needing a Savior, is reckoned
out of date. The old common statements about so many thousands dying
daily, and going out into a lost eternity, are not liked. They are called
lurid. And, indeed, they are not used nearly so much now as once.

This swing away has had a great influence upon the mass of church-members,
and upon their whole thought of the foreign-mission enterprise. There is a
vaguely expressed, but distinctly felt idea both in the Church and outside
of it, for the two seem to overlap as never before--that the send