tunity for expression. Each generation God pours into the world a tide of new life, not hardened by habit nor held by ancient forms of thought and life but responsive to the touch, ready to be formed. There is no summons to the church like this summons, to lead the world into a new life by the door of youth. It is this thought that underlies Benjamin Kidd's last volume on the Science of Power. "So far from civilization being practically unchangeable or only changeable through influences operating slowly over long periods of time, the world can be changed in a brief space of time. Within the life of a single generation it can be made to undergo changes so profound, so revolutionary, so permanent, that it would almost appear as if human nature itself had been completely altered." The instrument of power is the passion for the ideal and the place of its implanting in the mind of youth. That is the meaning of his closing words: "O, you blind leaders who seek to convert the world by laboring disputations! Step out of the way or the world must fling you aside. Give us the Young. Give us the Young and we will create a new mind and a new earth in a single generation."1 Two words need yet to be added, and the first is this: The final consummation for Christian hope is not this world but the next. At its best this world will only be approximating the goal. The new generations as they come must in their turn choose and strive and decide, and it will always remain a growing world. Nor can it ever be the home of those who have passed away. It will always remain the world of time and change and death. 1 From The Science of Power, by Benjamin Kidd. Courtesy of G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers, New York and London. The final home of the sons of men will be another than this world where the passing generation spends its brief days and takes its training for the life beyond. And the final word, here as always when we think of the Christian hope, is that of faith. There is no program of future events that any one can demonstrate. Like the first generation of the church, we for our day have only to trust in God and await the event with the assurance that to such faith the Spirit of God will give light and strength. We may well make our own the closing words of the Statement of Faith adopted a few years ago by the representatives of the Evangelical Free Churches of England. "These things as all else in our Christian faith we hold in reverent submission to the guidance and teaching of the Holy Spirit Who is Truth, and we shall ever seek of Him enlightenment and grace both to unlearn our errors and also more fully to learn the mind and will of God Whom to know is life eternal and to serve is perfect freedom. "And being thus called of God unto the purpose of his redeeming love wherein He is delivering the world from sin and misery and is reconciling all things to himself in Christ Jesus, and being animated with faith in the final triumph of our Lord, we set before us as our end and aim to carry the Gospel to every creature, and to serve and establish in our land and throughout the earth His reign of righteousness, joy, and peace.' APPENDIX I. WAS JOHN WESLEY A PREMILLENNIALIST? Or the larger church bodies in this country, hardly another has given so little place to premillennialism as the Methodist Church. In the published report of the last "prophetic conference" held in Chicago, that of 1914, a list of premillennialists was appended. The list shows an apparent effort to make it as extensive as possible, for nearly half of the names are of those not living, and the living are by no means limited to those who are well known or representative. Yet with all this, among the two hundred and sixty-nine living there are but eight Methodist Episcopal ministers, and the list does not contain a single Methodist bishop, general officer, or district superintendent, or a teacher from any Methodist college or seminary. To break the force of this situation the effort has been made to prove that Wesley himself was a premillennialist. This has been most recently attempted in an editorial in the Christian Workers Magazine of October, 1916. Turning to Wesley's sermons, the first notable fact is that Wesley nowhere discusses a single one of the distinctive ideals of premillennialism. This has reference to the two volumes of sermons which Wesley himself collected and to which he prefaced the statement: "I am not conscious that there is any one point of doctrine on which I am accustomed to speak in public, which is not here laid before every Christian reader." Now Wesley, as a matter of fact, was deeply interested in the |