Japan and the United States. The endowment which Dr. Teusler is seeking is modest. especially in view of the vast amount of good it is capable of doing, and he deserves the prompt and generous support of his fellowAmericans in his efforts to place this international good work on a sound financial basis.

LETTERS TO UNKNOWN
FRIENDS

I am a member of the church and am striving to live a Christian life; and this letter is not written in a spirit of criticism, but through an earnest desire to know the truth and to follow it.

As I understand it, the foundation of the Christian faith is, that Christ was sent into the world by God, the Father, to suffer and die on the cross as a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of men; in other words, that we who accept him are redeemed from eternal punishment through his blood. Now, it would seem that God the Father, and Christ the Son, being all-wise and all-powerful, knew that Christ's death on the cross was merely apparent death, only a temporary suspension, as it were, of animation. How could the all-wise Father have suffered any anxiety or sorrow as to this event or its result?

The great central truth of the Christian doctrine as taught in the church of which I am a member is, that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son as a sacrifice to redeem the world from the penalty of the law; and that whosoever believed on him-that is, accepted him as our Redeemer-should have eternal life. There is much in the Bible that teaches this; but it is hard for me to comprehend it. As a corollary of this is the doctrine that whosoever does not believe on him in this regard shall be eternally damned. Hence the great importance of accepting this doctrine in our hearts and minds, and not merely to profess a belief in it.

It appears to the devout Christian that the views of Christ's death expressed in this letter are close akin to blasphemy, but, as God knows my heart, I do not intend it that way, but I am anxious to be convinced of the truth.

If you can give me any light on this great question, I assure you that it will be profoundly appreciated by me. Of course I will ask you not to mention my name or address in case you choose to reply through The Outlook.

AN UNKNOWN FRIEND.

This is one of several letters containing in different forms the same essential question : What relation, if any, have the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ to the forgiveness of sins and to the moral and spiritual progress of mankind? They have recalled to my mind a passage in one of my father's books—“ Hoaryhead and McDonner "—written nearly eighty years ago. In this story

McDonner, a man of wild, turbulent nature, an outlaw, a professional criminal, as the

"There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel's veins,

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains."

My father in his narrative continues: "Nothing can be more exceptionable, scarcely, in a rhetorical point of view than the Scripture metaphor of washing out stains in a fountain of blood, and the great truth intended by it is apparently liable to very formidable philosophical exceptions. But it possesses a strange and almost magical power to subdue and soothe the stormy agitations of remorse; and the hard, unrelenting spirit, fixed as it was in almost spasmodic rigidness when McDonner opened the book, melted away under the very first stanza, uttered in the slow and distinct tones with which he read it—

"And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, Wash all their guilt away.'

His mind did not stop to philosophize about it. He had no clear theological views of the nature of the redemption purchased by Christ. He only felt deeply his own guilt and condemnation. There was something in the very word blood which soothed and satisfied that instinct of justice which seemed to demand some satisfaction for his sins. He did not think of Jesus Christ as literally punished in his stead, but as, in some way or other, he knew not how, suffering in his stead; and it seemed more possible that forgiveness might be procured for him by another's exertions and pain than that it could come of course, simply because now, hemmed in and harassed by the consequences of guilt, he was willing to leave off sinning. At least, if this is not the explanation, we cannot easily account for the fact that it is so difficult to assuage the anguish of a spirit really troubled with a sense of its sins, except through some ideas of an expiation-some difficulty or suffering incurred by the innocent, through which, in some way or other, the forgiveness is procured."

Theorize about the doctrine of the atonement as we may, there can be no question of the fact which my father has here dramatically portrayed. Wherever the life, teachings,

and death of Jesus Christ have been preached, the burden of remorse has been lifted off from the souls of men and their sins have ceased to haunt them. Repentance, which is the abandonment of sin, has been substituted for remorse, which is suffering for sin. Bunyan in

Pilgrim's Progress" represents Christian as carrying upon his back a burden which nearly sinks him in the Slough of Despond. When he comes to the Cross of Christ, it rolls off his back and he sees it no more and goes on his way rejoicing. This has been not only the personal experience of unnumbered thousands of those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Master, but it has been in a large way the experience of the world wherever the story of Christ's life and sufferings has been told. The result has always been that the face of humanity has been turned from the past to the future, and the heart of humanity has been quickened by a new-born hope.

The object of the religions of paganism has been to rid men of the irreparable past. They have been religions of sacrifice, pilgrimages, penances, self-inflicted pains. By these, men have sought to avert the wrath of the gods, to become reconciled to them, to secure their favor, or at least their forgiveness. The question which has brought them to their temples and their priests, and wrung from them their piteous tears and their selfsacrificing offerings, has been the question which the Prophet Micah puts into the mouth of Israel: "Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” To men thus haunted by the memory of the past and tortured by fears for the future, the Glad Tidings came with its message: "He pardoneth and absolveth all those who truly repent and unfeignedly believe in his holy Gospel." This was the message of the Apostolic Church to the Roman world; and this has been the message of the Church to mankind from that day to this.

It is true that the Church itself has only half believed its message; true that it has itself been only half converted; true that it has not dared to substitute the inspirational power of hope and love for the deterrent power of fear, and has attempted to unite

them in a Christianized paganism; true that it has often substituted belief in a theory of atonement for belief in the forgiveness of sins. But, laying aside for the moment all theological theories and all theological phraseology, the message of Christianity might be stated thus:

You have sinned against God and against your own soul. You say: We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against Thy holy law. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us." That is true. The Gospel offers neither defense, excuse, nor apology for such wrongdoing. And the evil you have done cannot be undone without sacrifice. But you are mistaken in thinking that the sacrifice must be offered by you or on your behalf, either to appease the wrath of an angry God or to satisfy the requirements of an offended law. It is not to be offered by you to God. It is offered by God for you. It is not an inducement to him to forgive. It is the means by which he exercises forgiveness. It is not the suffering of the child which wrests forgiving love from a reluctant mother. It is the suffering of the mother, in the shame and degradation of her sinful child, which enables her to recover him to her and to himself. The suffering which your wrong-doing has brought upon yourself God shares with you. The evil consequences of your wrong-doing which you can repair you must repair. What you cannot repair leave with him. Forget the past, which you cannot alter. Turn your thoughts to the future, which is still

yours.

I make no attempt here to state any theory of the atonement. I recall no better statement of the experience of atonement than the following sentence from an address delivered by Henry Ward Beecher to the London ministers in 1886: I know not what the tablets of eternity have written down, but I think that when I stand in Zion and before God, the brightest thing I shall look back upon will be that blessed morning of May when it pleased God to reveal to my wondering soul the idea that it was His nature to love a man in his sins for the sake of helping him out of them; that He did not do it out of compliment to Christ, or to a law, or a plan of salvation, but from the fullness of His great heart; that He was a Being not

made mad by sin, but sorry; that He was not furious with wrath toward the sinner, but pitied him-in short, that he felt toward me as my mother felt toward me, to whose eyes my wrong-doing brought tears, who never pressed me so close to her as when I had done wrong, and who would fain with her yearning love lift me out of trouble."

Mr. Beecher was a liberal; Mr. Dwight L. Moody was a conservative. And Mr. Dwight L. Moody, when he expressed his faith in the Gospel, in terms of experience, expressed the same faith as did Mr. Beecher. "I used to think," he says in one of his ser

mons," of God as a stern Judge on the throne, from whose wrath Jesus Christ had saved me. It seems to me now I could not have a falser idea of God than that. Since I have become a father I have made this discovery: That it takes more love and sacrifice for the father to give up the son than it does for the son to die."

The only sacrifice which the Gospel knows is self-sacrifice. It is sacrifice, not offered by man to God; it is offered by God for man. It is offered, not by the sinner to the One sinned against; but by the One sinned against for the sinner. LYMAN ABBOTT.

T

HE proposed income tax is a just tax, say its supporters, because it emphasizes the following principles :

SEVEN ARGUMENTS FOR THE TAX

(1) First of all, it rests on the just theory, affirms the Los Angeles" Express" (Prog.), that the burdens of government should be borne, as nearly as may be, with some relation to the benefits enjoyed by the citizen and the cost to the Government of protecting his interests. The 66 Express" adds that "no form of taxation was ever discovered that was pleasing. None has ever been discovered that rendered evasion impossible. Possibly the tax that comes nearest being felt equally is the one that is nearest just. By this test the inheritance tax and the income tax come nearest the ideal."

(2) The income tax is favored because it satisfies, aver its supporters, the economic law that taxes should be proportioned according to ability to pay. Owing to defects in personal property taxation, the Sault Ste. Marie "News" (Rep.) reports, "the larger incomes in the United States have escaped with less than their just share of taxation. It is hoped that this measure will in part overcome taxation defects and equalize the general burden." It is particularly appropriate, adds the Topeka “Capital” (Rep.), that the "idle rich" should pay an income tax. It gives them something to do, and, what is more, something for the country. The income tax is correct on the rule that taxes should be paid by those able to pay."

(3) The income tax is favored because it cannot be shifted to other shoulders by the person who pays in the first instance; indeed, the Topeka paper just quoted thinks this its highest merit, informing us that "the owner of a dwelling shifts the tax to the tenant, and the merchant adds taxes to the price of goods, but the tax on net income is paid when the transactions are all concluded and there is nobody upon whom the final burden can be shifted."

(4) The income tax is favored because, in the words of the Tacoma "Tribune" (Ind.). it will remove the last contention of the stand-patters and permit a reduction of the tariff schedules that will make the ultimate consumer, instead of the trusts, the beneficiary, and readjust tariff taxes." Or, as Mr. Underwood, the author of the bill before Congress, declares, it should be “ a means of redressing in some measure the unequal tax burdens which result from the practice of basing the Federal income entirely upon customs and internal revenue duties." The tariff and internal revenue rates fall on all classes, and the household of narrow means pays more in proportion to ability than the family of larger income, the Knoxville tinel" (Dem.) informs us, explaining that "the workingmen and salaried employees. expend practically all of their earnings, and largely for articles upon which duties are levied either by the Government or the trusts. It would not be fair to tax persons of small means before taking a generous slice from large incomes."

Sen

(5) The income tax is favored because a close personal knowledge of the amount of taxes required of the people will, contend many newspapers, more closely enlist the people's interest and active co-operation in all governmental affairs, but especially with regard to revenues and expenditures.

(6) The income tax is favored by those who believe, with the Springfield "Republican" (Ind.), that "military expenses are so much increased by reason of the international competition in battle-ships that the addition of an income tax is simply social justice."

(7) The proposed income tax is favored, finally, because it can be raised or lowered within a few days without business disturbance such as would be occasioned by general tariff changes.

SEVEN ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE TAX

(1) Any income tax is opposed because it is a tax, not on property, as all taxes should be, its critics say, but on ability and industry. The tax can be easily collected from the salaried man, who, to quote Senator Root,

is in the enjoyment of a few years of earning capacity-it may be ten or twenty or thirty-when he is turning into money his brains and his nerves and his life." Το which the New York Sun" (Ind.) adds, "his usually modest income can always be traced and taxed," and shows that salaries are surer of being taxed than are dividends on property, which escape with proportionately lighter burden.

(2) The income tax is opposed because it is not more universally distributed. Says the Philadelphia Ledger" (Rep.):

Under the plan of "collecting at the source," an employee in receipt of a salary in excess of $3,500 a year has to make a statement of all his taxable private means, of his wife's private means, and of the means of every member of his family constituting his household. The inquisitorial power, which is so offensive a part of any such measure, is, in fact, handed on. No self-respecting employee would dream of making such a statement at present, and his wife might constitutionally object; while no decent employer would ask for such information from an employee sufficiently trusted to be in receipt of a taxable salary.

The Waterbury "American" (Rep.) declares :

If the returns from the income tax are kept as much of a secret as have been those from the corporation tax, no decent citizen will protest. But if the uncertainties of an income are to be paraded to the public . . . then there will be a very general feeling of protest. For, among those counted rich, it is very possible for a person to have an income, say, of $100,000 one year and of $30,000 the next. Such a person does not wish to have this fact advertised any more than would a person who one year had an income of $2,000 and the next year one of $600.

Another Connecticut paper, the Hartford "Courant," adds:

A man's success or failure will be required and extorted under penalty, and a huge bureaucracy will be kept fully occupied to see that we make these private revelations with accuracy and with at least a legal degree of honesty. When one knows that a two-cent stamp on checks would produce about the same revenue-all that would be needed, in any case-this change to the Bryan policy, in time of peace, is not worth while.

(4) The income tax is opposed because it is inequitable in several particulars. First of all, as reported by the Topeka "Capital," "the present bill omits the rental of the residence as part of the income of the owner, but it does not permit the renter of a house to deduct from his income the amount of the rent." Another feature is noted by the Springfield Republican " (Ind.), namely, the non-exemption of the net income of mutual savings banks from taxation. Another is the application of the proposed tax to the so-called "dividends paid by mutual life insurance companies to their policy-holders

and to the proceeds of life insurance policies when they mature by the death of the insured. The Chicago" Inter Ocean” (Rep.) says:

What such taxes will mean may be best understood by considering the commonest case of life insurance. . . . It is the case of the young business or professional man. . . He is a man who will be well-to-do, and perhaps rich-if he lives long enough. But he doesn't live long enough. He dies between forty and fifty.... And when his debts are paid and his estate settled, about all there is left for his widow and children is some second-hand household furniture, maybe a home with a mortgage on it, and a life insurance policy for $5,000. And the wisdom of Democratic statesmanship . . . immediately takes from that widow and those orphans $50 of the scanty provision that the husband and father had been able to make for them in the event of his untimely death!

(5) The income tax is opposed because no financial emergency calls for it. Its levy can be excused only by the need of additional revenue, protests the New York "Tribune" (Rep.), and such a need can be created only by stimulating reckless expenditure or by surrendering present revenue outright." Certainly there has been reckless expenditure. The New York " Times" (Ind. Dem.) thus particularizes:

A River and Harbor Bill calling for $41,000,000 of expenditure, a Public Buildings Bill appropriating $45,000,000, and the Service Pension Law, costing the country $25,000,000, make an aggre gate just about equal to the expected yield of the income tax. It is in that way that wealth is redistributed. A very great part of the expenditure for rivers and harbors and public buildings is sheer waste, money thrown into the districts of Congressmen who wish to stand well with their constituents. The Service Pension Act, carrying our annual expenditure for pensions up to $180,000,000, was a sheer gratuity. Thus the income tax will be levied really for the benefit of Congressmen who, for their private political ends, have secured appropriations of millions to be spent in their districts.

There has also been a surrender outright of present revenue, again protests the New York Tribune;" for instance :

The sugar-planter will have to be sacrificed in order to demonstrate the utility of an income tax. . . . Free sugar will cost the Government sixty million dollars in duties. . . . And if that sacrifice is not sufficient, Mr. Underwood will have to... strike at other industries by giving free entry to competing foreign products.

The New York Times" concludes that the "emergency" which calls for the imposition of an income tax springs not from tariff revision and the lowering of customs duties. "It has been deliberately created

by Congress." The Burlington, Vermont, "Free Press" (Rep.) declares:

If the thing were to do over again, it is possible... that it might not be so easy as it was to secure the ratification of the income tax amendment, for the great mass of the people in the respective States understood that the Federal Government would resort to this form of additional taxation upon their citizens only in times of great stress.

(6) The income tax is opposed by those who scoff at the plea that the adoption of such a tax would assist in arousing general public interest in behalf of governmental economy. It is calculated, says the New York " Sun," that only four hundred and twenty-five thousand incomes will be reached by the measure advocated. In other words, "the kind of income tax which is recommended would offer a special incentive to about two per cent of the electorate to interest itself and to co-operate actively in Government affairs."

(7) The proposed income tax is opposed by those who would not give the power quickly to raise or lower it. The "Sun" points out that it should not be difficult to obtain assent from about ninety-eight per cent of the voters to a proposal to raise the rate on the other two per cent.

As a result of all, asserts the Philadelphia Press" (Rep.), the Democratic Administration has now seized upon the income tax as a means of securing the ordinary revenue "forfeited by abandoning the tariff policy under which the Nation has grown so great." The "Press" adds:

The American people will have a chance of comparing an income tax in theory and an income tax in practice. Evidence will be at hand for deciding fairly for themselves which is the more advantageous, an indirect tax levied on imports from foreign countries, or a direct tax paid out of pocket or subtracted from salaries, dividends and interest by corporations.

And the Buffalo "Express" (Ind.) has its little fling:

The Democrats have devised this tax with the idea that it will be more popular than customs taxation. They may have some surprises coming to them if they ever attempt conscientiously and honestly to enforce it. . . . The "Express thinks that the income tax is a mistake, and that its application will result in a sad disillusionment for those who have imagined that it was a device to put the burden of supporting the Government on the millionaires of Wall Street. Nevertheless, it unquestionably responds to the prevailing public opinion of the time, and those of us who think that the majority is wrong have no recourse but to bow to the majority's judg

ment.