2. THE UNSEEN FORCES OF GOD (2 Kings 6. 17). Harold O. Perry, Superintendent The Dalles Dis- 3. BROTHER ENOCH (Gen. 5. 24).. FOREWORD THE discerning editor of this work interprets his commission with an altogether satisfactory comprehensiveness. In his own introduction he sets forth with eloquence the wonders of the Pacific Northwest; then in the symposium with which the work concludes he discloses the problems involved in the proper development of the Empire whose wonders he celebrates and whose prosperity is his chief joy. Midway he places prophetic messages illustrative at once of the temper of the people, their need and their hope, the whole constituting a commentary on the land and its inhabitants not only informing but intimate. It is a commonplace of historical criticism that the real life of a people is to be studied best in the poetry or the preaching of the period. Always the true poet and the prophet has deeper and truer things to say of an epoch than the chronicler or reporter. The sermons of John Chrysostom tell us more of social life at Constantinople during the fourth century than do the records of the state; and if one would see the very heart of Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it is not to official activities one would go but to the poetry of Dante and the preaching of Savonarola. The subtle and complex spirit of the nineteenth century has been reflected with greater fulness and with keener discrimination in the poetry of Tennyson and Browning, in the preaching of Maurice and Newman than in the records and memoirs of contemporary historians. It is a true instinct, therefore, that leads the editor to give the pulpit of his Pacific Northwest a central place in the record. The true prophet is first of all a seer; it is his to penetrate beneath the surface of things and read the inner life of a people. Only thus could he minister to his age. The things that lie on the surface are not the main concern of life, though from the attention they receive and the notice they compel one might be tempted to think otherwise. Sometimes it would seem as if such things were not even symptoms. People seem to have a passion for show and pleasure and dissipation and the acquisition of great wealth; while all the time the real hunger of the heart is for purity, power, and peace, if only some one were able to interpret them to themselves. Our own age is often described as irreligious. Nothing could be more misleading. The immense number of religions and quasi-religious cults is indicative not of an irreligious, but of a religious age, bewildered and vagrant if you will, but seriously and positively religious. The sermons in the present volume witness to |