Communication from Rev. Zink

By kindly extended permission of The Sentinel, a reliable paper, we come before the public to set right some wrong impressions created by the paper known as "Uncle Sam" of Murray, Iowa. This papers calls us the Passmore of Iowa, and this Mr. Passmore, a minister of Denver, recently villified the ministry at extended length in the city where he resides, and to be called "The Passmore of Iowa" is stronger than we permit, especially without our advice.

The bone of contention is the announced lecture at the Murray opera house, Murray, Iowa, the date being Friday, August 30th. Uncle Sam failed to announce our subject which was "The Religion of the Day" and then proceeded to lavish some gush upon us acting much as an erratic to our more rational senses.

I am neither Populist, infidel nor Catholic as I have recently been called, but a broad liberal man.

The clipping which has recently flashed in the papers all through southern Iowa that I said in a sermon, recently, in Osceola, that the ministry was five hundred years behind the times, is hardly the true statement of the matter. But this is what I did say and I am willing to abide it: "As a race or nation ascend the inclined plain of intelligence, at apparently regular intervals as soon as they reach a certain degree of enlightment, that race or nation will dash aside the relgion of inferior ages and accept one more in harmony with their advanced ideas and manners of life. A great nation or a great race must have a great religion to enable it to solve the great problems thrust upon it for solution; a religion which is harmonious with its worldly affairs and pleasant to its enlgihtened knowledge."

The spirit of liberty has largely supplanted the destructive system of competition which formerly governed men in their business relations.

Observation teaches that the tendency of the itimes in all commercial matters is toward co-operation.

When the two great Christian churches are considered as to this spirit of cooperation we find that they are five hundred years behind the times compared with the business world.

Men care more about how to live this life as so as to make it brighter and happier than they do about the location of either heaven or hell, and a man who has lived this life successfully will be all right in the next life whether he accepted any peculiar denominational belief, creed, dogma, baptism or no baptism.

And the churches have their choice to either abandon doctrinal differences, erase denominational lines and broaden out the spirit of the times or go empy.

I have very briefly sketched my position believing it due the cause of Christianity, my brethren in the ministry and myself.

Yours for truth.

A. L. Zink

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