Several famous people narrowly missed boarding the Titanic. One of them was John Raleigh Mott. He was an influential evangelist and YMCA official who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. He and a colleague were offered free passage on the Titanic by a White Star Line official interested in their work, but they declined and instead took a humbler liner named Lapland.

The Library of Parliament in Canada is the only part of the building that survived the great fire of 1916 – and that dates back to the Victorian Era. The library is a very striking room—a great open rotunda with galleries spanning the circumference. Rising in the centre of the library, in the place of absolute pre-eminence, is a towering statue of Queen Victoria.

In 1897, Adolph S. Ochs, the owner of the New York Times, adopted for his paper the motto, “All the news that’s fit to print”. It was a declaration of his intention to maintain high standards of journalism, as well as to hold to good taste and integrity in the advertising he would permit in the paper. The motto still appears on the paper’s masthead.

We live in a rapidly changing world. Technology is constantly advancing. Political leadership is continually changing hands. Cultural trends are always in flux. Even our physical bodies change.

Many of our difficulties in the Christian life stem from the fact that we don’t really know God as we ought to know Him. We don’t see Him as He is, and we don’t understand Him as He has made himself known in His word.