Part 5 (2/2)

”My _Saviour_ and my _G.o.d_.”

If you have already owned him as your Saviour, then, as Thomas of old, with the voice of deep devotion say:

”My _Lord_ and my _G.o.d_.”

To those of you (if there be such) who still deny his deity and persist in calling him good, he, himself, is asking you from heaven as he asked it aforetime upon earth:

”_Why_ callest thou me _good?_”

In asking you that he is putting upon you the responsibility of the terrible conclusion of your own premise:

IF NOT G.o.d--NOT GOOD!

Are you willing to face him in eternity with that inexorable alternative:

”IF NOT G.o.d--NOT GOOD?”

Christianity

WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?

WHAT is Christianity?

The question seems a belated one.

It never was more pertinent than now. Its pertinency rests upon two facts.

First: the modern drift in Christianity and its absolute failure.

Second: the phenomenal triumph of primitive Christianity.

The modern drift is antagonistic to doctrine and repudiates the miraculous.

It sets aside the virgin birth, has no toleration for atonement by sacrificial death, and positively refuses to accept the bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It holds that G.o.d is the Father of all men. Each man is inherently a son of G.o.d. He has in him all the elements of the divine lineage.

Exercise and culture are alone needed to reveal these elements and demonstrate this lineage. Salvation is not the redemption of a child of the Devil, but recovery of a child of G.o.d from the hands of the Devil. Salvation is the restoration of the individual to the consciousness of this relations.h.i.+p; but salvation is effectively individual only as it is primarily social. The time has pa.s.sed (so we are told) when the individual may be discussed and his social condition ignored. To seek out an individual here and there and endeavor to redeem or recover him while the environment remains unchanged, is a waste of force: as foolish as it would be to spend millions on remedies for people sick with malaria in a pestilential and malarial district, and ignore the condition of the district.

True wisdom would demand first of all that the district be purged, the environment made healthy, the cause of malaria destroyed.

Human beings are neither sinning nor suffering because a possible first man away back somewhere ate forbidden fruit at the insistent appeal of his too persistent wife. Men are sinning and suffering because social conditions are all wrong. These wrong conditions fill the mult.i.tude with discouragement and depression. They are unable to breathe an inspiring life force. They cannot obtain sufficient impulse to live above low levels. The laws, the customs, the inequalities of life, hedge them like brutes in a corral. This corralling and hedging of humanity _en ma.s.se_, while the few pull away from the crowd and create an environment satisfactory to themselves at the expense of the crowd, is the _raison d'etre_ for all evil conditions. Let us have right legislation. Let us make right laws. The moment the social condition enables a man to discover the divine things in him, he will live right by preference.

We are no longer to spend eloquence, prayer and time on revivals, and now and then, here and there, get an individual to live fairly right in spite of hindering conditions. The sermon of the preacher should appeal to the law-maker rather than to the law-breaker; it should arouse men, not to the danger of a h.e.l.l far off, but to a h.e.l.l near at hand, the h.e.l.l of unjust laws, of sanitary neglect, of oppression of man by man.

Social redemption! that is the watchword.

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