Part 10 (1/2)

This is the consummation to which Christianity leads us--a perfect race of immortal beings in a perfect world, a perfect world in which no man shall say, ”I am sick”; where sin is unknown; where the funeral bell does not toll, and a grave is never dug. Where G.o.d is all in all.

This is the hope and the ultimate Christianity sets before us. Not once in all its record does it offer us heaven or bid us prepare for it as the ultimate, but always it exhorts us to look for and wait patiently for immortality and glory at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the Christianity of the primitive centuries.

This is the Christianity of the New Testament.

It is the Christianity that fully met the needs of men.

It met the needs of men who gave themselves up to unrestrained pa.s.sion, to the gluttony of every appet.i.te; who lounged away their day in cool marble halls, or leaned half drunken from the cus.h.i.+oned seats of the amphitheatre, while the sands of the arena were reddened with human blood to give them a holiday. Look at them there. They pa.s.sed their unsatisfying hours in idle jest, wreathed themselves with freshly plucked, but swiftly fading flowers, drowned their senses from moment to moment, still deeper in the spiced and maddening wines, gave unbridled freedom to their l.u.s.t; and then, at close of day, in the splendor of the sinking sun, went forth to cool their fevered brows in the Campagna's freshening but deadly air, and drove with furious pace and brutal laughter along the Appian way between rows of monumental tombs whose chiselled epitaphs told the hopeless end of human life; then back again they drove with still more reckless haste to spend the night in wild debauch and meet the gray dawning of another day with its mocking routine and disgust.

Loathing their very joys, revolting at their own gratification, these men asked: ”Is there nothing better than this, that we drain the cup of pleasure to the dregs, open our veins, watch the life blood ebb away, and laugh, and mingle our laughter with curses that so cheap and easy an ending should have cost so much to reach?”

O the woe, the horror, the emptiness, and the crying, agonizing need of lives like these.

And Christianity fully and richly met the need of lives like these.

It met the needs of men who in the midst of an environment of the flesh, with the wild beast of appet.i.te struggling within, now and then had longings for a power that should enable them to put their feet upon the neck of pa.s.sion.

It met the needs of men who, standing above their dead, asked again the old and oft-repeated question of Job, ”If a man die, shall he live again?”

Christianity met all these needs.

Through crowded streets of populous towns and lonely lanes of silent villages, in lordly palace and before straw-thatched hovels, to listening throngs and wayside hearers, it rang forth its wondrous proclamation.

It told men that a man had been here who had proven himself stronger than death and mightier than the grave; a man who had burst the bars of death asunder, spurned the sepulchre wherein human hands had laid his body, had ascended up on high, and now, from heaven's throne, had power to impart to men a life that hated sin, rejoiced in virtue, could make each moment of earth's existence worth while, and carried within it the a.s.surance and prophecy of eternal felicity.

Far and wide, over land and sea, it rang the tidings that this perfect life might be had by king or cotter, by freeman or slave, without money and without price, for so simple a thing as genuine faith in, and open confession of, him who had died and risen again.

With rich, exultant note it announced that he who as very G.o.d had clothed himself with a new and distinct humanity, who had loved men unto death and died for them, had not forgotten the earth wherein he had suffered, his own grave from whence he had so triumphantly risen, nor yet the graves of those who had confessed his name; but, on the contrary, was coming back in personal glory and with limitless power to raise the dead, transfigure the living, make them immortal, and so change this earth that it should no longer be a swinging cemetery of the hopeless dead, but the abiding home of the eternally living sons of G.o.d.

Men held like Laoc.o.o.n in the winding coils of sinuous and persistent sin, and who vainly sought to escape from its slowly crus.h.i.+ng embrace, heard the good news and turned their faces towards the rising hope of present deliverance.

Men standing in the shadow of the tombs and waiting their turn smiled until their smiles turned into joyous laughter as they said: ”If we die, we shall live again--the grave shall not always win its victory over us.”

Do you wonder the world stopped, listened, and that mult.i.tudes turned and followed after?

Do you wonder that this Christianity of the primitive centuries triumphed so phenomenally?

This is the Christianity we need to preach today.

It is full of a great body of doctrine.

It is full of the supernatural.

Miracle and miraculous are woven into its texture from beginning to end. You cannot touch it, or handle it, or look at it from any angle of vision that it does not suggest the miraculous. The moment the miracle is out of it it is no longer the Christianity of the first century, it is not the Christianity of the New Testament--the Christianity that has a miraculous Christ for its centre and the miracle of an infinite G.o.d for its environment.

A Christianity of doctrine!