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 cushioned 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 crushing 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!
A Christianity of miracle!
And why not?
It is as superior to the Christianity, so called, that sets aside miracle and doctrine, turns its back on the hereafter, makes its appeal in behalf of the present alone, and grounds its claim to authority, not on a "thus saith the Lord," but on a "thus saith science and reason"; a Christianity that owns the law of evolution as its present force and defining motive; it is as superior to that sort of Christianity and as high above it as the heavens are above the earth.
One night this summer I stood upon a mountain ridge and watched the revelation of the starry sky. The great constellations, like silver squadrons, were sailing slowly and majestically to their appointed havens; from north to south and from south to north again, the Milky Way swept upward from its double horizon to the zenith like a highway paved and set with diamonds--a highway over which the wheels of the king"s chariot had sped, leaving behind that cloud of dust in which every gleaming particle was a burnished sun. I gazed spellbound until it was as the vision of an unfathomed sea, an ocean tide of light, where the shimmering foam was the rise and fall of single and multiple systems, the surf beat breaking on the sh.o.r.es of converging universes. I gazed on this wealth and congeries of far -flung worlds, in which some that appeared the most insignificant and twinkled and trembled as though each glimmer would be the last, were actually so great that beside them our own poor little world was but as a mole hill to earth"s Himalayas; as I gazed I thought of the distance from world to world--measured as light travels--till the count of years fell away, and there were no more numbers with which to count, and I knew that at the end of this calculation I had but entered the suburbs of that realm for which we have but one word, whose inadequacy we all confess--the Infinite. I listened, the silence seemed to utter forth majesty and might and honor and omnipotence, the air had in it the breath of sacred and adoring things, and unwittingly I cried out, alone in the night there, "The heavens, O G.o.d, declare thy glory and the firmament showeth thy handiwork."
And when I look at this Christianity set forth in the New Testament, and antic.i.p.ated in the Old, the constellations of doctrine, this Via Lactea of truth in which every statement is a sun of splendor; when I begin to get the sweep of the divine purpose coming up from the opening pages of Genesis and culminating in the book of the Revelation; when I see that Christianity is the presentation to us of the ways and means whereby the original thought of incarnation (and this was the very first thought stamped upon the first pages of the Genesis record of the creation of man; for incarnation is conceived in Eden before it is brought to the birth in Bethlehem)-- when I see this original thought of incarnation, in spite of sin and failure, and the world"s captivity to the Devil and his angels; when I see this high purpose of G.o.d at last realized, and realized so completely that each redeemed soul is in final terms the glorious enthronement of G.o.d in humanity, and that G.o.d in Christ and in the Christian, gets his own world again, I cry out with full tribute of heart and intellect: "O Lord, this is the Christianity which thou hast wrought, thy name is written in every doctrine, every line justifies, as it proclaims thee, the infinite and gracious author."
This is the Christianity to preach.
Let the preacher preach a Christianity of doctrine.
There are three important things every preacher should preach. The first thing is doctrine. The second thing is doctrine. The third and pre-eminent thing is doctrine. The church is starving to death for the want of it, the preachers are becoming emasculated apologists for lack of it, and the world, looking on, is laughing at a limp, genuflecting thing calling itself modern Christianity and for want of vertebrate strength, unable to stand alone.
It was doctrine believed in and preached which sustained the martyrs and gave courage to missionaries. He who believed in the sovereignty of a redeeming G.o.d, the certainty that G.o.d would get his elect, the Coming of Christ, the millennial triumph, and a rebel world surrendered at the feet of G.o.d, could endure the agony of the stake, the privation of the wilderness, and all the discomforts and all the discouragements of fields of endeavor well sowed but scantily reaped.
Let the preacher preach the supernatural--the things that are miraculous, and be unafraid.
He need not be afraid. The world wants that sort of preaching. It is growing tired at heart of mere machinery and this eternally running up against a formula of the laboratory or a mathematical calculation and a.n.a.lyzed force, as explanatory of everything in heaven and in earth. It would like, if it were possible, to believe in something a little beyond the length of its eyelashes and the touch of its finger tips; something that cannot be summed up always in avoirdupois; something, indeed, beyond the ability of man.
Let the church get back to the old-fashioned doctrinal, supernatural, miraculous Christianity that underwrites itself with the name of G.o.d. Let it be boldly proclaimed that Christianity is miraculous, because it is, first and last, the Christianity of that G.o.d who is himself--the eternal miracle.
The very salvation of the church as a church depends upon this retrograde.
If the church hesitates, compromises, seeks to accommodate its formulas to modern nomenclature. If it is willing to carry its baggage at half weight; if it is willing to make its proclamation a continual denial of all that it has heretofore professed as fundamental; if it believes the twentieth century has the call on the first, and that modernism outranks primitivism; if, in short, it looks upon primitive and apostolic Christianity as the feeble hint which the modern thinker has known how to modify and improve, then, as already suggested, the days of its spiritual and moral bankruptcy are in sight, and the sooner good business arrangements are made to hire out its meeting houses for ethical and social culture the better.
Let the church persevere in turning its back upon the hereafter; let it continue the folly of ignoring the eschatological emphasis of Christianity; let it keep on giving to men the anodynes of mere moral maxims; let it direct all its energies to improving and perfecting a society which G.o.d has already judged and condemned at its best, and presently these drugged and befooled people will awake, the drugs will no longer be effective, and they will turn in indignation upon a Christianity which began by professing to be a revelation from G.o.d and ends by confessing to be nothing more than an evolution from man.
It is time for preachers to arouse if they would have the hearing, and not the indifferent ears.
Let them refuse to apologize or defend.
Let them have the courage of divine conviction.
Let them refuse to admit into their fellowship men who are willing that a bar-sinister shall be stained across the birth hour of the Christ; who are ready to smile away such a t.i.tle as "the Blessed Virgin"; who can read no deeper meaning in the cross than a brutal murder, and who do not yet know that in the garden of Arimathea there is still an empty tomb. Let them refuse ministerial ordination and partnership with men who, bearing the university brand, claim the authority of a self-elected scholarship to make the Word of G.o.d secondary to the word of man. Let them go forth and proclaim to the world with the voice of a.s.surance which permits of no debate and will accept no recall, the Christianity that is summed up, is perfectly defined and holds inclusively all its splendor of doctrine in the three immense facts which its Gospel proclaims:
The abolition of death, the gift of a new and spiritual life, and the guaranty to every believer of a resplendent immortality like unto his who sits on yonder throne--both eternal G.o.d and immortal man--Coming Bridegroom and Triumphant King.
Let them preach this. Let them tell the guilty sinner that the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ meets his case and can make the foulest clean; let them tell the slave-bound sinner that in a moment, in the flash of an eye glance, a risen Saviour can deliver him and set him free; let them tell the dying that death has lost its sting, and at death a convoy of heaven"s host shall bear him away from his home in this mortal body to be at home in heaven with his ascended Lord; let them cry above every Christian grave, louder than the sound of any falling tear: "Jesus is coming to raise your dead and change the living and clothe each saint with immortal beauty"; let them look abroad upon a world full of the storm of sin, the tumult of high pa.s.sion and long rebellion against our G.o.d, and shout aloud that victory cometh in the end; that Christ is G.o.d as well as man; that the days of his glory are at hand, when the "G.o.d of the whole earth"
shall he be called; and when all beneath a perfect heaven in a perfect world shall know him as Lord and G.o.d from the least to the greatest. Let them preach this, and with unbroken confidence repeat the exultant words of Holy Writ, the words which shall warrant all their speech, that "our Saviour Jesus Christ hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel"; and it will be this Gospel echoing forth with all the music of its joyful tidings that shall answer infallibly and beyond all dispute the question of the hour--"_What is Christianity?_"
The Bible
THE WORD OF G.o.d