. Christianity has become to us such an everyday and old thing

1. Christianity has become to us such an everyday and old thing, so different from the amazing, respiring miracle which once it was, that we fail to realise how Divine a revolution it was intended to effect. Yet Christ and His apostles tried to impress upon us that the gospel was not a slightly improved Judaism, not a mere scheme to produce the average morality of men, but a vast reversal of the past, a fresh beginning for the future. “May we know what this new teaching is?” cried the votaries of obsolete philosophics on Mars Hill. The writer to the Hebrews describes Christ as a new and living way to God. St. Paul describes conversion as putting off the old man, with his affections and lusts, and putting on the new man, and says: “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away, behold they are come new.” And St. Peter speaks of “a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.” And St. John in the Apocalypse talks of “a new name “and “a new song,” and a “new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God,” and He that sitteth on the throne said: “Behold, I make all things new.” Life from the dead--newness of life--that was the conception which the apostles and evangelists had formed of Christianity.

2. It was not that any ostensible change had taken place in the world around them. Men married, and gave in marriage, and sinned, and suffered, and lied, as before. Heathenism hardly deigned to cast one single glance upon Christianity, or, if so, simply scorned it as an insane enthusiasm or hated it as an execrable superstition. And that despised handful of artisans and fishermen was right, and the world, with all its powers, and splendours, was wrong. Not with the diadem, and the purple, the wisdom of Greece, the venerable institutions of Jerusalem, were the truth, and the force, and the glory of the future. With them was the ebbing, with these was the flowing tide. The peopled walls of the amphitheatre broke into yells of sanguinary exultation when the tiger sprang upon some aged martyr; but the hope and the meaning of all human life were with him, and not with them.

3. “Yes,” the cynic will coldly answer, “the world goes mad at times, and this was one of the world’s strange delusions; but we have changed all that.” Now we have come to the time when every little nobody can pose in the attitude of immense superiority to the ignorant superstition of Christians. First comes the materialist, who thinks himself great because he cannot believe in anything which he cannot grasp with both hands. “Why should I accept,” he asks, “anything which I cannot verify?” But he forgets to ask whether for the truths which he rejects there can be any verifying faculty but that spiritual faculty of which he denies the very existence. When we are assured by the materialist that man is but an animal, that he is a chance product of evolution; that what he takes for his thoughts are only a chemical change of the molecules in the grey substance of his brain--at everything of this kind Christians can only smile, not in anger, but in deep sorrow. If a man resolutely closes his eyes we cannot greatly respect his asseveration that there is no sun in heaven; if a man declares that there is no God, are we astonished if he has purposely atrophied within himself the faculty by which alone we are able to believe that God is? Christianity has less than nothing to dread from this dry and dusty system which supremely fails to account for the human consciousness and the moral nature, and which offers to men’s unquenchable spiritual yearnings nothing but a chaos of brute forces blindly evolving order out of mazy dream. But next we have the pessimist telling us, with a bitter sneer, that, after all, our Christianity has hopelessly failed. It is one of the notes of condemnation of these moral systems that they all, unlike Christianity, despair of man. Pessimism tells us by the voice of Schopenhauer that the human race always tends from bad to worse, and that there is no prospect for it but ever-deepening confusion and wretchedness. It asserts with Von Hartmann that existence is unspeakably wretched, and society will ever grow worse; and with Carlyle, “More dreary, barren, base, and ugly seem to me all the aspects of this poor, diminishing, quack world, doomed to a death which one can only wish to be speedy.”

4. To all such slanders and caricatures of humanity Faith gives her unwavering answer. To the materialist she opposes her unalterable conviction that the worlds were made by the Word of God, and that He is the Governor among the nations. To the pessimist she answers that though the road trodden by the long procession of humanity seems often to be rough and devious, and often even to sweep down into the valley of the shadow of death, it is yet a road which does not plunge into the abyss, but is ever leading us nearer to our God.

5. But Faith can appeal not only to intuition, but to reason, to experience, and to history. Admitting that change does not always or necessarily imply advance, she can yet show that even amid the most vehement moral earthquakes of history mankind has still ever found in Christianity the secret of rejuvenescence and of victory. Humanity may sometimes advance over ruins, but humanity advances still. The Church tamed the barbarians and silenced the scoffers; upon the disencumbered debris of past superstition she rebuilt the fairer and firmer fabric of her reformed faith; and now whatever ruins may ensue, we feel secure that God will once again, as ever heretofore, lay the stones of His Church with fair colours, and her foundations with sapphires, and that her walls should be salvation and her gates brass.

6. But after so many splendid victories, when it has undoubtedly blessed the world, how is it that men allow themselves so easily to speak slightingly and scornfully of Christianity as they do? I answer, it is our fault. A man must be ignorant indeed if he does not know how Christianity changed the life and character of the whole civilised pagan world. What need have I to tell you how it rescued the gladiator, how it emancipated the slave, how it elevated womanhood, how it flung over childhood the aegis of its protection, how it converted the wild, fierce tribes from the icy steppes and broad rivers of the North, how it built from the shattered fragments of the Roman empire a new created world, how it saved learning, how it baptized and recreated art, how it inspired music, how it placed the poor and the sick under the angel wings of mercy, and entrusted to the two great archangels of reason and conscience the guidance of the young? And is not Christianity exactly what it ever was? Is her force spent? Where is the Lord God of Elijah? Is His hand shortened that it cannot save, or His ears heavy that they cannot hear? God is where and what He was. It is not the “I am that I am” who has changed, but it is we who are dead, faithless, hollow and false. The new life of the gospel is as full of fire as it ever was; but because we have never truly felt and tested it we work no miracles, we cast out no devils, we subdue no kingdoms. God never does for man the work which He has assigned to man himself to do. It is of no use for us to say, “Well, God will mend all.” We must help Him. A handful of peasants, beaten, imprisoned, treated as the offscouring of all things, faced pagan Rome in the plenitude of her despotism, made whole armies drop their weapons before their defenceless feet. If they, with so little, did so much, how is it that we, with so much, do so little? Of what use is it for us to cry, “Awake, O arm of the Lord?” It is we who must awake. If Christianity does not prosper, it is only because the vast majority of us are Christians in name alone. We no longer feel that newness of life; we multiply organisations, but we enkindle no enthusiasm: we posture, and pray, and boast, and babble, and rail at one another, and Christ stands far away; we give a guinea to a missionary society, and think that we have discharged all our responsibilities to the heathen world. Thus our Christianity is smitten with vulgarity; it is commonplace, tamed out of its heroic faith and its splendid passion. If in one single congregation the fire of God burst forth again in every heart as in some of those congregations of the early Christians--yea, if there were but one man here and there capable of a God-like and absolute self-sacrifice--how would such a man flash the vivid thrill of nobleness into ten thousand hearts; how would life move again among the dry bones of the valley of vision! To very few in the long generations is it given to achieve a mighty work like this; but to every one of us it is given to help it forward and to carry it on. Every one of us can at least catch some faint and feeble and twinkling spark from that unemptiable fountain of eternal light. (Archdn. Farrar.)

The new life in the nation and the fatally

1. The prophets were interested not only in their own nation, but in the world around them. Christianity always suffers when it is dwarfed into individualism, or when it is made simply selfishness expanded to infinity. If Christianity was meant to be a new life in the world, it surely ought to exercise a profound influence upon every nation. But can we honestly say that in any lofty sense even those kingdoms which call themselves Christian have become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ?

2. The earliest of the prophets is Amos, and he begins his book by looking at the seven neighbouring nations, each of which he is compelled to condemn, and then turning to his own. The voice of prophecy has long dwindled down into smooth generalities; but suppose one true prophet were living, and were to turn his gaze upon the nations of Europe, would he be content to indulge in the song of “Peace on earth”? Strange peace, when there are in Europe upwards of thirteen millions of men under arms. Look at the relations of European nations. The Kaffir, the Hindu, the Australian, etc., have not the footsteps of our race among them been dyed in blood? Two crimes fling their lurid light over every land. There is the crime of the man stealer, which makes whole regions of Africa red with human blood; and the yet more ruinous crime of selling to the natives a filthy poison christened gin or rum. We, the Pharisees of the world, in the name of Free Trade, are inoculating the world with a virus of a deadly pestilence. It is greed which prevents Germany and England and America from combining at once as righteous and noble nations ought to do, to prevent this decimation of the Dark Continent.

3. If Amos were alive in these days would he not cry, “Thus saith the Lord, For three transgressions of Russia, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof, because her Church is torpid, and her upper classes unbelieving. For three transgressions of Germany, and for four, will I not turn away the punishment thereof, because she has the spirit of militarism, and is grasping and insolent. For three transgressions of France, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof, because, unwarned by the collapse and catastrophe of twenty years ago, she still suffers her sons to flood Europe with filthy literature, and has erased from her statute book the name of God”? Might not such a prophet also proceed to mention the names of Spain, Italy, and Turkey, and after looking around at these nations, what would he say of England? “Thus saith the Lord, For three transgressions of England, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof.” Are not men estimated for what they have far more than for what they are? Are there not spurious goods and lying advertisements? Are there no sweaters’ dens? Is not Christ sold for filthy lucre? Are not thousands ruined by gambling? Are there not in London alone a number equal to the whole population of Norwich of lost, degraded beings? Are there not streets as full as Sodom of youths who have poisoned their own blood and the blood of generations yet to come? Is it no crime that in spite of the warning of fifty years, drink should still continue to be the potent curse which has folded this nation round and round in its serpent coils?

4. Dare we say otherwise than that Christian nations are not walking in newness of life? Let none of you say, “It does not concern me.” It does concern you; and every one of us is guilty and responsible so far as we have suffered Christ in our lives to become nothing but a name, and Christianity in our examples to be dwarfed and dwindled into a sectarian squabble or a paltry form. Look at America sixty years ago. One boy--William Lloyd Garrison--confronts enraged statesmanship, and alone, with the dagger of the assassin flashing every day across his path, proclaimed to the slave States of America the duty of emancipation, and lived to carry the great plan which as a boy he had devised. Look at England fifty years ago--filled with sullen discontent, with starving poor; children in factories were made a holocaust to Mammon; women bent double; half-naked men dragging wagons of coal, like beasts of burden, in wet, black collieries; the streets were alive with ignorance and vices. Then arose Anthony Astley Shaftesbury. We cannot all be great heroes, but we may be humble soldiers in that great army when the Son of God goes forth to war.

5. For is there not one of us who does not belong to some family? And always the cornerstone of the commonwealth is the hearthstone. The chief hope for any country, the chief element for England’s safety, now lies in the purity of her homes. If you can do nothing more, every one of you may perform in your home the high duty of patriotism. If the Spartans were invincible, if the Romans carried into the world their majestic institutions, it was because Spartan and Roman mothers would tolerate no effeminate sons, no lackadaisical daughters. Let us each try so to illustrate the workings of the new life that by thus kindling throughout the length and breadth of England myriads of twinkling points of light there may be one broad glow of Christianity throughout the world.