shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful,
Counsellor, _the mighty God, the everlasting Father_."
Micah, the prophet, glorifies the little town of Bethlehem, least as
it is among the thousands of Judah, and foretells that he who shall
be born there, and is to be ruler in Israel, is he "_whose goings
forth have been from old, from everlasting_." He who has been the
outgoing and the forth-putting of the invisible God; and who is, and
who alone can be, the _visibility of God_.
When we turn to the New Testament once more, we are given a vision
of him, in Patmos, where he appears to that beloved John who had
leaned so heavily on his heart in the days of the earthly
pilgrimage. It is a vision of wonder, of glory, and divine splendor.
He is seen as a man--as one who had _become_ dead, who was now
alive, who had conquered both death and the grave. His face shone
with the light of the noonday sun, his eye glances were as a flame
of fire, and when he spoke, his voice was as the sound of many
waters; and this is what he said for himself:
"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord,
which is, and which was, and which is to come, _the Almighty_."
This is the climax.
He claimed to be Almighty God while on earth.
He claims it from heaven.
He says I am God--he says that because he declares himself as
embracing the whole extent of being.
Listen:
"I am he that _is_"--that is to say, the self-existing one; for the
statement is the cognate of that, "I am that I am," which is the
pre-eminent appelative of deity.
"I am he which _was_"--and this extends being into the past; that
past he himself defines. He does not say I am in the beginning, but
I am _the_ beginning--_beginning itself_--the _origin_ of things
and, therefore, himself unbegun, eternal, from _everlasting_. It is
the echo of that far-flung phrase of old: Even "_from everlasting to
everlasting thou art God_."
"I am he which is _to come_"--this includes eternity future--the
unendingness which stretches without a horizon beyond the present.
Here is fulness--and the fulness of the Godhead _bodily_.
In saying these words upon Patmos, then, our Lord Jesus Christ says:
"I am God--I am Almighty God."
Nor is this a mere conclusion from the premise here!
He says it directly, plainly and squarely himself.
He says not only that he _is_, and _was_, and _is to come_--but he
says--
"I AM THE ALMIGHTY."
And Paul, the special apostle of the Church, unites with Thomas (the
believing, but material evidence demanding representative of the
elect remnant in Israel) in proclaiming the deity of God's Christ.
Thomas falls at his feet and cries:
"My Lord and _My God_."
Paul bows his head in adoration before him and writes:
"_Our great God_ and Saviour--_Jesus Christ_."
Upon the august throne of the universe he is seated.
He who lay a babe upon a woman's breast; who, although he was
infinite, became an infant; who being in the form of God, did not
hesitate to put off the divine glory and put on mortal humanity that
(as an infinite person) he might, through the "prepared" body of his
mortality, offer an infinite sacrifice for men; who died under a
malefactor's doom, but with his nailed hands, in the hour of his
agony, saved a thief from hell--opening to him the gates of
Paradise; he who refused the deliverance of angels when they bent
above his cross, that by his cross he might give to men the
deliverance angels could not give; lie who was buried in a borrowed
grave; who rose as an immortal man, ascended as the _Second Adam_--
the _New Head of Humanity_--the _Life Giver_ to a world, and took
his seat on the _Father's_ throne, as witness of redemption achieved
and salvation secured--he sits there now, and having taken to
himself the glory which he had with the Father before all worlds
were, having clothed his _immortal_ humanity with that "_form of
God_" which ever was his, now sits the centre of a world's adoration
and heaven's amaze, as the GOD MAN--the highest form of God and the
ultimate form of man; the proclamation that man in Christ is the
archetype of God and God in Christ the archetype of man.
As we thus gaze upon him in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the
Godhead bodily; as we meditate upon him, seek to reason about him,
are touched by his love, held by his power, and filled with his
life, we say with the inspired apostle: "Without controversy, great
is the mystery of godliness: _God was manifest in the flesh_."
"_Our great God_," repeats Paul, and he adds, to balance the wonder
of it, "and _our Saviour Jesus Christ_;" he who, in some glad day
nearer than we think, is coming back to this old, sin-stained,
grave-digged world--to be owned and saluted by all nations, peoples,
kindred and tongues as--
"THE GOD OF THE WHOLE EARTH."
With all this glory and this wonder he is, as the angels said, (who
spoke of his ascension, session and Second Coming), "THIS SAME
JESUS," full of tender mercy, and loving compassion; by virtue of
his perfect sacrifice able to save unto the uttermost all who come
unto God the Father by him; saying from heaven as he once said on
earth: "Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out"; but
saying at the same time, and with unfailing faithfulness: "No man
cometh into the Father _but by me_"; saying it faithfully because,
of a truth, only in the _Son_ can the _Father_ be found.
Let me exhort all who may read these lines, if you have not already
done so, to fall down at his pierced feet, and with deep contrition
for all your transgressions and for your very _nature_ of sin which
helped to nail him to the accursed tree, say with voice of unfailing
love and unfaltering faith:
"My _Saviour_ and my _God_."
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 _God_."
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 GOD--NOT GOOD!
Are you willing to face him in eternity with that inexorable
alternative:
"IF NOT GOD--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 God is the Father of all men. Each man is inherently a
son of God. 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 God from the hands of the
Devil. Salvation is the restoration of the individual to the
consciousness of this relationship; but salvation is effectively
individual only as it is primarily social. The time has passed (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 multitude 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 masse_, 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 hell far off, but to a
hell near at hand, the hell of unjust laws, of sanitary neglect, of
oppression of man by man.
Social redemption! that is the watchword.
Social salvation! that is the crying need.
All this (we are told) is to be accomplished by appealing to the
divine in man, to his hitherto ignored resources. This appeal can be
made of avail only by setting up some human figure in which this
divine life has been fully proved and clearly portrayed. In the
nature of the case, for a modernist Christian, such a person is to
be found alone in our Lord Jesus Christ. By such he is now hailed,
and continually announced, as the advanced man, the quintessent
demonstration of evolution as applied to humanity, the way-shower,
the exemplar and true copy. He is incarnate altruism. His whole life
was self-denial. His daily interest was in social conditions. To him
society was the objective, the individual an incident. His
teachings, when fairly construed, involve the overthrow of the old,
and the bringing in of a radically new society, in which the divine
life in man may have an opportunity to unfold. His doctrines, when
analyzed, are explosive; if practically carried out would be
revolutionary. He is, in short, the true socialist. If we follow him
as such, if we work out his intent, we shall have individual
salvation, but we shall have it as a consequent of social
redemption.
There may be shining worlds beyond this. There may be holy cities
with golden streets. There may be robes of righteousness and trees
of life. What we need to do, as Christians, is to take care of the
world in which we now live, build first-class holy cities here, see
that the streets are well paved, and the sewers in order, put fit
clothing on the backs of the poor, fill the mouths of the hungry
with actual bread, make the hours of labor minimum, and the hours of
personal culture maximum, and thus weave a garment of civic, social
and individual righteousness that shall stand the test of this world
or any other. In other words, we are to live the life that now is--
and let that which is to come take care of itself.
This is the trend of the modern drift.
It is an endeavor to bring the church down out of the clouds, place
it on the level of human experience, meet present human needs in
practical ways, and establish a system of natural, rational and
universal ethics.
And yet--in spite of this widely heralded liberalism; in spite of
the effort to accommodate itself to the rationalism, the unbelief
and downright infidelity of the hour; in spite of the determination
to cut loose from the primaries of the first century and ally itself
with the fast-going advance of the twentieth, this movement in the
name of Christianity has not succeeded in winning and holding the
multitude either to a personal and modified Christ, or to a
reorganized and elastic church.
The churches in which it flourishes; the churches which have
renounced faith in the supernatural and miraculous; the churches
which have swung the doors wide open on the hinges of worldly wisdom
and easy tolerance; the churches which have substituted natural
generation for supernatural regeneration, evolution instead of
revolution, the working out of human life, instead of the coming in
of divine life; the churches which teach that man is to go up and
take hold of God, instead of God coming down to take hold on man;
the churches which are broad enough to allow men of all faiths, and
men of no faith at all, to occupy their pulpits, are not
overcrowded, nor have righteousness and holiness extraordinarily
increased in their neighborhood.
On the contrary, in face of every effort to conciliate the
naturalism in man, men look upon these churches, and the
Christianity they advocate, with suspicion. They see these churches
have their goods still marked with the words, "supernatural,"
"miraculous." It is true, these churches may practically put such
goods out of sight; even then, men will not be attracted beyond the
expression of a condescending tolerance; and while admitting, as
they will, that the church is earnestly endeavoring to get rid of
its ancient incubus of theology, free its hands and take hold of the
plow handle of progress, ready, if needs be, to drive a furrow deep
enough to bury all memories of primitive faith, yet will they turn
away from that kind of a church and that sort of Christianity, with
the feeling that all this action on the part of the church is but
another feeble effort at competitive morality. They will turn from
it and seek their own organizations wherein no issue of the
supernatural has ever been raised; where the quasi personality and
questionable existence of an unseen God are not at all discussed;
and where man and his present life are the only subjects deemed
worthy of consideration.
If this drift as thus indicated shall continue another ten years,
and enlist the support and open advocacy of leading and
representative thinkers in the church; if the theological seminaries
shall continue to turn out on graduation day, with their all too
mechanical regularity, men who do not believe in the virgin birth,
who find no real reason why our Lord Jesus Christ should have died
at all, except the fatality of his genius that he was too far ahead
of his time and was "caught by the whirling wheel of the world's
evil and torn in pieces"; if the repudiation of the Bible as the
final and inerrant revelation of God for this age shall continue so
short a space as a decade, by that time, at the present rate of
development, we shall have not only a very modern Christianity, a
Christianity without miracles, without even a hint of the
supernatural, but a Christianity without spiritual power or moral
authority, standing as a delinquent on the street corners, and amid
the hurry and rush of more vital things, begging permission simply
to exist.
Over against this modern drift and its amplitude of failure stands
the phenomenal success of original and primitive Christianity.
And yet, the conditions which confronted this nascent faith were
appalling.
It was the era of materialism. Force was the prime minister, self
-gratification the supreme legislator. Exaggerated superstition was
balanced by decaying faith. It was a time of coordinately high
mental activity, an intellectuality that cynically rejoiced at its
own failure to solve the riddle of the universe, maliciously
suggested new difficulties, raised barriers against its own
research, and prostrating itself in the name of mere brutism,
worshipped nature as the ready panderer to its worst passions, while
owning it as a cruelly smiling and pitiless sphinx.
The one hundred and twenty men and women who faced the Roman world
with the determination to impinge their faith upon it, seemed the
most audaciously unwise of all forlorn and hopeless fanatics. They
had neither wealth nor social standing. Their culture was at zero,
their knowledge indifferent. Localism and tradition environed them,
and the story they had to tell was not only an affront to the course
of nature, but a direct repudiation of old faiths and cherished
religions. Itself a _religio illicita_, Christianity challenged
governmental law and invoked, logically, the keenest persecution.
The mountains which surrounded Jerusalem were not so high, nor so
difficult of ascent, as the prejudice far and near over which they
needs must climb, even if they would gain but a tolerated hearing.
Yet they went forth! and so preached, that they not only saved and
transfigured individuals, but so molded and transformed society,
that in its every-day achievements, Christianity itself seemed like
a miracle to astonished and silenced onlookers.
Startlingly enough this moulding of society, this overturning of old
conditions--this bringing in of the radically new, so that their
enemies said of them they had "turned the world upside down"; this
repudiation of brutality and the exaltation of unselfishness; this
building up of a condition in which a community now judged itself by
the standards of chastity, righteousness and neighborly kindness;
this renovation of whole centres of life till the erstwhile deserts
wherein not a flower of gentleness had bloomed, now blossomed as
gardens of delight, watered with never-ceasing streams of brotherly
love--were produced, not by an appeal to society itself, not by
denunciation of laws and customs, however bad, but by laying hold of
a human soul, estimating it in value by the weight of a whole world,
and changing the individual life.
This was the triumph of original and primitive Christianity.
In view of such a triumph and the unqualified failure of the modern
drift which claims the name of Christianity, it should seem a
perfectly legitimate and altogether pertinent question to ask,
"What is Christianity?"
The answer is given by the apostle Paul in his second letter to
Timothy, his son in the faith, the preacher of his own ordination.
He says:
"Our Saviour Jesus Christ . . . has abolished death and brought life
and immortality to light through the Gospel." (2 Timothy 1:10.)
According to this declaration, the Gospel is the good news that our
Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to accomplish three things--
abolish death, bring in a new life and reveal immortality. As the
Gospel is the heart beat of Christianity, then the three things
which proclaim its constituent and objective characteristic are:
The abolition of death.
The gift of a new life.
Immortality.
First--The abolition of death.
Death is a black fact. It is the shadow the sun never penetrates,
the robber who steals the treasure more precious than gold, the
guest who never waits to be invited, the intruder who feels at home
whether in palace or in cot, has no respect of persons, and lays his
hand with equal familiarity on the king upon his throne, or the
tramp by the wayside, saying "come" to the sick, "tarry not" to the
well, is sure of the old, and revels like a reaper in the harvest of
the young. It breaks the plans and disorganizes the relations of
life; and then, like a coarse comedian or a heartless satirist,
compels those who survive to turn away from the memory of their
dead, reorganize their lives and live on as though those who once
lived with them and formed an intimate part of their daily
experience had never existed.
Unless God himself shall intervene, death is the certain end of the
longest life.
Side by side with the certainty of death are two things which give
it emphasis: the brevity of life and its uncertainty.
How brief it is! what are sixty or seventy years as measured by
hopes and fears, by splendor of genius, by forecasts that outreach
the ages, by thoughts that climb and climb with ease to the
infinite, by energy of mind, which, rising superior to the combined
hindrances of every day, is always peering beyond the last endeavor,
and stretching itself towards unbroken continuance, cries, "What
next?" Extract from the allotted time of three score years and ten,
the puling days of infancy, the immature years of youth, the hours
of indecision as to the route to take, the right profession to
follow; take the hours given to eating and drinking (that eating and
drinking which in spite of the glamor we throw about it is simply
repairing the mechanical waste and renewing the chemical energy that
will enable us to go on a little while and a little way farther);
take out the time spent in sleep--in practical nonentity--and the
remainder is a pitiful handful of years, so few, that to number them
seems like a mathematical mockery, like numerical trifling.
And the uncertainty of life! What man is he who can assure himself
of ten days? In that time he may die, be buried and be forgotten by
the world that scarcely heard the tolling of his funeral bell, and
had no time to stay and hear the falling of the grave clods upon the
coffin lid.
This emphasis of brevity and uncertainty has affected men more or
less from the beginning. In the hour when Christianity was born it
affected them well nigh unto delirium. So brief was the vision of
life, so tumultuous its incidents, so conscious were men of its
uncertainty, that they played with it as gamblers throw dice. It
became cheap, cheaper than the ground in which their bodies were so
soon to be laid; and in derision of its cheapness they built great
monuments to hold their scattered dust, monuments that should
outlast by centuries their latest breath; with light laughter they
rode past these chiselled tombs and scorned themselves as the
builders of a longevity their own being could never know.
This fact of death is impressing men now.
In proportion as life increases in knowledge; in proportion as men
become masters of nature's forces; in proportion as they measure the
universe, make daily incursions therein, and bring back always some
conquered thing, some new discovery as a tribute to the
limitlessness of mind, in this proportion the unequal brevity and
the disintegrating uncertainty of life, lead men to ask with more
and more insistence, whether, after all, it is worth while. Is it
worth while to carry burdens which force us to look down into the
dust of the highway, and not up and out to the wider landscape? Is
it worth while to put so much force of soul and spirit, brain and
heart into things from which we may be summoned without a moment's
notice? Is it worth while to live, and then go to pieces through the
effort at living, live on day after day like a machine out of gear
(held together oftentimes only by the surgeon's skill), then break
down completely, give a final sigh and be hurried away to add a lot
of useless fragments to the already accumulated scrap heap of the
still more useless graveyard?
Into this emphasis of brevity and uncertainty, there enters another
element which increasingly raises the question--"Is it worth while?"
That added element is the silence of the grave.
The grave is terribly silent.
You can hear the gravel rattling out of the grave digger's shovel
with a thud upon the coffin lid; or, you can hear the crunching,
jarring sound as the casket is slid into its place in the receiving
vault, and you can hear the turn of the key and the snap of the bolt
as the gate or door of the sepulchre is shut and locked.
You may stand above the simple mound of the churchyard, in front of
some monumental shaft, or before the sculptured urn; it may be the
dust of a king, a scholar, or some nameless beggar which is heaped
within--the silence will be unbroken--except by the sound of your
own voice as you ask:
"Where are they? What are they? ARE they?"
Although the sun may be shining in full splendor over row after row
of graves, no light will be there in which to read the answer to
your questions.
Instead of light there will be thick darkness upon the graves, and
gross darkness within.