Addresses by the Right Reverend Phillips BrooksBrooks, Phillips
Religion
Addresses by the Right Reverend Phillips Brooks
Brooks, Phillips
Episcopal Church -- Sermons; Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Sermons; Sermons, American
But what, then, is the Christian religion? It is the simple following of
the divine person, Jesus Christ, who, entering into our humanity, has
made evident two things--the love of God for that humanity, and the
power of that humanity to answer to the love of God. The one thing that
the eye of the Christian sees and never can lose is that majestic,
simple figure, great in its simplicity, in its innocence, in its purity
and in its unworldliness, that walked once on this earth and that walks
forever through the lives of men, showing Himself to human kind,
manifest in human kind. The power to receive it, the divine life wakened
in every child of man by the divine life manifested in Jesus Christ.
That is the great Christian faith, and the man becomes a Christian in
his belief when he assures himself that that manifestation of the divine
life has been made and is perpetually being made, and he answers to that
appeal of the Christ. He manifests his belief in action when he gives
himself to the education and the guiding of that Christ, that in him
there may be awakened the life of divinity, which is his true human
life. Is it not glorious, this absolute simplicity of the Christian
faith? It is not primarily a truth; it is a person, it is He who walked
in Galilee and Judea, who sat in the houses of mankind, who hung upon
the cross, in order that He might perfectly manifest how God could live
and how man could suffer in the obedience to the life of God, and then
sent forth out of that inspiration and said, "Lo, I am with you always,
doing this very thing, being this very Saviour, even to the end of the
world." That which the Christian man believes to-day as a Christian,
whatever else he may believe in his private speculation, in his personal
opinion, is this: The life of God manifest in Jesus of Nazareth and
thenceforth going out into the world wakening the divine capacity in
every man.
You say, "How can a man believe that? What evidence is there of it?" The
personal evidence of Jesus Christ himself. It is the self testimony of
Christ that makes the assurance of the Christian faith. Does that sound
to you all unreasonable? Do you turn here in your pew or in your aisle
and say, "After all, it is the old story which I have tested and know to
be untrue."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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