Montefiori, a Jew, putting his finger on the source of Christianity's
power, would light upon the phrase "For the sake of Jesus," and would
cry: "Of what fine lives and deaths has not this motive been the spring
and the sustainment!" [5] None would have thought that so long after
Calvary seemed to end forever the power of Jesus, one of the race's
greatest men, David Livingstone, engaged in one of the race's most
courageous enterprises, breaking his way into the untraveled jungles of
Africa, would sing as he went, for so his journal says he did,
"Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills my breast"?
Take the personality of the Master out of Christian history and we have
robbed it of its central moral power.
Moreover, the personality of Jesus has always been the standard of
reformation when Christianity has become recreant or laggard or
corrupt. A man named John Wilkes started a political movement in
England in the eighteenth century, and around him sprang up a party who
called themselves Wilkites. These followers of Wilkes, however, went
to extremes so wild and perilous that poor John Wilkes himself had to
explain to everybody that, as for him, he was not a Wilkite. This
lapse of a movement from the original intention of its founder is
familiar in history and nowhere is it more clearly illustrated than in
Christianity. The Master, watching Western Christendom today, with all
our hatred, bitterness, war, would have to say, If this is
Christianity, then I am not a Christian. The Master, wandering through
our cathedrals with their masses, waxen images and votive gifts, or
through our Protestant churches with their fine-spun speculations
insisted on as necessary to belief if one is to be a child of grace,
would have to say, If this is Christianity, then I am not a Christian.
Indeed, just this sort of service the Master always has been rendering
his movement; he is the perennial rebuke of all that is degenerate and
false in Christianity. Whenever reform has come, whenever real
Christianity has sprung up again through the false and superficial, the
movement has been associated with somebody's rediscovery of Jesus
Christ. Saint Francis of Assisi rediscovered him, and made a spot of
spiritual beauty at the heart of the medieval age. John Wesley
rediscovered him and his compassion for the outcast, and led the Church
into a new day of evangelism and philanthropy. William Carey
rediscovered him and his unbounded care for men, and blazed the trail
for a new era of expansive Christianity. And if today many of us are
deeply in earnest about the application of Christian principles to the
social life of men, it is because we have rediscovered him and the
spirit of his Good Samaritan. In an old myth, Antaeus, the child of
Earth, could be overcome when he was lifted from contact with the
ground but, whenever he touched again the earth from which he sprang,
his old power came back once more. Such is Christianity's relation
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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