brethren and sisters in Jesus Christ.
The uniting power of the common faith and the common love to the one
Lord marked Christianity as altogether supernatural and new, unique
in the world's experience, and obviously requiring something more
than a human force to produce it. Will anybody say that the
Christianity of this day has preserved and exhibits that primitive
demonstration of its superhuman source? Is there anything obviously
beyond the power of earthly motives in the unselfish, expansive love
of modern Christians? Alas! alas! to ask the question is to answer
it, and everybody knows the answer, and nobody sorrows over it. Is
any duty more pressingly laid upon Christian churches of this
generation than that, forgetting their doctrinal janglings for a
while, and putting away their sectarianisms and narrowness, they
should show the world that their faith has still the power to do what
it did in the old times, bridge over the gulf that separates class
from class, and bring all men together in the unity of the faith and
of the love of Jesus Christ? Depend upon it, unless the modern
organisations of Christianity which call themselves 'churches' show
themselves, in the next twenty years, a great deal more alive to the
necessity, and a great deal more able to cope with the problem, of
uniting the classes of our modern complex civilisation, the term of
life of these churches is comparatively brief. And the form of
Christianity which another century will see will be one which
reproduces the old miracle of the early days, and reaches across the
deepest clefts that separate modern society, and makes all one in
Jesus Christ. It is all very well for us to glorify the ancient love
of the early Christians, but there is a vast deal of false
sentimentality about our eulogistic talk of it. It were better to
praise it less and imitate it more. Translate it into present life,
and you will find that to-day it requires what it nineteen hundred
years ago was recognised as manifesting, the presence of something
more than human motive, and something more than man discovers of
truth. The cement must be divine that binds men thus together.
Again, these two households suggest for us the tranquillising power
of Christian resignation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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