Quiet Talks with World WinnersGordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Religion
Quiet Talks with World Winners
Gordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Christian life
And then there's a yet graver peril threatening. It's quite the common
thing to appeal to selfish motives. It is striking that the great strides
that prohibition has made of recent years, have been due to a sort of
legislation and to business regulation that appeal to selfish motives. The
economic motive, and the disagreeable and injurious likelihood of a saloon
being close to one's own home, have had greater influence than higher
moral motives. And we are glad of any motive that will put the damnable
traffic down and out.
Well, I'm going to come down a step here, and remind you of a yet graver
peril that threatens. There is serious danger of <i>a heathenized
Christianity</i> dominating our boasted Christian civilization and Christian
lands. And in time that would be a serious menace to our pocket-books.
That is to say, there may be the energy and keen mental life without the
mellowing and sweetening influence of the Christian spirit. The restless
aggressiveness may come without the poise; the ceaseless activity without
the deeper steadying quality; the keenness without the softening touch of
the true life. In other words, if we don't Christianize heathendom, they
will exert an influence on us that will practically amount to their
heathenizing Christendom.
Already such influences are seeping in at more than one crack.
Mohammedanism has an active propaganda in Great Britain. Heathen wedges
are slipping their thin edges in, in our land. More and more it will
extend, in time influencing our whole moral fabric, and affecting our
whole national life.
During some recent researches among the ruins of Pompeii the explorers
turned up a find that told its own story. It was the body of a crippled
boy. He was lame in his foot. And around the body there was a woman's arm,
a finely shaped, beautiful, bejewelled arm. The mute find told its simple
story. The great stream of fire suddenly coming from the volcano, the
crowd fleeing for life, the little cripple unable to get along fast
enough, the woman's heart touched, her arm thrown about the boy to aid
his escape; then the overtaking fire-flood, and both lost. The arm that
was stretched out to save another was preserved, and only that. All the
rest of the brave rescuer's body had gone. The saving part was saved. Only
that mercifully outstretched to save another was itself saved.
The Church or the man that selfishly saveth his life shall lose it. He
that forgetteth about his own life in eagerly saving others shall find
that he has saved his own life, and that it has grown into a new fulness
and richness of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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