Some Christian Convictions: A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day ThinkingCoffin, Henry Sloane
Religion
Some Christian Convictions: A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking
Coffin, Henry Sloane
Christianity -- 20th century; Theology, Doctrinal -- Popular works
He made everlasting life much more necessary to His followers than to
the rest of men. By bringing life to light and showing us how infinitely
rich it is, He kindled in us the passion for the second life, and
rendered immortality indispensable for Christians.
Christ enhances every man's worth in his own eyes. We find that we mean
so much to Him and to His God and Father, that we come to mean
infinitely more to ourselves. "If," writes a modern essayist, "a man
feels that his life is spent in expedients for killing time, he finds it
hard to suppose that he can go on forever trying to kill eternity. It is
when he thinks on the littleness that makes up his day, on the poor
trifles he cares for--his pipe, his dinner, his ease, his gains, his
newspaper--that he feels so cramped and cribbed, cabined and confined,
that he loses the power of conceiving anything vast or
sublime--immortality among the rest. When a man rises in his aims and
looks at the weal of the universe, and the harmony of the soul with God,
then we feel that extinction would be grievous." And it is just this
uplift into a new outlook that men find in Jesus Christ. A Second
Century Christian, writing to his friend, Diognetus, characterizes
Christianity as "this new interest which has entered into life." We look
upon each day with a fresh expectancy; we view ourselves with a new
reverence. The waste wilderness within, from which we despaired of
producing anything, must under Christ's recreating touch become an Eden,
where we feel
Pison and Euphrates roll
Round the great garden of a kingly soul.
But is this emparadised life to be some day thrown aside? G.J. Romanes,
whose Christian upbringing had instilled in him the distinctively
Christian appreciation of the value of his own life, when his scientific
opinions robbed him of the hope of immortality, wrote: "Although from
henceforth the precept 'to work while it is day' will doubtless but gain
an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words
that 'the night cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think,
as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed
glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of
existence as I now find it, at such times I shall ever feel it
impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my instinct is
susceptible."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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