There is the conserved force of Christian money. This has taken the form
of church buildings, buildings for education, for orphans, for the sick,
for the wretched and the poor. There is not a great city in the world
to-day without a Christian church edifice. They are the expressions of
a great force, of which we are seeking to find the equivalent. They owe
their existence directly to the person of Christ. The millions of money
which have been spent in their erection have been because of love to
him. They are as directly related to him as the oak tree is to the sun.
If all these churches were burned down to-day, men would begin at once
the erection of better ones to take their places. The conserved force of
Christian money, then, which tends to lift itself into church edifices,
is not exhausted in those which already stand upon the earth; but just as
much as has lifted itself into brick and marble, and window, and dome,
and pinnacle is ready to take the same forms if the necessity for them
were laid upon the Christian world.
There is the conserved force of Christian home life. The force here
referred to is not manifest in the life itself, but in the form which
family life has taken in the Christian world. There is hardly a home
in Christendom to-day, but has been formed directly or indirectly with
reference to Christ. Into those places where character is formed, where
revolutions are started, where Wesleys and Gladstones are developed,
where eternal issues pend, Christ has come quietly and silently to
regulate, to dominate and control. To thus influence, regulate, and
vitally touch homes, to thus determine their form, appointment, and
character, requires a great deal of force.
There is the conserved force implied in the inception and perpetuation
of the Christian Calendar. Infidels, materialists, and atheists, in
dating their letters, pay tribute to the character of Christ in the fact
that they recognize he has ushered in a new era. Christ has claimed and
held through nearly two thousand years one day out of every week to be
devoted to his service. The day upon which he was born is celebrated in
the hearts of men and in the arts of men. To change the world’s calendar,
to inaugurate and make permanent a new date, to impel the world to set
apart a day for his worship, to furnish the world with new festivals and
holidays, has required, certainly, a vast amount of force. This we are to
trace and determine, and we are also to find its equivalent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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