Christian fiction; Wingfold, Thomas (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
The news of that strange first sermon had of course spread through
the town, and the people came to church the next Sunday in crowds--
twice as many as the usual assembly--some who went seldom, some who
went nowhere, some who belonged to other congregations and
communities--mostly bent on witnessing whatever eccentricity the
very peculiar young man might be guilty of next, but having a few
among them who were sympathetically interested in seeing how far his
call, if call it was, would lead him.
His second sermon was to the same purport as the first. Preposing no
text, he spoke to the following effect, and indeed the following are
of the very words he uttered:
"The church wherein you now listen, my hearers, the pulpit wherein I
now speak, stand here from of old in the name of Christianity. What
is Christianity? I know but one definition, the analysis of which,
if the thing in question be a truth, must be the joyous labour of
every devout heart to all eternity. For Christianity does not mean
what you think or what I think concerning Christ, but what IS OF
Christ. My Christianity, if ever I come to have any, will be what of
Christ is in me; your Christianity now is what of Christ is in you.
Last Sunday I showed you our Lord's very words--that he, and no
other, was his disciple who did what he told him,--and said therefore
that I dared not call myself a disciple. I say the same thing in
saying now that I dare not call myself a Christian, lest I should
offend him with my 'Lord, Lord!' Still it is, and I cannot now help
it, in the name of Christianity that I here stand. I have, alas,
with blameful and appalling thoughtlessness I subscribed my name, as
a believer, to the Articles of the Church of England, with no better
reason than that I was unaware of any dissent therefrom, and have
been ordained one of her ministers. The relations into which this
has brought me I do not feel justified in severing at once, lest I
should therein seem to deny that which its own illumination may yet
show me to be true, and I desire therefore a little respite and room
for thought and resolve. But meantime it remains my business, as an
honest man in the employment of the church, to do my best towards
the setting forth of'the claims of him upon whom that church is
founded, and in whose name she exists. As one standing on the
outskirts of a listening Galilean crowd, a word comes now and then
to my hungry ears and hungrier heart: I turn and tell it again to
you--not that ye have not heard it also, but that I may stir you up
to ask yourselves: 'Do I then obey this word? Have I ever, have I
once sought to obey it? Am I a pupil of Jesus? Am I a Christian?'
Hear then of his words. For me, they fill my heart with doubt and
dismay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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