The Church is waking up to its full duty in social service. Bishop
Simpson, even in his day, eloquently described the mission of the Church
in the world: “The Church must grope her way into the alleys and courts
and purlieus of the city, and up the broken staircase, and into the bare
room and beside the loathsome sufferer; she must go down into the pit
with the miner, into the forecastle with the sailor, into the tent with
the soldier, into the shop with the mechanic, into the factory with the
operative, into the field with the farmer, into the counting-room with
the merchant. Like the air, the Church must press equally on all the
surfaces of society; like the sea, flow into every nook of the shoreline
of humanity, and, like the sun, shine on things foul and low, as well as
fair and high, for she was organized, commissioned and equipped for the
moral renovation of the world.”
In closing this chapter we cannot do better than to quote from the
fourth volume of the Jewish Encyclopedia, which pays this remarkable
tribute to Christianity:
“Christianity, following the matchless ideals of its Christ, redeemed
the despised and outcast, and ennobled suffering. It checked
infanticide, and founded asylums for the young. It removed the curse of
slavery by making the humblest bondsmen proud of being a child of God.
It fought against the cruelties of the arena, it invested the home with
purity and proclaimed the value of each human soul as a treasure in the
eyes of God, and it so leavens the great masses of the empire as to
render the cross of Christ the sign of victory for its legions in place
of the Roman eagle.
“The Galilean entered the world as a conqueror. The Church became the
educator of pagan nations; and one race after another was brought under
her tutorship. The Latin races were followed by the Celt, the Teuton and
the Slav. The same burning enthusiasm which sent forth the first
Apostles, also set the missionaries aglow, and brought all Europe and
Africa, and finally the American continent, under the scepter of an
omnipotent Church. Christianity is not an end, but the means to an end,
the establishment of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.”
CHAPTER XI
HEREDITARY SIN
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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