Christianity, No Fable 377 circles the worship of Jesus for the worship of heathen divini ties and of the Roman Emperor. Not without passing through fierce tribulation in the long succession of persecutions with which it was assailed did it achieve the victory, but in its ex perience was repeated the experience of Israel in Egypt—“the more it was afflicted the more it multiplied and grew,” so that by the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth cen tury it had within its pale about a fifth of the Roman Empire. ' From that time on Christianity applied itself to the task of making nominal Christians into real ones; and but for the mercy of God at the Reformation it might have been defeated But God’s Spirit brooded upon the moral and spiritual waste as erst He did upon the material in the beginning, and God’s Word said—“Let there be light!” and there was light. Luther in Germany, Calvin in Geneva, and Knox in Scotland, with others in different parts arose as champions of the Truth and recalled men’s thoughts to the simplicities and certainties of the Gospel; and a great awakening overspread the nominally Christian world. Thereafter Christianity took a forward step among the nations;; and is now doing for the world what no other re ligion has done or can do—neither Buddhism, nor Confucian ism, nor Mohammedanism—what no modern substitute for Christianity can do.?—whether materialism, or agnosticism, or spiritism, or socialism; and just because of this we may rest assured that Christianity is no cunningly devised fable but a divinely revealed truth—that it alone contains hope for the world, as a whole, and for generation after generation as it passes, and that the day will yet come when it will fill the globe. In short, when one remembers that Christianity has built up the Christian church and that the Christian church has been the most powerful factor in creating modern civiliza tion, it becomes: an impossibility to credit the allegation or even to harbor the suspicion, that it is founded on a lie. By
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker