The Fundamentals - 1910: Vol.3

Testimony of Christian Experience 83 None of them can compete with Christ in this respect. Look at Peter and Saul of Tarsus, and Augustine, and John Bunyan, and George Müller, and S. H. Hadley and thousands of oth­ ers. A sense of moral power comes with Christian experience. The moral heights lift themselves up to the very heavens, but they no longer seem impossible. The spirit of a strong runner enters a man, the spirit and sense of conquest and the moral transformation follows. There is not a grace or vir­ tue that Christ cannot and has not produced in human char­ acter, not all at the same time or in the same person, but all have been produced. CHR IST A F INA L ITY In this way Christ becomes final for the man, final for his reason, final for his conscience, final for his will, final for his intellect and most of all, final for his faith, his hope and his love, his aspiration. Nothing higher can be conceived. He now understands why all the creeds of Christendom have Christ as their center. He becomes a judge and critic of other religious systems than the Christian discerning that their unworkableness is due to their lack of Christ. He under­ stands the perennial and remarkable power of the Scriptures over the human heart as Christ’s power. Ten thousand other witnesses and confessors around him and a long line of them running back to Christ confirm his experience and thus create a spiritual community the parts of which mutually support each other. . Of course, this experience is convincing to the man who has it and should be to the outside observer. To the latter is presented a new spiritual cosmos, a great system with laws and forces analagous to the physical cosmos. There are not here planets revolving around a sun, but there are redeemed souls by the million revolving around a Saviour. There is not a law of physical gravitation acting between bodies di­ rectly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance, -

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