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1. Christianity. has become to us such an everyday and old thing, so different from the amazing, respiring miracle which once it was, that we fail to realise how Divine a revolution it was intended to effect. Yet Christ and His apostles tried to impress upon us that the gospel was not a slightly improved Judaism, not a mere scheme to produce the average morality of men, but a vast reversal of the past, a fresh beginning for the future. "May we know what this new teaching is?" cried the votaries of obsolete philosophics on Mars Hill. The writer to the Hebrews describes Christ as a new and living way to God. St. Paul describes conversion as putting off the old man, with his affections and lusts, and putting on the new man, and says: "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away, behold they are come new." And St. Peter speaks of "a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." And St. John in the Apocalypse talks of "a new name "and "a new song," and a "new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God," and He that sitteth on the throne said: "Behold, I make all things new." Life from the dead — newness of life — that was the conception which the apostles and evangelists had formed of Christianity.

2. It was not that any ostensible change had taken place in the world around them. Men married, and gave in marriage, and sinned, and suffered, and lied, as before. Heathenism hardly deigned to cast one single glance upon Christianity, or, if so, simply scorned it as an insane enthusiasm or hated it as an execrable superstition. And that despised handful of artisans and fishermen was right, and the world, with all its powers, and splendours, was wrong. Not with the diadem, and the purple, the wisdom of Greece, the venerable institutions of Jerusalem, were the truth, and the force, and the glory of the future. With them was the ebbing, with these was the flowing tide. The peopled walls of the amphitheatre broke into yells of sanguinary exultation when the tiger sprang upon some aged martyr; but the hope and the meaning of all human life were with him, and not with them.

3. "Yes," the cynic will coldly answer, "the world goes mad at times, and this was one of the world's strange delusions; but we have changed all that." Now we have come to the time when every little nobody can pose in the attitude of immense superiority to the ignorant superstition of Christians. First comes the materialist, who thinks himself great because he cannot believe in anything which he cannot grasp with both hands. "Why should I accept," he asks, "anything which I cannot verify?" But he forgets to ask whether for the truths which he rejects there can be any verifying faculty but that spiritual faculty of which he denies the very existence. When we are assured by the materialist that man is but an animal, that he is a chance product of evolution; that what he takes for his thoughts are only a chemical change of the molecules in the grey substance of his brain — at everything of this kind Christians can only smile, not in anger, but in deep sorrow. If a man resolutely closes his eyes we cannot greatly respect his asseveration that there is no sun in heaven; if a man declares that there is no God, are we astonished if he has purposely atrophied within himself the faculty by which alone we are able to believe that God is? Christianity has less than nothing to dread from this dry and dusty system which supremely fails to account for the human consciousness and the moral nature, and which offers to men's unquenchable spiritual yearnings nothing but a chaos of brute forces blindly evolving order out of mazy dream. But next we have the pessimist telling us, with a bitter sneer, that, after all, our Christianity has hopelessly failed. It is one of the notes of condemnation of these moral systems that they all, unlike Christianity, despair of man. Pessimism tells us by the voice of Schopenhauer that the human race always tends from bad to worse, and that there is no prospect for it but ever-deepening confusion and wretchedness. It asserts with Von Hartmann that existence is unspeakably wretched, and society will ever grow worse; and with Carlyle, "More dreary, barren, base, and ugly seem to me all the aspects of this poor, diminishing, quack world, doomed to a death which one can only wish to be speedy."

4. To all such slanders and caricatures of humanity Faith gives her unwavering answer. To the materialist she opposes her unalterable conviction that the worlds were made by the Word of God, and that He is the Governor among the nations. To the pessimist she answers that though the road trodden by the long procession of humanity seems often to be rough and devious, and often even to sweep down into the valley of the shadow of death, it is yet a road which does not plunge into the abyss, but is ever leading us nearer to our God.

5. But Faith can appeal not only to intuition, but to reason, to experience, and to history. Admitting that change does not always or necessarily imply advance, she can yet show that even amid the most vehement moral earthquakes of history mankind has still ever found in Christianity the secret of rejuvenescence and of victory. Humanity may sometimes advance over ruins, but humanity advances still. The Church tamed the barbarians and silenced the scoffers; upon the disencumbered debris of past superstition she rebuilt the fairer and firmer fabric of her reformed faith; and now whatever ruins may ensue, we feel secure that God will once again, as ever heretofore, lay the stones of His Church with fair colours, and her foundations with sapphires, and that her walls should be salvation and her gates brass.

6. But after so many splendid victories, when it has undoubtedly blessed the world, how is it that men allow themselves so easily to speak slightingly and scornfully of Christianity as they do? I answer, it is our fault. A man must be ignorant indeed if he does not know how Christianity changed the life and character of the whole civilised pagan world. What need have I to tell you how it rescued the gladiator, how it emancipated the slave, how it elevated womanhood, how it flung over childhood the aegis of its protection, how it converted the wild, fierce tribes from the icy steppes and broad rivers of the North, how it built from the shattered fragments of the Roman empire a new created world, how it saved learning, how it baptized and recreated art, how it inspired music, how it placed the poor and the sick under the angel wings of mercy, and entrusted to the two great archangels of reason and conscience the guidance of the young? And is not Christianity exactly what it ever was? Is her force spent? Where is the Lord God of Elijah? Is His hand shortened that it cannot save, or His ears heavy that they cannot hear? God is where and what He was. It is not the "I am that I am" who has changed, but it is we who are dead, faithless, hollow and false. The new life of the gospel is as full of fire as it ever was; but because we have never truly felt and tested it we work no miracles, we cast out no devils, we subdue no kingdoms. God never does for man the work which He has assigned to man himself to do. It is of no use for us to say, "Well, God will mend all." We must help Him. A handful of peasants, beaten, imprisoned, treated as the offscouring of all things, faced pagan Rome in the plenitude of her despotism, made whole armies drop their weapons before their defenceless feet. If they, with so little, did so much, how is it that we, with so much, do so little? Of what use is it for us to cry, "Awake, O arm of the Lord?" It is we who must awake. If Christianity does not prosper, it is only because the vast majority of us are Christians in name alone. We no longer feel that newness of life; we multiply organisations, but we enkindle no enthusiasm: we posture, and pray, and boast, and babble, and rail at one another, and Christ stands far away; we give a guinea to a missionary society, and think that we have discharged all our responsibilities to the heathen world. Thus our Christianity is smitten with vulgarity; it is commonplace, tamed out of its heroic faith and its splendid passion. If in one single congregation the fire of God burst forth again in every heart as in some of those congregations of the early Christians — yea, if there were but one man here and there capable of a God-like and absolute self-sacrifice — how would such a man flash the vivid thrill of nobleness into ten thousand hearts; how would life move again among the dry bones of the valley of vision! To very few in the long generations is it given to achieve a mighty work like this; but to every one of us it is given to help it forward and to carry it on. Every one of us can at least catch some faint and feeble and twinkling spark from that unemptiable fountain of eternal light.

(Archdn. Farrar.)

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KJV: Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

WEB: Or don't you know that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?