Chapter VI

But the signs of the times are full of hope. In social work at home, in the progress of missions abroad, in revivals of one kind and another, in growing reverence for holy things, in a renewed interest in religion as the most vital of all topics, even in strange spiritual manifestations not within the Church, we have, amid all that is discouraging and depressing, indication of the coming kingdom. The cry, 'Back to Christ,' with all the truth that is in it, is only half a truth if it does not also mean 'Forward to Christ.' He is before us as well as behind us, and the Hope of the World is the gathering together of all things in Him. Should there be, as there has been over and over again in days gone by, a widespread unbelief, a rejection of His Divine Revelation, of this we may be sure--it will be only for a time. When the sceptical physician, in Tennyson's poem, murmured:

'The good Lord Jesus has had his day,'

{213} the believing nurse made the comment:

'Had? has it come? It has only dawned: it will
come by and by.'

A thought most sad, though most inspiring. 'Only dawned.' Why is Christianity after all these centuries only beginning to be manifested? It is at least partly because of the apathy, the divisions, the evil lives of us who profess and call ourselves Christians, because we have wrangled about the secondary and the comparatively unimportant, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, because we have so left to those beyond the Church the duty of proclaiming and enforcing principles which our Lord and His Apostles put in the forefront of their teaching. We have narrowed the Kingdom of Christ, we have claimed too little for Him, we have forgotten that He has to do with the secular as well as with the spiritual, that He must be King of the Nation as well as of the Church. But now in the growing {214} prominence of Social Questions, which so many fear as an evidence of the waning of religion, have we not an incentive to show that the social must be pervaded by the religious, that our duties to one another are no small part of the Kingdom of Christ? For all sorts and conditions of men, for masters and servants, for rulers and ruled, for employers and employed, there is ever accumulating proof that only as they bear themselves towards each other in the spirit of the New Testament can there be true harmony and mutual respect; that only, in short, as the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ will men in reality bear one another's burdens; that only as the Everlasting Gospel of the Everlasting Love prevails will all strife and contention, whether personal or political or ecclesiastical or national, come to an end; that only as men enter into the fellowship of that Son of Man Who came not to be {215} ministered unto but to minister and to give His Life a ransom for many will the glorious vision of old be fulfilled: I saw in the night vision, and behold One like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven and came to the Ancient of Days and they brought Him near before Him. And there was given Him dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all people, nations and languages shall serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

[1] In this Lecture are included some paragraphs from a sermon long out of print, _The Witness of Scepticism to Christ_, preached before the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale.

[2] G. Lommel, _Jesus von Nazareth_ (quoted in Pfannmueller's _Jesus im Urteil der Jahrhunderte_).

[3] Appendix XXIII.

[4] _Jesus in Modern Criticism_.

[5] H. Weinel, _Jesus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert_.

[6] Quoted in E. Naville, _Le Temoignage du Christ_.

[7] _First and Last Things: a Confession of Faith and Rule of Life_.

[8] Appendix XXIV.

[9] Appendix XXV.

[10] _Lux Hominum_, Preface.

[11] _Lux Hominum_, p. 84.

[12] _The Oriental Christ_.

[13] _Esoteric Christianity_.

[14] Appendix XXVI.

[15] J. Warschauer, _The New Evangel_.

[16] Appendix XXVII.

[17] Appendix XXVIII.

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APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

'I hope no reader imagines me so weak to stand up in defence of real Christianity such as used in primitive times (if we may believe the authors of those ages) to have an influence upon men's beliefs and actions. To offer at the restoring of that would indeed be a wild project: it would be to dig up foundations: to destroy at one blow all the wit and half the learning of the kingdom, to break the entire frame and constitution of things, to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the professors of them; in short, to turn our courts, exchanges, and shops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal of Horace, where he advises the Romans all in a body, to leave their city, and seek a new seat in some remote part of the world, by way of cure for the corruption of their manners.'--DEAN SWIFT, _An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England may, as things now stand, be attended with some Inconveniences_.

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