Christian literature

“ If then you would know whether christianity be true, it is first of all needful that you read and ponder the Christian books. These books prove themselves. The religion of Christ is felt to be true, as you read the writings in which it is recorded. Just as the works of nature prove to the contemplative mind the being of a God, so do the books of the Christians prove the truth of their religion. ”

“ In his treatment of this part of the subject, the work of Christ as the true Creator, through the Christian Church, of living morality, what is peculiar and impressive is the way in which sympathy with Christianity in its antique and original form, in its most austere, unearthly, exacting aspects, is combined with sympathy with the practical realities of modern life, with its boldness, its freedom, its love of improvement, its love of truth. It is no common grasp which can embrace both so easily and so firmly. ”

“ But, on the other hand, in recent years a number of writers have appeared, thoroughly popular, and at the same time thoroughly Christian, who, as popular poets and novelists, have become apostles of Christian views, morals, and customs to the people. ”

“ And I shall endeavour to show, that a grain of the pure gold of Christian influence, which is the exhibition, in truth, of the mind of Christ, springing from the love of Christ in the soul, is no wise increased in value by being beaten out into plates as thin as imagination can conceive, and employed to gild the brassy admixture of earthly influence,--the titles, honours, rank, wealth, learning and secular power of this world. ”

“ Oh that a preacher might arise and expound from the Book of books a religion with a God, a religion with a heart in it--a Christian religion, which would abolish the cold legend whose centre is respectability, and which rears great buildings in which the rich recline on silken hassocks while the poor perish in the shadow thereof. ”

“ He would seize on everything that the genius of past ages had indorsed, even as Christianity itself appropriates everything human,--science, art, music, poetry, eloquence, literature,--sanctifies it, and dedicates it to the Lord; not for the pride of priests, but for the improvement of humanity. ”

“ Our poets betray, in the passages which are the favorites of earnest minds, the influence of these Scriptures. From Paradise Lost to In Memoriam, from The Temple to the Christian Year, the poems which the devout delight in are either Biblical paraphrases or Biblical distillations. Our masters of fiction could not have written the scenes which most rouse our moral nature, could not have conceived the characters which most inspire our devotional nature, without the Bible. ”

“ Secondly, we desire that your Excellencies and Honors would weigh, with the infallible word of God, with the living example of Christ, and with the pious, unblamable life of the saints, how a true Christian should be disposed according to the Scriptures. If reading, singing, water, bread, wine, name, and boasting, would constitute true Christianity, then there would be a great number of Christians. ”

“ II The Christian Motive.—Rightly regarded Christ is not only the model of the new life, but its motive as well. All the great appeals of the Gospel—every persuasion and plea by which God seeks to awaken a responsive love in the hearts of men—are centred in, and find expression through, the Person and Passion of Christ. ”

“ But the poet, in order to realize his grand idea, should be gifted not only with the highest poetical genius in order to represent the philosophical principles of Christianity in the peculiar characters and types of Christian art, and give them a new, independent, and majestic appearance; but he should be also possessed, on the one hand, of a clear and perfect knowledge of Christian doctrine and ethics, and a deep and extensive knowledge of philosophy and theology ”

“ As a man not barely believes, but knows assuredly that that very person is his particular friend in whom he sees all the proper, peculiar, distinguishing marks and characters of his friend, so the Christian knows that book to be the word of God in and upon which he sees all the proper marks and characters of a divinely inspired book. He tastes a sweetness, and feels a power, and sees a glory, in it truly divine. 3. The divinity of the scriptures must be known and acknowledged in the first place, before men can profitably use them, before they can give good heed to them. ”

“ The central truths of Christianity are always the same; but Biblical criticism, the comparative study of Hebrew or Christian epochs, the domain of doctrinal thought, are growths of the human mind, and every advance has been the fruit of experimental searching. ”

“ Hence it is indispensably necessary for the Christian, in every period of his life, but especially when entering on his religious course, to implore the gracious influence of the Divine Spirit, to guard him against every species of error—to lead him into all truth—and to invest the truth with that holy unction, which will render it no less a source of the highest intellectual improvement, than of the most exquisite mental enjoyment. ”

“ The Old Testament, which is the record of the earlier stages of the Christian revelation, distinctly preparatory and prophetic, forms a continual instruction in duty and righteousness. It grounds the moral life essentially in the religious, but religion must walk in holiness. ”

“ Christ’s taking flesh, and dying therein for our sins, &c. whether that historical knowledge come to us, either by the sole inward revelation of the holy Spirit, without the medium or mean of Scripture, or also by both, to wit, both by the inward inspiration of the holy Spirit, and by the Scriptures; which two mediums or means, do sometimes concur in producing in men historical knowledge and faith concerning God and Christ, as is said before, but in a different manner. ”

“ His wide learning and liberal spirit, the rugged eloquence of his style, and his deep insight into human nature made him a most attractive and stimulating teacher; and his students responded with the utmost loyalty and devotion. The substance of his teaching was published in 1893 in the volume entitled Christ in Modern Theology, which its author described as ‘an endeavour, through a Christian doctrine of God, at a sketch of the first lines of a Christian theology’. ”

“ In the light thus obtained the sacred text has been transformed: out of the old chaos has come order; out of the old welter of hopelessly conflicting statements in religion and morals has come, in obedience to this new conception of development, the idea of a sacred literature which mirrors the most striking evolution of morals and religion in the history of our race. Of all the sacred writings of the world, it shows us our own as the most beautiful and the most precious ”

“ The scientific study of the New Testament has brought clearly to light the individual traits of the various writers, but has shown at the same time the striking agreement of these writers in their fundamental conception of the Christian Faith. For those who set forth objectively the words and ministry of Jesus as well as for those who deal more explicitly with doctrinal interpretation, the centre of interest lies in the Person, the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ. ”

“ Who can calculate the moral force of one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred thousand Christian preachers in a world like ours, most of whom are arrayed on the side of morality and learning. It may be said that these benefits may more properly be considered to flow from Christianity as revealed in the Bible; that the Bible is the cause of all this great impulse to civilization. ”

“ The poet and the true Christian have alike a hidden life. Worship is the vital element of each. Poetry has in it that kind of utility which good men find in their Bible, rather than such convenience as bad men often profess to draw from it. ”

“ The Christian life, in its highest form, from this amalgamation of human traits, has constructed an ideal for the soul founded on something tangible and substantial in human consciousness. When the Christian said, "O God, make me pure and noble," it has been no longer necessary to rhapsodize on a heaven concerning which he knew nothing, and to disclaim all interest in this earth. ”

“ Christianity conquered the world because it proclaimed a new poetry, a new ideal and a new God. "The moving power was a fable ... it carried the imagination into a new sphere ... it was a whole world of poetry descended among men." ”

“ The question as to how we shall interpret the Bible is solved by taking the book as a whole and thinking of the true and evident nature of God as infinitely and eternally loving, incapable of the weaknesses of hating humanity, and avenging Himself upon them. ”

“ Our theologians are not content with discussing abstract doctrines or recounting the decisions of church councils, but are turning to the gospels and seeking to depict the life of Jesus—to probe the secret of His divine humanity and to interpret the meaning for the world of His unique personality. ”

“ Now let the reader mark the foregoing citations from standard Christian authors, setting forth some of the reasons which led the founders of Christianity to adopt a visible man-God in their worship in the person of Jesus Christ, Language could hardly be used to prove more conclusively that the whole thing grew out of an idolatrous proclivity to man-worship,—that is, the gross, sensuous, carnally-minded propensity to worship an extetnal, visible God,—proving, with the corroborative evidence of many other facts, that they were not a whit above the heathen in spiritual development. ”

“ Now, all our exigeant demands are met by words written in a Book, and by the manifestations of a Person; and we are waiting for a Christianity such as the world has not yet known. Hitherto, Christ has existed for our uses ”

“ In the fierce white light of his idealism human effort seemed weakness, human virtue but sin, human reason but folly. Absorbed as he was in the thought of God, craving for nothing less than a divine righteousness, a divine wisdom, a divine strength, he grasped the written Bible as the law of God and concentrated every energy in the effort to obey it. ”

“ Yet this book, the Bible, portrays the character of God, the Father of our spirits, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, just as clearly as any work ever written by man portrays the shape, nature, construction and constitution of the human frame. ”

“ We glory most in the fact, that Scripture so commends itself to the conscience, and experience so bears out the Bible, that the gospel can go the round of the world, and carry with it, in all its travel, its own mighty credentials. ”

“ It is not Christianity—the rational, thorough, all-embracing Gospel of Christ,—which throws its blessed sanctities over and around our whole humanity,—which owns and consecrates our whole nature and our whole life—which is thus taught. ”

“ The deep experiences of the soul are the {115} stuff of which literature is made; and in language whose appeal is alike to the wise and the simple this Book dramatizes the life of the soul. Though struggling much between right and wrong and falling often, the Old Testament heroes groped their way upward to better things, and established their belief in one God upon a firm foundation. ”

“ And whatever of spiritual wisdom, or of the savour of piety, is found in these pages, was all derived from the influence of that Holy Spirit, who inspired the prophets and apostles to write the Scriptures, and who still bestows grace and spiritual endowments on his chosen servants, by which they are qualified, to preach and write, in such a manner, as to promote the edification of his church. In every age, God raises up men for the defence of the gospel, and also for the exposition of his word ”

“ The separation of the new ideas in the teaching of Christ and of the Apostles from the general terms of religion at the time, is the only road to understanding what Christianity meant to those who actually heard the teaching. ”

“ We must study the true meaning of the Bible, the book and chief collection of the records of faith, precious above all for the immortal image and photograph, in so many a shifting light and various expression, of the transcendent form of divinity through manhood in Him to be ever reverently and lovingly named, Jesus Christ. But there is a spirit in man. ”

“ Through this insight, they were the beginners of a new type of Christianity, which has become wide-spread and impressive in the modern world, a type that finds the supreme significance of Christ's Life in His double revelation of the inherent nature of God, and the immense value and potentiality of man, and that changes the emphasis from schemes of salvation to interpretations of life, from the magic significance of doctrine to the incalculable worth of the moral will. ”

“ They abjectly look to men of the world, to scholars, to statesmen, for testimonies to the everlasting and self-evidencing verities of heaven! And if they can gather up, from the writings or speeches of these men, some patronising notices of religion, some incidental compliment to the civilising influence of the Bible, or to the aesthetic proprieties of worship, or to the moral sublimity of the character or gospel of Christ, they forthwith proclaim these tributes as lending some great confirmation to the Truth of GOD! ”

“ But those parts of the Bible which have influenced the history of the human race for the better are those chapters of the New Testament which teach us the great moral lessons of love, charity and forgiveness. ”

“ Christianity, in its unadulterated simplicity, is distinguished by the consolatory views it imparts of the benignity and grace of God, and by the direct and cogent motives it suggests for holiness and righteousness of life. ”