Christianization

“ But coming to us from the company and with the sanction of Christ risen, it never can be merely like other books. A so-called Christianity, ignoring or playing with Christ's resurrection, and using the Bible as a sort of Homer, may satisfy a class of clever and cultivated persons. It may be to them the parent of high and noble thoughts, and readily lend itself to the service of mankind. But it is well in so serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion may borrow from Christianity as it may borrow from Plato, or from Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. ”

“ Yet with all the advantages which came to Christianity through the support of the state; with the intelligence and wealth of Europe behind it; with the privilege of following in the wake of its commerce and conquests; what has Christendom done in the way of converting the world to its religion? But a little over one-fourth of the inhabitants of the earth are even nominally Christian! There are in the world, according to statistics published on the subject:
Roman Catholics ...........................206,588,206
Protestants (all sects) ................... ”

“ Our religion centres in our faith, which is not a condensed extract from Bible History, but comes from the Church. Not Bible History, then, but the teaching of the Church must, on Catholic principles, be at once the beginning, middle and end of religious instruction. ”

“ The learned men of Christendom are held to be learned by virtue of their safeguarding the teaching of Christ, and yet consider how they themselves have been the cause of men’s failure to accept the Faith and attain unto salvation! Is it still thy wish to follow in their footsteps? The followers of Jesus submitted to their clerics to be saved on the Day of Resurrection, and as a result of this obedience they eventually entered into the fire, and on the Day when the Apostle of God appeared they shut themselves out from the recognition of His exalted Person. ”

“ If the Catholic Church is to lead all men to eternal salvation, and has, for that purpose, received from Christ her doctrine, her means of grace, and her powers, [2] what, for his part, is every one obliged to do? ”

“ How, then, could God the Father admit one into his Kingdom, who has always refused to do his will, - who, instead of learning to do the will of God, the full doctrine of Christ, through the Catholic Church, was himself his own teacher, his own lawgiver, his own judge, in all religious matters! ”

“ As to Catholicism, the records of Councils, the invectives of the Church, show us that, from the beginning, the secondary religion in point of time, the religion of the Church, laboured vainly to suppress, and had in part to tolerate, the primary religion of childish superstitions. ”

“ In the diversity of the Church will be found a more powerful argument for the divine origin of Christianity itself, than in the most perfect unity. It is not, humanly speaking, surprising that a religion should sustain itself from age to age in the same race and country. ”

“ But since the Reformation personal religion has been increasingly outside the Catholic Church, while the religion which has remained Catholic has been increasingly a matter of institutions and politics and historic continuity. ”

“ The Mendicants came upon Christendom like a revelation—men who had abandoned all that was enticing in life to imitate the apostles, to convert the sinner and unbeliever, to arouse the slumbering moral sense of mankind, to instruct the ignorant, to offer salvation to all ”

“ The missionaries find that this doctrine is the hardest doctrine for Christianity to assail; and there are not a few who, despairing of success, suggest that the position must be turned, and ancestor worship must be Christianised and accepted as an essential part of a man's belief. ”

“ Worship is the language of conviction. To a large and rapidly increasing body of Anglicans, Christ is not, as He is to Protestants, a mere historical personage, the founder of Christianity, but is the centre of a religious system, the ever-present object of adoration for His people. ”

“ The more progressive theologians would be ready to-day to accept this Monistic broadening and deepening of religion if they were not compelled by their clerical condition, and the connection of the Church with the State, to adhere to Jesus in some sense or other, no matter how slender it be. ”

“ Here, then, in the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the leaders of the Reformation were using all their powers of dialectic to formulate in new scholastic phrase the sound creed for Protestant Christendom, and while the fierce and decisive battle was being waged over the new form in which the Eucharist must be celebrated, there appeared a little group of men who proposed that Christianity should be conceived and practised as a way of living—nothing more nor less. ”

“ In its advance from authority to freedom, the history of Christian theology supplies a parallel to that of science and that of the state. Christianity, based on the claim of its founder to be the Lord and Saviour of men, finds its strongest and most consistent exponent in the Roman Catholic Church. That Church presents its dogmas with absolute claims to truth and infallibility, and demands the complete submission of mind and will, as the representative on earth of the Divine Saviour. ”

“ Christ Jesus and his disciples teach publicly a new doctrine, fundamentally different from the religion professed.
First, God’s people have proclaimed, taught, disputed, for divers months together, a new religion and worship, contrary to the worship projected in the town, city, or state where they have lived, or where they have travelled, as did the Lord Jesus himself over all Galilee, and the apostles after Him in all places, both in the synagogues and market-places, as appears Acts xvii. 2, 17; Acts xviii. 4, 8. Yet this is no arrogance nor impetuousness. ”

“ What is called Christian, but should rather be termed theological, morality, was not the work of Christ or the Apostles, but is of much later origin, having been gradually built up by the Catholic church of the first five centuries, and though not implicitly adopted by moderns and Protestants, has been much less modified by them than might have been expected. ”

“ Such a conception of Christianity can recognize many embodiments in ritual, organization and dogma, but its test in all ages and in all lands is conformity to the purpose of the life of Christ. The Lord’s Prayer in its oldest and simplest form is the expression of its faith, and Christ’s separation of mankind on the right hand and on the left in accordance with their service or refusal of service to their fellow-men is its own judgment of the right of any age or church to the name Christian. ”

“ I ask, then, what do all Protestants, save those called Unitarians, believe about Jesus Christ? They believe precisely what the Catholic Church teaches, namely, that He is true God and true man, the Person of the Word of God incarnate, conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary; that He is the Messiah, the Redeemer; that by His infinite merits alone is the salvation of mankind possible or obtainable. ”

“ If therefore you take any thing to be church-reformation, but a full departure from the wisdom of this world, or any thing to be your entrance into a salvation-church, but the nature and Spirit of Christ, in you, then, whether Papist or Protestant, all will be just as much good to you, as when a Sadducee turns Publican, or a Publican a Pharisee.—And here it is well to be observed, that the church of Christ is solely for this end, to make us holy as he is holy. ”

“ If, then, the tradition of God being born into the world was so universally established in heathen countries before the Christian era, as here shown, why should not, and why will not, our good Christian brethren dismiss their prejudices, and tear the scales from their eyes, so as to see that this universal belief would as naturally lead to the deification and worship of "the man Christ Jesus" as water flows down a descending plane? ”

“ They speak even patronizingly of the church, and are quite ready to concede that she was good and useful to humanity in her day, in barbarous times, and in the infancy of the race; but humanity, having attained its majority, has outgrown her, and demands now a more manly and robust, a purer and broader and a more living and life-giving religion—a religion, in a word, more Christian than Christianity, more Catholic than Catholicity. ”

“ There is a principle which is inseparable from the existence of vital godliness, and that is faith in Christ. Now if all who look to the work of Christ for justification, and confide in the Holy Spirit for sanctification, are really Christians, why should they not be felt to be such, and loved as brethren? ”

“ After this long and circuitous digression we may direct our attention now on the specific nature of Christianity as an historical religion, and consider what organization Jesus Christ gave redeemed humanity in the universal church, how he embodied the absolute, universal religion, what means he adopted for achieving the work of the moral regeneration and eternal salvation of mankind. ”

“ And when we look at the spiritual state of the world at the commencement of the third century, we find that Christianity, having formed and made its place in human society, is penetrating through it more and more in every direction. It is then that we discern the first beginnings of that great spiritual creation, in which Reason has been applied to Faith under the guidance of Authority, which the Christian Church, alone being in possession of these three constituents, could alone produce, and has carried on from that day to this. ”

“ Again the churches are coming to see that Christ is not only the Saviour of the individual, but also of society. If the new civilization of the twentieth century is to be more Christian than that of the nineteenth, it will be because the principles of Christ's teaching are more faithfully and effectively applied to it ”

“ As we look around the ecclesiastical horizon, we find agitation and controversy on all sides. In one denomination, it is the question of the salvation of the heathen; in another, that of the virgin birth of Christ and the apostolic succession; in a third, it is the invasion of doubt as to the eternal torment of the wicked; in a fourth, the evidential value of the miracles; in a fifth, the grand questions included under the higher criticism of the Scriptures and the relative authority of reason and the Bible. ”

“ The method we have pointed out or the Catholic rule produces the conviction of the truth of the church and what she teaches, and shows it to be one’s duty to seek, if he has it not, the grace that inclines the will, illumines the understanding, and regenerates the soul. ”

“ They cared as little for Christ and his religion as the chief priests and elders did; and men that have no religion at all, can be very well pleased to see Christianity run down, and lend a hand to it, if need be, to serve a turn. ”

“ This is but another way of saying, what is perfectly true, that not only is Christianity necessary, but the Church also. The Church is necessary, the clergy are necessary; the future of Christianity is hardly conceivable without them. But as lucidity is a condition from which the Christianity of the future cannot escape, so is it a condition from which the Church and the clergy cannot escape either. ”

“ I hold that Christians are ill-employed, who spend their strength in missionary attempts to change the creed of other branches of the Christian Church, while their efforts at conversion might be much better utilised in behalf of the heathen, or, what is the same thing in effect, the untaught multitudes in our midst who know nothing whatever of the teachings of the Gospel of Christ. ”

“ These waverers, these men who lack force of character, whose hearts are charged with diluted Catholicism, know and believe, and by listening to sermons and religious instructions can completely convince themselves, that the Catholic Church is divine in her origin, holy in her founder, infallible in her doctrines, apostolic in her organization, glorious and wonderful in her saints. ”

“ Says one, 'if the ancient model or pattern is the standard, then the veil of modern Christendom is thrown off, and the entire world unchristianized—for we nowhere find such a pattern.' Well, admit then that there is no Christian church in existence among men, and that there has not been for many ages. ”

“ There are Catholicism, Presbyterianism, and all other isms, the advocates of which worship the same God, though their doctrine, precepts, and belief are not the same; they think differently, and worship differently, and each party sends to hell, in a wholesale manner, all who differ from them! ”

“ Yet this is Christendom, and the Christian principles are entirely familiar, and every Sunday and saint's day in all the Christian churches we protest that the practice of them is essential to our soul's salvation. Then we wipe our eyes, and smile kindly upon any one who really insists that we should offer the other cheek, and forgive seventy times seven. Oh no, we say; that is an eccentric view. No man in this world—that is, in Christendom—can afford to allow himself to be imposed upon. ”

“ Our space will prevent our telling of the adding of tradition to the Scripture, and of the rejection of much of the Word of God. Catholicism and Protestantism largely deny the doctrine of holiness. Some of the Protestant teachers teach holiness to a degree, but very few, or none of them, teach true Bible holiness. ”