Vol. V. No. 2] LANGHAM HALL PULPIT [JAN. 15, 1882

The Triumph

OF

PREACHED AT THE LANGHAM HALL, JANUARY 8, 1882.

BY

REV. CHARLES VOYS EY.

ISAIAH ii. 20.—In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver and his idols of gold which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats.

PSALM xlvi. 10.-Be still then and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, and I will be exalted in the earth.

A CLERICAL friend in criticising my sermon on Christmas Day urges upon me several considerations, among which, the most important is the ethical effect upon a large portion of mankind of the Christian religion as professedly based on the alleged resurrection of Christ.

His words are:

We come to the question of the Resurrection of Christ: on historical and ethical grounds, will the event bear historical tests ? Has it produced ethical effects? Nec Deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus.' (Translation: Let not a deity be introduced unless there is a knot worthy of his unravelling.') The results have been 'miraculous.' Take the history of the world before the event, and contrast with it that which has followed, and I think we may fairly speak of it as a New Creation.

Rev. C. Voysey's Sermons are to be obtained at Langham Hall, 43 Great Portland Street, every Sunday Morning, or from the Author (by post), Camden House, Dulwich, S.E. or of Mr. W. P. Collins, Bookseller, Weymouth Street, Corner of Great Portland Street, W. Price One Penny.

I do not propose to enter this morning into the historical part of this question as to the resurrection of Christ, but only to consider in a broad and comprehensive view what is suggested and confirmed by my correspondent in reference to the marvellous ethical results of Christianity in its rise and subsequent establishment.

That those effects have been great, deep and widespread, surely no one will deny; but what is in dispute is that the rise and triumph of the Christian religion were 'miraculous' or at all demand, as a necessity, the introduction of a deity to explain them. Believing as we do that the whole world is under the rule and control of Divine Providence, we may attribute the good effects of the Christian Religion among other benefits to His blessed will, but beyond that we cannot grant more room for the supernatural.

If the term 'miraculous' applies to the growth of Christianity, it applies equally well to every other successful effort in the establishment or reformation of a creed. Buddhisni began in the same helplessness of infancy and though it was absolutely cast out from the country of its birth-like Christianity too in this respect-yet it finally grew and spread till it is now embraced by about a third part of the whole human Mahommedanism in like manner spread with a rapidity and success greater still than that of the Christian faith. The Reformers of the 15th & 16th centuries began too under the most crushing disadvatages and all Christendom declared the new heresy could not live. Nevertheless it abides to this day and its mighty harvests have yet to be reaped.

race.

If God's hand be traced in one such unexpected survival and triumph, it must be traced likewise in them all. And if success be reckoned by majorities, Buddhism has far outstripped Christianity.

To condense the matter of a discourse on such a wide theme into our very narrow limits, we must be content to keep ourselves rigidly to two distinct questions.

1. Granting, for the sake of argument, a wonderful growth and spread of the Christian faith, by whom and by what manner of people, and under what conditions was Christianity accepted?

2. Is the boast of its miraculous rise and progress really sustained by facts?

We cannot, however, even touch the first of these two questions until we have some clear not on in our minds of what we mean by the 'Christian Faith.' If we go to the Gospels in search of it, we are puzzled to know what that 6 faith' was. According to some parts, it was theologically identical with Judaism. According to other parts it was a Tritheistic faith wholly abhorrent to the Jewish mind. If we search in the Acts of the Apostles, we shall find it to consist in a belief in the miraculous performances and in the resurrection of Jesus. If we search the Epistles, we find a Pauline and a Johannine system of theology, both differing hopelessly from that of the Apostle James. The Christian faith' wore the hues of a chameleon and from the very days of the apostles was divided into sects holding different heresies. For three centuries the Church was more or less Arian, and neither gospels nor epistles availed to establish the 'Christian Faith' without the aid of councils and the intervention of secular force. We are thus in a difficulty at the very outset to find out what it was that grew and spread under that ambiguous term. Without going into details I will first remark that inasmuch as the most memorable of the conquests by Christianity was made over the subjects of the Roman empire, and that as St. Paul was emphatically the founder of the Roman Church and the Apostle of the Gentiles, so we may safely conclude that the Christianity which overspread the Roman populations was that preached and taught by St. Paul and not that of the early Church in Jerusalem which was in deadly antagonism to the Pauline doctrine and practice.

Christianity, however, in whatever form, first laid hold of the great religious divisions of the then known world, viz., the Roman, the Greek, and the Egyptian; and as a matter of fact these religions were essentially inferior to any form of the Christian faith. All were more or less idolatrous, polytheistic, and morally not elevating. The gods were but men and women of like passions with ourselves. Long ago the immortal Socrates had protested against the worship of them, and schools of philosophy flourished at Rome, at Athens, and at Alexandria, in which popular superstitions and religious ceremonies were contemptuously ignored or openly despised. But the mass of the people were still, as

St. Paul said of the citizens of Athens,' wholly given to idolatry.' Men were divided, pretty much as now, between the credulous and the sceptical-the superstitious and the atheists. The one part held an agnosticism fatal to moral energy; the other a belief degrading to the moral sense and provocative of unbridled sensuality. The so-called 'Pagan world' was, as is admitted on all hands, in a deplorable state both religiously and morally. It needed a new light, a new law, a new Gospel; and without any hesitation or reservation I affirm my belief that Christianity, almost in any of its then existing forms, was exactly what was wanted to raise these debased and degraded people from their gross moral darkness. Even the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection and the Judgment to come were all higher and more elevating than the beliefs which they displaced. With the solitary exceptions of Election and Everlasting Hell, the Christian dogmas were without question an immense advance on the beliefs and theology prevalent among the masses of the people. Instead of exciting our wonder or suggesting miraculous interference, the spread of Christianity among such people was little short of inevitable. The wonder and miracle would have been for them not to embrace it. The wonder is that their conversion was so slow.

When, however, we go more deeply into the matter, we find that not only on purely theological grounds, but on grounds intensely moral, Christianity was a timely and welcome boon. It not only proclaimed the holiness, and the ineffable purity of God, which was borrowed of course from Judaism, but it declared the imperative necessity of purification of life. The old man with his evil deeds of darkness was to be put off, and the new man formed in the image of righteousness and true holiness was to be put on. No compromise was permitted between the works of the flesh and the demands of the Holy Spirit of God. Even civilised mankind in those days was yet in its infancy, needed still both bribes and threats to train it into habits of virtue. St. Paul, no more than anyone else at that period, could dispense with the terrors of the law, the dread cere monies of the Day of Judgment, and the horrible vengeance stored up for the impenitent and unreclaimed. And yet

side by side with these then needful accessories there was proclaimed a free pardon for all past iniquity, and the awakened sinner was supported and encouraged in his earliest efforts at renewal by a hope in the mercy and love_of_God, which healed while it comforted his remorseful soul. There was nothing in all the Greek, or Roman, or Egyptian mythologies approaching to this as a moral remedy for inveterate sin. Christianity deserved to succeed as a substitute for a corrupting idolatry, and as filling the terrible void which had ever existed in Pagan faiths by supplying the highest moral influences.

We do not, of course, herein condemn the splendid instances of both religious and moral teaching to be found in Greek and Roman literature. But the people at large were wholly outside the reach of such teaching, and the teachers themselves were but seldom imbued with any earnest desire to arouse and instruct their countrymen at large. Hence they needed such a religion as St. Paul brought them, and in spite of opposition and prejudice it did gain hold of their affections and regard. And the wonder is, not that it prevailed, but that it spread so slowly and so gradually as it actually did.

But we shall miss the whole force of this argument from the fact of the spread of Christianity among the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, if we do not notice also by whom and by what manner of people Christianity was rejected. There was one section at least of the Roman Empire that steadfastly refused to accept Christianity, whom no bribes, no threats, not the bitterest penalties or persecutions could ever compel to profess the Christian faith. A people historically often unfaithful, changeable, prone to wander, nevertheless immovable as the everlasting hills to all apostolic inducements to idolatry. This people actually gave heed for a time to its founder and his immediate followers, and allowed even the establishment in Jerusalem of a Christian Bishop, but the moment they saw what Christianity really was and what it involved, they shook it off from them like a leprous garment, and from that day forth would not-for very love of God-allow themselves to be perverted by its claims. Is it needful to ask why? Surely not. Nothing is more patent than that the Jews rejected Christianity because