Jude 1:3 Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write to you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write to you… What are our primary, positive reasons — such as spring from the broad facts which meet us on the forefront of history and human nature — for believing in the permanence of our Christian creed? 1. First, surely we may gather reassurance from the past history of Christianity. Human nature is one and the same beneath all distinctions of race and class. Christianity has already in the past shown a marvellous power so to get down to the permanent roots of human life and to pass in substance unchanged through the greatest possible crisis and most radical epochs of change in human history. 2. Should we not find reassurance in the fact that the panics with which the faith of our own generation has been assailed are storms which the ship of Christian faith is already showing signs that she can weather? For example, it cannot be denied that the horror with which, not wisely perhaps, but certainly not unnaturally, new conceptions of evolution in nature were at first regarded by theologians and Christian teachers is passing away, and they at least are declaring on all sides and in all good faith that they do not find their frankest acceptance at all inconsistent with a Christian belief. 3. Again, if we are tempted to take an over-ideal view of development as the law of the world, and to fear that Christianity by the very fact that it claims finality proves its falsity, is there anything more reassuring than to consider carefully the broad fact that Christian morality has as a matter of history vindicated its claim in this respect. A morality — an ideal of human life, individual and social — promulgated in Syria 1800 years ago, proclaimed in its completeness by a few mostly uneducated men of Jewish birth and training, within the limit of a few years — this ideal has remained through the ages, and almost nobody seriously claims to find it deficient. At any rate those who do, appeal very little to our consciences and better reason. But, then, what a vast admission is here! It means that morality has, under circumstances when such a fact was not at all to be expected, vindicated its finality; each successive generation has but to go back and drink its fill afresh from that inexhaustible source of a moral ideal which is Catholic. 4. And if we are convinced of this, if we are convinced that in this moral and spiritual sphere of human life an ideal promulgated 1800 years ago in an Eastern country has shown every sign of being universal and final, if we are convinced that the law of evolution has here something which in actual experience limits its application, then it seems no great step to ask a person to admit that this finality shall be attributed not to the life merely in ideal and effect, but to what St. Paul calls the "mould" of Christian teaching which fashions the life. For just as surely as in the lapse of years we identify the Mahommedan character with the Mahommedan creed, and in the creed recognise the condition of the character, just so surely we must recognise the whole organism of the historic Christian system as the condition of the Christian morality. Is there any consideration in the world which can call itself scientific which would justify us in supposing that a life consciously and confessedly moulded by a body of truths can go on existing without those truths? Is it not contradicting all principles of science to imagine that a changed environment of truth will not produce a changed product? The prayerful temper must excite our admiration, but is it not inconceivable that the prayerful temper can be developed except on the basis of a belief in a personal God to whom we can have personal and open access? The temper of penitence we know to be one of the most absolute essentials of spiritual progress. But the temper of penitence is the simple product of a belief at once in the personal holiness and personal love of God, a belief which can become conviction only in the revelation of Christ. (Canon Gore.) Parallel Verses KJV: Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. |
    |