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If you want to know what it is that makes the living centre of Christianity, go and ask a missionary what it is that he finds it best to tell people that gather round him. Is it not the one story — the universality of sin and the redeeming Christ? Wherefore we say with confidence, and I wish it were deeper in the hearts of all of us, that Christianity — not all the minutiae of reticulations of the net in which we carry it, but the treasure which we carry in the net — that our Christianity is the only religion on the face of the earth that has got stamped upon it universality. Mohammedanism bears the stamp of Mahommed, and dissolves before Western civilisation. It is needless to ask whether Buddhism or Brahmanism can live beyond certain degrees of latitude and longitude, or outside certain stages of human thought and progress. They are all like the vegetation of the countries in which they had their origin. You cannot transplant palm trees and bamboos into our northern latitudes. But the seed which the great Sower came to scatter is like the bread-corn, an exotic nowhere, and yet an exotic everywhere, the bread of God that came down from heaven. All these other religions are like water that is strongly impregnated with the salts or the mineral matters which it has dissolved out of the strata through which it rises; but the river of the Water of Life that proceedeth from the throne of God and of the Lamb has no taste of earthly elements in it, and in spite of all the presumptuous crowing of some whose wish is father to the thought, it will flow on till it covers the earth, and every thing shall live whithersoever the river cometh.

(A. Maclaren, D. D.)

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KJV: For thus saith the LORD of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land;

WEB: For this is what Yahweh of Armies says: 'Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, the earth, the sea, and the dry land;