which fills, soothes, blesses, inspires the aching, restless, craving human heart.
When it can no longer satisfy itself with the cold moralities of philosophy, when
it pines for a deeper and a warmer life, when it is weary with problems which it
cannot solve, and disappointed in hopes which it has seen fade away like dreams
of the night, it turns to the Cross and is comforted. The mysteries which
perplexed it vanish in the light that emanates from the Divine history of the SON
of GOD. The awe with which it regards the passionless abstraction of a great First
Cause, a supreme entity of Power and Wisdom without Love, passes into
reverent admiration and joyous thanksgiving when it looks up into the face of
the Good Shepherd, and reposes in the shadow of the Vine, and learns how that
He Who was with the FATHER before the beginning, has suffered even as we
suffer, has borne the heavy burden of the flesh even as we have borne it, and
now sits on the right hand of GOD,—not an idea, not a principle, not a Spirit, but
a PERSON, bidding all who believe to come unto Him and be at rest.
This, indeed, is the cardinal merit of Christianity,—it has given us CHRIST.
GOD forbid that we should deny a certain value even to the “unconscious
prophecies of heathendom,” or refuse to see something of the spirit of CHRIST in
the teaching of the ancient sages and philosophers; but when an attempt is made
to raise Magianism to an equal rank with Christianity, and the cold intellectual
utterances of the Zendavesta to rank with the living voices of Holy Writ, it is
essential to point out how vast, how impassable is the gulf between them; how
little Magianism did or could do to elevate man’s spiritual nature; and how
largely Christianity surpasses it, in and through the manifestation of the Divine
love in the mystery of GOD made Man.