TWO RELIGIONS

Hokitika Guardian, 13 April 1929, Page 7

TWO RELIGIONS

(R.v iho BISHOP OF LONDON in the London “.Daily Mail.”) $

It is becoming clearer day by day that we have to choose between two religions.

There is the popular and easy one, viz., that a very good man appeared two thousand years ago called Jesus Christ, who left us many true and beautiful sayings and preached some very good sermons, of which the best was the Sermon on the -Mount. If you read and follow the Sermon on the Mount (not a very easy thing to do by the way) you are a good Christian, and you need not worry about such tilings as church-going or sacraments, or whether or not you believe in miracles ; indeed, to use the words which have become famous: “You need not worry what your sins.”

Now there is no doubt that it is far l>etter to get so far than to get nowhere. Really to carry out the Sermon on the Mount would be to revolutionise human lives more than most people imagine. But as Professor Cairns, of Aberdeen, points out in an excellent book called “The Faith that Rebels,” this is not the original Christian religion.

The original Christian Gospel, instead of watering down or emptying away all that was miraculous in the story of Christ, may be said to have “revelled in miracles!” It was the miracles which were the kernel of the story and the heart of the Gospel. This also comes out in Bishop Gore’s book, “Jesus of Nazareth,” which has just appeared. The miracles are just as common in St. Mark’s Gospel, which all agree is the earliest, as in any other. The healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, the power over nature, and, finally, the actual rising from the dead, leaving behind, as l)r Latham so vividly describes in the “ Risen Master,” the graveclothes lying as they were in the empty tomb.

All this is of the very lie-art of the Gospel and has given mankind tlie spring of hope which lights up the world to-day. These things arc all natural and fall into place with the original Gospel, which was that “The Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us, AND we beheld hi is Glory, the Glory as of the only Begotten the Father, full of grace and truth.” (St. John, i. 14.) Once believe that Jesus was the Word, the Eternal Son of God. who “for us men 1 and for our salvation came down 'from heaven,” then the Virgin Birth, the Miracles, the Resurrection, fall into place as natural to a supernatural Person; nature becomes not an iron mask, hut. to use Professor Cairn’s phrase, “ a silken glove ” on a Hand of Power, and it is this supernatural Christ whom we watch ruling the world to-day and who has promised to he with us all the days, even to the end of the world.

It is this Christ, and no other, round whom we gather in Tent and ask Him to draw us nearer to Himself.