RELIGIOUS WORLD.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 259, 9 November 1901, Page 2 (Supplement)

RELIGIOUS WORLD.

A REASONABLE FAITH.

(By ROBERT F. IIORTON.

M.A.. P. 0.)

THE CROSS

Harnack, in his analysis of the truth which the Apostolic Church believed and delivered, shows how those first Christians accepted Christ as the living Lord because He was risen from the dead, and because He had died for

them. And in trying- to estimate what that sacrificial death meant for them, he distinguishes these three broad factors: —(1) The death on the cross actually abolished all the system of sacrifices and altars; whatever instinct of the religious spirit was expressed in that effort to propitiate the holy and the powerful God was satisfied by the Cross. As a simple matter of "history, thenceforth .such sacrifices disappeared from the highest religion. (2) The sufferings of the pure and of the just have always been the saving element of history; the recognition, therefore, that Jesus had, in any sense, laid down His life for them," appealed to those first believers as sufficient evidence of love and power. "The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep" was an argument which needed no further analysis to be convincing to the mind and "moving to the heart. (3) Injustice and sin deserve punishment. When, therefore, the just and the holy suffer an atonement is made. How in a universe of righteousness and wisdom can the sinless suffer for nothing? If the sinless suffer, it i* that others may reap the benefit. A great vicarious principle runs through human experience; the good are ever bearing the sins of the bad; the supremely good, the holy Son of Man, who was the Son of God, bore all the sins of all the bad.

These factors, however general and even elusive, sufficed in the Apostolic Church to give the supreme conviction that Jesus was the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world, the Propitiation for our sins, and not for ours Only, but for the whole world.

When we attempt to press the "how" farther than the first believers pressed it, we find that we are liable to errors and to divisions. Our theories divide us. The wise reserve of the New Testament unites us again. Again we are gathered about the Cross, and dwell on such broad facts as these: —(1) Christ offers himself to God through the Eternal Spirit, in place of all" the sacrifices and propitiations, endless and unavailing, which the conscience in its terror, or the heart in its agony has, in all i-eligious, offered to God. " (2) Christ being at once the Son of Man, representative man, and the Son of God, a principle of the Divine nature itself, must necessarily, in His devotion, obedience, suffering and sacrifice, have a universal significance. His unique relation to man makes His offering the offering of all men. His unique relation to God gives to His suffering the nature of the suffering of God. (3) Not only by the fulness and confidence of the apostolic preaching on the subject, but by His own express words: "This is My blood, shed for the remission of sins"; "Father, forgive them": "It is finished"; "Thy si'is be forgiven thee"; we are justified in believing that there in the sacrifice of the Cross is full and free pardon for all sin to every one who believes. (4) Christ crucified must be preached to the world as the spiritual basis of forgiveness and reconciliation to God. And we may be sure that where He is preached as history presents Him, and as Christian experience testifies to Him, men will everywhere receive Him, believe, and be

How? is the question still repeated. How can this man forgive sins? has been the voice of incredulity from the beginning. The true answer is, Come

and see

That death, as it occurs in the Gospels, as the issue of His life and teaching, carries its own Divine power in it. We love the One who lays down His life for us. When we realise that it was human sin that crucified Him, and therefore in the spiritual sense, our sin; when we grasp the fact that our sin puts Him to an open shame, as we crucify the Son of God afresh; we ard brought to the point when sin becomes hateful, and we determine to break with it. We love Him because He first loved us. We love God in Him, because the whole transaction of the Cross appears as the love of God suffering for us, the heart-pang in the Godhead caused by our sin and endured for our redemption. Arid in that answering love of sinful man to his suffering God, the lovelessness which is our sin melts away. The love of Christ constrains us. The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts. The love of man flows from the love of God. How shall we not love all men, since for all men Christ died?

Apart from all subtle refinements and juristic explanations, this fact of the Cross seems to me to have acted and to act upon the human heart in this redemptive way. The experience of those who have been redeemed, repeated year after year for these long centuries, flows on essentially the same under all the differing modes of thought by which the fact has been from time to time explained.

The officials of the National Bible Society of Scotland have sold 8800 copies of the Scriptures from the society's stall in the Glasgow Exhibition.

The Duke of Clarence Memorial Church, at Llaurhos, Llandudno, the memorial stone of which was laid by the late Duchess of Teek in 1895, has recently been consecrated by the Bishop of St. Asaph.

The Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior in the new Ministry which recently came into power in Holland is Dr. Kuyper, a Presbyterian minister, and one of the ablest Calvinistie theologians of the day.

Examination of the United Methodist "Minutes" in Great Britain shows that nearly thirty ministers are staying a fourth year in their appointmnts, and twentyfour a fifth. Nine remain for a sixth1. five for a seventh and four for a tenth. Four ministers are respectively in their thirteenth, fourteenth, twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth year on their stations, and two'are in their twenty-third.

In consequence of the refusal of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to recognise the Moderator of the Irish Presbyterian Church in State functions, equally with the Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches, the Moderator has signified his intention to absent himself from all vice-regal fuue-

t i o ii s

General Booth's American tour was postponed in consequence of the serious illness of his daughter, Mrs Booth-Tucker, who, with Mr BoothTucker, is at the head of the forces in the United States. Two months of absolute rest will be necessary for the patient, who i= suffering1, the General says, from the malady which almost proved fatal some iive or six

years ago

The Rev. Dr. Norman Macleod says that church extension is one of the most urgent duties to which the Scottish churches are called, in order to keep pace with the increase of population, which is at the rate of from 30,000 to 40,000 per year.

The most famous relic which the Czar saw during his visit to Rheims Cathedral, France, says a Sydney Roman Catholic journal, was the Sainte Ampoulle, or sacred flask of oil. from which the Kings of France u;:ed to be anointed at their Corona--1 ion.

The "winter programme at Westbournepark Institute (Dr. John ClifJ'orcl) presents a comprehensive field of educational opportunities. The evening classes, embracing all manner of subjects, from art to cookery and from languages to dress cutting and making, are conducted by twen-ty-live qualified teachers, including University graduates and class lecturers of front rank. Prizes and medals are offered as inducements to serious study.

Another illustration of the expansion of the Anglican Church in England is seen in the creation of the new see of Burnley in Lancashire, about twenty miles from Manchester, to which Canon iloskjus. of Boltou (formerly rector of Stepney, London) has been appointed the first Suffragan Bishop.

The committee have adopted the St. James's Mount site for the new Liverpool Cathedral. The Dean of Lincoln, in a published letter, stated that, the late Mr Gladstone at Cannes in 1898, during a period of comparative ease from pain, said: "I wish some one would give me a million of money." When asked what he would do with the. money, he replied, "1 would spend most of it in building a cathedral and providing- a chapter in Liverpool."

A young couple recently applied to the rector of Rattlesden, Bury St. Edmunds, England, to marry them. They were unbaptised, and the rector insisted on their being baptised before he would perform the ceremony. They, however, declined to submit to this' demand, and were subsequently married in the Baptist Church.

Some of the monks exiled from France have arrived in England. A permanent home for the Benedictines has been formed in the Isle of Wight, and Cardinal Vaughan has invited another French brotherhood to settle in Wapping. The monks of the Grand Chartreuse are also reported to be removing to Spain, the German Emperor having refused to allow them to settle in Alsace-Lorraine.

Dr. Westcott, the late Bishop of Durham, paid all the money he received as bishop of the diocese into a special banking account, called "the King's Messenger Fund," and from it he paid all that was necessary for the keeping up of the bishopric, and the remainder—said to be a large snm — novv comes back to the diocese. He felt that the money was not his own, but a trust for Durham.

Rev.- F. Lawrence, lion. sec. of the Burial, Funeral, and .Mourning Iteform Asociation, has issued circular letters urging preachers to avail themselves of the, sixteenth Sunday after Trinity as suitable for giving expression to the Funeral Reformers' Manifesto, which is: "No darkened house, no durable coffin, no special mourning attire, no bricked grave, no unnecessary show, no avoidable expense, and no unusual eating and drinking." Mr Lawrence mentions that ihe Sunday named, which this year falls on September 22, is chosen on the ground that the Gospel for the day records what Christ said and did on the only occasion when he is known to have met a funeral procession.

Professor George Adam Smith preached in Kelvinside Church, Glasgow, in connection with the visit of

the British Association, and contended that the consideration of such snbjets as those brought before the Association could not be without a pure and sobering effect upon the community. Accurate truthfulness, loyalty to facts, and courage in the face of facts were virtues indispensable to religious health, for examples of which an honest Christian ethic could 'not but be grateful to the physical and historical sciences of the centm-y. One of the most brilliant prophets of the atomic theory, the late Professor Clerk Maxwell, not only believed that the atomic theory fortified man's belief in God, but was himself a devout confessor of the Christian religion. Christianity was. however, mainly planted in the belief that the Divine character and purposes for men have been fully declared through a longhistorical process which culminated in Jesus Christ.

Rev. Dr. K. C. Andei-son, of Ward Church, Dundee, preached recently on Count Tolstoi's doctrine of non-re-sistance. He said that to argue that force was never to be used in the world to secure righteous and moral ends was to argue anarchism. He would agree with Count Tolstoi if his theory could be practised under present conditions, but after deep research he considered it wholly false and unsound. Tolstoi was prepared to carry his theory to a logical conclusion; but while we should admire his staunch adherence to his principles, Dr. Anderson confessed that he could not approve what led to anarchy—not necessarily the murderous, destructive anarchy of the asassin and rebel, but philosophical anarchy. If rights could have been obtained without foi-ce, then force was wrong. If the right end could be obtained without force for the Outlanders in tho Transvaal, then it was ivrong to h'nve gone to war. and the same might be said regarding America and the Cubans. But Dr. Anderson declared that Tolstoi's doctrine was based on a too literal interpretation of Christ'? words, "Resist not evil."