Robert William Dale
Published: 2012-02
Total Pages: 0
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III THE DIRECT APPEAL OF CHRIST TO THE SPIRIT OF MAN SIX or seven years ago, I had the honour of receiving as my guest a Japanese gentleman who had become a Christian. He spent only a few hours under my roof?he came in the afternoon, and left the next morning; but, brief as the time was, I was impressed by his moral dignity, his nobleness, devoutness, veracity, and force. Those who knew him best had a deep admiration for him; and he had shown the energy of his loyalty to Christ by making a great personal sacrifice in the service of the Church of which he was a member. He seemed to me to be one of those men who, without effort, and by the mere massiveness of their nature, assert ascendency and authority over other men. He had considerable intellectual culture, and great intellectual activity and vigour. At night, when the house was still, I askedhim how it was that he became a Christian. I reminded him that he and his countrymen were wholly separated from the traditions of Christendom, and from that unbroken line of historic continuity by which we ourselves are united to those who first received the Christian Gospel. As we Europeans look back over the Christian centuries, we can see a succession of scholars, theologians, and saints, extending from our own times to the very beginnings of the Christian Faith. We can ascend from age to age, listening in turn to the testimony of every generation to the power and grace of the Living Christ, until at last we listen to the words of those who saw and heard the original apostles. But to the Japanese this great Christian tradition is non-existent; to them no fires light up the vast blackness of the eighteen hundred years which separate the present generation from the first generation of Christians. I also reminded him that, ...