The
Christian Church has been stained with many a blot. Ill deeds have been
wrought in the name of Christ. Evil laws have been passed. Strange
superstitions have prevailed. But no other body can show such saints, no
other body can produce so great a cloud of witnesses. It is certain that
the lives and the deaths, the characters and the aims, of those who have
trusted their all to Christ have made them what He bade them be, the
salt of the earth. And they testify with one voice that they know no
other power which has upheld them but the power of Christ whom they have
taken for their Lord. Others have sometimes been set up as in some sort
rivals to Him as teachers or as examples; but here there is no rival
even pretended. In no other man have men been called on to believe as a
living present power, able to give strength and victory in the
conflicts of the soul. The Church, too, has passed through times of
spiritual depression, we may almost say of degradation. And in the worst
of times within the Church there has always remained a wonderful
recuperative power, which has shaken off inconsistencies and defects in
the past, and will do so yet more in the future. But this recuperative
power has always shown itself in one form, and in one form only, namely,
a return to Christ and to trust in Him, a trust which has never been
falsified.
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