istian.
Indeed, just this sort of service the Master always has been rendering
his movement; he is the perennial rebuke of all that is degenerate and
false in Christianity. Whenever reform has come, whenever real
Christianity has sprung up again through the false and superficial, the
movement has been associated with somebody's rediscovery of Jesus
Christ. Saint Francis of Assisi rediscovered him, and made a spot of
spiritual beauty at the heart of the medieval age. John Wesley
rediscovered him and his compassion for the outcast, and led the Church
into a new day of evangelism and philanthropy. William Carey
rediscovered him and his unbounded care for men, and blazed the trail
for a new era of expansive Christianity. And if today many of us are
deeply in earnest about the application of Christian principles to the
social life of men, it is because we have rediscovered him and the
spirit of his Good Samaritan. In an old myth, Antaeus, the child of
Earth, could be overcome when he was lifted from contact with the
ground but, whenever he touched again the earth from which he sprang,
his old power came back once more. Such is Christianity's relation
with Jesus Christ. If, therefore, the idea of progress involves the
modern man's condescension to the Master as the outgrown seer of an
ancient day, the idea of progress has given Christianity an incurable
wound.

Before we surrender to such a popular interpretation of the meaning of
progress, we may well discriminate between two aspects of human life in
one of which we plainly have progressed, but in the other of which
progress is not so evident. In the Coliseum in ancient Rome centuries
ago, a group of Christians waited in the arena to be devoured by the
lions, and eighty thousand spectators watched their vigil. Those
Christians were plain folk--"not many mighty, not many noble"--and
every one of them could have escaped that brutal fate if he had been
willing to burn a little incense to the Emperor. Turn now to
ourselves, eighteen hundred years afterwards. We have had a long time
to outgrow the character and fidelity of those first Christians; do we
think that we have done so? As we imagine ourselves in their places,
are we ready with any glibness to talk about progress in character?
Those first Christians never had ridden in a trolley car; they never
had seen a subway; they never had been to a moving picture show; they
never had talked over a telephone. There a