is but
another feeble effort at competitive morality. They will turn from
it and seek their own organizations wherein no issue of the
supernatural has ever been raised; where the quasi personality and
questionable existence of an unseen God are not at all discussed;
and where man and his present life are the only subjects deemed
worthy of consideration.

If this drift as thus indicated shall continue another ten years,
and enlist the support and open advocacy of leading and
representative thinkers in the church; if the theological seminaries
shall continue to turn out on graduation day, with their all too
mechanical regularity, men who do not believe in the virgin birth,
who find no real reason why our Lord Jesus Christ should have died
at all, except the fatality of his genius that he was too far ahead
of his time and was "caught by the whirling wheel of the world's
evil and torn in pieces"; if the repudiation of the Bible as the
final and inerrant revelation of God for this age shall continue so
short a space as a decade, by that time, at the present rate of
development, we shall have not only a very modern Christianity, a
Christianity without miracles, without even a hint of the
supernatural, but a Christianity without spiritual power or moral
authority, standing as a delinquent on the street corners, and amid
the hurry and rush of more vital things, begging permission simply
to exist.

Over against this modern drift and its amplitude of failure stands
the phenomenal success of original and primitive Christianity.

And yet, the conditions which confronted this nascent faith were
appalling.

It was the era of materialism. Force was the prime minister, self
-gratification the supreme legislator. Exaggerated superstition was
balanced by decaying faith. It was a time of coordinately high
mental activity, an intellectuality that cynically rejoiced at its
own failure to solve the riddle of the universe, maliciously
suggested new difficulties, raised barriers against its own
research, and prostrating itself in the name of mere brutism,
worshipped nature as the ready panderer to its worst passions, while
owning it as a cruelly smiling and pitiless sphinx.

The one hundred and twenty men and women who faced the Roman world
with the determination to impinge their faith upon it, seemed the
most audaciously unwise of all forlorn and hopeless fanatics. They
had neither wealth nor social standing. Their culture was at zer