o,
their knowledge indifferent. Localism and tradition environed them,
and the story they had to tell was not only an affront to the course
of nature, but a direct repudiation of old faiths and cherished
religions. Itself a _religio illicita_, Christianity challenged
governmental law and invoked, logically, the keenest persecution.
The mountains which surrounded Jerusalem were not so high, nor so
difficult of ascent, as the prejudice far and near over which they
needs must climb, even if they would gain but a tolerated hearing.

Yet they went forth! and so preached, that they not only saved and
transfigured individuals, but so molded and transformed society,
that in its every-day achievements, Christianity itself seemed like
a miracle to astonished and silenced onlookers.

Startlingly enough this moulding of society, this overturning of old
conditions--this bringing in of the radically new, so that their
enemies said of them they had "turned the world upside down"; this
repudiation of brutality and the exaltation of unselfishness; this
building up of a condition in which a community now judged itself by
the standards of chastity, righteousness and neighborly kindness;
this renovation of whole centres of life till the erstwhile deserts
wherein not a flower of gentleness had bloomed, now blossomed as
gardens of delight, watered with never-ceasing streams of brotherly
love--were produced, not by an appeal to society itself, not by
denunciation of laws and customs, however bad, but by laying hold of
a human soul, estimating it in value by the weight of a whole world,
and changing the individual life.

This was the triumph of original and primitive Christianity.

In view of such a triumph and the unqualified failure of the modern
drift which claims the name of Christianity, it should seem a
perfectly legitimate and altogether pertinent question to ask,

"What is Christianity?"

The answer is given by the apostle Paul in his second letter to
Timothy, his son in the faith, the preacher of his own ordination.
He says:

"Our Saviour Jesus Christ . . . has abolished death and brought life
and immortality to light through the Gospel." (2 Timothy 1:10.)

According to this declaration, the Gospel is the good news that our
Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to accomplish three things--
abolish death, bring in a new life and reveal immortality. As the
Gospel is the heart beat of Christianity, then the three things
which