The History of Christianity - John S. C. Abbott (bookstand for reading .txt) 📗
- Author: John S. C. Abbott
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The life of Paley was in many respects quite the reverse of that of Wesley. He was by no means an ardent Christian. His piety, and his appreciation of Christianity, were intellectual far more than spiritual or emotional. He was not a popular preacher: his appropriate field of labor was the silence and solitude of the study. From this retreat he issued works upon God, Christian Morals, and the Evidences of Christianity, which greatly baffled infidelity, and silenced its cavils.
Being promoted from one living to another as he gained reputation, in 1782 he was advanced to the Archdeanery of Carlyle. Three years after this he published his first important work, entitled “The Principles of Moral and Political Economy.” Though some of its principles were violently assailed, it commanded the respectful attention of all thoughtful men. The work became exceedingly popular even with the masses, as Paley had the power of making the most abstruse truths clear and entertaining to the popular mind.
Five years after this, in 1790, Paley published another work, entitled “Horæ Paulinæ,” which is generally deemed the most original and ingenious of all his writings. In this work, which obtained renown through all Christendom, he maintained with irresistible force of logic the genuineness of St. Paul’s Epistles and of the Acts of the Apostles, from the reciprocal supports they received, from the undesigned coincidences between them. This work added greatly to the celebrity of the already distinguished writer, and secured for him still more lucrative offices in the English Church.
Four years later, in 1794, he issued another volume, entitled “View of the Evidences of Christianity.” It may be safely said that the arguments here brought forward in attestation of the divine origin of the religion of Jesus of Nazareth never have been, and never can be, refuted. In clearness of diction, beauty of illustration, and force of logic, the work has never been surpassed. It has been adopted as a text-book in many of the most distinguished universities, and is considered one of the most cogent arguments to be found in any language in favor of the divine authority of Christianity.
Thus does God raise up different instruments to accomplish his great purposes of benevolence. While Wesley and his coadjutors were traversing thousands of miles, and, by their impassioned eloquence, were rousing the humble and unlettered masses to an acceptance of the glad tidings of the gospel, Paley, in the lonely hours of entire seclusion in his study, was framing those arguments which intellectually enthroned Christianity in the minds of the thoughtful and the philosophic.
At the close of a studious life of sixty-two years, spent in his study and his garden, with but few companions and few exciting incidents, this illustrious servant of the Church of Christ fell asleep on the 25th of May, 1805.
For nearly nineteen centuries, Christianity has struggled against almost every conceivable form of human corruption. All the energies of the powers of darkness have been combined against it. In this unholy alliance, kings have contributed imperial power; so-called philosophers, like Voltaire, have consecrated to the foul enterprise the most brilliant endowments of wit and learning; while all “the lewd fellows of the baser sort” have swelled the ranks of infidelity with their legions of debauchees, inebriates, and blasphemers; but all in vain: generation after generation of these despisers have passed away, and perished.
Christianity has been steadily triumphing over all opposition, and was never before such a power in the world as at this day. Could you, upon some pleasant sabbath morning, look down from a balloon, as with an angel’s eye, over the wide expanse of Europe, witnessing the movement of its myriad population, and, as with an angel’s ear, listen to the sounds which sweep over its mountains, its valleys, and its plains, how wonderful the spectacle which would meet the eye, and the vibrations which, like the fabled music of the spheres, would fill the air! Suppose it to be such a sabbath morning as Herbert describes,—
“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky:”
you would hear the chime of millions of church-bells floating in Æolian harmony over crowded cities and green fields, melodious as angel-voices proclaiming the praises of God. As you inquire, “What causes this simultaneous clangor of sweet sounds over thousands of leagues of territory, regardless of the barriers of mountains and rivers, of national boundaries and diverse tongues? whence comes the impulse which has created this wondrous summons to hundreds of millions of people, spread over a majestic continent, under diverse institutions, speaking different languages, inhabiting different climes, and under all varieties of forms of government?” you would be told,—and not an individual on the globe would dispute the assertion,—“It is the religion of Jesus of Nazareth.”
As you listen, you look; and, lo! thronging millions are crowding towards innumerable temples of every variety of form, size, and structure. The gilded chariot waits at the portals of the castle and the palace for the conveyance of nobles and kings to these sanctuaries. Through all the streets of the cities, and over many green-ribboned roads of the country, vehicles of every description may be seen, crowded with men, women, and children, all peacefully pressing on to alight at the doors of these temples. The pavements of the crowded towns are thronged; pedestrians, in their best attire, are hastening along the banks of the rivers, and crossing the pastures and the flowery plains; while, some in wagons, some in carts, some on horseback, the mighty mass, unnumbered and innumerable, moves on to ten thousand times ten thousand cathedrals and village churches, and to the humblest edifices, where coarsely-clad and unlettered peasants meet for praise and prayer.
The innumerable throng sweeps along the base of the Carpathian Mountains, threads the passes of the Tyrol, and winds its way through the gorges of the Alps and the Apennines. In Russia, wrapped in furs, they struggle through snow-drifts, and breast the gale, as they crowd to the Greek Church. On the sunny banks of the Mediterranean, in Italy, France, and Spain, through vineyards and orange-groves, cheered by the songs of birds and the bloom of flowers, nobles and peasants, princes and subjects, press along to the massive, moss-covered churches where their ancestors for centuries have worshipped according to the rites of the Catholic Church. In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and through all the highways and byways of England, Scotland, and Wales, the inmates of lordly castles, and humble artisans from mines and manufactories, are moving onward to the churches where the religion of Jesus is inculcated in accordance with the simple rites of the Protestant faith.
And, if we cross the Atlantic, we witness the same sublime spectacle, extending from the icy regions north of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic coast almost to the base of the Rocky Mountains, and again repeated upon the Pacific shores through the rapidly-populating plains of California and Oregon. Scarcely have the hardy settlers reared half a dozen log-huts ere the spire of the church rises, where the religion of Jesus is taught as the first essential to the prosperity of the growing village. And so through South America: through its conglomeration of States, where light is contending with darkness; through Chili, Peru, Bolivia, and along the majestic streams and wide-spreading savannas of the vast empire of Brazil,—the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, notwithstanding the imperfections which fallen humanity has attached to it, is potent above all other influences in enlightening the masses, and in moulding their manners and their minds. And now we begin faintly to hear, along the western coast of Africa and the southern shores of India, and upon many a green tropical island emerging from the Pacific, the tolling of the church-bell, indicating that that religion which has became dominant in Europe and America is destined to bring the whole world, from pole to pole, under its benignant sway.
And it is worthy of note that the most thoroughly Christian nations are the most enlightened, moral, and prosperous upon the globe. Where we do not find this religion, we meet effeminate Asiatics, stolid Chinamen, wandering Tartars, and Bedouins of the desert. They are the Christian nations who stand forth luminous in wealth, power, and intellect. These are the nations which seem now to hold the destinies of the globe in their hand; and it is the religion of Jesus which has crowned them with this wealth and influence.
And again: it is well to call attention to the fact, that every literary and scientific university in Christendom, where the ablest men in all intellectual culture do congregate, is mainly under the control of those who bow in cordial assent to Jesus of Nazareth as their Teacher and Lord.
The Universities of Cambridge and Oxford in England, of Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, of Harvard and Yale in the United States, declare through their learned professors, with almost one united voice, that the salvation of humanity can come only through the religion of Jesus the Christ. In France, Italy, Germany, Russia, in all the renowned, time-honored universities of Continental Europe, the name of Jesus is revered as above every name, and his teachings are regarded as the wisdom of God and the power of God. There is hardly a university of learning of any note, in Europe or America, where Jesus of Nazareth is not recognized as the Son of God, who came to seek and to save the lost.
The standard of what is called goodness in this world greatly varies. “There is honor among thieves.” A gang of debauchees, gamblers, and inebriates, has its code of morals. The proudest oppressors who have ever crushed humanity beneath a merciless heel have usually some standard of right and wrong, so adroitly formed as to enable them to flatter themselves that they are to be numbered among the good men.
Socrates, unenlightened by revelation, simply through the teachings of his own honest mind, declares him only to be a good man who tries to make himself, and all whom he can influence, as perfect as possible. The definition which Jesus gives of goodness, even more comprehensive and beautiful, is, that a man should love his Father, God, with all his heart, and his brother, man, as himself. This is the only real goodness,—angelic goodness, divine goodness. Now, it may be safely said that you cannot find at the present time, or through all past ages, a truly good man, in either of the above definitions of the term, whose character has not been modelled by the principles laid down by Jesus of Nazareth.
Let the mind run along the list of great and good men, who, with loving hearts and pure lives and beneficent actions, have been the ornaments of humanity; men and women who have made their own homes happy, who have ever had an open hand to relieve the distressed, whose hearts have yearned over the wandering, and whose lips have entreated them to return to the paths of virtue; and where can you find one who has not manifested the spirit of Jesus, and drawn his main inspiration from the principles which he has inculcated?
There are now many men and women all over Christendom, of self-denying lives, active in every good word and work, sympathizing with the afflicted, helping the needy, praying for and trying to reclaim their brothers and sisters of the human family who are crowding the paths of sin; searching out the children of abandonment, destitution, and woe, from the depravity of the streets and from homes of wretchedness, that they may be clothed and educated and made holy,—there are thousands
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