Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death: 07. Christianity a Fact

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Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death: 07. Christianity a Fact



TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 07. Christianity a Fact

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Christianity a Fact

This leads to the second fact, Christianity is a fact. For Christian civilization is an outgrowth of Christianity. Christianity is the root. Christion civilization is the shoot out of the root. It has no separate life of its own. And more yet, it seems pretty plain that Christian civilization isn't the chief outgrowth.

These radical differences between two civilization must really be classed as incidentals. Revolutionary they are, blessedly revolutionary, yet mere by-products. Christian civilization is a by-product; nothing more. It is a by-product of Christianity. It is not the main thing itself.

For, by common consent, no nation today is Christian in the profession and daily lives and practices of even a majority of its people. And the governmental policies, while taking on the outer coloring of Christian civilization, are underneath, confessedly the reverse of Christian, in the selfish, grasping spirit that dominates. Christian ity has not had the opportunity of producing its chief result in the generic life of Christian nations.

So, if these distinctive traits of our characteristic civilization are mere incidentals or by-products of something else, that something else is seen to be not only a fact, but a fact of immensely deeper significance.

Christianity is an ideal, a group of moral principles, and it is a vital power, that makes that ideal and those principles real in human life. It can change radically a human life from bad to good. And it does it. It presents a high ideal, makes a man long intensely after it, and then makes it an actual experience in his life, over-coming the most stubborn opposition.

No stronger thing could be said of any power. It changes the human will. It changes it at the core. And it does it wholly from within. There is no other power known to man that has done that, or that can do it.

The drunkard becomes sober, and a hater of the evil he once loved so passionately. The impure becomes pure, the thief honest, the covetous generous, the wavering and drifting purposeful, the weak strong. And the changed man becomes a new factor influencing his surroundings.

Every continent, and civilization, and distinct race, has living evidence of such change. Yellow men and brown, black men and white, have alike revealed this unmatched solitary power at work. The extremes meet here. The city slum, that ugly ragged sloughed-off edge of our best civilization, and the savage tribe untouched as yet by any civilization, acknowledge alike this trans-forming power.

This is what I mean by saying that Christian civilization is merely an incidental of Christianity. This thing of changing radically human character from bad to good this is the chief thing. Any thing else is incidental to this. The civilization is mere surface veneer. This goes down to the very vitals. Indeed this is the starting point of a true abiding civilization.

And so, Christianity is seen to be a fact, in plain open evidence in the life of the race. It is an indisputable fact even to those who hate it.