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I " SD-FOURTft YEAR.
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Organ of ihe North Carolina Conference.
RALEIGH, N. C, JULY 25, 1918.
RELIGION AND PERSONALITY
A somewhat skeptical young man was at church one Sunday morning.
He had been attending this church for some months. The pastor was a brilliant
thinker and a forcible speaker. His sermons were masterly pieces of argu
ment. The young man used to say that he went to hear him in order to shar
pen the blades of his mind. Today a stranger was in the pulpit. The young
man moved a little restlessly in his seat. So many men had nothing to say
that he was tempted to rise and go out. Something about the fashion in
which the preacher of the day read the opening hymn held him, however,
and he watched the progress of the service in a half critical mood. When
the preacher began to speak he soon forgot everything else in listening.
This wasnot argument. It was life. It was not discussion. It was exper
ience. The word seemed dripping with a thousand human contacts. The
preacher had thought. He had also lived, and emerging from all his
speech one clear, strong figure stood forth in vital dominant power. He did
not argue about Jesus Christ. He did not build up an elaborate process of
reasoning. It seemed as if he drew aside a curtain and said quietly, " Look and
see the Master life. " You looked and what you saw made you know that he was
right. The young man walked away from the church at the close of the service,
quietly repeating to himself one sentence from the sermon, " Christianity is
Jesus Christ.
The Christian religion is for persons. It is built about a Person. It has
a great place for ideals. It has a great place for principles. It has a pro
found philosophic basis and it involves a noble and commanding theology.
It includes a system of ethics which is to transform the relations of men, but
all goes back to one towering, gripping, mastering Personality. You miss the
genius of Christianity if you miss the compulsion of the personal leadership
of Jesus Christ. If you surrender to Him, all the other wonderful things are
involved in that great surrender. For the last six months we have been
watching Him, and listening to Him, and feeling the impact of His life. If
all this has entered deeply into our own lives the world has been changed and
deepened, life has been enlarged, and in some genuine way we look out upon
the world with new eyes. Lynn H. Hough, in Christain Advocate.
Ill