The Dynamic of Christianity; A Study of the Vital and Permanent Element in the Christian Religion (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 Excerpt: ...the experience of religion. Christianity has always found some lives to whose general sense of good it has appealed; but they have gone no further than to approve it in a nerveless and complexionless fashion. Others have seen in it that which promised to advantage them in such measure that they have been moved to contend for it. They regard faith as a source of comfort in grief, or of assurance in prospect of death, or of physical and mental serenity--a good policy, for life. Multitudes doubtless accept faith upon these terms. It is a perfectly reasonable course and beyond carping criticism. But the fact remains that religious influence reaches its highest potential only in the man who feeds upon his faith. He thinks less of the demands which religion is likely to make upon him, or of the benefits which he is likely to reap from it--but he ponders more upon its intrinsic necessity to him. It is for him. He would be lost without it. The object of his faith is not so much an entity apart from himself, beckoning or commanding, as a Spirit with whose essence his own is becoming identified. 1 John vi. 54. 2 Johnvi. 57. Within this sense of immediateness are the hidings of the Mystic's power. As Professor Seth put it, "God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience."1 All great religions as distinct from merely ecclesiastical revivals have borne witness to the reality of this distinction, and to the power which the "experience of God" confers. This power has shown itself to be strikingly independent of ecclesiastical circumstance. The real Dynamic of Christianity has once and again proven itself to be a thing springing so directly out of spiritual experience that everything else can be treated with relative contempt. The Reformation and ...