Judges 16:6

Judges 16:6

This has been the question of the world to the Church from the beginning. Conscious of the fact that a spiritual force is in the midst of it, perceiving its power over men, the world asks again and again wherein consists the strength of the kingdom, which, even from its seeming contradictions, it is reluctantly sensible is not of the world.

I. The strength of Christianity lies in the continued activity of the living Christ. "I am He that liveth and was dead." This is to the believer the only sufficient explanation of the history of the last eighteen centuries.

II. A second source of the strength of the Church is the power of its doctrine over the human soul. That power lies primarily in the very nature of the doctrine. Christianity at its first promulgation by our Lord and his Apostles was an appeal to the conscience the moral sense, the innate religiousness of man not so much to the wonder, the awe, the reverence, as to feelings more deeply seated in him; less to his imagination than to his spiritual constitution.

And the doctrine of Christianity has also all the force which belongs to definiteness. The human soul welcomes religion as a revelation of something beyond its own discovery, as to itself, the world around, and the future which lies before it.

Bishop Woodford, Sermon Preached at the Opening of Selywn College, Cambridge,Oct. 10th, 1882.