Читать книгу The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity онлайн

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Up to this time I had been little, if at all, impressed by preaching. Our old Rector was a good Greek scholar and a gentleman; but he had a difficulty in making his thoughts intelligible to any but a refined minority among the congregation; and even that select few was made fewer, partly by an awkwardness of gesture which reminded one of Dominie Sampson, and partly by a grievous impediment in his speech. Consequently I had been permitted, and indeed encouraged, never to listen, nor even to appear to listen, to the weekly sermon; and as soon as the Rector gave out his text, I used to take up my Bible and read steadily away till the sermon was over. This sort of thing went on till I was about sixteen years old; when a new Rector came to preach his first sermon. That was a remarkable Sunday for me. To my surprise, when he read out his text, and I, in accordance with unbroken precedent, reached out my hand for the invariable Bible, my father, somewhat abruptly, took it out of my hand, bidding me “for once shut up that book and listen to a sermon.” I can still remember the resentment I felt at this infringement on my theological and constitutional rights, and how I stiffened my neck and hardened my heart and determined “hearing to hear, but not to understand.” But I was compelled to understand. For here, to my astonishment, was an entirely new religion. This man’s Christianity was not a “scheme of salvation”; it was a faith in a great Leader, human yet divine, who was leading the armies of God against the armies of Evil; “Each for himself is the Devil’s own watchword: but with us it must be each for Christ, and each for all.” The scales fell from my eyes. After all, then, Christianity was not less noble than Plutarch’s lives; it was more noble. There was to be a contest; yet not each man contending for his own soul, but for good against evil. A Christian was not a mercenary fighting for reward, nor a slave fighting for fear of stripes, but a free soldier fighting out of loyalty to Christ and to humanity.