TJ We are able without confusion to associate faith in the " All-Father " with much of the picturesque and poetic beliefs of the ancient world. They, too, through the flimsy veil of grotesque mythology, looked into the heavens, and believed God to reign there, with power over human destiny, the Arbiter of fate and the Eewarder of the righteous. They, too, felt beneath the out- spread beauty of the earth a living presence of God. " God is in everything you see, the world is only the shrine of His presence and the veil of His glory." So with many of the great systems of nature-worship with which we are brought into contact to-day in the march of our civilization: beneath them there is the sense of an overshadowing majesty which can be used and elevated and stripped of its superstitious adjuncts and purged from its materialism. But " I believe in Jesus Christ, God of God, Light of light, very God of very God, . . . being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things are made," is at once to bring in a different element altogether. This sad, attenuated figure, with arms outstretched upon the Cross, seems at once to drive away
ACTS iv. 12 77
the nymphs from the fountains, the dryads from the groves, and to pass like a cloud across the sun, "a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief," crowned with thorns, not with roses ; out- cast, despised, rejected, crucified ; at one time enwrapped in the miraculous, at another apparently overwhelmed with humanity and its capacities for suffering. At once we introduce with this Divine figure a history which is challenged at every step, a history which cannot be dissolved into poetry, or relegated into a mythology dear to the souls of those who think they can believe and disbelieve at the same time.1
2. If we believe in Christ only as our Teacher, although we spoke of Him as the greatest of all Teachers the world has ever had, we should stop short of the conclusion at which St. Peter arrived. If we believe this, and observe all that this belief in His teaching involves in our life and actions, it is much, but it is not enough. We must believe in Jesus not only as our Teacher and Master, but as our Saviour. May we not think that this is the very ground reason which led St. Peter to put his proposition in this form which has been called narrow and exclusive ? " Neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved." We must be careful, while we call Christ Jesus the Teacher, not to forget that He is also our Saviour. That postulates a great truth which we cannot push aside with the Athanasian Creed. We listen to Him, it may be, as One who has said some very beautiful things and has given us some very useful advice. Jesus Christ is placed, as we may see, in a beautiful building near London, as one of the great teachers of the world, with Socrates and Confucius and Buddha and Muhammad. But it is not what Christ has taught us, but what Christ has done for us, that the Church and our Bible put before us as the object of our belief : " I believe in Jesus Christ our Saviour " — nothing short of this.
T{ The boldness of Peter and John in making this assertion appears no less amazing to us, after these centuries have passed, than it did to the men of their time. We can explain it only by the statement in verse 8, that they were " filled with the Holy Ghost." To venture on the morrow of a criminal's execution, in the city where he was executed, and before the persons who had con- demned him, not only to vindicate his memory, and to assert his
1 W. C. E. Newbolt.
78 THE SAVING NAME
innocence, but to set him forward as the headstone of the corner " the one man under heaven whereby we must be saved," argues an inspiration from God. If there had been no truth in the bold attribution, it would have been the raving of hallucina- tion, and the world would have heard no more of it. But, as the claim has been in these nineteen centuries substantiated by many and various evidences, we may be sure that a power and knowledge more than human instructed the minds of the Apostles.1
1| Did you ever notice the intolerance of God's religion ? In olden times the heathen, who had different gods, all of them respected the gods of their neighbours. For instance, the king of Egypt would confess that the gods of Nineveh were true and real gods, and the prince of Babylon would acknowledge that the gods of the Philistines were true and real gods; but Jehovah, the God of Israel, put this as one of His first commandments, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"; and He would not allow them to pay the slightest possible respect to the gods of any other nation : " Thou shalt hew them in pieces, thou shalt break down their temples, and cut down their groves." All other nations were tolerant the one of the other, but the Jew could not be so. One part of his religion was, " Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord thy God is one " : and as the consequence of his belief that there was but one God, and that that one God was Jehovah, he felt it his bounden duty to treat all other gods with contempt. Now the Christian religion, you observe, is just as intolerant as this. If you apply to a Brahmin to know the way of salvation, he will very likely tell you at once that all persons who follow out their sincere religious convictions will undoubtedly be saved. " Here," says he, " are the Muhammadans ; if they obey Muhammad, and sincerely believe what he has taught, without doubt, Allah will glorify them at last." And the Brahmin turns round upon the Christian missionary, and says, " What is the use of your bringing your Christianity here to disturb us ? I tell you our religion is quite capable of carrying us to heaven, if we are faithful to it." Now hear the text : how intolerant is the Christian religion ! "Neither is there salvation in any other." The Brahmin may admit that there is salvation in fifty religions besides his own : but we admit no such thing. There is no true salvation out of Jesus Christ. The gods of the heathen may approach us with their mock charity, and tell us that every man may follow out his own conscientious conviction and be saved. We reply — No such thing : there is no salvation in any other ; " for there is none