The work of the Holy Spirit - pagina 293

;

SIN

NOT MATERIAL

253

Church under a Christian name, and by believing men. We confine ourselves to a few features.

But

this is

impossible.

The mission

of divine truth in this world is not to wanton with wisdom, but to expose it as a lie. Divine Wisdom does not compromise with the speculations and delusions of worldly wisdom, but calls them folly and demands their surrender. In the Kingdom of truth, light and darkness are pronounced opposites. Hence the Church, in coming in contact with the learning and philosophy of the Gentile world, came into direct and open conflict with it. Compared to Israel, the heathen world was wonderfully wise, learned, and scientific; and from her scientific standpoint, she looked down with deep contempt and infinite condescension upon the foolishness of Christianity. That foolish, ignorant, and unlettered Christianity was not only false, but beneath their notice, unworthy to be discussed. In Athens the good-natured people had for these unthinking men and their absurd babbling a Homeric But neismile, and the sinister ridiculed them with bitter satire. ther the one nor the other ever seriously considered the matter, for its

it

was

unscientific.

And yet, after all, that stupid Christianity carried the made progress. It obtained influence, even power. At

day.

great minds and geniuses of those days began to feel attracted to until, after a conflict of

nearly a century, the hour came

It

last the

when

it

the

heathen world was compelled to come down from its proud self-conceit, and acknowledge that ignorant, unlettered, and unscientific Christianity.

The lively preaching of these Nazarenes had drowned

the disputations of those dry philosophers.

world's

life

Soon the stream

of the

passed by their schools, and flowed into the channel of

Even before the Church was two centuries old, proud heathendom discovered that, mortally wounded, its life was in jeopardy.

the wonderful and inexplicable Jesus.

Then under the appearance of honoring Christianity, with cunning craftiness Satan vitally injured it, injecting poison into its heart. In the second century three learned and complicated systems,

viz..

Gnosticism,

Manicheism,

with one gigantic effort to smother

it

and Neo-Platonism, tried embrace of their

in the mortal

heathen philosophies.

When

the cross was planted on Calvary, two empires existed in

heathendom: one

in the West, containing

the other in the East, with

its

Rome and

Greece, and

centers in Babylon and Egypt.

In

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