Acts 1:8 But you shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come on you: and you shall be witnesses to me both in Jerusalem… How came these humble and hated persons, these slaves and artisans, these unlearned and ignorant men to get the start of the majestic world, and bear the palm alone? How came it that the:greatest, the most advanced, the splendid and prominent races of the whole world have, one after another, embraced Christianity? How comes it that at this very moment one out of every four of the one hundred thousand millions of human beings is a professing Christian? Securus judicat orbis terrarium. Is the world so silly, is all its best intellect so anile, is the genius of humanity so wretched a fool as to be duped by a mere fraud and illusion preached by wandering beggars, blindly to embrace with all its heart, to enshrine in its stateliest temples, to enrich with its most splendid offerings, to set forth in its most brilliant hues of imagination and intellect, a faith so intrinsically feeble that after nineteen centuries of beneficent victory it can only tumble down like a pack of cards at the touch of any smart declaimer who chooses to say it is a lie? Because it was a truth and no lie. We have been well reminded that the babes and striplings of the world prevailed over the serried army of emperors, aristocracies, statesmen, institutions. Is this solemn voice of the ages, is this cogent mass of human testimony to go for nothing? Is it nothing that Christianity has prevailed over the banded union of the powers of evil, and that even in spite of the corruptions which have gathered round it; in spite of the crimes, negligences, and ignorances of its own professing followers that it should still triumph and prevail. I say that if Christianity be a lie, then everything and all human life is a lie, and "the pillared firmament is rottenness, and the earth's base built on stubble." (Archdeacon Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. |
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