proceeded under an economy of grace. And I repeat, its fundamental
principle of sacrifice, exemplified as it has been through the
Christian centuries, has won the recognition even of those who were not
themselves the followers of Christ. "The history of self-sacrifice
during the last eighteen hundred years," says Lecky, "has been mainly
the history of the action of Christianity upon the world. Ignorance and
error have no doubt often directed the heroic spirit into wrong
channels, and sometimes even made it a cause of great evil to mankind;
but it is the moral type and beauty, the enlarged conception and
persuasive power of the Christian faith that have chiefly called it into
being; and it is by their influence alone that it can be permanently
maintained."[208] Speaking of the same principle Carlyle says: "It is
only with renunciation that life, properly speaking, can be said to
begin.... In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making
others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie." And George Sand in still
stronger terms has said, "There is but one sole virtue in the world--the
Eternal Sacrifice of self."

While we ponder these testimonies coming from such witnesses we remember
how the Great Apostle traces this wonder-working principle back to its
Divine Source, and from that Source down into all the commonest walks of
life when he says, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ,
who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with
God; but made himself of no reputation, and took on Him the form of a
servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion
as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the
death of the Cross." Or when he reminds the Corinthians that, though
Christ was rich, yet for their sake He became poor, that they through
His poverty might be rich.

In all the Oriental systems there is nothing like this, either as a
divine source of all-availing help and rescue, or as a celestial spring
of human action. It is through this communicable grace that Christ
becomes the Way, the Truth, the Life. Well might Augustine say that
while the philosophy of Plato led him to lofty conceptions of God, it
could not show him how to approach Him or be reconciled unto Him. "For
it is one thing," he says, "from the mountain's shaggy top to see the
land of peace and to find no way thither; and in vain to essay through
ways impossible, opposed and b