be seen to be the beginning and the ending of the purpose of
God.

This is the consummation to which Christianity leads us--a perfect
race of immortal beings in a perfect world, a perfect world in which
no man shall say, "I am sick"; where sin is unknown; where the
funeral bell does not toll, and a grave is never dug. Where God is
all in all.

This is the hope and the ultimate Christianity sets before us. Not
once in all its record does it offer us heaven or bid us prepare for
it as the ultimate, but always it exhorts us to look for and wait
patiently for immortality and glory at the Coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ.

This is the Christianity of the primitive centuries.

This is the Christianity of the New Testament.

It is the Christianity that fully met the needs of men.

It met the needs of men who gave themselves up to unrestrained
passion, to the gluttony of every appetite; who lounged away their
day in cool marble halls, or leaned half drunken from the cushioned
seats of the amphitheatre, while the sands of the arena were
reddened with human blood to give them a holiday. Look at them
there. They passed their unsatisfying hours in idle jest, wreathed
themselves with freshly plucked, but swiftly fading flowers, drowned
their senses from moment to moment, still deeper in the spiced and
maddening wines, gave unbridled freedom to their lust; and then, at
close of day, in the splendor of the sinking sun, went forth to cool
their fevered brows in the Campagna's freshening but deadly air, and
drove with furious pace and brutal laughter along the Appian way
between rows of monumental tombs whose chiselled epitaphs told the
hopeless end of human life; then back again they drove with still
more reckless haste to spend the night in wild debauch and meet the
gray dawning of another day with its mocking routine and disgust.
Loathing their very joys, revolting at their own gratification,
these men asked: "Is there nothing better than this, that we drain
the cup of pleasure to the dregs, open our veins, watch the life
blood ebb away, and laugh, and mingle our laughter with curses that
so cheap and easy an ending should have cost so much to reach?"

O the woe, the horror, the emptiness, and the crying, agonizing need
of lives like these.

And Christianity fully and richly met the need of lives like these.

It met the needs of men who in the midst of an environment of the
flesh, with the wild beast of appetite strugglin