anity of the primitive centuries
triumphed so phenomenally?

This is the Christianity we need to preach today.

It is full of a great body of doctrine.

It is full of the supernatural.

Miracle and miraculous are woven into its texture from beginning to
end. You cannot touch it, or handle it, or look at it from any angle
of vision that it does not suggest the miraculous. The moment the
miracle is out of it it is no longer the Christianity of the first
century, it is not the Christianity of the New Testament--the
Christianity that has a miraculous Christ for its centre and the
miracle of an infinite God for its environment.

A Christianity of doctrine!

A Christianity of miracle!

And why not?

It is as superior to the Christianity, so called, that sets aside
miracle and doctrine, turns its back on the hereafter, makes its
appeal in behalf of the present alone, and grounds its claim to
authority, not on a "thus saith the Lord," but on a "thus saith
science and reason"; a Christianity that owns the law of evolution
as its present force and defining motive; it is as superior to that
sort of Christianity and as high above it as the heavens are above
the earth.

One night this summer I stood upon a mountain ridge and watched the
revelation of the starry sky. The great constellations, like silver
squadrons, were sailing slowly and majestically to their appointed
havens; from north to south and from south to north again, the Milky
Way swept upward from its double horizon to the zenith like a
highway paved and set with diamonds--a highway over which the wheels
of the king's chariot had sped, leaving behind that cloud of dust in
which every gleaming particle was a burnished sun. I gazed
spellbound until it was as the vision of an unfathomed sea, an ocean
tide of light, where the shimmering foam was the rise and fall of
single and multiple systems, the surf beat breaking on the shores of
converging universes. I gazed on this wealth and congeries of far
-flung worlds, in which some that appeared the most insignificant and
twinkled and trembled as though each glimmer would be the last, were
actually so great that beside them our own poor little world was but
as a mole hill to earth's Himalayas; as I gazed I thought of the
distance from world to world--measured as light travels--till the
count of years fell away, and there were no more numbers with which
to count, and I knew that at the end of this calculation I had but