to be felt rather than understood. The Cross so seen is the
symbol at once of love and need, of moral defeat and moral discipline,
of suffering helplessness and overcoming goodness. We cannot overstate
the influence of this faith upon the better part of Western
civilization.

It has kept us greatly humble, purged us of our pride and thrown us back
in a helplessness which is, after all, the true secret of our strength,
upon the saving mercy of God. The story of it, simply told, has moved
the hard or bitter or the careless as nothing else can do. Its
assurances of deliverance have given new hope to the hopeless and a
power not their own to the powerless. It has exalted as the very message
of God the patient enduring of unmerited suffering; it has taught us how
there is no deliverance save as the good suffer for the bad and the
strong put their strength at the service of the weak; it has taught us
that the greatest sin is the sin against love and the really enduring
victories for any better cause are won only as through the appeal of a
much enduring unselfishness new tempers are created and new forces are
released. Nor is there any sign yet that its empire has begun to come to
an end.

_The Catholic Church Offered Deliverance in Obedience to the Authority
of an Inerrant Church_

Nevertheless the preaching of the Cross has not commonly taken such
forms as these; it has been rather the appeal of the Church to the
individual to escape his sinful and hopeless estate either through an
obedient self-identification with the Church's discipline and an
unquestioning acceptance of the Church's authority, or else through an
intellectual acceptance of the scheme of redemption and a moral
surrender to it. Here are really the two lines of approach through the
one or the other of which Christianity has been made real to the
individual from the time of St. Paul till our own time. During the early
formative period of the Church it was a matter between the individual
and his God. So much we read in and between the lines of the Pauline
Epistles. As far as any later time can accurately recast the thought and
method of a far earlier time evangelical Protestant theology fairly
interprets St. Paul. Faith--a big enough word, standing for both
intellectual acceptance and a kind of mystic receptivity to the love and
goodness and justice of God revealed in the Cross of Christ--is the key
to salvation and the condition of Christian character. It