Take Christ out of the gospel, and you take its very heart out. He has not only originated a system, but He has put Himself into it, as its very life and soul and power.

God is merely tuning the soul, as an instrument, in this life. And these joys of the Christian, are only the notes and chords that are sounded out in the preparation--preludes to the perfect harmony that shall flood the soul--forerunners of the perfected and rapturous joy that shall bless the soul, in that exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

Here is Christianity. Whence came it? It is a force in the world, a prodigious force. It has revolutionized society. It has lifted man out of himself. It has changed the face of the world. There it lies, imbedded in more than eighteen centuries of human history; and history of no mean sort, the best record of the race.

The saddest of all failures is that of a soul, with its capabilities and possibilities, failing of life everlasting, and entering upon that night of death upon which morning never dawns.

Take Christ out of the gospel, and you take its very heart out. He has not only originated a system, but He has put Himself into it, as its very life and soul and power.

If God is a reality, and the soul is a reality, and you are an immortal being, what are you doing with your Bible shut?

Look, therefore, which way we will, whether at the direct Scriptural statements of death as the penalty of sin, or at the agony of the cross as a means of rescue, or at the joy of the angels of God over a rescue; we see from either that it must be a work of infinite and eternal consequence--the work of redemption.