on the Lord’s Day to wend their way to the house of God and engage in religious worship, is a phenomenon which is worth thinking about.  How does the Roman Catholic Church do it?  Somebody says she does it all by appealing to men’s fears, she scares men into penitence and devotion.  Do you think that that is a fair explanation?  I do not think so.  I can conceive how she might frighten people for one generation, or for two, but I can not conceive how she could frighten a dozen generations.  One would suppose that the spell would wear off by and by.  There is a deeper explanation than that The explanation is to be found in the spiritual nature of man.  The Roman Catholic leaders, notwithstanding their blunders and their awful sins, have always seen that the central fact of the Christian revelation is the death of Jesus, and around that fact they have organized all their worship.  Roman Catholics go to mass; what is the mass?  It is the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.  What is the Lord’s Supper?  It is the ceremony that proclaims our Lord’s death until He comes.  The hosts of worshipers that fill our streets in the early Sunday morning hours are not going to church to hear some man discuss an interesting problem, nor are they going to listen to a few singers sing; they are going to celebrate once more the death of the Savior of the world.  In all her cathedrals Catholicism places the stations of the cross, that they may tell to the eye the story of the stages of His dying.  On all her altars she keeps the crucifix.  Before the eyes of every faithful Catholic that crucifix is held until his eyes close in death.  A Catholic goes out of the world thinking of Jesus crucified.  So long as a Church holds on to that great fact, she will have a grip on human minds and hearts that can not be broken.  The cross, as St. Paul said, a stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes.  The Catholic Church has picked up the fact of Jesus’ death and held it aloft like a burning torch.  Around the torch she has thrown all sorts of dark philosophies, but through the philosophies the light has streamed into the hearts and homes of millions of God’s children.

Protestantism has prospered just in proportion as she has kept the cross at the forefront of all her preaching.  The missionaries bring back the same report from every field, that it is the story of Jesus’ death that opens the hearts of the pagan world.  Every now and then a denomination has started, determined to get rid of the cross of Jesus, or at least to pay scant attention to it, and in every case these denominations have been at the end of the third or fourth generation either decaying or dead.  There is no interpretation of the Christian religion that has in it redeeming power which ignores or belittles the death of Christ.