Some of you will go through the same experience.  You will preach to cultured and intelligent audiences, and they will listen courteously and eagerly as long as you tell them something new, and do not ask them to do anything.  The only possible way of reaching Athenian intellect or Corinthian materialism and vice is by preaching Christ, “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”  And you will reach more Corinthians than Athenians.

You may preach sermons full of the grandest philosophy and theology, and of the highest, most exact, science; you may chain men by your logic, thrill them by your rhetoric, and move them to tears by your eloquence, and they will go home as dead and cold as they came.  What they need is power, life.  But preach “Christ and him crucified”—­not merely dead two thousand years ago—­but risen and alive for evermore, and with us to the end of the world, the grandest, most heroic, divinest helper who ever stood by a man, one all-powerful to help and who never forsakes, and every one of your hearers who is not dead to truth will catch the life, and go home alive and not alone.

So long as we preach a dead Christ we shall have a dead church, as hopeless as the apostles were before the resurrection.  “But now is Christ risen from the dead,” “alive for evermore.”  See how Paul and Peter and John, and doubtless all the others, talked with him and he with them, after he was taken from them, and you have found the secret of their power, and of that of all the great Christian heroes and martyrs who could truly say, Lord Jesus, we understand each other.  Better yet, prove by experience that it is possible for every one of us.

And our Lord and Master is the connecting link between God and man, through whom God’s own Holy Spirit is poured like a mighty flood into the hearts and lives of men, transfiguring them and filling them with the divine power.  This is the biblical idea of Christianity; man, through Christ, flooded and permeated and interpenetrated with the Holy Spirit of God.  And thus Paul is dead and yet alive, but fully possessed and dominated by the spirit of Christ.  Alive as never before, and yet his every thought, word, and deed is really that of his great leader.  Can you talk of self-denial to such a Christian?  He had forgotten that such a man as Saul of Tarsus or Paul ever existed; he lives only in his Master’s work, and is transfigured by it.  This, and nothing less, is Christianity, and this is the very highest and grandest heroism.  Paul conquers Europe single-handed, alone he stands before Caesar’s tribunal, and yet he is never alone; and from the gloom of the Mammertine dungeon he sends back a shout of triumph.  And Peter walks steadily, cheerfully, and unflinchingly, in the footsteps of his Master to share his cross.

Let us, before leaving this topic, notice carefully just what religion, and especially Christianity, is not.