we can do for people, is it worth doing? "Certainly I must confess," cried Sir Philip Sidney, "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." And to you has been committed the infinitely more heartmoving story of the Word made flesh: "that incredible interruption," wrote G. K. Chesterton, "as a blow that broke the very backbone of history." "It were better," he declared, "to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgment, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism, in the presence of so catastrophic a claim."
What strikes you about the preachers of the New Testament is that they had been swept off their feet and carried away by the glory of the great revelation. They went to men who had sinned disastrously, and they cried, "Listen! We can tell you of reconciliation and a new beginning." They went to others who had nothing but the vaguest fatalism for a religion, and they proclaimed exultingly the love of the eternal Father. They went to desolate and weak and lonely souls, and with shouts of confidence exclaimed, "Lift up your heads! You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you." They went to others shivering in cold terror at the thought of death's onward inexorable march, and they bade them "Rejoice! Christ has conquered. Death lies dead!" It is the same tremendous tidings for which the world is hungry yet. To discover, after a hundred defeats, that it is still possible in Christ to make a fresh beginning; to have
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