CHRISTIANITY (from OF. ('resticette, Cres /Ica fct, from Lat. Christionitas, Christianity, from Christianus, Christian). Religion depends it two elements, the perception 14 need, and belief in some higher power able to relieve it. :\lan is very early brought to feel his helplessness in respect to his own life and the things he most needs for its maintenance. lle early forms the idea of some higher being, some force of nature, some departed spirit, or some superhuman being, who has the power, even if not the will, to help him preserve his life, or give hint food. The moment he turns to this being in supplication and with some degree of trust, that moment he has become a religions being. Thus Schleier macher was right in defining religion as essen tially the feeling of dependence.
As man progresses in knowledge of himself and ay world, he is led tee see that this world is free from evils and that lie is never lifted to the complete independence of it. Hence he begins to place the Ala good for which he another and a At the same time his conception of the super human being upon whom lie depends becomes 1111iTO elevated, and he begins to view life under ethical eousiderations, which lend color tee his view of the goad to he attained in a future state. This process may carry him to a high degree of knowledge of God, immortality, morality, as it did the Greeks. who found in Plato a channel for the expression of the purest and highest form of religion which any pagan people attained.
Christianity, now, partakes of the character of all religion, in that it is fundamentally a recognition by man of his dependence upon God; but it is distinguished front other religions lc: the character of the provision which it makes for the satisfaction of the elementary religious de mand. 1t is the religion of salvation, and it provides this through a definite channel, through the work of a Saviour sent from God, desus Christ. It is in its conception the absolute and only true religion. Toward Judaism its relation is that of the perfect to the divinely or dained, but preparatory and imperfect. Toward the various forms of heathenism its relation is that of the pure tee the multifariously debased. It recognizes in none of them saving power. If any soul is saved in heathenism ( Romans ii. 14-111), it is because it has assumed the same attitude toward God which Christianity requires, and its salvation is granted solely upon the ground of the perfect work of Christ wrought for it as well as others. Without the essential elements of the Gospel, without the atonement of Christ, and without. faith (confiding trust) in God. Christianity teaches there is no salvation (Acts iv. 12).
The claim of absoluteness whkh is made for Christianity is supported by the method in which it originated. It is the religion of revelation. God makes himself known to men by personal communication in a supernatural way. He speaks by chosen messengers (prophets) and sus tains their message by divine signs (miracles), and at last. in the fullness of time, sends His own
Son. who takes upon Ilim humanity. reveals God more perfectly than any of 1Iis forerunners. per forms the work of atonement, and then sends the divine Spirit to work immanently in the soul and be a new power of life, delivering it from the control of sin.
This conception of supernatural origin is essen tial to Christianity. The great teachers who have le ft the record of their teachings in the Bilde did not obtain their conceptions of truth by the unaided operations of their own minds, as men have discovered the powers of steam and elec tricity. if the knowledge of truth had grown in this way. it would still have grown under the effective agency of God, as the process of evolu tion is by the immanent working of Ills per sonality econsult Le Conte, I:ro/ution rind llc New York, ISSS). lint revelation em phasizes that personality. It is accompanied by the sense of personal contact with God. It gives truth which is necessarily recognize.d as coining from God and not as originating in the h'unum soul. Prophecy and miracles are equally per sonal. Prophecy is not a merely natural antici pation of the future by any shrewd guessing, or by any special sympathy with the mind. enabling man to decipher the riddle of the future. nitwit less is it error and self-deceit. It is God's personal communication to the prophet of the unknown future as it lies in the divine plan. Miracles are also God's present and per sonal interference in the course of name. They need not be conceived as destroying any funda mental law of nature, but they are what nature never does and never can do without God, as it never does and never can do a multitude of things which it does without man. And when Jesus Christ comes into the world, the height of the supernatural is reached. lie cannot be re garded as an Ideal man' merely, though Ile was that. He did not originate as a man by the merely natural processes by which other men originate. His peculiarity is not found in the degree of intimacy With which Ile conummed with God. On the contrary. Christianity regards Him as God come in the flesh. Ile is God in the centre of ]his personality, and speaks with the authority and knowledge of Cod. The work of atonement which He performs is no mere incident in Ills earthly career, nothing in which men have any part, nor which they can do after Him; but is unique as Ills person is unique. and neither capable of imitation by man nor proposed for his imitation, although His spirit is, even the spirit in which He wrought this great work (Phil. ii. riff.). All the various explanations of the pe euliarities of Christianity are natural explana tions, and are foreign from the spirit of the sys tem. It is in distinction from and contradiction of them all that it is 'supernatural.' It is not anti-natural. and is even natural, if in the scope of that word the nature of God and the secrets of eternity are embraced; but it is above nature, as man knows nature.