Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 November 1876 — The Work of Christ. [ARTICLE]

The Work of Christ.

The eflects, then, of the work of Christ are even to the unbeliever indisputable and historical. It expelled cruelty; it curbed passion; it branded suicide; it punished and repressed an execrable infanticide ; it drove the shameless impurities of heathendom into a congenial darkness. There was hardly a class whose wrongs it did not‘remedy. It rescued the gladiator; it freed the slave; it protected the captive-; it nursed the sick; it sheltered the orphan; it elevated the woman; it shrouded as with a halo of sacred innocence the tender years of a child. In every region of life its ameliorating influwence was felt. It changed pity from a vice into a virtue. It elevated poverty from a curse to a beatitude. It ennobled labor from a vulgarity into a dignity and a duty. It sanctified marriage from litide more than a burdensome convention into little less than a blessed sacrament. It revealed for the first time the angelic beauty of a Purity of which men had dispaired and of a Meekness at which they had utterly scoffed. It created the very conception of charity, and broadened the limits of its obligation from the narrow circles of a neighborhood to the widest horizons of the race. And while it thus evolved the idea of humanity as a common brotherhood, even where "its tidings were not believed—all over the world, wherever its tidings were believed, it cleansed the life, ana elevated the soul of each individual man. And in all lands where it has molded the, character of its true believers, it has created hearts so pure, and lives so peaceful, and homes so sweet, that it might seem as though those angels who had heralded its event had also whispered to every depressed and despairing sufferer among the sons of men, “ Though yie have lain among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove, that is covered with silvenfcings, and her feathers like gold.”— Farrier'a Life of Chriat.