United States or Puerto Rico ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe, reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which the Christianising Jews first brought from the east.
Of these a great number are excellent in both intention and execution, and must be numbered among the educating, civilising, Christianising agencies of the day. They are something more and higher than the "savoury literary entremets" designed to please the fastidious taste of a cultured and leisured class, which was the just description of our periodical literature at large not so very long ago.
So much for the Britons. As for the Celts, we have sufficient evidence that the message of Christ was taken to them and welcomed by them in the later parts of the period ending with 450. During the years of the struggle between the Britons and their Teutonic invaders, say from 450 to 590, this Christianising went on among the Celts.
So hot did our arguments become about this subject of the Church, for, as may be imagined, in the course of them I revealed some unorthodoxy, especially as regards the matter of our methods of Christianising Kaffirs, that I was extremely thankful when a diversion occurred which took me away from home.
Missionaries of the different denominations have gone into these remote regions, have lived amidst many privations, and have given their lives to the blessed work of Christianising, and then civilising these long neglected people. They have not toiled in vain. Thousands have renounced their paganism and become earnest, genuine Christians.
With this missionary spirit in the Church, with priests still engaged in christianising and monks in establishing themselves on their domains, with a very general ignorance of art, with the absorbing interest of the powerful and great in warfare, and the very great struggle among the poor for existence, architecture before the X century had few students or protectors.
It is commonly assumed that the rejecters of the popular religion stand in face of it, as the Christians stood in face of the pagan belief and pagan rites in the Empire. The analogy is inexact. The modern denier, if he is anything better than that, or entertains hopes of a creed to come, is nearer to the position of the Christianising Jew.
I must, however, mention one authority which stands supreme among its brethren the edition of Adamnan's Life of St Columba, edited by Dr Reeves, under the joint patronage of the Irish Archæological and the Bannatyne Clubs. The original work has long been accepted as throwing a light on the Christianising of the North, second only to that shed by the invaluable morsels in Bede.
They sally forth from their mountains like mice from caverns, and will take no ransom from a captive save his head." Another result of the consideration, which I have suggested, of the date and manner of the Christianising of Ireland, is the probability that the Irish Church and the remains of the British Church had some not inconsiderable differences of practice.
In 1853 the mission of the American Board was dissolved, their object having been fully realised in Christianising the people, planting churches, and making them self-supporting. Kamehamea the Third, the brother and successor of the king, who died in England, reigned well and wisely till 1854. On his death, Prince Alexander Liholiho, a well-educated and religiously disposed young man, became king.
Word Of The Day