544                  A. M. E. REVIEW.

breaks from the fair skin and clothes his body anew in a fresh
garment of purple. Look and listen, and reflect. This is his
reparation for our sins of impurity. At the pillar flowed forth
the stream of a precious medicament against the temptation
of this baleful vice. Physicians of any standing or repute in
their profession are suspicious, and justly suspicious of any
remedy, which professes to cure all manner of sickness. But
in Christ crucified we have without exaggeration and without
reserve, a veritable panacea for all maladies of our souls. Read
the acts of the early martyrs, and other documents bearing
upon those primitive times, and you will learn how rude citi-
zens, and illiterate slaves, and delicate maidens, and tender
children, made strong in the strength of the crucified Lord,
withstood the power of Roman praetors, and Roman provin-
cial governors; nay, of Roman emperors themselves. They
withstood it to the death, they died and they conquered. Why?
Because
               "The cause was God's and did prevail
               In spite of all its foes."
   It excels all other revolutions. It can never go backwards.
Its auxiliaries though unknown to themselves, have been the
voices of antiquity in the wilderness of the early civilization.
The ten thousand Greeks, mercenaries of that Cyrus in the
fratricidal war waged against his brother Artaxerxes for monar-
chical supremacy; when their cause was lost and many of their
officers slain, under Xenophon fought their way back to the
sea, and gave latterly the key to the situation, to the famous
Macedonian, Alexander, to spread the Grecian tributes to the
world's uplift, science and literature; thereby unifying the con-
quered states to get ready for the coming of Emanuel which
being interpreted, God with us. Then came Rome, the king-
dom of the iron and clay, its star being in the ascendant as it
beat down the mighty Carthage; it distributed law and ad-
ministration.  What was the contribution of the early fathers
to the world's great movement?  Basil says: "Religious life
is a privileged state in which, by a happy and admirable ex-
change, we give the things of this world for the things of the
heavenly, those things which pass away for such as are eternal,




			

OHS/National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center Serial Collection

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 28, Num. 2

Volume:  28
Issue Number:  02
Date:  10/1911