“It is not long since the little storm of prejudice broke out in the far west, and wrote into the laws of the United States government, over the protest of the President and the Secretary of State and many groups of learned and liberal people, to say nothing of many religious groups, a bitter, most unchristian, and gratuitous insult in one of the great powers and peoples of the modern world. And when the general for the United States Army passed through this city not long ago, while the train was standing in the shed, and General Pershing waited in view of the people on the rear platform, someone shouted “We will be with you when you go to Japan.” And the crowd muttered its amusement,” was the present day instance of national prejudice given by Rev. W.A. Stanbury in a powerful sermon yesterday morning on “The Limit of Christian Interest.”
“Most of us live most of the time with our eyes shut, or at best, half shut. Things go on all around us all the time, of which we are utterly oblivious, or else aware in small and infinite degree. It is only the keen-eyed and observant man who even sees what is going on, to say nothing of perceiving its significance.
“Jesus saw clear over the bounds of national prejudice. In fact, they did not exist for him. And you must remember that he bridged the chasm between the Jew and Samaritan as easily as one steps over an imaginary line. A good while afterward, an apostle said, ‘I preconceive that God is no respecter of persons, and another, greater than he, said, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, for all are one in Jesus Christ.’ He was just as truly and just as readily Christ for the outcast Samaritans as for the Galileans or the men of Judah. And He was a ‘light to lighten the Gentiles.’”
“And friends, it is hard to live up to the Christian religious at this point, perhaps as hard as at any. None of us is readier to do anything than to let prejudice speak instead of the Christian spirit, when an affair comes up between us and another nation, or another section. There is no sectional lines in Jesus.
“Where may a Christian draw a line, beyond which his interest need not go? What concern has Jesus, the Jew, or His followers, with the outcast Samaritans? Is there a man, anywhere, who does not count with Jesus Christ? does any man ever reach the zero point with Him? Can you name a man or a nation or a race that you think He does not care about, that was left out when He said, ‘I am the light of the world’?”
“There is at least one thing certain nowadays. That is, that we are going to make some kind of contact with the other peoples of the world. It may be a commercial contact. And then it may be a scientific contact. Or it may be the contact of education and culture. Or it may be a contact of suspicion and fear and prejudice, resulting after a bit in the contacts of war, which God forbid.
‘There are some things to remember. One of them is this: no one nation can be Christian alone. It is a thing which has to be done, if it is done at all, not separately and isolatedly, but together. The character of the political, industrial, and social life of the world is going to move in the Christian direction, or in the pagan direction. we are going to have a Christian civilization to export, and export to or we are going to allow ourselves and all the world to become a selfish, heathen, pagan society.”
From the front page of the Wilson Times, June 17, 1924
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