And these all Making our ancestors our contemporaries

having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect. Heb. 11:39-40 The Christian tradition . . . comes to us most potently as the gift of twenty centuries of dead men. For Christianity includes all that it has done for men during the last two thousand years.

It includes all that men have become through the influence of Jesus Christ. It includes all that men have done under his inspiration. You cannot deprive the Apostle Paul of the right to vote at any Christian convocation because he is dead. And Boniface from the German forests, and the monk Augustine in early England, and Patrick in Ireland, and Carey in India, and Livingstone in Africa belong to every Christian assembly.

And Origen from Alexandria, and Chrysostom from Constantinople, and the great Bishop of Hippo from Africa, and Anselm from eleventh-century Eng- land, and Saint Francis from thirteenth-century Italy come to do commerce with us today. It takes everything that has ever happened to all the saints and martyrs and thinkers and men of action inspired by Christ to make up the Christian Church. From every Christian century they come hurrying to councils vaster and more potent than Nicaea. And as we allow them all to speak, and as we allow them all to vote, we begin really to understand the quality and the meaning of the Christian religion.

It is only when all our Christian ancestors are allowed to become our contemporaries that the real splendor of the Christian faith and the Christian life begin to dawn upon us. Lynn Harold Hough 166