Have we this Christ?

Another clasic from P. T. Forsyth in his 1908 sermon ‘Christ at the Gate’ (p.252) in Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History edited by Jason Goroncy.

“I know what you are ready to do – to confront me with the irony of existing Christendom.
You may heap up the crimes of the past, and even of the Church.
You may accumulate before my eyes the wrongs, anomalies, and miseries of the present.
You may charge the civilisation of Europe after these two millenniums of Christianity with being little but a veneered paganism.
It may all be too true.
But it is not Christendom that is the religion of Christians. It is the Gospel.
It is not Christians that make the evidence of Christianity, it is Christ.
Christ is the one apologetic.
Have we this Christ?
We certainly have the Church – have we this Christ?
Yea, we have this Christ, else we were no Church.”