on the part of some of those bishops which is largely responsible. The glory is departing from some of our mainstream denominations, because of undisciplined error in the most fundamental matter of the lordship of Christ.
Jesus confronts the nation of Britain, too, with this prospect of final judgment. For if Israel had known blessing from God's help over the centuries, so has this land of ours. For a thousand years Christianity has been the official faith of this land. We were delivered from paganism in the distant past, from Islam in the Middle Ages, from apostate Catholicism in the sixteenth century, and from Fascist and Marxist dictatorship in this twentieth century. God has spared this country politically in most remarkable ways, time and time again.
More than that, he has blessed this nation with preachers of extraordinary power and influence: godly men who have called us as a nation to place ourselves under the authority of God; martyrs who have died to bring us the Bible; evangelists who have spent their lives promoting revival. There are churches and chapels in every town and village testifying to God's signal goodness to this land.
What then will God do to us if, in the face of all that blessing, this land today turns its back on its Christian heritage and embraces a secularism as godless in its immorality and pagan in its superstition as many nations that have enjoyed not a fraction of its privileges?
Is it any wonder that economic prosperity is drying up, that the crime rate soars, that our international influence declines? Our world is littered with wrecks of great empires and nations of the past. There is nothing immortal about Great Britain.
But perhaps supremely we have to face the fact that Jesus confronts each of us as individuals with the prospect of final judgment, in these sobering and solemn words at the end of his story.
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