ACTS iv. 12.
“Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other
name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be
saved.”
THESE words were uttered by St. Paul representing the
young Church of Christ, when, for the first time after her
foundation, she stood face to face with the hostile power
of the world. When the cripple was healed at the Temple
the Jewish world roused itself in earnest. St. Peter here
makes a positive assertion that Jesus Christ—His name—
that is Himself—brings salvation. What kind of salva-
tion?
I. First of all—though not chiefly—salvation from
physical discomfort and pain. Jesus was the real worker
of the cure of the cripple. It was as much His work as
any one of the miracles that had been wrought in the days
of His earthly life. He did what He does at this moment
by the generous hearts, by the kind hands, and cultivated
understandings, of those whom in hospitals and elsewhere
He guides to the relief, to the cure of bodily pain. His
precepts, His charity, His unseen but Divine energetic
Spirit—these are the true sources of the best inspirations
of our philanthropy.
II. It meant the particular salvation which the Messiah
was to bring—the salvation to which Israel as a nation
was looking forward. Israel was the real cripple after all,
and her rulers knew it. The Roman conqueror had broken
its limbs, and the nation lay bound, prostrate and power-
less. The political salvation implied, as in the result it
always does, a moral and spiritual salvation. Israel must
be saved by Jesus or it would perish.
III. Salvation means here the saving from moral ruin
and death of the separate souls of men. Salvation in its
deepest, in its one legitimate sense, is the rescuing of single
souls from present sin and future misery. Jesus Christ
saves men and women from the very depths of iniquity.
He washes out the sin of a guilty past. He gives new
desires, new aims, new hopes, new enthusiasms. He in-
spires a hatred for the very garment which but now was
spotted by the flesh, and thus He renews, little by little, by
His Eternal Spirit what His enemies have destroyed.
Henry Parry Liddon, D.C.L.