The Kiss

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  “Ryabovitch pulled the bed-clothes over his head, curled himself up in bed, and tried to gather together the floating images in his mind and to combine them into one whole. But nothing came of it. He soon fell asleep, and his last thought was that someone had caressed him and made him happy—that something extraordinary, foolish, but joyful and delightful, had come into his life. The thought did not leave him even in his sleep. When he woke up the sensations of oil on his neck and the chill of peppermint about his lips had gone, but joy flooded his heart just as the day before.” The Kiss By Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)

Defining Christianity

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"The Christian faith is a specific form of dependence on God, and to cavil [raise trivial and frivolous objection] at the atonement is to begin the process of gradually abandoning that sense of dependence. It is to refuse to allow it to be conditioned by Christ at the central and vital point, the point at which the sinner is reconciled to God; and if we can do without Christ there, we can do without Him altogether. The process which begins with denying that we owe to Him and to His death the forgiveness of sin, ends by denying that He has any proper place in the gospel at all. It is neither from His own lips, nor from the lips of any of the apostles, that we so learn Christ."

Denny, James. The Death of Christ. Cumbria: Paternoster, 1997. p. 40

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