ANONYMOUS CHRISTIANS

I have been in mission work for sixteen years and have been in it much longer by affection. I was never very much concerned with the theological problem of what used to be called the salvation of pagans. But traveling around the world and visiting leper colonies and seeing starving people fight vultures in Latin America, seeing starving mothers with starving children strapped to their backs in India, seeing 250,180 people a night sleeping in the street in Calcutta, seeing all of the hunger and want and indigence and pain below the thirtieth parallel, I came to have a new vision of the world.    Traveling through all those worlds, I never saw so many Christs in my life. Christs, yes. But you say, they don't know him. No, they do not consciously know him, but he is in them as long as they do not rebel; he is in them by their sufferings. I was hungry; I was sick; I was naked; I was homeless. When? When? When? No, they didn't know, but Christ was in them. Remember these words were said to the nations, to the Gentiles, and that's how they are saved. We will be surprised to see that many of those who have not known Christ as we have known him may be ahead of us in the kingdom of heaven because they were always with his cross, even though it was unwitting.