This is a far cry from the easy believism of being a Christian in our culture. It does not require much for us to profess faith in Christ in our neighborhoods. Nobody cares what we do with our Sunday mornings as long as it does not infringe upon their freedom to do what they want to do. Christian faith is met with indifference rather than hostility. We are more likely to be mocked or patronized than persecuted.

He spent the rest of his life teaching and writing about the missionary task of proclaiming the Gospel in the secular West. His personal life and writings commend the Gospel, as did that of St. Paul in his day. When Paul was called upon to prove the authenticity of his Christian faith he provided a remarkable check-list of three characteristics.

First, the authentic Christian is a person who endures hardship and opposition with grace.

St Paul tells us that in Christ we have these two kinds of life: the flesh and the spirit, the outward and the inward, the earthly and the heavenly, the old self and the new self, the animal-life and the Christ-life, the life of the first Adam and the life of the second Adam, the self-centered and the Christ-centered, the old and the new. The old life is what we derived from our parents, our childhood, the culture in which we were raised. None of us is self-invented.

Years later, at age 51, he wrote of his teenage experience: 'All of a sudden I experience the sensation people talk about who have been through an earthquake, when the ground shakes under their feet, as do the walls around them, the ceilings over their heads, the furniture beneath their hands, all of nature before their eyes. I was seized by the blackest melancholy, then by an extreme disgust with life.'