bright light upon the office of embellishment and gives a touch of cheer to many a humble home. The commonplace turns poem. The crude becomes refined. The highest use of imagination is, to see and to disclose moral beauty. It walks in the light. "It needs no candle, neither light of the sun." It creates cheer when there is no helpful touch, tone, form, color, poem or music. It generates its supplies by a spiritual dynamo. It consumes its own smoke. It sees the invisible. Imagination is nothing but reason working in the moral sphere. Men would discount the imagination and clip its wings, but God gives us “exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think." Because the function of the imagination is not to analyze gases or minerals, it does not despise reason working in the material realm. The latter is indirectly a valued auxiliary to faith. What is said is, that whatever benefits Thomas may derive from the witness of physical sense to physical things he is supremely blessed if he has a God he can call "My God," because he has used the higher power on its legitimate and higher object. Many men of affairs distrust the imagination, supposing that it is unreal and the reverse of practical. It is meanwhile forgotten, that imagination is the very faculty which they themselves use so much in projecting great material concerns. Why should they affect to despise it when directed toward nobler objects? The money king, a man of large mental endowment, who can discern futures, especially when his competitors are so reduced that he is not strained to guage his field of operation, wins a great fortune. A successful business man can command a princely salary as the president of a life insurance company. He can move in all lands and harness the seasons to his chariot. He deals with the more hazy forms of the seen. He brings his skill to the things that can be handled at a distance and all things go his way. This is a legitimate use for the imagination if held subservient to the imagination of faith. But what shall we say of that use of the imagination which terminates in the accumulation of money. What dwarfs are the mere accumulators, in comparison with the commonest man who believes God, not to mention the poets, the prophets, the statesmen, the educators and moral teachers of any age. These latter deal with the great realities. The greatest man is probably he who can deal with small realities and not become small. By a strange contradiction some call the real, unreal, and the unreal, real. It has been said "the preachers ask us to take a leap into the dark." We have all heard in sermons, but perhaps not of late, that faith is like the act of a child throwing itself into the darkness of the night from a high window of a burning building at the call of a voice below. This is not a fair figure. It illustrates, almost to perfection, the absence of faith. Faith is the soul's certainty of its own dignity, reality, safety. The man who lives for what his senses report to him, is in a very bad way. He is in a building which, as regards permanence, may be said to be on fire. If called to leave life, his capital is not in such shape that he can take it with him. He is forced by the natural fact of bodily dissolution to leap into the darkness of spiritual bankruptcy, He is so sure of the reality of his sumptuous fare, and is so sure that the idealism is absurd which sees a man in sores and rags, in jails and tenements, that he will not be persuaded to change his emphasis from matter to spirit, "though one rose from the dead.” The faith which avails must be more than a gift or natural endowment. The fable of the tortoise and the hare is here in point. The slow-going creature that keeps at the race is more fleet than the proud and sleek, but slumbering, leader in the lists. The faith that can remove mountains of matter is nothing beside the ungifted love that hopeth, believeth, endureth in the mountains of the spirit. Art for art's sake, the science of the five senses alone, mere religious zeal, cold philanthropy are so many chattering ghosts. They become glorified when they serve the queen of the arts, the supreme science, the justifier of zeal, the ultimate philanthropy, the vision of a faithful faith. "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in Heaven." Not the prayer of "vain repetition," nor the brilliant poem; not the music ostensibly offered as worship, but in fact a concert, not the great painting with a religious subject, not eloquence, may say Lord, Lord," and for that reason escape the wreck of the fool who built his house on the sand of an old river-bed. Faith and work are inseparable. Neither is genuine without the other. Every person can do something who has not lost the use of his senses and all his limbs. Faith is the work of God. It includes works. It is in its motion duplex. Faith rises in aspiration only to return with greater beneficence. Faith makes right. It is the process by which the "just" who "live by faith" become rectified. Faith is thus two fold in its action. It is no accident that the angels on the ladder of Jacob's vision were both ascending and descending. God is high and God is present. The pool must evaporate, but it will return purified. It will condense and fall in rain, by which process God has prevented the famine and the fever. An army chaplain may be pardoned for being called a “skypilot," when the morrow may find all in eternity who hear his voice. The prayer of a prophet is that which dwells with sincere fervor on the petition, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." There is a spurious faith which gazes up into Heaven with the temper of a hireling, and that holds to the present world with the clutch of a pauper. This is as worldly as though it were heathen, and has its reward. The best definition of faith, is that which gathers up the essence of all others. This has been done by the great teacher. One day, in the height of His popularity, He had been pursued by the multitude, who wished an instant harvest and an unlimited supply of "loaves and fishes." They were plainly told that they cared nothing for the permanent and intrinsic, that their labor was for the passing and perishing. "Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you, for Him hath God the Father sealed." Then said they unto Him, what shall we do, that we might work the works of God? Jesus answered and said unto them, this is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent." This moral sense is to embrace Christ. In Him is all truth and good represented. He is the Alpha and Omega. Faith is to fasten not upon law, not upon prophecy, but upon a person, not upon the Old Testament scriptures, not upon a scripture record yet to exist, not upon the Jewish Church, not upon a Christian Church yet to exist, but upon the One whom God hath sent. "Ye search the Scriptures," said Christ, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify concerning me, but ye will not come to me that ye might have life." In many reports of Christ's words, the equivalent of the following is found: "Ye join the church, and think that in that ye have eternal life, and in that are many who came to me before they came into the church, but ye will not come to me that ye might have life." What is it to come to Him, to believe in Him, to confide in Him? It would be quite absurd to suppose that holding tenaciously to the Westminster Confession, or to the necessity of going under the water, or to feet-washing, can be what is meant. It will not suffice to say that believing in a person is substantially the same as believing in a creed. Friendship and a skeleton are not the same. Have your creed. But it can have nothing in it that is good which is not a part of the provision of the perfect Friend. Jesus goes on to say what belief is. It is, in figure, eating and drinking. Christ, in figure, is bread and His blood is wine. As the body appropriates and assimilates food, so the soul appropriates the person of Jesus Christ. Belief, then, as Christ defines it, is not acceptance of any statement about Him. This may or may not be an incident. It is not a passive attitude of trust. There are times for such a mood. It is not a courageous moral sense, unillumined by a perfect life. This is the stature of those who died “without the promise." It is nothing formal or external. It is an ever expanding fellowship, rising in range of object from glory to glory. It is personal adhesion to, and appropriation of, Christ as the food of the soul. This is the process of absorbtion and assimilation, by which the truth in living power builds, transforms and satisfies humanity. The mighty personal force which is remoulding society to-day, is the presence of the Spirit of God in Christ inspiring in us a faith, which redeems the mind from vanity, the will from feebleness, the affections from sorrow. We are to smelt the ore of secular life and retain the pure metal. As we now gather at the table, which belongs to Jesus Christ and not to the Church, I invite, in His name, all who, though they exercise faith for the first time, may desire to join us in this feast of memory, worship and love. "If I ascend up into heaven Thou are there, If I make my bed in Sheol; behold Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there shall Thy hand lead me, And Thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, -Psalm CXXXIX: 8-12. |