Meanwhile laws, proverbs, institutions are not all abolished. They have their niche. But, however complete in wisdom, they lack adaptation. They fail at the point where the spirit is most in need, the point of inspiration. It requires a person to inspire a person. It requires the Father of the human race to inspire that race. The power of the Gospel lies in the fact that the Father of the race has inspired a perfect human personality to reveal both God and man. Paul despised shame in proclaiming this message, because Jesus Christ was to him, not a fellow creature, feeling after an unknown God, but a person who came from God, a hand reached down, a practical power of God unto rectification. He never would have gone to Rome with the humanitarian gospel of inadequate power. How long now would it take him to detect the sophistry, which substitutes a hero for the Lord who has given us a Christian civilization? Jesus Christ is glad tidings personified to Paul, not because the world can weigh, measure and describe the metaphysical being of Jesus, but because He is the practical power of God unto character, transforming Saul into Paul. The apostle, whose main theme was the resurrection, could scarcely bring himself to leave Christ in the tomb. He who described his own experience, when he cried, Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" as though he were chained alive to a long dead companion, would find no joy of rescue in one who was only another in Judah's list of prophets. 66 What then, does the apostle see to be the cardinal note of God's power to inspire and save? Without doubt it is the unconditional and infinite love of God. That spontaneous paternity seen in an earthly father, that undying devotion found in all true motherhood. It can not cease. It does not halt and cool, while trying to keep a studied balance between complacency and displacency. God's conscience is infinitely sensitive to right and wrong, but it feels the eternal, undeniable pressure of right at the point of any weakness and need in His Universe. Displacency and sacrifice for cure, are ever found together. The one may increase, the other can not because it is ever perfect. The greatest idea in the Universe is God's love for the sinner. "For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." The more one thinks on this, with the spirit which it involves, the more power he has for good. Love for the loveless, for the hateful, the “unthankful and evil," for enemies, for the "ignorant," and for "those out of the way." for men in rags and tatters, love for the great unwashed and wicked. This is that which rings the bells of joy in the human heart, and makes a high day in Heaven. Tired of the long winter, the sight of the snow retreating from the valley, gives us cheer and promise, that we are soon to feel the soft air and see the flowers again. It is a parable of God, that the sun calls forth the flowers, and not the flowers the sun. The initiative is above. Man has a real worth, which the hardships of life protect as the snow holds latent warmth about the waiting seeds and roots, "but in due time," the Sun of Righteousness will melt the snows; and the apparent cruelties of human experience will disappear before the summer in the soul of God. Unless we retire behind some stone wall of self, or to some cave of passion, the heat of the Gospel will thaw us out inch by inch till we teem with response to God. There is no truth so common to all the seasons of the year as unconditional love, or love if at all conditioned, conditioned upon weakness. Every mother practices this truth. The little palpitating mass of pulp, that the mother hangs over and nurses and loves, though it is now the perfection of helplessness and poverty, is after all rich, because there is one to care for it whose love comes from a full fountain which despises contract. Motherhood pours wealth out upon need, doing disagreeable service and ever singing as she rocks the cradle of the crying world. The prevailing song dies gently away and the silence bears witness that there is "balm in Gilead." The home is often better than the church, and the church often better than the world, because of the varying application of this kind of love. During the hard times, when many parents have been making sacrifices to keep a boy or girl at college, what a wonderful pathos of economy there has been. It is not simply, that they forego a new hat, a trip to the city, a concert, a suit of clothes or a dress, but that they give up almost everything in one generous uncomplaining passion for the children. They are happy slaves. They will never regret their investment. If those who profit thereby, know the nature of their debt, the parents will rejoice, but if not, they will still hope that the infinite Parent from whose fire, they have lighted their torches, will yet succeed in reclaiming the wanderers. The disciples were taught that he who would be chief among them, must be servant of all. This is the principle by which God holds Himself bound. He is worthy, not by reason of the number of angels, who stand in ranks to praise. He is God because servant of all, bound by infinite chains of privilege to the greatest need. His motive is cure. His severites even when penal, are purgative and potent. The visible church is called to a service which finds pattern in a willing sacrifice that becomes an enthusiasm. If those who profess to follow Christ, know that the Lord has need of their time and talents, their means and influence, and need urging, or to be told a second time of an opportunity, it can not be that such persons know their Lord to be more than a great taskmaker, or the church to be other than a form of insurance, a bloodless sacrifice, but after all identical with the effort of the heathen to atone for his own sin, and to save his own soul. The duty of the church and home, is in a love that searches for the prodigal, as the woman for the lost coin, and the shepherd for the lost sheep. This is the essential qualification for a Sunday-school teacher. Nothing will be so dull to such a person, as some effort to pass the brief time of the Sundayschool. in the use of some substitute for the Bible and the life of Christ as the supreme fascination. No greater wrong can be devised for a class, than to introduce some substitute to save labor and to secure interest. The Bible requires study. A teacher should be conscious of its superiority in thought and style to all other literature, and devote the necessary time to preparation, giving up something else for that object, which now receives attention which should be more worthily bestowed. The Bible breathes throughout with a sympathy for man which finds perfect illustration in the biography of Jesus. Not one hundredth part of the help stored in the Scripture can appear in pulpit instruction. Never has such opportunity fallen to parent and teacher to bring forth treasures new and old, which illustrate and establish the love of Him, who having loved his own" ambitious, quarreling, jealous, avaricious, doubting, denying, bigoted disciples, "He loved unto the end.” Never can we be happy, till we pocket our pride, and equip ourselves for service after the manner of Him who gave us an example with towel and basin. It was one of His most luminous hours, if not the supreme hour of his life. The object lesson is given startling force with these words: “Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God, He riseth from supper, and took a towel, and girded Himself. After that He poureth water into a basin and began to wash the disciples feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded." Conscious of God's inmost heart habit, He puts into dramatic and useful form the teaching, that it is Godlike to serve the ungodly. Jesus appears thus not simply as a man, yet in a Divinity not opposite to man, save in degree. The promised Comforter still washes the feet of humanity. He touches our leprosy and serves at the table of spiritual hunger. Are there not those who are devoted in sacrifice, but who fail to see, as it were, the humanity of God? A woman brought up in a Christian land, a faithful member of a church in Scotland, finds her home in the Canadian wilderness. In a little settlement on the eastern shore of Lake Huron, she has a family altar, but other families have none. She has "little to earn and many to keep." There is no sabbath, no law or worthy public sentiment, people go drinking and carousing from house to house. Unaided and with no end of difficulty, from door to door she raises money to secure through the Home Missionary Society, some young Gospel Messenger. How great the welcome of such a one to the Heavenly mansions, when told that the act performed without thought of praise is Divine, since it is Divinity to serve. And now after almost forty years, when the wilderness blossoms like the rose, and she is forgotton on earth and remembered in Heaven, can we not see that our missionary interest in humanity is nothing compared with that of God? If men and women interest themselves in each other, how much more is that interest when carried up and multiplied by infinitude! Last week a wealthy Jewess, Mrs. Baron Hirsch, made the munificent bequest of fifteen hundred thousand dollars to help solve the problem of the tenement house in New York City. That gigantic evil which breeds disease, increases crime, and contains the sweating system the infernal parasite by which Dives living on fifth avenue, can drain the life-blood of the slums, has received another crushing blow. Some one may say the gift might have been greater. No matter, God is behind it. The procession is forming which will contain many late converts who always were in favor of the reform. "But," some one may ask, "how is this to illustrate the Gospel,, since this is the deed of a Jewess? I reply, Jesus is the head of the race as well as the head of the church. He is the head of the Kingdom as well as the synagogue. The mother of Jesus was a Jewess, and long ago in Paradise, she added knowledge to faith. It was not the Jew who crucified the Lord. It was human nature trained into exclusiveness and blinded by bigotry. He did "not come to destroy the Law and the prophets, but to fulfill." Whatever their sins, and all races are sinful, they rejected Christ in ignorance. The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, to the Jew first (in order of time) and also to the Greek." The Gospel is God's love. How little we know of God and the infinite love! There is not a poor wretch in New York, there is not a miserable soul on earth, there is not a cowering creature in the remotest province of China, there is not one human being however shrunken and shriveled, however overtaken by the logic of Devil-take-the-hindmost, however neglected, for whom God does not have a love a hundred millions times (plus) greater than that of all the Christians of the world put together. To the Jew, the office of priest was long associated with all that was sacred and entwined with affection. Only in the latter days of the temple did the priesthood come into disgrace. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews, in searching the Hebrew tongue for a word to fitly represent the "throne of grace," said, 66 For we have not an high priest, who can not be touched with a feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." In a world of sin and infirmity, there is a God who is adapted to man's need. It is more true than we realize that God loves holiness, but there is a far greater love than that. It is a love for the unholy. It is God electing the Jews, electing natural law, selecting leaders, in order that they may more effectually call the uncalled and reach the uttermost. If you are standing in the Gentile Court, and fear a holy God, know that the Gospel, the glad tidings of great joy to all people, and to every individual Jew and Greek is, that God loves the sinner and His holiness is not that which separates Him from man, but forever binds Him to man. Do you want such a God? If so, you will not have far to go to find Him. |