Sunday at Home.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 20, 12 August 1893, Page 6

Sunday at Home.

Sermon snaps

The historical spirit could not do its now destructive and now constructive work and ignore the Supreme Person of history. He has left the mark Of His hand on every generation of civilized men that has lived since He lived, and it would not be science to find Him everywhere, and never to ask what He was and what He did. Persons are the most potent factors of progress and change in history, ’ and the greatest Person known to it is the One who has been the most powerful factor of ordered progress. Who this is does not lie open to dispute. is a name that represents the most wonderful story and the profoundest problem on the field of history —the one because the other. There is no romance so marvellous as the most prosaic version of His history. The Son of a despised and hated people, meanly born, humbly bred, without letters, without opportunity, unbefriended, never, save for one brief and fatal moment, the dol of the crowd, opposed by the rich, resisted by the religious and the learned, persecuted unto death by the priests, destined to a life as short as it was obscure, issuing from His obscurity only to meet a death of nnpitied infamy, he yet, by means of His very sufferings and His cross, enters upon a throne such as no monarch ever filled, and a do ninion such as no Csesar ever exercised. He leads captive the civilized peoples; they accept His words as law, though they confess it a higher law than the human nature likes to obey; they build Him churches, they worship Him, they praise Him in songs, interpret him in philosophies and theologies; they deeply love, they madly hate, for His sake. It was a new thing in the history of the world, for though this humble life was written, and stood vivid before the eye and imagination of men, nay, because it veritably did so stand, they honoured, loved, served Him as no ancient Deity had been honoured, loved, or served. — Fairbairn.

I had a friend who died not long ago leaving about a quarter of a million. He had no family, and he left it to nephews who were mainly minors, and who were already well off. He left nothing to charity, church, or missions, for the good of men or the cause of men or the cause of God. What was the money worth ? Really nothing at all. It had not multiplied ; it was a barren pile ; it was left, like the body, to afflict the earth with more dust and ashes. I don’t know how he appeared before the Judge of all the earth with such a will in his right hand. He was a good man, and he must have received a hundred stripes on his back before he was sent up higher. He chax’geth His angels with fody. Ten thousand pounds might have been so left as to be worth a million by multiplying them with the service for men and enthusiasm for Christ. The spiritual multiplies the physical, the supernatural augments the natural. Or they remain ciphers, barren, dry. Christ was moved with compassion when He saw the multitude. Peyton.