SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 12 February 1916, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

THE TWO IDEALS. SERMON PREACHED BY REV. A. 11. COLVILE, M.A., at St. Mary's Church, New Plymouth, on Sunday, February S. "We have no King \but Caesar." — St. John xi.x., 15 I want to lix your attention this evening on that most dramatic and significant moment in the trial of our Lord—the climax, the last word that sealed His fate, the last word which was at once the triumph of the leaders of the Jewish nation and their humiliation—"We have no King but Caesar." The whole trial was a struggle between elders and these Jewish leaders, priests and Pharisees, backed up by the Jerusalem mob. It was an unequal struggle, for they fought in deadly earnest with fierce determination, and Pilate half-heartedly, now roused to some show of earnestness, now relapsing ints mere irritability; and there can be only one result when intern* ..passion and zeal are pitted against cleverness without real conviction. The weak, clever man collapses: "Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they required." "He whom the gods wish to destroy first goes mad," said the old proverb, and you would think that such was the case with Pilate. For that which lie no doubt thought a clever move in the prisoner's interest was in reality a mad piece of folly. A crisis such as that was 110 tim.i for compromise. The one thing needed was a hold front and a rigid insistence 011 justice and the law. Instead of which Pilate was mad enough to order that Chrislfc should be .scourged, hoping thus to both satisfy His enemies and to inspire pity for Him with the crowd. But howmad to think that one can call hack the hounds from their prey when they have once tasted blood! Once let a passion loose and encourage it, and though you may be a moderate man, temperate and law-abiding, you will find yourself unable to control it. Mark Antony knew that well., when having deliberately stirred the crowd to passion he made no attempt to control, but said with -a shrug: "So let it work, mischief, thou art afoot,

Take thou what course thou wilt." And Pilate had by his cruel but wellmeant action let loose the dogs with a vengeance. "Behold the man!" 'he cried in pity when the silent sufferer was led forth again decked in brutal jest with the kingly robe of purple and the crown of thorns; "Behold the man!" Pity! From the hoarse throats of the mob came the cry like the bay of the hounds when the chase is nearing its scent, "Crucify Him; crucify Him!" So Pilate tried his would-be clever tricks in vain, and then the accusers brought up their heavy guns and all was practically over. Religious accusations such as that of blasphemy with which they had begun, had little weight with such a man as Pilate, a practical atheist—what did he care whether Jesus had called himself the Son of God or not! That accusation only counted in so far ns it inflamed the fanaticism of the Jews and made his own position more difficult.; but lie did indeed tremble before the political accusation: "If thou let tills man go thou art not Caesar's friends; whosoever maketh himself a king spcaketh against Caesar." That cowed him. To speak against that gloomy monster, Tiberius Caesar, was a deadly crime; to encourage or seem to encourage anything like rebellion would, he knew, cost .him his life. He gave up Jesus finally to save himself. But he had one satisfaction, if it is a satisfaction to see your persecutors humiliated, or aS we say, "giving themselves away." "Shall I crucify your King?" he asked at length, more with sarcasm than anything else; and in order to find an effective answer in keeping with the line they had taken up, the priests humiliated themselves and humiliated their nation. From these great patriots was actually heard the cry, "We have no king but Caesar." And so they gained their case, but lost their cause. They falsified the past history of their race, gave up their distinctive claimse, disclaimed their religion, and sold their nation to gratify their hatred. Formerly they had sullenly acquiesced in the inevitable when the iron hand of Caesar had them in his grip; they had bent unwilling necks to the Roman yoke. But they had never acknowledged Caesar, except as the imperial power against which they could not strive. They still looked for a king of their own. They still believed in the Messiah. God safe their king, not Caesar, and Ho would send His deliverer. who would be their visible king. But here, carried away by hatred, their leaders gave up all that was dear to Jewish hearts. Thev acknowledged Caesar in the name of the nation. It was a fearful price to pay for the death ot' Christ. Their confession must have sounded in their own ears like a knell, "We have no king but Caesar." They had to choose in that hour between Christ or Caesar, and they made their choice. My friends, it was and is a real alternative. It is

CHRIST OR CAESAR for every nation and for every individual to-day. As we have seen, it was Christ or Caesar to the Jews. It became Christ or Caesar to more than the Jews. In the terrible atheism of the time, the only real god of the Rajnan world' was Imperial Caesar. Amid the multiture of gods in their Pantheon, the only deity men came to fear was the Emperor. He was worshipped as a god when living, and was accepted as a god when dead. It was the deification of materialism. Over that vast empire true religion died, and freedom perished. It seemed a lost world, until once more hope revived in that same Christ who had been crushed to death by the very mention of Caesar's name.

Christ and Caesar stand over against each other in the civilised world to-day. We are fighting against Caesar, against what we call "Kaiserdom," against a ruthless power that would trample the world into submission, against the ideal of brute force and material efficiency, against what we feel would crush or cram]), the true life of the nations. But are we indeed fighting for Christ or only for another sort of Caesar? For a ruler who is but the embodiment of pleasure and profit and worldly comfort and success? A hard materialism is indeed terrible, but a flabby materialism is contemptible, and will in the end prove of no value to ourselves or to the world. We say sometimes that we are fighting for democracy and democratic ideals; but without religion and its outcome of brotherly kindness and mutual charity democracy may become as selfish and hard a tyranny as the worst form of autocracy. Without Christ and the kingdom of the spirit, the little finger of democracy may lie heavier upon a nation than the whole

weight of an autocratic king. If all that we are fighting for is liberty to enjoy ourselves, and buy and sell and get gain as we did aforetime; if we think of the end of the war as a time when all the old industrial disputes and quarrels, and the old political tricks and monoeuvres, and the grabbing for material tilings may he once more resumed, then we are in evil case; we, too, have no king but Caesar. What is the war to-day? is it merely one sort of Caesar against another, or is it in very truth Christ against Caesar?

One of the finest cartoons issued since the war began is that entitled ''The two ideals." On the one side a lifesize elligy of Christ upon the Cross; on the other an armed figure representing the Kaiser shrinking away with a look of repulsion. and fear—the two ideals. One side of the picture is true enough—in the Prussian ideal there is little room for the Cross of Christ. But is the other side true? Is our ideal the Cross of Christ and all thn!t it stands for? Is Christ indeed our king, and is it His cause that will triumph! in the world if we win this war?

■Jfy friends, I am sure we can say this; We are fighting that the triumph of Christ may he made possible. Our enemies talk much of Cod and of His vengeance and of His power anil will to punish; they say little of Christ and of His message of forgiveness and love, as how could they? They have indeed made their choice; they have fashioned their god in the likeness of Caesar, and Caesar they will have, for Caesar tlicy are fighting. Those Jews who clamored in the judgment-hall got their wish. They won their victory over .Pilate. They sent Christ to the cross. "We have no king hut Caesar!" they cried, and they got their fill'of Caesar when the Holy City lav in ruins around them, and the smoke of the temple went up to Heaven. They had enough of Caesar then. There comes a time, my friends —and let us think not oniy of'our enemies, but take it as a warning to ourselves —when God gives an individual a nation up unto their own will; when at least He consents to their clamorous desires; when He seems to say, "Take it, take what you want, and take the consequences with it: take Caesar for your king and crucify your Christ." Aye, there come a time when not Pilate but flod himself "gives sentence that it should be as they require." I aav, let us take it as a warning to ourselves. Our enemies have chosen Caesar, and they have goit Caesar.

WHOM DO WE CHOOSE? We are fighting, as I have said, to make Christ's victory possible, for the Christian ideal will surely perish if we are defeated. But our real choice is yet'to come. When the war is over, and the world chastened, sobered, exhausted, faces the task of building up the future, will that future be based upon the foundation of Christ or Caesar? Then will come our temptation. There is our Caesar, fat, bloated, overfed, a sort of Bacchus, a sod of pleasure «ind comfort waiting for us to acknowledge him again. There is the opposite ideal, Christ and His Cross. Think for what they stand—sacrifice, simplicity of life, love for oi,hew, penitence for sin, the acknowledgment of God a? the Father of all, the intense importance of spiritual power in life, the immortality of the soul, the reality of life beyond the grave. These things" arc not merely dogmas of the Church; they are the simple elementary principles of Christianity, and if indeed we accept Christ as our king, it is upon these principles that the new world will be built, But remember, they cann'ot and .will not be • established in the same way that Caesar's kingdom might be built. Om victory will clear the way, but it will not be by force of arms, or by diplomatic arrangements, or by" humanitarian legislation that the Christ-ideal will come to its own. "My kingdom is not of this world," said the Master, and lie did not mean that the kingdom was only to be looked for in another life, but that it was internal before it could be external, that it was the power from above i.e., from God —in the hearts of men. That is where we accept Christ as our King. And it is if the hearts of men and women are touched, purified and filled with the desire for better things, for spiritual power and for knowledge of God; filled with love for Him and all ot'. ■" human souls, that Christ will indeed reign over a saddened and sobered world. Yes, my friends, it is in the personal life, the individual life that the real choice will lie. Your soldiers cannot make that choice for you, nor your statesmen, nor vour schoolmasters, nor your clergymen. Only you yourselves can make it. Christ or Caesar, the kingdom of the spirit or the kingdom of materialism, the submission of heart and life to our true Master, or the turning awav to the tyranny—under which king? That is our choice, and God, who in this terrible war is calling us to Himself, will at the last give sentence that it shall be as we require.

Alas for our country and ourselves if we choose wrong. To have no king but Caesar, no spiritual government of our inner lives, 110 master of the unruly will, no lord of the wayward heart, no king of the fickle life—the last state will be worse than the first. Aye, our surface life may be fat and well-liking and well-looking, but in the inner life there is chaos when there is no king but Caesar, and so it will be with us and with the world if we choose wrong. But if we find our true Master, then though our outward circumstances may suffer many changes as the result of this war, though life may be poorer, though we may lose much and suffer much as far as this world's comforts go, we can fall back on the inward life when there is peace and plenty : we can be glad and rejoice in heart, because instead of Caesar there is Christ, because we have found another and a greater King who will bring us by the way of the Cros3 to the fullness of everlasting life.