II. The qualifications for reception as necessarily resulting from
the characteristics.
The persons who receive must be those who consent to take the
station which the Gospel assigns. They must be babes, by which is
meant not such as are innocent, but such as are reliant on a higher
Power, self-distrustful, willing to obey.
These qualifications are all moral. The organ for reception of the
Gospel is the heart, not the head. To receive it by faith is a
spiritual, not an intellectual process. Ignorance is no
qualification nor no disqualification. Ignorance or knowledge is
immaterial. The one condition is to be willing to accept.
III. The disqualification of the wise as necessarily resulting from
the qualification.
The organ for the reception is not the head but the heart.
Therefore, wisdom is a barrier only in this way, that it has nothing
to do in the matter. Its presence or its absence is quite
indifferent here as in many other spheres of experience. The joys of
the affections, the joys of common emotions, the joys of bodily
life--all these are utterly independent of the culture of the
understanding.
Hence 'wisdom' becomes a barrier, because its possessors are
accustomed to think it the master key. Not intellect, but the pride
of intellect, trusting in it, glorying in wisdom is the
disqualification.
It is not true that there is any discord between religion and
cultivated thought. The loftier the soul, the loftier all its
attributes, the nobler should be, may be, its religion. It is not
true that there is any natural affinity between ignorance and
religion, between narrow understandings and deep faith. That is not
the Bible truth. The religion of Christ is not like owls that love
the twilight, but like eagles that 'purge their sight at the very
fountain itself of heavenly radiance.'
Take history: the great names--an Augustine and a Luther, a Dante
and a Milton, a Bacon and a Pascal--are enough to show that there is
no antagonism. On the other hand, names enough rise to show that
there is no alliance. The inference is that the intellect has little
to do with a man's attitude towards the Revelation of God in Christ,
but that the moral is all.
Let me close with the repetition of the thought that the apparent
exclusion is the result of the universality, and that 'Come unto Me'
is Christ's commentary on my text. Well then may we rejoice when we
think of a gospel for the world. Whatever you are, it is for you if
you are a man. However foolish, though you cannot read a letter and
know nothing, it is for you. If you be enriched with all knowledge,
you must come on the same terms as that beggar at your side. That is
a healthy discipline. You are more than a student, than a scholar,
than a thinker; you are a man, you are a sinful man. There is a
deeper chamber in your heart than any into which knowledge can
penetrate. Christ brings a gospel for all. When we think of it, with
its sublime disregard of all peculiarities, we may well rejoice with
him who said, 'Ye see your calling, brethren,' and with Him, the
loftiest, the incarnate, Wisdom who said, 'I thank Thee, Father.'
For if you rightly grasp the bearing of this text, and mark what
follows it in our Lord's heart and thoughts, you will see these deep
eyes of solemn joy turned from the heaven to you, filmy with
compassion, and those hands, then lifted in rapt devotion, stretched
out to beckon you and all the world to His breast, and hear the
voice that rose in that burst of thanksgiving melting into
tenderness as it woos you, be you wise or ignorant, to come to Him
and rest.