friends, about the business from which you have come here to worship for
this little hour. Men are questioning about what they care to do, what
they can have to do with Christianity. They are asking everywhere this
question: "Is it possible for a man to be engaged in the activities of
our modern life and yet to be a Christian? Is it possible for a man to
be a broker, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a mechanic, is it possible for a
man to be engaged in a business of to-day, and yet love his God and his
fellow-man as himself?" I do not know. I do not know what
transformations these dear businesses of yours have got to undergo
before they shall be true and ideal homes for the child of God; but I do
know that upon Christian merchants and Christian brokers and Christian
lawyers and Christian men in business to-day there rests an awful and a
beautiful responsibility: to prove, if you can prove it, that these
things are capable of being made divine, to prove that a man can do the
work that you have been doing this morning and will do this afternoon,
and yet shall love his God and his fellow-man as himself. If he cannot,
if he cannot, what business have you to be doing them? If he can, what
business have you to be doing them so poorly, so carnally, so
unspiritually, that men look on them and shake their heads with doubt?
It belongs to Christ in men first to prove that man may be a Christian
and yet do business; and, in the second place, to show how a man, as he
becomes a greater Christian, shall purify and lift the business that he
does and make it the worthy occupation of the Son of God.
What shall be our universal law of life? Can we give it as we draw
toward our last moment? I think we can. I want to live, I want to live,
if God will give me help, such a life that, if all men in the world were
living it, this world would be regenerated and saved. I want to live
such a life that, if that life changed into new personal peculiarities
as it went to different men, but the same life still, if every man were
living it, the millennium would be here; nay, heaven would be here, the
universal presence of God. Are you living that life now? Do you want
your life multiplied by the thousand million so that all men shall be
like you, or don't you shudder at the thought, don't you give hope that
other men are better than you are? Keep that fear, but only that it may
be the food of a diviner hope, that all the world may see in you the
thing that man was meant to be, that is, the Christ. Ah, you say, that
great world, it is too big; how can I stretch my thought and imagination
and conscience to the poor creatures in Africa and everywhere? Then
bring it home. Ah, this dear city of ours, this city that we love, this
city in which many of us were born, in which all of us are finding the
rich and sweet associations of our life, this city, whose very streets
we love because they come so close to everything we do and are, cannot
we do something for it? Cannot we make its life diviner? Cannot we
contribute something that it has not to-day? Cannot you put in it, some
little corner of it, a life which others shall see and say, "Ah, that
our lives may be like that!" And then the good Boston in which we so
rejoice, which we so love, which we would so fain make a part of the
kingdom of God, a true city of Jesus Christ, we shall not die without
having done something for it.
I linger, and yet I must not linger. Oh, my friends, oh, my fellow-men,
it is not very long that we shall be here. It is not very long. This
life for which we are so careful--it is not very long; and yet it is so
long, because, long, long after we have passed away out of men's sight
and out of men's memory, the world, with something that we have left
upon it, that we have left within it, will be going on still. It is so
long because, long after the city and the world have passed away, we
shall go on somewhere, somehow, the same beings still, carrying into the
depths of eternity something that this world has done for us that no
other world could do, something of goodness to get now that will be of
value to us a million years hence, that we never could get unless we got
it in the short years of this earthly life. Will you know it? Will you
let Christ teach it to you? Will you let Christ tell you what is the
perfect man? Will you let Him set His simplicity and graciousness close
to your life, and will you feel their power? Oh! be brave, be true, be
pure, be men, be men in the power of Jesus Christ. May God bless you!
May God bless you! Let us pray.
IV. TRUE LIBERTY.
An earnest appeal to all that enter that Liberty. May I read to you a
few words from the eighth chapter of St. John? "Then said Jesus to those
Jews which believed on Him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my
disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free."