Book of Life. It is not only a basket of silver network, but it
contains apples of gold. It is the record of glad tidings to a
perishing world, a message of joy to all people. In it, Wisdom
hath mingled her wine, and slain her fatlings, and furnished her
table, and calls all the hungry and needy to come and partake. The
entrance of its words giveth light and imparteth understanding
to the simple, and maketh wise unto salvation. It is a balm from
Gilead for the sick, oil for the bruises of the wounded, reprieve
for the prison-bound, and bread for them that are ready to perish.
Its different books are but so many angels of mercy, carrying
contentment into the abodes of poverty, enabling even the children
of want to lift up their eyes to God who ordereth all things well,
and to eat their scanty meals in peace; staying the hearts of the
persecuted and opprest, causing them to rejoice and sing under the
yoke, at the stake, and in the hottest of the fires, as on their
passage-way to crowns immortal in the world to come; calming the
minds of the fevered, mollifying where all earthly medicines fail,
and kindling glad hopes of recompense yet to be revealed; lighting
up comforts in the breasts of those that mourn for their dead, and
assuring them of blessed reunions in a better life; and kindling
even the dying eye and inspiring the dying heart with thoughts of
speedy triumph, causing lips already closed for death to open once
more in utterances of victory.
We may talk of the venerable age of the Bible, and its scientific
accuracy, and its literary beauty and sublimity, and its wonderful
influences upon the ideas, laws, governments, and general order of
society and mankind; but it is all nothing in comparison with the
spiritual good and immortal hopes and consolations which it begets
in those who receive it as a message from their God. Are we voyagers
upon a troubled and a dangerous sea? Here is a chart by which to
steer in safety to the happy shores. Are we soldiers, beset with
foes and required to endure the shocks of battle? This is an armory
from which all needed weapons may be drawn at will, and by the right
use of which we may hew our way to immortal triumph. Are we pilgrims
and strangers, worn and weary in our search for the home from which
we are exiles? In this book gush out the pure, fresh waters of
life, the cooling shades from the Rock of salvation appear, and
the guiding word is heard from pilgrims in advance, to cheer and
encourage us till we reach the mansion of our Father. Indeed, it is
beyond the power of language to express the excellency and richness
of spiritual treasure which we have in this holy Book. It is the
miraculous cruse of the Shunamitess which never exhausts. It is the
wand of Moses which swallows the serpents of life, and parts the sea
of trouble, and brings forth waters in the thirsty wilderness. It
is the ladder of Jacob on which our spirits ascend to commune with
God and angels. It is the telescope of faith by which we look on
things invisible, survey even the third heavens, and have present to
our view what is to be in after-ages. It is the chariot of Elijah
in which to ride up the starry way to immortality unhurt of death.
It is the channel of the almighty Spirit as it goes forth for the
sanctification of the race,--the very gulf-stream of eternal life as
it pours out for the resuscitation of our wilted and decaying world.
Allusion has been made to the dreadful eclipse it would be to the
world of letters and thought, for the Bible, and what it has done
for man, to be blotted out. But that were nothing to the moral and
spiritual night that would go along with such a calamity. Besides
carrying away with it a vast proportion of the intellectual and
moral life of the last eighteen centuries, it would silence every
preacher of salvation, and abolish at once his office and his text.
It would stop every work of mercy and plan of philanthropy in the
world.
It would transmute into a lie all our fond anticipations of the
return of Jesus to renew the world, restore our dead, complete our
salvation, and bring us to an eternal heaven. It would hush forever
the glad tidings with which men have comforted themselves for these
many weary ages. It would put out the mother's hopes of her dead
babes, quench the wife's fond desires for her husband's everlasting
peace, destroy the widow's consolation as she lingers by the grave
of her buried love, and extinguish the matron's last comfort as she
trembles on the verge of eternity.
It would take with it all the reliefs and blessedness which prayer
in the name of Jesus gives, and leave the sinner without pardon
in the extremities of life. It would take away the last appeal of
the slave against his oppressor, remove the last check of tyranny,
and lift from the wicked hearts of men the last restraints,
giving carnival to every lust and play to every passion, without
correction, without limit, and without end!
We stagger, and are horrified, at the mere idea of the loss that
would be inflicted. Chills run down our pulses at the contemplation
of the despair and wretchedness which would ensue.
Let us, then, learn to value the possession of such a precious
book. Let us bind it to our hearts as our chief treasure in this
sin-darkened world. And, whilst we admire its beauty and revere its
mysteries, let us abide by its precepts, and, as far as in us lies,
practise its sacred mandates.
MACLAREN
THE PATTERN OF SERVICE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ALEXANDER MACLAREN was born in 1826, educated at Glasgow University,
for twelve years preached at Southampton, and afterwards for many
years in Manchester. Besides an impressive face and figure he
brought to the pulpit a ripe scholarship, an almost perfect English
style, and an uncommonly vigorous personality. The keynote of
his life and character is disclosed in his own words, uttered in
Manchester:
"I have been so convinced that I was best serving all the varied
social, economical, and political interests that are dear to me
by preaching what I conceived to be the gospel of Jesus Christ,
that I have limited myself to that work. I am sure, with a growing
conviction day by day, that so we Christian ministers best serve our
generation. My work, whatever yours may be, is, and has been for
thirty-eight years, and I hope will be for a little while longer
yet, to preach Jesus Christ as the King of England and the Lord of
all our communities, and the Savior and friend of the individual
soul."
MACLAREN
BORN IN 1826
THE PATTERN OF SERVICE[2]
[2] From "The Secret of Power, and Other Sermons," published by Funk
& Wagnalls Company.
_He touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, He sighed, and
saith, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened._--Mark vii., 33, 34.
For what reason was there this unwonted slowness in Christ's healing
works? For what reason was there this unusual emotion ere He spoke
the word which cleansed?
As to the former question, a partial answer may perhaps be that our
Lord is here on half-heathen ground, where aids to faith were much
needed, and His power had to be veiled that it might be beheld.
Hence the miracle is a process rather than an act; and, advancing
as it does by distinct stages, is conformed in appearance to men's
works of mercy, which have to adapt means to ends, and creep to
their goal by persevering toil. As to the latter, we know not why
the sight of this one poor sufferer should have struck so strongly
on the ever-tremulous chords of Christ's pitying heart; but we do
know that it was the vision brought before His spirit by this
single instance of the world's griefs and sicknesses, in which mass,
however, the special case before Him was by no means lost, that
raised His eyes to heaven in mute appeal, and forced the groan from
His breast.
The missionary spirit is but one aspect of the Christian spirit.
We shall only strengthen the former as we invigorate the latter.
Harm has been done, both to ourselves and to this great cause, by
seeking to stimulate compassion and efforts for heathen lands by
the use of other excitements, which have tended to vitiate even the
emotions they have aroused, and are apt to fail us when we need
them most. It may therefore be profitable if we turn to Christ's
own manner of working, and His own emotions in His merciful deeds,
set forth in this remarkable narrative, as containing lessons for
us in our missionary and evangelistic work. I must necessarily omit
more than a passing reference to the slow process of healing which
this miracle exhibits. But that, too, has its teaching for us, who
are so often tempted to think ourselves badly used, unless the
fruit of our toil grows up, like Jonah's gourd, before our eyes. If
our Lord was content to reach His end of blessing step by step, we
may well accept patient continuance in well-doing as the condition
indispensable to reaping in due season.
But there are other thoughts still more needful which suggest
themselves. Those minute details which this evangelist ever delights
to give of our Lord's gestures, words, looks, and emotions, not only
add graphic force to the narrative, but are precious glimpses of the
very heart of Christ. That fixed gaze into heaven, that groan which
neither the glories seen above nor the conscious power to heal could
stifle, that most gentle touch, as if removing material obstacles
from the deaf ears, and moistening the stiff tongue that it might
move more freely in the parched mouth, that word of authority
which could not be wanting even when His working seemed likest a
servant's, do surely carry large lessons for us. The condition of
all service, the cost of feeling at which our work must be done, the
need that the helpers should identify themselves with the sufferers,
and the victorious power of Christ's word over all deaf ears--these
are the thoughts which I desire to connect with our text, and to
commend to your meditation to-day.
We have here set forth the foundation and condition of all true work
for God in the Lord's heavenward look.
The profound questions which are involved in the fact that, as
man, Christ held communion with God in the exercise of faith and
aspiration, the same in kind as ours, do not concern us here. I
speak to those who believe that Jesus is for us the perfect example
of complete manhood, and who therefore believe that He is "the
leader of faith," the head of the long procession of those who in
every age have trusted in God and been lightened. But, perhaps, tho
that conviction holds its place in our creeds, it has not been as
completely incorporated with our thoughts as it should have been.
There has, no doubt, been a tendency, operating in much of our
evangelical teaching, and in the common stream of orthodox opinion,
to except, half unconsciously, the exercises of the religious life
from the sphere of Christ's example, and we need to be reminded
that Scripture presents His vow, "I will put my trust in Him," as
the crowning proof of His brotherhood, and that the prints of His
kneeling limbs have left their impressions where we kneel before
the throne. True, the relation of the Son to the Father involves
more than communion--namely, unity. But if we follow the teaching
of the Bible, we shall not presume that the latter excludes the
former, but understand that the unity is the foundation of perfect
communion, and the communion the manifestation, so far as it can be
manifested, of the unspeakable unity. The solemn words which shine
like stars--starlike in that their height above us shrinks their
magnitude and dims their brightness, and in that they are points
of radiance partially disclosing, and separated by, abysses of
unlighted infinitude--tell us that in the order of eternity, before
creatures were, there was communion, for "the Word was with God,"
and there was unity, for "the Word was God." And in the records of
the life manifested on earth the consciousness of unity loftily
utters itself in the unfathomable declaration, "I and my Father are
one"; whilst the consciousness of communion, dependent like ours
on harmony of will and true obedience, breathes peacefully in the
witness which He leaves to Himself: "The Father has not left me
alone for I do always the things that please him."
We are fully warranted in supposing that that wistful gaze to heaven
means, and may be taken to symbolize, our Lord's conscious direction
of thought and spirit to God as He wrought His work of mercy. There
are two distinctions to be noted between His communion with God and
ours before we can apply the lesson to ourselves. His heavenward
look was not the renewal of interrupted fellowship, but rather, as a
man standing firmly on firm rock may yet lift his foot to plant it
again where it was before, and settle himself in his attitude before
he strikes with all his might; so we may say Christ fixes Himself
where He always stood, and grasps anew the hand that He always held,
before He does the deed of power. The communion that had never been
broken was renewed; how much more the need that in our work for God
the renewal of the--alas! too sadly sundered--fellowship should
ever precede and always accompany our efforts! And again, Christ's
fellowship was with the Father. Ours must be with the Father through
the Son. The communion to which we are called is with Jesus Christ,
in whom we find God.
The manner of that intercourse, and the various discipline of
ourselves with a view to its perfecting, which Christian prudence
prescribes, need not concern us here. As for the latter, let us not
forget that a wholesome and wide-reaching self-denial cannot be
dispensed with. Hands that are full of gilded toys and glass beads
cannot grasp durable riches, and eyes that have been accustomed to
glaring lights see only darkness when they look up to the violet
heaven with all its stars. As to the former, every part of our
nature above the simply animal is capable of God, and the communion
ought to include our whole being.
Christ is truth for the understanding, authority for the will, love
for the heart, certainty for the hope, fruition for all the desires,
and for the conscience at once cleansing and law. Fellowship with
Him is no indolent passiveness, nor the luxurious exercise of
certain emotions, but the contact of the whole nature with its sole
adequate object and rightful Lord.
Such intercourse, brethren, lies at the foundation of all work for
God. It is the condition of all our power. It is the measure of all
our success. Without it we may seem to realize the externals of
prosperity, but it will be all illusion. With it we may perchance
seem to spend our strength for naught; but heaven has its surprizes;
and those who toiled, nor left their hold of their Lord in all their
work, will have to say at last with wonder, as they see the results
of their poor efforts, "Who hath begotten me these? behold, I was
left alone; these, where had they been?"
Consider in few words the manifold ways in which the indispensable
prerequisite of all right effort for Christ may be shown to be
communion with Christ.
The heavenward look is the renewal of our own vision of the calm
verities in which we trust, the recourse for ourselves to the
realities which we desire that others should see. And what is equal
in persuasive power to the simple utterance of your own intense
conviction? He only will infuse his own religion into other minds,
whose religion is not a set of hard dogmas, but is fused by the heat
of personal experience into a river of living fire. It will flow
then, not otherwise. The only claim which the hearts of men will
listen to, in those who would win them to spiritual beliefs, is that
ancient one: "That which we have seen with our eyes, which we have
looked upon, declare we unto you." Mightier than all arguments,
than all "proofs of the truth of the Christian religion," and
penetrating into a sphere deeper than that of the understanding,
is the simple proclamation, "We have found the Messias." If we
would give sight to the blind, we must ourselves be gazing into
heaven. Only when we testify of that which we see, as one might who,
standing in a beleaguered city, discerned on the horizon the filmy
dust-cloud through which the spear-heads of the deliverers flashed
at intervals, shall we win any to gaze with us till they too behold
and know themselves set free.
Christ has set us the example. Let our prayers ascend as His did,
and in our measure the answers which came to Him will not fail us.
For us, too, "praying, the heavens" shall be "opened," and the
peace-bringing spirit fall dove-like on our meek hearts. For us,
too, when the shadow of our cross lies black and gaunt upon our
paths, and our souls are troubled, communion with heaven will bring
the assurance, audible to our ears at least, that God will glorify
Himself even in us. If, after many a weary day, we seek to hold
fellowship with God as He sought it on the Mount of Olives, or among
the solitudes of the midnight hills, or out in the morning freshness
of the silent wilderness, like Him we shall have men gathering
around us to hear us speak when we come forth from the secret place
of the Most High. If our prayer, like His, goes before our mighty
deeds, the voice that first pierced the skies will penetrate the
tomb, and make the dead stir in their grave-clothes. If our longing,
trustful look is turned to the heavens, we shall not speak in vain
on earth when we say, "Be opened."
Brethren, we cannot do without the communion which our Master
needed. Do we delight in what strengthened Him? Does our work rest
upon the basis of inward fellowship with God which underlay His?
Alas! that our pattern should be our rebuke, and the readiest way to
force home our faults on our consciences should be the contemplation
of the life which we say that we try to copy!
We have here pity for the evils we would remove set forth by the
Lord's sigh.
What was it that drew that sigh from the heart of Jesus? One poor
man stood before Him, by no means the most sorely afflicted of the
many wretched ones whom He healed. But He saw in him more than a
solitary instance of physical infirmities. Did there not roll darkly
before His thoughts that whole weltering sea of sorrow that moans
round the world, of which here is but one drop that He could dry
up? Did there not rise black and solid against the clear blue, to
which He had been looking, the mass of man's sin, of which these
bodily infirmities were but a poor symbol as well as a consequence?
He saw as none but He could bear to see, the miserable realities
of human life. His knowledge of all that man might be, of all that
the most of men were becoming, His power of contemplating in one
awful aggregate the entire sum of sorrows and sins, laid upon His
heart a burden which none but He has ever endured. His communion
with Heaven deepened the dark shadow on earth, and the eyes that
looked up to God and saw Him could not but see foulness where others
suspected none, and murderous messengers of hell walking in darkness
unpenetrated by mortal sight. And all that pain of clearer knowledge
of the sorrowfulness of sorrow, and the sinfulness of sin, was laid
upon a heart in which was no selfishness to blunt the sharp edge
of the pain nor any sin to stagnate the pity that flowed from the
wound. To Jesus Christ, life was a daily martyrdom before death had
"made the sacrifice complete," and He bore our griefs, and carried
our sorrows through many a weary hour before He "bare them in his
own body on the tree." Therefore, "Bear ye one another's burden, and
so fulfil the law" which Christ obeyed, becomes a command for all
who would draw men to Him. And true sorrow, a sharp and real sense
of pain, becomes indispensable as preparation for, and accompaniment
to, our work.
Mark how in us, as in our Lord, the sigh of compassion is connected
with the look to heaven. It follows upon that gaze. The evils are
more real, more terrible, by their startling contrast with the
unshadowed light which lives above cloudracks and mists. It is
a sharp shock to turn from the free sweep of the heavens, starry
and radiant, to the sights that meet us in "this dim spot which
men call earth." Thus habitual communion with God is the root of
the truest and purest compassion. It does not withdraw us from our
fellow feeling with our brethren, it cultivates no isolation for
undisturbed beholding of God. It at once supplies a standard by
which to measure the greatness of man's godlessness, and therefore
of his gloom, and a motive for laying the pain of these upon our
hearts, as if they were our own. He has looked into the heavens to
little purpose who has not learned how bad and how sad the world now
is, and how God bends over it in pitying love.
And that same fellowship, which will clear our eyes and soften
our hearts, is also the one consolation which we have when our
sense of all the ills that flesh is heir to becomes deep, near
to despair. When one thinks of the real facts of human life, and
tries to conceive of the frightful meanness and passion and hate
and wretchedness, that has been howling and shrieking and gibbering
and groaning through dreary millenniums, one's brain reels, and
hope seems to be absurdity, and joy a sin against our fellows, as
a feast would be in a house next door to where was a funeral. I do
not wonder at settled sorrow falling upon men of vivid imagination,
keen moral sense, and ordinary sensitiveness, when they brood long
on the world as it is. But I do wonder at the superficial optimism
which goes on with its little prophecies about human progress, and
its rose-colored pictures of human life, and sees nothing to strike
it dumb for ever in men's writhing miseries, blank failures, and
hopeless end. Ah! brethren, if it were not for the heavenward look,
how could we bear the sight of earth! "We see not yet all things put
under him." No, God knows, far enough off from that. Man's folly,
man's submission to the creatures he should rule, man's agonies, and
man's transgression, are a grim contrast to the psalmist's vision.
If we had only earth to look to, despair of the race, exprest in
settled melancholy apathy, or in fierce cynicism, were the wisest
attitude. But there is more within our view than earth; "we see
Jesus"; we look to the heaven, and as we behold the true man, we see
more than ever, indeed, how far from that pattern we all are; but we
can bear the thought of what men as yet have been, when we see that
perfect example of what men shall be. The root and the consolation
of our sorrow for man's evils is communion with God.
We have here loving contact with those whom we would help, set forth
in the Lord's touch.
The reasons for the variety observable in Christ's method of
communicating supernatural blessing were, probably, too closely
connected with unrecorded differences in the spiritual conditions of
the recipients to be distinctly traceable by us. But tho we cannot
tell why a particular method was employed in a given case, why now a
word, and now a symbolic action, now the touch of His hand, and now
the hem of His garment, appeared to be the vehicles of His power, we
can discern the significance of these divers ways, and learn great
lessons from them all.
His touch was sometimes obviously the result of what one may venture
to call instinctive tenderness, as when He lifted the little
children in His arms and laid His hands upon their heads. It was, I
suppose, always the spontaneous expression of love and compassion,
even when it was something more.
The touch of His hand on the ghastly glossiness of the leper's skin
was, no doubt, His assertion of priestly functions, and of elevation
above all laws of defilement; but what was it to the poor outcast,
who for years had never felt the warm contact of flesh and blood? It
always indicated that He Himself was the source of healing and life.
It always exprest His identification of Himself with sorrow and
sickness. So that it is in principle analogous to, and may be taken
as illustrative of, that transcendent act whereby He became flesh,
and dwelt among us. Indeed, the very word by which our Lord's taking
the blind man by the hand is described in the chapter following our
text is that employed in the Epistle to the Hebrews when, dealing
with the true brotherhood of Jesus, the writer says, "He took not
hold of angels, but of the seed of Abraham he taketh hold." Christ's
touch is His willing contact with man's infirmities and sins, that
He may strengthen and hallow.