material reality is here, and here science has found all her truth,
and every season reminds her that inexpressible wonders still wait her
search. In the heavens above, and in the earth beneath, and in the
waters under the earth are hidden the treasure for which she is to
toil. Earth and sea and sky; the waveless depths and the windless
heights, and the wide expanse between, now sunlit and again
stormswept, are the field of her enterprise and hope. And in the same
way the human environment is the region that the spirit must explore.
The meaning of humanity must be found in and through humanity. "Say
not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? that is, to bring
Christ down; or who shall descend into the abyss? that is, to bring
Christ up from the dead. The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in
thy heart." The divine reality offers itself to faith in and through
the scope and sweep of life. The order of God is in the life of
society. The ideal for man, the method by which it is realized, and
the power, are set in the spiritual tissues of the race. If you see no
God, no soul, no genuine religion, believe rather that you are blind
than that your human environment does not contain them. You are the
product of nature. It follows that nature must be great enough to
account for you and your race and the Christ who is your race at its
best. Back of the nature that gave birth to you, that bore your kind,
and brought forth Christ, there must be the sufficient Spirit. You
are sure that you can not live by bread alone. You have thoughts that
wander through eternity. You can not rest until you rest in God. You
are a being made for religion, and again here is the gospel that meets
your intelligence with its wisdom, your heart with its love, your will
with its moral authority. Nothing puts your being in tune, and nothing
rings out the best music that is in you, as the gospel does. It is
omnipresent in our civilization, working everywhere to crush the
beast and to free the man. It is in a mother's love, the soul of its
tenderness; it is in a father's heart as ideal and incentive. The
history and the experience and the hope of our homes are transfigured
in its light, as if the earth should repose in an everlasting evening
glow. Patriotism is alive with its fire, and the new and growing
passion for humanity is the great token of its quickening spirit.
It is the box of ointment, very precious, which has been broken in
society and all Christendom is filled with its perfume. Birth and
death, love and sorrow, achievement and failure, human life and its
immemorial content, the old room and the dear and dreary things in it,
take on new dignity and grace. To detect the new spirit in the old
dwelling is the best and most rewarding of all intuitions. To live in
the human homestead consecrated by the diffusion of Christ's gospel is
to undergo an unconscious conformation to exalted ideals. Because of
our Christian civilization, behind every morning is the Father, who
makes His sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and who sends His
rain upon the just and the unjust. Nature has been lifted into a
servant of the divine beneficence. And man's wild but imperishable
passion for the unseen has been brought to see its last and best self
in the love of Christ. Wherever we look, this gospel is the master
light of all our seeing; and once more, is it not light from heaven?
We know where to look for the belt of Orion, and clear and grand as
the stars that constitute it are the great saving truths which are set
in the human sky. There is nothing arbitrary in this sublime faith,
nothing that does not rise out of the human order, nothing that is a
mere import from the world of fancy or wild belief. The faith is the
translation of fact into thought and speech. The eyes of Christ pass
over and through the order of the universe, and His vision is our
faith. Man is the interpreter of nature; religion is the interpreter
of man; Christianity is the interpreter of religion; and God the
Father is the interpreter of Christianity.
DAWSON
CHRIST AMONG THE COMMON THINGS OF LIFE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William James Dawson, Congregational preacher and evangelist, was born
in Towcester, Northamptonshire, in 1854. He was educated at Kingswood
School, Bath, and Didsbury College, Manchester. He has long been
known as an author of originality and pure literary style. In 1906 he
received the pastorate of Highbury Quadrant Congregational Church,
London, and accepted an invitation to do general evangelistic work
under the auspices of the National Council of the Congregational
churches of the United States. He now resides in this country.
DAWSON
Born in 1854:
CHRIST AMONG THE COMMON THINGS OF LIFE[1]
[Footnote 1: Reprinted by kind permission of Messrs. Fleming H. Revell
& Co., New York.]
_As soon then as they were come to land they saw a fire of coals
there, and fish laid thereon, and bread. Jesus saith unto them, Come
and dine_.--John xxi., 9, 12.
I can not read these words without indulging for a moment in a
reminiscence. Not long ago, in the early morning, while all the world
slept, I stood beside the Sea of Tiberias, just as the morning mist
lifted, and watched a single brown-sailed fishing-boat making for the
shore, and the tired fishermen dragging their net to land. In that
moment it seemed to me as if more than the morning mist lifted--twenty
centuries seemed to melt like mist, and the last chapter of St. John's
gospel seemed to enact itself before my eyes. For so vivid was the
sense of something familiar in the scene, so mystic was the hour, that
I should scarce have been surprized had I seen a fire of coals burning
on the shore, and heard the voice of Jesus inviting these tired
fishermen to come and dine.
Now if I felt that, if I was sensible of the haunting presence of
Christ by that Galilean shore, how much more these disciples, in
whose minds every aspect of the Galilean lake was connected with some
intimate and thrilling memory of the ministry of Jesus.
Christ once more stands among the common things of life; the fire,
the fish, the bread--all common things; a group of tired, hungry
fishers--all common men; and He is there to affirm that in His
resurrection He had not broken His bond with men, but strengthened
it--wherever common life goes on there is Jesus still.
I. Notice the words with which the story opens, and you will see at
once that this is the real clue to its interpretation. "When morning
had now come, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples knew not
that it was Jesus." A strange thing that! Why did they not know Him?
Because they were not looking for Him in such a scene. It had seemed a
natural thing, if Jesus should appear at all, that He should appear in
the garden, a vision of life at the very altar of death. It seemed yet
more probable and appropriate that He should appear in the upper room,
that room made sacred by holiest love and memory. If any words of
Christ yet lingered in the mind and had power to thrill them, they
were surely these words, "Ye shall see the Son of man coming in the
clouds of heaven," glorified, triumphant, lifted far above the earth
and its humble life. And so, if they were looking for Christ at all
that morning, I think they watched the morning clouds, expecting Him
to come down the resplendent staircase of the sunbeams to call the
nations together and vindicate Himself in acts of universal judgment.
And behold! Jesus comes as a fisherman standing on the lakeside, busy
over a little fire, where the morning meal is cooking; and behold!
Jesus speaks, and it is not of the eternal mysteries of God, not of
the solemn secrets of the grave, but of nets and fishing and how to
cast the nets--the simple concerns of simple men engaged in humble
tasks.
No wonder they did not recognize Him. Once more the Son of Man comes
eating and drinking, and even the eyes that knew Him best can not see
in this human figure by the lakeside the only begotten Son of the
Father, full of grace and truth. They looked and saw but a fellow
fisherman, cooking his meal upon the shore, and they knew not that it
was Jesus.
II. Think for a moment of the earthly life of Christ, and you will
see that it was designedly linked with all the common and even the
commonest things of life.
If you or I could have conceived the great thought of some human
creature that should be the very incarnation of God, what would have
been the shape of our imaginings? Surely we should have chosen for
this earthly temple of the Highest some human form perfected in grace
and beauty by the long refinements of exalted ancestry; the child of
kings or scholars; the delicate flower of life, in whom the elements
were so subtly mixed that we should recognize them as special and
miraculous--so we might think of God manifest in man. But God chooses
for the habitation of His Spirit a peasant woman of Nazareth, humble,
poor, unconsidered.
If we could have forecast the training of such a life, how should
we have pictured it? Surely as sheltered from the coarseness of the
world, delicately nourished, sedulously cultured; but God orders
that this life should manifest itself in the house of the village
carpenter, out of reach of schools, in a little wicked town, under the
commonest conditions of poverty, obscurity, and toil.
If you and I could have imagined the introduction of this life of
lives to the world, how should we picture that? Surely we should have
pictured it coming with pomp and display that would at once have
attracted all eyes; but God orders that it shall come without
observation, unfolding its quiet beauty like the wayside flower, which
there are few to see and very few to love. Commonness: that is the
great note of the incarnation and the purposed feature of Christ's
earthly life.
He reaffirms His fraternity in common life. The disciples could not
imagine that as possible; nor can we. And why not? For two reasons,
one of which is that we have forgotten the dignity of common life.
1. Dignity is for us almost synonymous with some kind of separation
from common life; it dwells in palaces, not in cottages; it inheres in
culture, but is inconceivable in narrow knowledge; and to the great
mass of men it is, alas! the attribute of wealth, of fine raiment,
of social isolation. But we have not learned even the alphabet
of Christ's gospel unless we have come to see that the only true
_in_dignity in human life is sin, meanness, malevolence, and
small-heartedness; and that all life is dignified where there are
love, purity, and piety in it, whatever be its social category.
I read the other day that it is probable that the very mire of the
London streets contains that mysterious substance known as radium, the
most tremendous agent of light and heat ever yet discovered by man; so
in man himself, however low his state, there is the spark of God, an
ember lit at the altar fires of the Eternal, and it is because we
forget this that we forget the dignity of common life. For we do
forget it. We may make our boast that a single human soul is of more
value than all the splendors and immensities of matter; but in our
actions we treat the boast as a mere rhetorical expression. There is
nothing so cheap as men and women--let the lords of commerce answer
if it be not so. But Christ acted as tho the boast were true. He
deliberately inwove His life into all that is commonest in life. He
has made it impossible for us, if indeed we have His spirit, to think
of any salient aspect of human life without thinking of Him.
Where childhood is, there is Bethlehem; where sorrow is, there is
Gethsemane; where death is, there is Calvary; where the toiler is,
there is the poor man of Nazareth; and where the beggar is, there is
He who had no place where to lay His head. There is not a drop of
blood of Christ, nor a throb of thought in our brains that is not
thrilling with the impact of this divine life of lives. And so the
true dignity of life is this, that Christ is in all men, faintly
outlined it may be, defaced, half-obliterated, but there, and the
Church that forgets this has neither impulse nor mandate for Christ's
work among men.
2. And then, again, there is a second reason: we have not learned to
look for Christ among the common things of life.
"Let us build three tabernacles," said the wondering disciples on
the Mount of Transfiguration, and the speech betrayed a tendency of
thought which was in time to prove fatal to the Church.
The Christ without a tabernacle, the free, familiar Christ of the lake
or the wayside was everybody's Christ; but the moment Christ is shut
up in a church or a tabernacle He becomes the priest's Christ, the
thinker's Christ, the devotee's Christ, but He ceases to be the
people's Christ.
I remember five years ago standing in the great church of Assisi,
which has been erected over and encloses the little humble chapel
where Francis first received his call. You will scarcely be surprized
if I confess that I turned with a sense of heart-sick indignation
from the pomp of that splendid service in the gorgeous church to
the thought of Francis, in his worn robe, going up and down these
neighboring roads, touching the lepers, calling them "God's patients,"
pouring out his life for the poor; and I knew Christ nearer to me
on the roads that Francis trod than in that church, which is his
mausoleum rather than his monument. And as I felt that day in far-off
Umbria, so I have felt to-day in England; my heart goes out to
Catherine Booth; to Father Dolling, to these Christs of the wayside,
and it turns more and more from the kind of Christ who lives in
churches and nowhere else. My brethren, you will let me say that we do
but make the church Christ's prison when we forget that all the realm
of life is His. Oh, you good people, you do love your church, but
often think and act as tho the presence of Christ can be found nowhere
else. Lift up your eyes and see this risen Christ, a fisherman upon
the shore, busy in no loftier task than to have a meal prepared for
hungry fishermen. Unlock your church doors, let Christ go out among
common people; nay, go yourselves, for it is here that He would have
you be. Remember that wherever there is toil, there is the Christ
who toiled; and there you should be, with the kind glance, the warm
hand-grasp, and the loving warmth of brotherhood.
Christ stands amid the common things of life; where the fire is lit,
there is He; where the bread is broken, there is He; where the net of
business gain is drawn, there is He; and only as we learn to see Him
everywhere shall we understand the dignity and the divinity of human
life.
III. "And Jesus said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the
ship, and ye shall find. They cast, and now they were not able to draw
it for the multitude of fishes."
Here is another strange thing. Christ knows more about the management
of their own business than they do. They had toiled all night and
caught nothing; is not that a significant description of many human
lives? "Children, have ye any meat?" asks that quiet Voice from
the shore, and they answer "No." Is not that yet more pathetically
significant? All the heartbreak and disappointment of the world cry
aloud in that confession. Oh, I could fill an hour with the mere
recital of the names of great and famous people who have toiled
through a long life, and as the last gray hour came over their dim sea
of life, "brackish with the salt of human tears," have acknowledged
with infinite bitterness that they have caught nothing. Listen to the
voice of Goethe, "In all my seventy-five years I have not had four
weeks of genuine well-being;" to the confession of our own famous
poet,
My life is in the yellow leaf,
The flowers, the fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone.
to the ambitious and successful statesman who says, "Youth is folly,
manhood is struggle, old age regret"; to one of our most brilliant
women of genius in our own generation, wife of a still more brilliant
husband, who cries, "I married for ambition, and I am miserable."
Surely there is some tragic mismanagement of the great business of
living here. Oh, brother, is it true of you, that after all the
painful years happiness is not yours? You have no meat, no food on
which the heart feeds, no green pasture in the soul, no table in the
wilderness, and the last gray day draws near and will find you still
hungering for what life Has never given you.
Learn, then, that Christ knows more about the proper management of
your life than you do. "Cast your net on the right side of the ship,"
speaks that quiet Voice from the shore. And you know what happened.
And it is so still. Just because Christ stands among the common things
of life, He knows most about life, and, above all, He knows where
the golden fruit of happiness is found and where the secret wells of
peace.
And to some of us whom God has called to be fishers of men the issue
is yet more solemn. We have the boat and the nets, all this elaborate
organization of the Church, but have we caught anything this year?
Where is the draft of fishes? Where are the men and women saved by
our triumphant effort? I will make my humble confession this morning,
that for five-and-twenty years I have cast the net, but only lately
have I found the right side of the ship; only lately have I discovered
how easy it is to get the great draft of fishes by simply going to
work in Christ's way. I do not believe in the indifference of the
masses in religion; the indifference is not in the masses, but in the
churches. You will never catch many fish if you stand upon the shore
of cold respectability and wait for them to come; launch out into the
deep and you will find them. Go for them--that is Christ's method.
Compel them to come in, for remember Christ's ideal was, as Bishop
Lightfoot so nobly put it, "the universal compulsion of the souls of
men." And if your experience is like mine, you will find that there is
strangely little compulsion needed to bring men and women to Christ.
I stood but lately in a house where fifty fallen women lived; I went
there to rescue three of its unhappy inmates. When the moment came to
take these three women from their life of sin, their comrades lined
the passage to shake my hand; there were tears and prayers, and
messages like these, "Be good. You'll be a good woman," "We wish we
had your chance"; and these poor souls in their inferno wished me
"a happy New-year." Compulsion! There was small need for compulsion
there! I believe I could have rescued all of these fifty women at one
stroke had I known where to take them. But to the shame of the Free
Churches in London I confess that, with the exception of the Wesleyans
and the Salvation Army, I do not know a single Free Church Rescue Home
in London. And I put it to you this morning whether you can any longer
tolerate that omission? I ask you whether you really want a great
draft of fishes, for you can have them if you want them. Christ knows
the business better than you do; and if you will come out of the
cloister of the church and seek the people in His spirit, I promise
you that very soon you will not be able to drag the net for the
multitude of fishes.
IV. "And Jesus said unto them, Come and dine."
Dine on what? Not the fish which they had caught. They had caught one
hundred and fifty-three great fishes; but notice Christ's fire was
kindled before they came. Christ's fish was already laid thereon, and
all they had to do was to come and dine. It is all you have to do, all
the churches have to do. Did not Christ so put it in the parable of
the Great Supper?--"Come, for all things are ready." Is not the last
word of Scripture the great invitation?--"The Spirit and the Bride
say, Come, and whosoever will, let him come, and take of the water of
life freely." Many a church can not say to a hungry world, "Come and
dine," because it will not let Christ prepare the meal. It will not
live in His spirit, it has no real faith in His gospel, it does not
understand that its true strength is not in elaborate organization
or worship, but in simple reliance on His grace. And so there is the
table covered with elaborate confections, which are not bread, and
when it says, "Come and dine," men will not come, for they know that
there is nothing there for them. Let Christ prepare the meal and all
is different then. When He says, "Come and dine," there is "enough
for each, enough for all, enough for evermore." And as Jesus spoke, I
think there flashed upon the memory of these men the scene when Jesus
fed the five thousand, and by that memory they knew their Jesus. No
one else ever spoke like that, with such certainty and such authority.
And the same Voice speaks even now to your hunger-bitten soul, to your
famished heart, "Come and dine."
V. "Then Jesus taketh bread and giveth them, and fish likewise."
There is no mistaking the act; it was a sacramental act. Here, upon
the lake shore, without a church, without an altar, the true feast of
the Lord was observed. For what does the Holy Supper, which is the
bond and seal of the Church's fellowship, stand for, if it is not
for this, the sanctification of the common life? Bread and wine, the
commonest of all foods to an Oriental, are elements indeed, because
they are necessary to the most elementary form of physical life,
things used daily in the humblest home. By linking Himself
imperishably with these commonest elements of life, Christ makes it
impossible to forget Him. Once more the thought shines clear, Jesus
among the common things of life.
And then there comes one last touch in the beautiful story. While
these things happened, the day was breaking. Is there one of us
long tossed on sunless seas of doubt, long conscious of failure and
disappointment in life? Are there those of us whose sorrow lies deeper
than that which is personal--sorrow over our failure in Christ's work,
pain over a life's ministry for Christ that has known no victorious
evangel? Turn your eyes from that barren sea to Him who stands upon
the shore; He shall yet make you a fisher of men. Turn your eyes from
that bleak, dark sea of wasted effort where you have fared so ill; it
is always dark till Jesus comes, it is always light when He has come.
There is a new day breaking for the churches--a day of widespread
evangelistic triumphs that shall eclipse all the greatest triumphs of
the past, if we will but go back to Christ's school and learn of Him
how to save the people. And to each of us He says to-day: "I am the
living bread; I am the bread of life come down from heaven. If any man
eat of this bread, he shall live forever." "Come and dine." Will you
come?
SMITH
ASSURANCE IN GOD
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, divine, educator and author, was born at Calcutta
in 1856, and educated at New College, Edinburgh, Scotland. He is at
present professor of Old Testament Language, Literature and Theology
in the United Free Church College, Glasgow. He is author of "The
Historical Geography of the Holy Land," "Jerusalem, the Topography,
Economics and History from the Earliest Time to A.D. 70" (1908). He is
generally regarded as one of the most gifted preachers of Scotland.
SMITH
Born in 1856
ASSURANCE IN GOD
_Preserve me, O God._--Psalm xvi., 16.
The psalmist lived in a period when belief in the reality of many gods
was still strong, and when a man who would follow the one true God
had to prefer to do so against the attractions of other deities and
against the convictions of a great number of his fellow countrymen
that these deities were living and powerful. That stage of religion is
so distant from ourselves that we may imagine the psalmist's example
to be of no practical value for our faith, yet in such an imagination
we should be very much mistaken indeed, for, to begin with, consider
how much you and I to-day owe to those believers who so many centuries
ago rejected all the gods that offered themselves to the hearts of men
except the true God, and who chose to cleave to Him alone with all
that passionate loyalty which breathes through these verses. But for
them you and I could not be standing where we are in religion to-day.
As the eleventh of Hebrews reminds us, we are the spiritual heir of
such believers. It is to their struggles and their faith and their
victories that we greatly owe it that we have been born into an
atmosphere in which no religious belief is possible to us save in one
God who is Spirit and Righteousness and all Truth.