FAITH IDEAL AND ACTIVE. ΙΟΙ In passion, dark with guilt, and his cry is, "How can God receive me?" And here the Divine mystery of Christ reveals its wondrous meaning, the grand secret of the new and perfect relation of God to man. ancient religions God is conceived as a terrible Being, to be appeased by dreadful rites, to be bribed, not into mercy for mercy He had not-but into partiality and favour. In Christ, God stands forth "reconciling the world unto Himself." The gift is God's; the joy is man's. In the Son, so freely given, God and man meet, the right hand of His divinity binds God to man, the left hand of His humanity binds man to God. Over our weary and sinful earth a spirit of peace was breathed when the words fell and went wandering over it, as from the bosom of the Eternal, "God so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." 2. And now a word or two as to the actual and active side of our Christian faith. And here let the wondrous way in which the ideal and the active are bound together be noted. It is so in no other religion. The truths of Christianity are moral energies, agencies for the creation of the simplest yet sublimest morality. It exercises this power in the individual and in society. Look around you confront a civilization that, in all its high, generous, humane elements, was created by the religion of Christ; that has, to all its ignoble, pernicious, and evil elements, in that religion a permanent and merciless foe. Christ is the enemy of all that is sinful and selfish in man and society; and, marvellous though it be, in the conflict He is progressively victorious. Think what an achievement it is to lead and rule the Western mind. The Oriental does not move like the Occidental.. The West describes in days cycles to which the East takes centuries. Where centuries pass without any perceptible change, it is a small thing for a religion to live. The will does not fret to be free, the reason does not so rebel as to recoil into vehement and revolutionary denial. But here our faith faces an intellect that cannot brook ignorance, that is curious to know the secrets of nature and mind, the present and the past, heaven and earth; and claims to control a will that cannot bear restraint, loves to show its independence of authority and to obey its own sweet choice. Yet this reason Christ is powerful to hold, and He is strong to command this will. To live and rule for a thousand years in the West speaks more for the truth of a religion, than undisputed continuance for a thousand thousands in the immobile East. A system that is never doubted can never be believed, and the doubt our faith has overcome and is overcoming is the best proof of its invincible energy and truth. As an actual religion history shows it to be universal, permanent and progressive, able and willing to comprehend mankind, to continue under the most varied forms essentially unchanged, qualified amid the utmost intellectual activity to quicken and lead the march of mind. And its force is always spiritual, moral. To believe it is to be bound to live by it. And it is simple, sober truth to say, its history is the history of the most splendid moral changes the world has known. It has cleansed the heart of the guilty, and changed the sinner into a saint; it has created in every generation a noble army of teachers, reformers, philanthro GOD'S SEARCH FOR MAN. 103 pists; has freed the slave, built the hospital for the diseased and destitute, lightened the horrors of war, tempered justice with mercy, sent conscience and honour into the soul of ignorance and fear. Christ has made man conscious that he was the brother of man the wide world over, conscious, too, that he was the son of God. And so His truth grapples in the most splendid way with our worst ills. Within the soul of the Christian peoples a dread conflict is ever in process. Christ and mammon, Christ and passion, Christ and mad ambition, narrow and demoniac selfishness, do battle there. Now evil has the mastery, and men hasten to sin, or nations rush to battle: but even then the gentle Christ follows, whispers the word that brings penitence to the man, or raises aloft on the battle-field the white banner with the red cross that speaks of woman's tender nursing and man's hand, skilled to cure, swift to heal. O Christ, this world saved by Thee, from the madness of passion, or the still greater madness of despair, can only call Thee blessed. Here, then, we end our quest. The religion of Christ is the religion man needs; it has come from God that it may bring to God. Here indeed, lies the secret of its pre-eminence. Other religions have risen out of man's search for God; it has come out of God's search for man. In the religion of Christ the redemptive and reconciling energies of God are, as it were, incorporated, sent to live, a beneficent and powerful being, on earth and among men. God created it for man, and man has now a right to God's glorious and universal gift. We dare not intercept it, we who have received only to give. It came to us when we were a savage race; made us the people we are; and now from us it must go out to the old and new peoples of the earth. Africa with her millions, a vast continent opening to us on all sides, for ages spurned by the foot of the white man, or used only for his worst rapacities and lusts; the islands that sleep in the glorious Pacific, rich in varied wealth, with children here fierce as the wild beast, there inoffensive as the lamb; vast spaces of the America that was desolated by the greed and cursed by the cruelties of the pale-faced conqueror; India with her millions held fast in the merciless vice of caste; Central Asia with her moving multitudes praying to a Buddha that cannot hear; China with her crowded cities and teeming valleys and swarming rivers, bent in abject submission before the dead that cannot speak, and a past that cannot inspire; Japan, full of deft and cunning hands, subtle and docile brains, in recoil from her own ancient customs and ways, open to the generous light and wisdom of the West-all these and many more, unconsciously to themselves, stretch over the sea suppliant and helpless hands, and cry, "O England! Queen of the Seas, give us of the secret of your greatness! Let the light that came to you from Christ shine out towards us. Let the Gospel of God's love you received be preached on our shores and through our valleys. Let the power that made you what you are come to us, that the joy and the good and the peace you have may be ours!" In the cry of earth there is the voice of God; and when that voice is heard, the Churches of England must obey. |