from heaven and flushing all the earth, like the dawn descending the mountain sides,-how should we arise to meet it? Would our occupations, and the aspirations of our hearts, and our affections shade off into it without any shock, so that it would seem to us only a calmer, brighter morning, and we should grasp one another's hands with nothing more than a glad subdued surprise, saying that the kingdom of God was come? or would its advent be felt to be a calamity rather than a blessing? The claims of Christ require a moral basis to rest upon, and that basis does not exist in the world as it is at present. Even those who in some measure believe in Christ often fail to get an answer from Him. They look for some manifestation of His power on themselves, some exhibition of His heavenly mission, some proof that He is from God; but He answers them nothing. They go from church to church, from meeting to meeting, seeking some proof of His supernatural power, but they come away unimpressed, unconvinced, cold, uncertain, weary, perplexed. The reason? Is all previous knowledge lived up to? Or are the great principles of John's baptism-sin, remission, the kingdom of God-understood and felt with any vividness? How far may some sin be at the bottom of Christ's silence? not an open sin, but a hidden one,-some mode of feeling rather than of thinking, some mode of thinking rather than of speaking or acting? May it not be alienating the mind, unfitting it to receive correct impressions of Christ, making it averse, by passing a constant current over it in another direction? How, for instance, the cherishing of an enmity in the heart may hinder the very essence of Christ's love of God from commending itself to the mind! "If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" Or how, for instance, the cherishing and keeping in the mind of impure thoughts, which are too subtle for human intercourse to detect, which betray themselves only by the hasty glance of the eye, or by the too great sensitiveness and unwillingness to refer to what is impure,-how this may make the mind so averse to the thought of Him who was holy, harmless, undefiled, that He can find no entrance! Or how that hauteur which accredited professors of religion are apt to entertain, that self-satisfied confidence, that sectarian dislike of others because their ways are different from ours, how this may close the eyes of the heart, so that Christ Himself shall not be recognised, even when He stands before us, and how we may let some great work of God go by, because it is not carried on precisely according to our ecclesiastical rules! The faith of Christ is founded on morality. It is not morality, but it is based on it, on the common facts of our life and its needs-on sin, on the miseries and evils of life. It presupposes these, and is received by minds alive to these, by open, candid, simple, earnest minds. To these Jesus unfolds His claims. "I thank Thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." Through these things we rise up to Him. Christ is not a supernatural fact out of all connection with life, but His claims base themselves upon life as it is. And that which hinders His divine claims from being admitted is oftenest some sin, some neglect of a duty which we know, some giving way to a vice which we are aware of, which disturbs and alienates the mind from Christ; some pride which makes us feel we have nothing to learn; some thing of this kind which puts the mind out of harmony with Christ and His claims, and makes it hard for them to commend themselves to the heart. I say oftenest, let me not say always; for there are mysteries here, especially, which no theory of ours will take in. There are earnest, pure minds on whom the light has not yet broken; yet these are not far from the kingdom of God, though they may think themselves to be; and it will sometimes happen to them that in some moment of thought or feeling the partition wall that confined their view will be suddenly gone, and they will wonder what it was that hindered them; for they are unchanged, except that the light is about them. "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of Myself." But when I say oftenest, I am surely standing on ground on which He stood Himself. |