A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.: 2nd ed.Jameson, Mrs. (Anna)
General
A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.: 2nd ed.
Jameson, Mrs. (Anna)
Art and literature; Commonplace books; Ethics; Quotations
(All this part of his discourse very beautiful, earnest, eloquent; but I
regretted that he did not follow out the distinction he began with
between _sin_ and _crime_, and the views and deductions, religious and
moral, which that distinction leads to.)
He continued to this effect: “Christ said that it was a part of his
mission to heal the broken-hearted. What is meant by the phrase ‘a
broken heart?’” He illustrated it by the story of Eli, and by the wife
of Phineas, both of whom died broken in heart; “and our Saviour himself
died on the cross heart-broken by sorrow rather than by physical
torture.”—
(I lost something here because I was questioning and doubting within
myself, for I have always had the thought that Christ must have been
_glad_ to die.)
He went on:—“To heal the broken-hearted is to say to those who are beset
by the remembrance and the misery of sin, ‘My brother, the past is
past—think not of it to thy perdition; arise and sin no more.’” (All
this, and more to the same purpose, wonderfully beautiful! and I became
all soul—subdued to listen.) “There are two ways of meeting the pressure
of misery and heart-break: first, by trusting to time” (then followed a
quotation from Schiller’s “Wallenstein,” in reference to grief, which
sounded strange, and yet beautiful, from the pulpit, “Was verschmerzte
nicht der Mensch?”—what cannot man grieve down?); “secondly, by defiance
and resistance, setting oneself resolutely to endure. But Christ taught
a different way from either—by _submission_—by the complete surrender of
our whole being to the will of God.
“The next part of Christ’s mission was to preach deliverance to the
captives.” (Then followed a most eloquent and beautiful exposition of
Christian freedom—of who were free; and who were not free, but properly
spiritual captives.) “To be content within limitations is freedom; to
desire beyond those limitations is bondage. The bird which is content
within her cage is free; the bird which can fly from tree to tree, yet
desires to soar like the eagle,—the eagle which can ascend to the
mountain peak yet desires to reach the height of that sun on which his
eye is fixed,—these are in bondage. The man who is not content within
his sphere of duties and powers, but feels his faculties, his position,
his profession; a perpetual trammel,—_he_ is spiritually in bondage. The
only freedom is the freedom of the soul, content within its external
limitations, and yet elevated spiritually far above them by the inward
powers and impulses which lift it up to God.”
[Illustration]
IV.
_Recollections of another Church of England Sermon preached extempore._
The text was taken from Matt. xii. 42.: “The Queen of the South shall
rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it,” &c.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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