Christmas Evans, the Preacher of Wild Wales: His country, his times, and his contemporariesHood, Edwin Paxton
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Christmas Evans, the Preacher of Wild Wales: His country, his times, and his contemporaries
Hood, Edwin Paxton
Evans, Christmas, 1766-1838
“It is even so! For there are the shroud, and the napkin, and the
heavenly watchers; and when He awoke, and cast off His grave-clothes,
the earthquake was felt in the city, and jarred the gates of hell.
‘The Hind of the Morning’ is up earlier than any of His pursuers,
‘leaping upon the mountains, and skipping upon the hills.’ He is
seen first with Mary at the tomb; then with the disciples in
Jerusalem; then with two of them on the way to Emmaus; then going
before His brethren into Galilee; and, finally, leaping upon the top
of Olivet to the hills of Paradise; fleeing away to ‘the mountain of
spices,’ where He shall never more be hunted by the Black Prince and
his hounds.
“Christ is perfect master of gravitation, and all the laws of nature
are obedient to His will. Once He walked upon the water, as if it
were marble beneath His feet; and now, as He stands blessing His
people, the glorious Form, so recently nailed to the cross, and still
more recently cold in the grave, begins to ascend like ‘the living
creature’ in Ezekiel’s vision, ‘lifted up from the earth,’ till
nearly out of sight; when ‘the chariots of God, even thousands of
angels,’ receive Him, and haste to the celestial city, waking the
thrones of eternity with this jubilant chorus—‘Lift up your heads, O
ye gates! and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors! and the King of
glory shall come in!’
“Christ might have rode in a chariot of fire all the way from
Bethlehem to Calvary; but he preferred riding in a chariot of mercy,
whose lining was crimson, and whose ornament the malefactor’s cross.
How rapidly rolled his wheels over the hills and the plains of
Palestine, gathering up everywhere the children of affliction, and
scattering blessings like the beams of the morning! Now we find Him
in Cana of Galilee, turning water into wine; then treading the waves
of the sea, and hushing the roar of the tempest; then delivering the
demoniac of Gadara from the fury of a legion of fiends; then healing
the nobleman’s son at Capernaum; raising the daughter of Jairus, and
the young man of Nain; writing upon the grave of Bethany, ‘I am the
resurrection and the life;’ curing the invalid at the pool of
Bethesda; feeding the five thousand in the wilderness; preaching to
the woman by Jacob’s well, acquitting the adulteress, and shaming her
accusers; and exercising everywhere, in all his travels, the three
offices of Physician, Prophet, and Saviour, as he drove on towards
the place of skulls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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