Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. LukeMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. Luke
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Luke -- Commentaries
Education? Yes! it will do a great deal, but it will do nothing in
regard to sin. It will alter the type of the disease, because the
cultured man's transgressions will be very different from those of
the illiterate boor. But wise or foolish, professor, student,
thinker, or savage with narrow forehead and all but dead brain, are
alike in this, that they are sinners in God's sight. I would that I
could get through the fence that some of you have reared round you,
on the ground of your superior enlightenment and education and
refinement, and make you feel that there is something deeper than
all that, and that you may be a very clever, and a very well
educated, a very highly cultured, an extremely thoughtful and
philosophical sinner, but you are a sinner all the same.
And again, we hear a great deal at present, and I do not desire that
we should hear less, about social and economic and political
changes, which some eager enthusiasts suppose will bring the
millennium. Well, if the land were nationalised, and all 'the means
of production and distribution' were nationalised, and everybody got
his share, and we were all brought to the communistic condition,
what then? That would not make men better, in the deepest sense of
the word. The fact is, these people are beginning at the wrong end.
You cannot better humanity merely by altering its environment for
the better. Christianity reverses the process. It begins with the
inmost man, and it works outwards to the circumference, and that is
the thorough way. Why! suppose you took a company of people out of
the slums, for instance, and put them into a model lodging-house,
how long will it continue a model? They will take their dirty habits
with them, and pull down the woodwork for firing, and in a very
short time make the place where they are as like as possible to the
hovel whence they came. You must change the men, and then you can
change their circumstances, or rather they will change them for
themselves. Now, all this is not to be taken as casting cold water
on any such efforts to improve matters, but only as a protest
against its being supposed that these _alone_ are sufficient to
rectify the ills and cure the sorrows of humanity. 'Ye have healed
the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly.' The patient is
dying of cancer, and you are treating him for a skin disease. It is
Jesus Christ alone who can cure the sins, and therein the sorrows,
of humanity.
III. Lastly, we are not all healed.
That is only too plain. All the sick in the crowd round Christ were
sent away well, but the gifts He bestowed so broadcast had no
relation to their spiritual natures, and gifts that have relation to
our spiritual nature cannot be thus given in entire disregard of our
actions in the matter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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