Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day DawnPurves, George Tybout
Religion
Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn
Purves, George Tybout
Patton, Francis L. (Francis Landey), 1843-1932
finish his work."
I. Let us first, then, draw a little closer to this peerless soul, in
which there was such perfect sense of the worth of infinite things, and
let us note more particularly, and appreciate as far as we are able,
this phase of the character of the Son of Man.
I have said that Christ was a very natural man. But he was more than
that. I am sure that none can study his character without admitting and
admiring the perfect proportion in which truth evidently lay in his
mind. This is one of the rarest beauties of character. Most of us are
very one-sided. We can grasp but a part of truth; and in order to grasp
that part firmly, we have to absolutely let other truth go. In order to
be devoted to duty as we see it, we commonly have to leave other duties
untouched. Our spiritual growth ought to take just this direction of
including broader views of truth and duty, of obtaining a conception of
life in which the various elements shall be held in their proper
relations and proportions; no one allowed to eclipse the others, but
each modified to a proper extent by the presence and influence of the
rest. I say this is a rare achievement. No one but Christ has ever
achieved it perfectly. It is easy to see that even the apostles,
inspired as they were, did not equally appreciate all sides of
revelation. They have their distinguishing doctrines and points of
view.
It is still easier to see that Christian churches and theologians
differ for this same reason, and to a much greater extent. No creed, no
church, no theology, that builds on the Word of God, can be wholly
wrong. Its difference from others must lie in its partial appreciation
of the truth, in its inability to take in all truths in their relative
proportion. And so in literature and science and philosophy some men
are impressed with material evidences, others with moral. Some men are
poets, others are logicians; some critical, others dogmatic. The hope
of the future for the Church and for humanity is in the slow
approximation and combination of these partial views, until at last,
"in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, we
shall come unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the
fullness of Christ." Meanwhile, at the beginning of our Christian
history, Christ stands perfect. To see this is to appreciate his
authority. As Paul said, He is the corner stone of the spiritual temple
which the Divine Spirit is building.
I do not mean that he taught explicitly all the truth which later times
have discovered, or which after him apostles taught. But he laid the
living germs of all later religious truth, and he held them in such
perfect proportion that when the long course of history shall be
finished, when that which is in part shall have been done away, and
that which is perfect shall have come, the result will be but the
reproduction on a large scale of the already perfect stature of Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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