Lancashire (England) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
In a few minutes Mr. Penrose ascended the pulpit. Never before was
there such a congregation to greet him; and as the people rose to
join in singing the old tune, Devizes, the worm-eaten galleries
trembled and creaked beneath the mass of worshippers. Then
followed prayer and the lessons, the hymn before the address being
'Come, ye that love the Lord.'
With a great swell of harmony from five hundred voices, whose
training for song had been the moors, the words of Dr. Watts went
up to heaven, and when the second verse was reached--
'Let those refuse to sing,
Who never knew our Lord,'
little Milly, who had hobbled to chapel on her crutch, turned to
Abraham Lord, and said:
'Sithee, owd Moses is singing, faither.'
And it was even so. Poor Moses! for so many years a mute
worshipper, and whose voice had been raised only to harry and
distress, no longer was silent in the service of song.
Mr. Penrose's address was brief. Taking for his text, 'The Son of
Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost,' he said:
'It was the best in man that was longest in being discovered. That
which was lost was not the false man, but the true man--the
heavenly. We were none of us vile in the sight of God, because God
saw Himself in us. It was this God-self in us that was lost to us.
Not knowing it to be the hidden root of our true life, we did not
claim our dignity, nor walk as became the sons of God. A man who
lost the sense of his freedom, though free, would be fettered
still. A man whose sense of beauty was lost would be as in a
desert in the paradise of God. A lost sense of freedom meant a
slavish mind, and a lost sense of beauty meant a prosaic mind, no
matter how free the man, nor how beautiful his environment. So men
had lost the sense of their sonship. They did not know their royal
descent, their kinship with the Father, and therefore they did not
act as became sons. A lost sense of relationship begat in them
disobedience and alienation. They possessed gold, but were content
with brass; and instead of iron they built with clay. The eternal
and abiding was in them, but _lost_ to them, covered with
incrustations of self and buried deep beneath the lesser and the
meaner man. There were times in a man's life when the better
nature gave hints of its existence. The mission of Christ was to
awaken these hints. He came to tell them they were men, that they
were souls, that they were sons and not servants, friends and not
enemies of God. When He stirred these powers in men He stirred the
lost. He set it before the eye of man, and made man see what he
had within him, what he was _really_, and at the _root_ of his
being--a man, a Son of Man, a Child of God. How hard this was only
Christ knew. Spiritually, men put themselves, through spiritual
ignorance, in false relations. This wrong relationship lay at the
root of all disorder. It was the secret of discomfiture, misery
and sin. Men were not lost in badness, not lost in sin, but lost
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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