Living Fountains or Broken Cisterns: An Educational Problem for ProtestantsSutherland, E. A. (Edward Alexander)
Religion
Living Fountains or Broken Cisterns: An Educational Problem for Protestants
Sutherland, E. A. (Edward Alexander)
Church and education; Education -- History; Religious education
“Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold; all these gather themselves
together, and come to thee. As I live, saith the Lord, thou shalt
surely clothe thee with them all, as with an ornament, and bind them on
thee, as a bride doeth. For thy waste and thy desolate places and the
land of thy destruction, shall even now be too narrow by reason of the
inhabitants.... _The children which thou shalt have, after thou hast
lost the other_, shall say again in thine ears, the place is too strait
for me; give place to me that I may dwell. Then shalt thou say in thine
heart, Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children, and am
desolate?... Who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left alone; these,
where had they been? Thus saith the Lord God, Behold! I will lift up Mine
hand to the Gentiles, and set up My standard to the people; and they
shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried
upon their shoulders. And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their
queens thy nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee with their faces
toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet.... For I will contend
with him that contendeth with thee, AND I WILL SAVE THY CHILDREN.”[190]
How will He save the children?—“ALL THY CHILDREN SHALL BE TAUGHT OF THE
LORD.” When will the Gentiles come bringing their children to supply the
places of those now lost?—When Protestants can show to the Gentiles that
they have a system of education which is free from the errors now so
prevalent; when they can teach the Gentiles the TRUTH.
“Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing,
and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the
children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith
the Lord. Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth
the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and
strengthen thy stakes; for thou shalt break forth on the right hand and
on the left; and thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles.”[191]
When shall these things be? The same chapter of Isaiah answers. When
“all thy children shall be taught of the Lord.” When Protestants educate
according to the principles of true Protestantism, then will the words of
the same prophet, recorded in the sixtieth chapter, be fulfilled. “Arise,
be enlightened, for thy light cometh.... The Gentiles shall come to thy
light and kings to the brightness of thy rising.... Thy sons shall come
from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side.”[192]
Christ came, fulfilling in every particular the prophecies quoted. “As
thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the
world,” are the words of Christ to His church. As Christ was a teacher,
so that church which does the work which the Christian church _must_ do,
will have a system of education, and its members will be educators indeed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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