Christian life; Free Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English; Young men
Granted then for a moment that we had but a little more of this
God-fibre running through our individual and our collective life, such
an experience as physical want would become but a memory of a hideous
past. This good old mother-earth can yield us, not only enough to go
round, but enough to go round in generous abundance. Why is it that a
few have so much more than they can use, and so many have less than
they need? Do we think that God wills it? Can we conceive of it as
having any part in the economy of the Kingdom which Jesus came to
establish on the earth? It is not God, but our selfishness that wills
it; a selfishness that has its length of days and its malign power in
the widespread folly and culpable ignorance that play into its hands.
Think again for a moment about the effects on society as a whole of the
intemperate use of strong drink. They are incarnated in horrors, look
where we will. The injuries which simply swarm out of our licensed
temptations to drunkenness are not exceptional and irregular; they are,
as one of the most eminent of our publicists has said, "uniform as the
movements of the planets, and as deadly as the sirocco of the desert or
the malaria of the marshes." There is not a profession round which
drink has not thrown the spell of its sorcery; scarcely a household
that has not been despoiled by its leprous pollution. And who is
responsible for it? Does any one doubt that if the Christian Churches
looked at this accursed traffic through the eyes of God, and attacked
it with faith in His omnipotence, that we could not break its back
within the next ten years?
Long as we are content merely to run the eyes of our intelligence over
the episodes of this great battle of wrong against right; to mark down
its critical moments, and to analyse its issues while careful above all
things not to implicate ourselves in the agonies of its crises, then
let us not challenge the faithfulness of God for wrongs and sorrows
brought into the world, and kept here by our selfishness. Those of us
who have part or lot in this selfishness--and most of us have--let us,
at any rate, play the game, and accept our own responsibility.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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