Our Unitarian GospelSavage, Minot J. (Minot Judson)
Religion
Our Unitarian Gospel
Savage, Minot J. (Minot Judson)
Sermons; Unitarianism
And then pass to the next stage, and come to the worship of the human,
to the admiration of the highest and finest qualities that are
manifested in the lives of men and women. Who is there that is not
touched and thrilled by some story of heroic action, of heroic self-
sacrifice, of consecration to duty in the face of danger and death? And
no matter what this manifestation of human goodness may be, if you can
be thrilled by it and lifted by it, then you have taken another step up
this ladder of worship which leads you into the very presence chamber
of the Divine.
Let a boy read the life of Lincoln, see his earnest thirst for
knowledge, the sacrifice he was willing to pay for it, his consecration
to his ideals of truth, the transparent honesty of the man, the supreme
contempt with which he could look down upon anything poor or mean or
low, the firmness and simplicity with which he assumes high office, the
faithfulness, the unassuming devotion, that he carries into the
fulfilment of the trust. Take him all the way through, study his
character and admire, and you are a worshipper of that which is divine.
So in the case of Jesus, the supreme soul of history in its
consecration to the Father, its simple trust in the divine love, its
superiority to fear, to question, to death. When we bow ourselves in
the presence of the Nazarene, we are not worshipping another God. We
are worshipping his Father and our Father as lie shines in the face of
Jesus, as he illumines and beautifies his life, as he makes glorious
the humble pathways of Galilee, and so casts a reflected glory over the
humblest pathways any of us may be called upon to tread.
The next step in our ascent brings us to the conscious worship of God
himself. We cannot grasp the divine idea. The finite cannot measure or
outline the infinite; and so, when we say God, we mean only the
grandest ideal that we can frame, that reaches on towards, but can
never adequately express the Deity. And so we worship this thought,
this ideal, growing as our capacity develops, advancing as the race
advances, and ever leading us Godward, as when we follow a ray of light
we are travelling towards its source. And the attitude of our souls in
the presence of this which is divine is truest worship. The humility of
it, the exaltation of it, is beautifully phrased in two or three lines
which I wish to repeat to you from Browning's Saul: "I but open my
eyes, and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined,
full-fronts me, and God is seen God In the star, in the stone, in the
flesh, in the soul and the clod. And, thus looking within and around
me, I ever renew (With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises
it, too), As by each new obeisance in spirit I climb to his feet!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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