Sermons: Selected from the Papers of the Late Rev. Clement Bailhache — John Shaqi
Sermons: Selected from the Papers of the Late Rev. Clement BailhacheBailhache, Clement
Religion
Sermons: Selected from the Papers of the Late Rev. Clement Bailhache
Bailhache, Clement
Sermons
_To our knowledge of Divine truth._ How uniformly have God's truest
witnesses upon earth consisted of men conspicuous for their lowliness
of mind. It was to such that the Saviour was first announced and that
He first came. Such were the people who listened to Him and accepted
Him, whilst the "learned" and the "great" rejected Him. His apostles
were humble men; and it has always been by the humble that the strong
and the proud have, in the end, been vanquished. Every bright page in
the history of the Church is a commentary on our text. To-day, in
spite of the progress of thought in our world, we, in regard to the
matters that belong to our spiritual life and salvation, have to sit
as disciples at the feet of the humble men who themselves sat at the
feet of the Divine Teacher who said, "Learn of me, for I am meek and
lowly of heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls." Our views of
the truth as it is in Jesus may be modified and corrected; yet the
pages of these same humble men are still the standard of our faith and
of our teaching. Religious opinions change, not because we have gone
beyond Paul and Peter and John, but because we understand them better.
This is no plea, no apology, for mental weakness. On the contrary,
pride is rather the characteristic of mental weakness and of ignorance
than of mental strength and enlightenment. We may search, but we must
remember that we always depend upon God for light. In religion the
condition of the heart is the condition of knowledge. Proud, haughty,
self-sufficient Saul of Tarsus had to be humbled before he could
become Paul the Believer and the Apostle.
_To the every-day dispensations of life._ In this world we are the
subjects of God's discipline, and that discipline is for the most part
mysterious. The course of events with us is often varied. We are
subjected to vicissitudes of every kind--vicissitudes of thought, of
impression, of feeling, and of experience. We are troubled in life, in
heart, in the cultivation of Christian excellence, in the maintenance
of life's relationships, in the performance of duty. Whilst we try to
bear in mind the glorious issues to which we are destined, we are
often perplexed in our endeavours to ascertain how the discipline we
are undergoing tends towards their realisation. We are puzzled by the
prevalence of wickedness, by the disappointment of hopes, the apparent
futility of many of our prayers; and we say, "I am blind, and the way
in which I am walking is unknown to me." Humility will help us to
think that God has _His own way_ among all these perplexities of ours,
though we are unable to trace it. "All things work together for good
to them that love God."
God works not as man works, nor sees
As man sees, though we mark
Ofttimes the moving of His hands
Beneath the eternal Dark.
* * * *
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