The Expositor's Bible: The Pastoral EpistlesPlummer, Alfred
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Pastoral Epistles
Plummer, Alfred
Bible. Pastoral Epistles -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
What shall we say, then, about the difficulty of realizing the
solidarity of the whole human race? For they also are God's offspring,
and as such are of one family with ourselves. If it is hard to remember
that the welfare of the humblest member of a remote and obscure
community in Christendom intimately concerns ourselves, how shall we
keep in view the fact that we have both interests and obligations in
reference to the wildest and most degraded heathens in the heart of
Africa or in the islands of the Pacific? Here is a fact on a far more
stupendous scale; for in the population of the globe, those who are not
even in name Christians, outnumber us by at least three to one. And yet
let us never forget that our interest in these countless multitudes,
whom we have never seen and never shall see in this life, is not a mere
graceful sentiment or empty flourish of rhetoric, but a sober and solid
fact. The hackneyed phrase, "a man and a brother," represents a vital
truth. Every human being is one of our brethren, and, whether we like
the responsibility or not, we are still our "brother's keeper." In our
keeping, to a very real extent, lie the supreme issues of his spiritual
life, and we have to look to it that we discharge our trust faithfully.
We read with horror, and it may be with compassion, of the monstrous
outrages committed by savage chiefs upon their subjects, their wives, or
their enemies. We forget that the guilt of these things may lie partly
at our door, because we have not done our part in helping forward
civilizing influences which would have prevented such horrors, above all
because we have not prayed as we ought for those who commit them. There
are few of us who have not some opportunities of giving assistance in
various ways to missionary enterprise and humanizing efforts. But all of
us can at least pray for God's blessing upon such things, and for His
mercy upon those who are in need of it. Of those who, having nothing
else to give, give their struggles after holiness and their prayers for
their fellow-men, the blessed commendation stands written, "They have
done what they could."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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