Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
he seeks the slavery of all: where can he find whom to serve? how can he
become if but a threshold in the temple of Christ, where all serve all,
and no man thinks first of himself? He to whom the mass of his fellows,
as he massed them, was common and unclean, bows before every human
sign of the presence of the making God. The sun, which was to him but
a candle with which to search after his own ends, wealth, power, place,
praise--the world, which was but the cavern where he thus searched--are
now full of the mystery of loveliness, full of the truth of which sun
and wind and land and sea are symbols and signs. From a withered old age
of unbelief, the dim eyes of which refuse the glory of things a passage
to the heart, he is raised up a child full of admiration, wonder, and
gladness. Everything is glorious to him; he can believe, and therefore
he sees. It is from the grave into the sunshine, from the night into
the morning, from death into life. To come out of the ugly into the
beautiful; out of the mean and selfish into the noble and loving; out
of the paltry into the great; out of the false into the true; out of the
filthy into the clean; out of the commonplace into the glorious; out of
the corruption of disease into the fine vigour and gracious movements
of health; in a word, out of evil into good--is not this a resurrection
indeed--_the_ resurrection of all, the resurrection of Life? God grant
that with St. Paul we may attain to this resurrection of the dead.
“This rising from the dead is often a long and a painful process. Even
after he had preached the gospel to the Gentiles, and suffered much for
the sake of his Master, Paul sees the resurrection of the dead
towering grandly before him, not yet climbed, not yet attained unto--a
mountainous splendour and marvel, still shining aloft in the air of
existence, still, thank God, to be attained, but ever growing in height
and beauty as, forgetting those things that are behind, he presses
towards the mark, if by any means he may attain to the resurrection of
the dead. Every blessed moment in which a man bethinks himself that
he has been forgetting his high calling, and sends up to the Father a
prayer for aid; every time a man resolves that what he has been doing he
will do no more; every time that the love of God, or the feeling of
the truth, rouses a man to look first up at the light, then down at the
skirts of his own garments--that moment a divine resurrection is wrought
in the earth. Yea, every time that a man passes from resentment to
forgiveness, from cruelty to compassion, from hardness to tenderness,
from indifference to carefulness, from selfishness to honesty, from
honesty to generosity, from generosity to love,--a resurrection, the
bursting of a fresh bud of life out of the grave of evil, gladdens
the eye of the Father watching his children. Awake, then, thou that
sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give thee light. As
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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