Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
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 the harvest rises from the wintry earth, so rise thou up
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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