The World's Great Sermons, Volume 04: L. Beecher to Bushnell
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 04: L. Beecher to Bushnell
Sermons
Thus Jesus lived with men; with the consciousness of unutterable
majesty He joined a lowliness, gentleness, humanity, and sympathy,
which have no example in human history. I ask you to contemplate
this wonderful union. In proportion to the superiority of Jesus to
all around Him was the intimacy, the brotherly love, with which He
bound Himself to them. I maintain that this is a character wholly
remote from human conception. To imagine it to be the production
of imposture or enthusiasm shows a strange unsoundness of mind. I
contemplate it with a veneration second only to the profound awe
with which I look up to God. It bears no mark of human invention. It
was real. It belonged to and it manifested the beloved Son of God.
But I have not done. May I ask your attention a few moments more?
We have not yet reached the depth of Christ's character. We have
not touched the great principle on which His wonderful sympathy was
founded, and which endeared to Him His office of universal Savior.
Do you ask what this deep principle was? I answer, it was His
conviction of the greatness of the human soul. He saw in man the
impress and image of the Divinity, and therefore thirsted for his
redemption, and took the tenderest interest in him, whatever might
be the rank, character, or condition in which he was found. This
spiritual view of man pervades and distinguishes the teaching of
Christ.
Jesus looked on men with an eye which pierced beneath the material
frame. The body vanished before Him. The trappings of the rich, the
rags of the poor, were nothing to Him. He looked through them, as
tho they did not exist, to the soul; and there, amidst clouds of
ignorance and plague-spots of sin, He recognized a spiritual and
immortal nature, and the germs of power and perfection which might
be unfolded forever. In the most fallen and depraved man He saw a
being who might become an angel of light.
Still more, He felt that there was nothing in Himself to which men
might not ascend. His own lofty consciousness did not sever Him from
the multitude; for He saw in His own greatness the model of what men
might become. So deeply was He thus imprest that, again and again,
in speaking of His future glories, He announced that in these His
true followers were to share. They were to sit on His throne and
partake of His beneficent power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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