The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Sermons
How does the Gethsemane come? Often it is passed with very little
sign or show. You have read in "The Bonny Brier Bush" that when
George Howe came home to die, his mother hid herself beneath the
laburnum, and as the cat stood beneath the stile, it told the plain
fact, as she had feared. And Margaret passed through her Gethsemane
with the gold blossoms falling on her face. I believe there are
some of you who are passing through your Gethsemane in this chapel
while I am speaking to you now. There is little to show--some
absence of manner, some twitching of the lips, some unwonted pallor,
some strange abstraction, but no more. And you will never tell
anybody about it, and nobody will discover it when you are dead.
You sometimes suspect--do you not?--about another man what his
Gethsemane has been. You are almost sure to be wrong. That surrender
which you see was accomplished almost without murmur or reluctance.
Sometimes in biographies I think I can see where the Gethsemane is.
It may be, and often is, the rooting out of some cherished ambition
that has filled the heart and occupied every thought, every dream
for years and years. It may be the shattering of some song, the
breaking of some dream. It may be, and often is, a great rending
of the affections, the cutting the soul free from some detaining
human tenderness. Well, we do not know--the real Gethsemane never
lasts long. I think an hour is the longest that anybody could bear
it--"Could ye not watch with me one hour?" True, the heartache may
go on to the end, but the Gethsemane, that can not last a long time.
We have in biographies some instances of Gethsemanes, and sometimes
in very unexpected places. You would not imagine that a prosperous
suburban minister, with a rich congregation, and every earthly
ambition realized, would have his Gethsemane as a missionary
far among the heathen has. But in the "Life of Dr. Raleigh," of
Kensington, whom many of you remember, there is a significant
passage. When he was at the zenith of his fame he said that
ministers came and looked around at his crowded church and envied
his position. "They do not know," he said, "what it has cost me
to come to this." In the "Life" of the beloved James Hamilton, of
Regent Square, there is a passage which always touches me. It shows
how he parted, for Christ's sake, with the great ambition of his
life. He longed to write a life of Erasmus, but other things came
and he was balked of his desire. He says:
"So this day, with a certain touch of tenderness, I restored the
eleven tone folios to the shelf and tied up my memoranda, and took
leave of a project which has often cheered the hours of exhaustion,
the mere thought of which has always been enough to overcome my
natural indulgence. It is well. It is the only chance I ever had of
attaining a small measure of literary distinction, and where there
is so much pride and naughtiness of heart it is better to remain
unknown."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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