The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Sermons
And, then, how shall it be restored? By again, I say, being taken
up out of the stream by the true handle. If you wish to restore
the power of truth, you must see that it is the truth which has
a claim upon your moral being. For just as we are told that the
sun may pour down its beams eternally upon the face of the moon,
burning and blistering with its rays its surface, and that there
everything remains cold and frozen underneath those beams, because
no sweet atmosphere can hold the sunbeams in its fold, so it is
true that when you take truth and use it from its false side, it
shall pour its brightest rays into your intellect, not the dry light
which Bacon meant, but the false light which some substitute for
it. You receive a true light upon your understanding, and there is
no moral atmosphere upon your nature to embrace those sunbeams, to
keep them and make them your own, and make them your life blood by
their presence. If thus we take truth it becomes false to us, a
buried and useless thing. But if you take truth from its moral side,
and approach it from its moral and spiritual side, it shall again
become a power in your nature.
When men believed in the inspiration of God and the Bible it was a
power to them; but when this dropt down into a belief that every
jot and tittle was part and parcel of God's inspiration, then they
merely crystallized into a dogma what was a great and living truth.
When men ask us, Are the doctrines of Christianity dead; are they
played out? my answer is, They are dead to those who use them
wrongly, as all truth is dead to those who have no moral love of
truth--dead to those who will use them as charms and incantations,
sewing them, as the Pharisees sewed some texts, into the border of
their robes; dead, indeed, they are to those who are not making them
part of their own life, but not dead to those who, tho they may
not be able to formulate their view into any way that will satisfy
a partizan section of Christianity, yet feel that to them the old
inspiration is life. God's living voice will speak to them godlike
in every line, to them because they believe in a Christ behind
all these truths, and that these are but the endeavors of men to
express the power of the living thought and voice of God. Then to
them ordinances will live; a real presence will be about their path.
Sacraments and ordinances will live because something lives behind
them. They are not using them falsely but reverently, and truly God
has spoken to their souls; He has put back the truths into their
hearts by the handle of some new-found life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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