The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10: Drummond to Jowett, and General Index
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10: Drummond to Jowett, and General Index
Sermons
Thus Christianity is everywhere the interpreter of religion.
Everywhere it carries the world's faith to its best. It is the
consummation both of the human need and the divine answer. And to-day,
in our own world, it goes on the same high errand. The intuitions of
righteousness, the sympathies with goodness, the wish for the more
abundant life, the ideals and the struggles, the hope and the fear,
without which man would not be man, find their interpreter in
Christianity. It is the soul carried to the utmost depth of its need
and the loftiest height of its desire, and then made conscious that
below its profoundest weakness and above its highest dream is the
infinite Love that is educating its life. It is the best wisdom of
history speaking to the highest interests of man. As mothers brought
their children to Jesus that He might reveal the inmost meaning of
childhood, open its treasure to the hearts that loved it, and by His
consecrating touch assure it of perpetual increase; so are the nations
bringing their religions to Him, and the noble among men their
uncomprehended longing and hope. He walks among us still as the
Revealer, the Conserver, and the Consummator of life.
IV. Lastly, Christianity finds it own interpretation in God. We have
seen man looking backward and finding the origin of his soul in the
Soul that is behind nature. We have seen his religion telling him
that he can not live by bread alone, that he can rest only under
the shelter of the unseen, that he is infinitely more akin to the
invisible than to the visible, that he has a spirit and must therefore
hunger for the fellowship of the eternal Spirit. We see Christianity
lifting this religious capacity to its highest, and bringing in the
divine appeal in its sublimest form. We behold the earth transfigured
in this Christian dream, the ladder set that reaches from the dreamer
to heaven, and upon it, going up and coming down, the great prayers of
the soul and the tender responses of the Most High. To what shall we
refer this sublime, transfiguring dream? Is it the delusion of the
sleeper, or the whisper of God? Is the ladder set up from the earth,
or is it let down from above? Did man shape it out of his abysmal
desire, or did God make and establish it out of His love. What can
we say of that which is the highest wisdom, the widest sympathy, the
divinest love, and the mightiest power in human history? What can
we do with that which is the true life of man? Can the trees of the
field, as they clap their hands and sing in the freshening breeze, do
other than refer it to heaven? And man, as he sees the light of Christ
upon the Spirit behind nature, beholds in the gospel that which
interprets his highest dreams, feels in Christianity the power to
understand and to become his own best self--can he do other than say
that his Christian faith is the gift of God? The star in the brook
refers you for the explanation of its being to the star in the sky;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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