Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.MacDonald, George
Religion
Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.
MacDonald, George
Sermons, English -- 19th century
And now will come in all the arguments out of which the man tried in
vain before to build a stair up to the sunny heights of love. "Ah
brother! thou hast a soul like mine," he will say. "Out of thine eyes
thou lookest, and sights and sounds and odours visit thy soul as mine,
with wonder and tender comforting. Thou too lovest the faces of thy
neighbours. Thou art oppressed with thy sorrows, uplifted with thy
joys. Perhaps thou knowest not so well as I, that a region of gladness
surrounds all thy grief, of light all thy darkness, of peace all thy
tumult. Oh, my brother! I will love thee. I cannot come very near thee:
I will love thee the more. It may be thou dost not love thy neighbour;
it may be thou thinkest only how to get from him, how to gain by him.
How lonely then must thou be! how shut up in thy poverty-stricken room,
with the bare walls of thy selfishness, and the hard couch of thy
unsatisfaction! I will love thee the more. Thou shalt not be alone with
thyself. Thou art not me; thou art another life--a second self;
therefore I can, may, and will love thee."
When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the
hand of his neighbour is the hand of a brother, then will he understand
what St Paul meant when he said, "I could wish that myself were
accursed from Christ for my brethren." But he will no longer understand
those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbour an essential
of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to
come. There, at least, for the glory of God, they may limit its
expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its
battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar, and say to each
other, "Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our
neighbours no more." St Paul would be wretched before the throne of
God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and
that as much for God's glory as for the man's sake. And what shall we
say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not,
upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off
time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the
blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with
the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself
more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who,
in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one
of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were
taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far
below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he
must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird
his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire,
travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his
brother?--who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love
of the Father?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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