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Page 35
The Gospel of Christ, in its endeavor to make and keep men whole, faces
a similarly double labor. It has its ministry of rescue and healing for
sinning men and women; it has its plan of spiritual health for society.
It comes to every man with its offer of rebirth into newness of life:
"If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." It comes to society
with its offer of a regenesis, a paradise of love on earth. The life of
God enters our world by two paths--personally, through individuals whom
it recreates, and by whom it remakes society; socially, through a new
communal order which reshapes the men and women who live under it. The
New Testament speaks of both entrances of the Spirit of God into human
life: it pictures "_one_ born from above," and "the holy _city_ coming
down from God out of heaven." The two processes supplement each other.
Consecrated man and wife make their home Christian; a Christian home
renders the conversion of its children unnecessary; they know themselves
children of God as soon as they know themselves anything at all. Saved
souls save society, and a saved society saves souls.
Religion must always be personal; each must respond for himself to his
highest inspirations. A child may confuse the divine voice with that of
its parents, through whom the divine message comes; but a day arrives
when he learns that God speaks directly to him, perhaps differently from
the way in which his parents understand His voice, and he must listen
for himself alone. A Job may take at second-hand the conventional views
of God current in his day, and through them have some touch with the
Divine; but this will seem mere hearsay when the stress of life compels
him to fight his way past the opinions of his most devout friends to a
personal vision of God. Religious experience is hardly worthy the name
until one can say, "O God, Thou art _my_ God." There is no sphere of
life in which a man is so conscious of his isolation as in his dealings
with his Highest. The most serious decisions of his life--his
apprehension of Truth, his obedience to Right, his response to Love--he
must settle for himself.
Space is but narrow--east and west--There
is not room for two abreast.
"Each one of us shall give account of himself to God." In our
consciousness of sin, in our penitence, in our faith, others may
stimulate and inspire us, may point the way saying, "Behold the Lamb of
God," may go with us in a common confession of guilt and a common
aspiration towards the Most High, but we are hardly conscious of their
fellowship; it is the living God with whom we personally have to do.
Points have we all of us within our souls
Where all stand single.
The Gospel comes as a summons to men one by one. Christ knocks at each
man's door, offering the most complete personal friendship with him.
Were there but a single child of God astray, the Good Shepherd would
adventure His life for him, and there is joy in the presence of the
angels over _one_ sinner that repenteth.
The Evangel has always been good news to sinning people who wished to be
different. In _Adam Bede_ Mrs. Poyser says of Mr. Craig, "It was a pity
he couldna' be hatched o'er again, and hatched different." The Gospel
claims to be the power of God which can make the worst and lowest of
men--an Iago or a Caliban--into sons of the Most High in the measure of
the stature of the fulness of Christ.
This has seemed incredible to most outsiders. Celsus in the Second
Century, in his attack on Christianity, wrote, "It must be clear to
everybody, I should think, that those who are sinners by nature and
training, none could change, not even by punishment--to say nothing of
doing it by pity." Dickens' Pecksniff "always said of what was very bad
that it was very natural." But it has been the glory of the Gospel that
it could speak in the past tense of some at least of the sins of its
adherents: "such _were_ some of you." Individual regeneration will ever
remain a large part of God's work through His Church. Unless we can
raise the dead in sin to life in Christ, we have lost the quickening
Spirit of God; so long as the world lieth in wickedness, every follower
of Jesus must go with Him after men one by one, to seek and to save that
which was lost.
But a man's religious experience is vitally affected by social
conditions. Moses' protest against the slavery of the Israelites in
Egypt sprang from his feeling that it hindered their fellowship with
God. "Let My people go," he felt God saying, "_that they may serve Me_."
Mencius, the Chinese sage, wrote: "If the people have not a certain
livelihood, they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a
fixed heart, there is nothing which they will not do in the way of
self-abandonment. An intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of
the people, so as to make sure that, above, they have sufficient
wherewith to serve their parents, and, below, sufficient wherewith to
support their wives and children; that in good years they shall always
be abundantly satisfied, and that in bad years they shall escape the
danger of perishing. After this he may urge them, and they will proceed
to what is good." Christian workers, today, know well how all but
impossible it is to get a man to live as a Christian, until he is given
at least the chance to earn a decent living.
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