Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. From the heart be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins; for your baptism will beautifully represent your salvation, it will helpfully confirm your salvation, it will blessedly associate your salvation with the salvation of others, it will significantly consummate your salvation in an obedience whose process is one with your salvation day by day, and the end eternal life.

SERMON XIV.

THE GOSPEL, A MISSION AND A CULTURE.

XIV.

THE GOSPEL, A MISSION AND A CULTURE.

"Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the end of the world."-Matt. xxviii. 19, 20.

The Gospel of Christ, studied in itself and studied in its history, has always presented these two ideas. The Gospel of Christ is a mission, and it is also a spiritual culture. "Make disciples of all the nations "there it is a mission, a world-wide propagation. "Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you"-there it is an unlimited spiritual culture of life. These two ideas, as such, are inseparably connected. They have their vital unity in the very nature of the Gospel, corresponding to the nature of man. They are the secret of Christ's undying influence on human nature and in human history. They were meant to go along together in a beautiful oneness of beneficence. The insistence on either idea to the neglect of the other, always does harm, and keeps back the complete triumph of the Gospel.

In the long eighteen centuries since Christianity began-began as a mission and as a spiritual culturewe can see the working of these two ideas at every step of its progress. They have worked at every step

in some way or other. They have made swift progress seldom, if ever, together at one time. Often, being separated, one has gone ahead successfully for a while, only to stop and be compelled to wait until the other has caught up; and, being separated, what one has achieved it has often found weakened because the other was not present with its balance of power. The Gospel as a mission has sometimes spread with the swiftness of wind or fire. It has crossed over into a Macedonia upon hearing the midnight cry for help, and the following day thousands have been baptized. Then there seems to have come, frequently, a pause. The Gospel had been propagated as a mission-disciples had been made; it needed to be grown as a spir itual culture of character-the disciples needed to be taught the manifold precepts of their Lord. But too often the growing of the Gospel as a spiritual culture of life has been attempted with a neglect of propagating it as a mission. The Church has settled down to mere speculation and criticism, and conversions to Christ have become infrequent. Then the propagative idea has burst out afresh, sometimes running terrible risks of perversions. We read again of stirring revivals, sometimes the conversion almost of a nation, or almost of a little province. But the propagative idea again subsides, and the work of grafting must be taken up once more. Such has been the progress of the Gospel with its double ideas—not a uniform progress, but one-sided; not a simple, untrammeled progress, but varied, struggling, laborious.

The occasion of it all is, that while Christianity is itself spiritual, spiritual as a mission and spiritual as a culture, it has been compelled to take men as they are,

« ÎnapoiContinuă »