THE urgent need of this period is real, whole-souled Christian philanthropy in the broadest sense and of the most practical kind. This is the inspiration of all missionary labor worthy of the name.
It was Christian philanthropy that moved John Howard to visit the prisons of Europe, and before kings and emperors to plead the cause of those confined therein, that their condition might be ameliorated. Then, he maintained, Christ could enter and soften their hearts and change their motives, and, consequently, the aims and objects of their lives. Howard might be styled a pioneer medical missionary, since he treated the sick gratuitously with nature's simple remedies, himself practising that abstinence and personal cleanliness he so urgently recommended to others. Dying in Southern Russia, battling the plague, the multitudes that followed him to his grave and wept upon his bier, proved the potency of love.
The missionary of the closing generation of the world must be broad, large-hearted, and possessed of a courage and zeal inspired by the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, he must have skill to make a practical application of nature's remedies in the treatment of the common diseases of these times. And it is essential, of course, consistently to practise himself what he advocates and recommends to others.
Christ was and is a friend of all men, without regard to rank or wealth. He especially has a deep compassion for those suffering from poverty, from despotic laws, and for suffering virtue. Lordly, unjust man raises up privileged classes who rule rigorously over the masses in selfishness and pride. But Christ is no respecter of persons. He enjoins meekness and equity on all His disciples, and would have them reach a helping hand to the downtrodden and oppressed.
The missionary of the period must not only have moral courage, but he must be a moral hero. He is liable to be called to stand before kings and emperors and powerful organizations that sway more or less the decisions of kings and emperors. Hence he must be broad. He can not afford to cripple his usefulness by joining any party or organization that would bring him into conflict with other people.
Prejudice is a terrible obstacle in the way of doing good in this wicked world. So the missionary who lives for the highest good of all he meets, must not be swayed by it. As the divine character is forming within him, prejudices will disappear, and he will look upon every human being as a member of the great family out of which are to be gathered the heirs of Christ's kingdom of righteousness and glory.
The missionary must be Christlike. He must ever keep in view the Saviour's benevolence and philanthropy, that embraced the entire human race. When Christ accepted the scheme of redemption, He knew it would cost Him His heart's blood, with agonies untold, to accomplish it; and yet He shrank not from the awful responsibility, but virtually said to lost and wretched man, "Live; I have found a ransom for you." The great, sympathetic heart of humanity confesses to the divinity of the life of the immaculate Christ. What sublimity, what majesty, what pathos, what love cluster about the life, the deeds, the character, the cross of Christ!
Here is our faultless Pattern. Let us conquer our prejudices, and cease to be swayed by our aversions; let us make the Golden Rule our precept and practise, ever remembering that without the exercise of charity, as defined in 1 Corinthians 13, we can have no hope of salvation. The human heart is so constituted that by loving mankind we may draw them to love us; and, having their love, we, through it, have a suasive power, which we may use to draw them heavenward.
Let the love of Christ move us to comfort the mourner, encourage the despondent, assuage the pains of the suffering, soothe the wounded in spirit, and love all mankind. Thus shall we be true missionaries, and, keeping our union with Christ unsevered, have continually the protecting care of the heavenly host.
Healdsburg, Cal. G. W. COPLEY.
COMING, COMING, COMING.
By J. H. Earl
[Pastor J. H. Earl, in Christian Worker.]
In the freshness of the morning,
As I enter on the day,
Oft there comes the whispered message
That my Lord is on the way;
He is coming, coming, coming,
He is even on the way.
In the brightness of the noontide,
When the morning hours are past,
Comes again this wondrous message,
He is coming, coming fast;
He is coming, coming, coming,
He is on His way at last.
In the stillness of the twilight,
When the busy day is o'er,
Comes the sweet strain of that message,
Echoed from the glory shore,
He is coming, coming, coming,
He is even at the door.
In the solitude of midnight,
Oft I seem to hear Him say,
As He bends low o'er my bedside,
Driving fears and cares away,
"I am coming, coming, coming,
I have started on My way."
. . . . .
So in every weary moment
Of these watching, waiting days,
I am cheered on by His promise,
And my soul is filled with praise;
For He's coming, coming, coming,
And He hasteth on His way.
Brother, sister, friend, and sinner,
Are you ready for that hour
When He'll change us in a twinkling,
And He'll raise us by His power?
For He's coming, coming, coming,
Coming in His glory-power.
IDLENESS NOT CONDUCIVE TO GOODNESS.
Gen. 3:17: "Cursed is the ground for thy sake."
Prov. 19:15: "An idle soul shall suffer hunger."
The bread of idleness breeds sin and trouble to those who eat it. This is well illustrated in the effect of tropical vegetation upon the inhabitants. The unsought bounty of nature feeds a race of idle and dissolute men. There are those who believe that the banana tree is a curse rather than a blessing to tropical countries, because it will support life with no labor. "It grows as a weed, and hangs down its branches of ripe, tempting fruit into your lap as you lie in its cool shade." One never becomes tired of its taste, and without suffering in health you may live upon it exclusively. Such are the results of eating the bread of idleness; yet how many parents toil, and save, and hoard, that they may bring up their children in idleness and leave them a fortune as fatal as the banana plant. The fortune which exempts them from toil seduces them into sin. Idle bodies, hungry souls.
PRECIOUS LESSONS FOR ALL.
IN Mark 16:2-7 we read the following:
"They come to the tomb when the sun was risen. And they were saying among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the tomb? and looking up, they see that the stone is rolled back; for it was exceeding great. And entering into the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, arrayed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he saith unto them, Be not amazed; ye seek Jesus, the Nazarene, which hath been crucified; He is risen; He is not here; behold, the place where they laid Him! . . . He goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see Him." R.V.
Here are precious lessons for the church of Christ in all ages, lessons both negative and positive. Let us study them for a little while.
1. We are prone to look for our Lord where we seemingly last left Him. The women came to the tomb where Christ had been laid, as they supposed, for His long sleep. In that death which will ultimately destroy the work of Satan and Satan himself, the sorrow-blind, disappointed disciples saw only defeat, defeat so intertwined with their own lives and His whom they loved that their disappointment could not break their sympathy even in the seemingly hopeless death. They sought Jesus as the Dead One, not as the Living; and yet they still sought Him; and this was pleasing to God.
Even so we, in our half-blind, half-selfish following of our Lord, have met disappointment, and its gloom has buried our hopes and hid Him from our sight. After the night of wretched sorrows and despairing doubts we sometimes seek Him again, but how often in the cold tomb of our yesterday's experience! That took from us blessings in which our life was bound up, and we seek Him in the grave of our hopes, not knowing, what is gloriously true, that He has just on before blessings surpassing all that we knew. Jesus is not in the grave of buried hopes or disappointed ambitions.
2. The Lord of righteousness and life had been walled in the sepulcher by the great stone made fast by the greatest of human powers. It could not hold Him there. "It was not possible that He should be holden of" death. Acts 2:24. In absolute righteousness is absolute power, and Christ, the Head, had now His right to everlasting sovereignty; He only waits now for the body to win.
But the disciples did not know this. "Who shall roll us away the stone?" is their question.
So we ask. In the work of God there are seemingly insurmountable difficulties. We see Red Seas before us, mountains on either hand, enemies in our rear; or the cause seems hindered by barriers insurmountable, obstacles immovable. We forget that in God's work is God, who "doeth according to His will, . . . and none can stay His hand." If Christ says, "Wait and see the salvation of God," there wait. God waits not for want of power, but in plenitude of mercy. Does He say, "Go forward," then go, and the sea will be a dry-walled path to you. The stone will be rolled away.
3. The angel was in the tomb of Christ only to tell the disciples, the true seekers, that Jesus was not there; He was risen. "Look where He lay, but linger not. The tomb is empty. Nevermore will its rock-hewn walls inclose the Anointed of God."
And yet how many thousands are still seeking Christ in the tomb! All the lives lost in the Crusades were based upon this baseless hope. What matters whether Papist or Orthodox or Moslem or Pagan possess the empty tomb? Christ is not there.
And yet again, we who see all this folly and boast of better things, repeat the same in principle. Here is some method of work that some uninstructed yet consecrated soul used in the work of God. He was successful in his work, not because of the method, but in spite of it. God blessed the man, because the man yielded himself to become a living temple, a growing, fruit-bearing tree for His glory. But we go back to the old case, the dead, dry method of that man's work, hoping to find Christ there. He is not there; He has passed on with the living worker. Or we look back to certain experiences in our own lives, where God greatly blessed us; we note the surroundings of that time; we picture again the human helps; we think of the work which we did; and we endeavor to repeat it all, but find disappointment. We are seeking Jesus in the empty tomb. Happy for us if we can hear the voice of His messenger: "He is not here; He is risen."
4. "He goeth before you." Satan supposed that the bands of death had forever bound those hands which had ministered blessings unnumbered to others; that the sweet eyes out of which all Heaven looked to the poor, weak, disconsolate, longing soul, were closed forever; that the ears that ever listened to human need and heart-hungry cries would never hear more; that the pure lips and sanctified tongue would nevermore speak words of life and healing and power to the dying; that the great heart that had forever hated all wrong and throbbed in sympathy with all the wronged ones, was forever stilled. Satan still believed the lie. But righteousness is life. Christ was declared by His resurrection to be the Son of God in truth and righteousness.
And "He goeth before." He is the living, working One. "I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive forevermore; . . . and have the keys of hell and of death." "He goeth before" His sheep, and leadeth them out to the green pastures and the waters of rest. He goeth before His soldiers in the battles of life, in order that every victory may be won. "He goeth before" the weary, stumbling ones, to remove from the path every needless stumbling-block, to press down with His own feet the cruel thorns. We may see His blood-marked footprints all the way. "He goeth before" His workers in their own little narrow valleys, spanned by their own selfishly-narrowed vision, on and on through Samaria, out into Galilee of the Gentiles, even to earth's remotest bounds. Among the poor and needy; among the sick and suffering; among sin's lowest outcasts and the rejected even of earth; among the black men and brown men; among the yellow men and red men—everywhere, where human need demands divine aid, "there shall ye see Him," and there He welcomes all who long to be with Him.
Are not these precious lessons?
The Creation and Uncreation of Man
LIFE AND IMMORTALITY. No. 7.
The Creation and Uncreation of Man.
ALL previous studies have abundantly shown that righteousness is life, and only in righteousness is there life in the truest sense. For all that is called life which is separated from righteousness ends in death, or non-extinction of being. Such life is, in the ultimate, death, ever tending toward it, and continued only through the mercy of God for the sake of His creatures,—continued that man may be brought to repentance and find the life everlasting in Jesus Christ. The teachings of Scripture relating to man's nature, his condition in death, and his final destiny are all in harmony with this fundamental thought. In the light of it, let us study some of the special texts relating to man's nature.
1. Man's Creation. Of this we have two accounts, the first a general statement of the creation of the human species, the second a particular statement of the creation of the first pair, the head of the race. These statements are as follows:—
"And God said, Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them." Gen. 1:26, 27.
"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Gen. 2:7.
a. Man was made in God's image. This doubtless took in man's physical, upright image, as well as his moral condition. The chief of God's glorious handiwork was not in his physical being to even seem to be a groveler of the earth. His uprightness physically was to indicate uprightness morally. "Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions." Eccl. 7:29. It is not difficult to believe that the fall morally has equally affected man's physical being. Sin has marred and blasted and dwarfed and crippled and degraded man both spiritually and physically. But this image did not constitute man immortal any more than it clothed him with omnipotence or omniscience. God "only hath immortality." 1 Tim. 6:16.
b. Man was made of the dust of the ground. "The first man is of the earth, earthy." And this man, formed of God from the earth, was made a living soul by the Creator's breathing into him the breath of life. The record does not say that God made a form of clay, into which He placed a soul, and that soul was man. God made the man of the dust of the earth, a perfect being, with functions of thought and action all complete, lacking but the one thing—life. This God breathed into his nostrils, and he that before was a lifeless soul, became a living soul, or, as the Hebrew words mean, a living creature. The breath of life was the life which God gave to all animate creation,7as shown in other scriptures. See Gen. 7:15, 22. There is not the least shadow of basis in the Scriptures of truth for the assumption that this breath of life, or spirit, was other than the vital principle, the power from God which set in motion the human machinery, and which connected man with the Great Central Dynamo, the Fountain of Life. It was not an entity before it was given to man; it had no separate conscious existence; and it certainly did not acquire that by being breathed within man. Let this suffice: It was the breath of life which made man a living creature.
c. Man's continuation of life depended on unbroken harmony with the great Source of life, his Creator. When he broke that by disobedience he was to die. Therefore, the test of loyalty placed before man,—the forbidden tree,—is coupled with God's loving warning, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Gen. 2:17. When man chose sin, he chose death. Free from sin, he was free from death. When he ate of the tree, therefore, he became a dying man—a subject, a child, of death.
We are aware that it is said that this means only a part of man, the soul. But common sense and humble faith will say that the "thou" whom God addressed was the man He made from clay, and that the death warned against meant the death of the man. This theory is very old. It originated in the Garden of Eden, though not a product of the garden. The old tempter was there, and when God said, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," the tempter said, "Ye shall not surely die; . . . ye shall be as God." Gen. 3:4, 5. Not being able to convince man that all that humanity can see of man does not die, Satan invented that double falsehood, upon which has been based every false religion from that time to this: (1) That the real man is immortal, does not, can not die, from which have sprung transmigration of souls, ancestor-worship, various forms of polytheism, purgatory, saint-worship, eternal torment, etc., etc. (2) Self-salvation, or salvation through human merit. "Ye shall be as God;" in some way man his own saviour has been the disappointing falsehood in all false religions, and will be the eternal disappointment of all outside of faith in the great all-powerful, all-cleansing love of God.
c. Man was, therefore, created neither mortal nor immortal. To be mortal is to be subject to death. Man was not created to die, but to live. He was a candidate for immortality. Immortality is incorruptibility, deathlessness. But as incorruptibility of the flesh depends upon the incorruptibility of character, and as man had not yet formed his character, or met the test, he was not immortal. He was pure and holy. From the great Fountain he received the eternal life of God. By the power of that life constantly received through faith man would have perfected a righteous character, and then would have been made immortal physically.
2. His Uncreating. But man failed. He listened to the tempter through his wife, and here is the record of the sad consequences:—
"And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it, . . . in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Gen. 3:17-19.
"And now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever; therefore the Lord God . . . drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." Vs. 22-24.
"Then shalt the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Eccl. 12:7.
a. He was formed from the dust; back to the dust he returns. Out of it he was taken, back to it he goes when sin has finished its work. Nothing could be more plainly stated. From God the life or spirit came. The original word—rooakh—is the same in Eccl. 12:7 and Gen. 6:17 and 7:15. Its root meaning is "to blow" or "to breathe." The word "breath" in Gen. 2:7 is from neshamah, the primary meaning of which is "a puff, that is wind, angry or violent breath."—Strong's Lexicon. The same word is rendered breath in Gen. 7:22. How did the spirit of life come from God?—As the breath of life. How does it return?—As the breath of life.
b. Man's life was made to depend upon God's agencies. Divine Wisdom could not for man's sake give him occasion to think that he was self-existent. If the life of God was to be continued to man, he must get it specially through the tree of life. But when man was shut off from this, his life came to an end. When he depended upon himself, he died.
But there is hope, as we have already seen, in Jesus Christ. He is Redeemer because He is able to re-create.
QUESTION CORNER
1087. Sin against the Holy Ghost.
By Editor
"What is the sin against the Holy Ghost? Y."
There is one agency used of God in all His work for man, and that is His Holy Spirit. Men may be used, the Word may be used, angels may be used, trees, flowers, sun, and stars may be used, to save man; but the one thing which makes all these effectual is the Spirit of God. It is the Spirit which inspired the Word. It is the Spirit which by the Word brings conviction to the sinner. It is the Spirit which converts or changes the heart of the sinner who yields, and that writes God's law where first was sin. It is the Spirit which instructs through the Word, even to the end. Men may resist for the time this Spirit; men may grieve it away, to have it return again with reproof and pleading; men may quench it in the heart by refusing to obey it. But sometime that Spirit does its last work. It uses its last argument, makes its last plea, brings its last evidence to the sin-hardened, self-loving soul. And some sinners yield, but some turn from the sweet, tender pleadings, the mighty evidences, to the last. Such is sin against the Holy Ghost, and there is never forgiveness because never repentance.
So when some of the Jews had witnessed all that God wrought through Jesus in the power of the Spirit, had seen the work that was good and only good, and yet, in the face of it all, their sin-loving hearts could say, "He casteth out demons by Beelzebub the prince of demons," then there was no more hope for them. God had no other means of reaching them. But that soul who feels true sorrow for sin because it is sin against a loving Father, and not because of sin's consequences, may know that there is hope, because the Spirit still gives and incites repentance.
1088. Isa. 65 : 20.—The first part of the verse refers to the redeemed state, to conditions in the new earth. There will not be there henceforth what we now see. "There shall be no more thence an infant of days nor an old man that hath not filled his days." Here a great proportion die in infancy; very few fill out their days or live to extreme old age. But then God's people's days will be "as the days of a tree," the tree of life. Verse 22. The last part of verse 20 gives the reason: God's judgment has done its work, and His character is vindicated. The wicked have been raised. For a season—100 years—they are again under Satan's deceptive power. He marshals them into armies, trains them for conflict, brings them out to fight against God, and they perish. Rev. 20 : 1-9. "The child shall die an hundred years old, and the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed." Sin and its consequences in that destruction shall be evermore banished, and "the righteous shall inherit the land, and dwell therein forever."
A STRIKING PARALLEL.
JESUS said to the Jewish Church in its last generation of existence: "Full well do ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your tradition. For Moses said, Honor thy father and thy mother; . . . but ye say, If a man shall say to his father or his mother, That wherewith thou mightest have been profited by me is Corban, that is to say, Given to God; ye no longer suffer him to do aught for his father or his mother; making void the Word of God by your tradition, which ye have delivered." Mark 7:9-13, R.V.
Which means that, however wealthy a man might be, he need not support his father or his mother; he could say that his property was dedicated to God, that he could not use it or his parents, and yet at the same time have, as a self-appointed steward, the full use of it himself. Thus they made void a sacred command of God, enjoining solemn duty to parents.
The last generation of the Christian church is now on the stage of action. One of the solemn commands of God, a part of the great Decalogue observed by Jesus Christ, is this: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; . . . for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day [the day of His rest], and hallowed IT."
But tradition, received and retained in the place of that solemn law, says, "Keep the first day in honor of Christ's resurrection from the dead." God never commanded this. The church has only tradition for it. And the keeping of that tradition makes void the command of God. Are not the words of Jesus as applicable to the church now as then? Do God's laws get too old to keep? Is not He ever the same? Will years make an eternal truth a lie?
READ THE COMMANDMENT AGAIN.
THE word "Sabbath" is Hebrew for rest; the word is transferred into our language, not translated. Let us read the commandment in the light of the English: "Remember the Rest day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Rest of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man servant, nor thy maid servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Rest day, and hallowed it."
In the obvious meaning of that language, so plain that it admits of no construction, it must be clearly evident to all that it is the keeping of the day that is enjoined of God, not an institution indefinite as to the day. It is the one day, the seventh of a cycle, the day of that cycle on which He rested, which He blessed and hallowed, because that in it He had rested. The law gives none occasion for quibbling or juggling. It is simple, plain, clear, specific. Why will not men keep the day which He, the great King of the universe, has so signally honored?
