"I welcome all Thy sovereign will, For all that will is love; And when I know not what Thou dost, How radiant and magnificent is that truth as it appears in the history of the Church! The people of God have often been persecuted and oppressed, yet God has been on their side, and no weapon that has been formed against them has prospered. How often has God proved his sovereignty by preserving and rescuing and delivering his people from overwhelming perils! Even when it has seemed to be otherwise, even when the Church has appeared forsaken and helpless, when the billows of persecution have rolled fathom-deep above her head, when avalanches of falsehood have buried the truth out of sight, it has only been for a time, and the end has been the victory of the defeated. The blood of the martyrs has been the seed of the Church. The boastful shouts of error have been the advertisement of the silent truth. Error has had kings and generals, philosophers and orators, empires and armies; truth has had God. Error has had swords and spears, ships and cannons, fortresses and dungeons, racks and fires; truth has had God. God and one make a majority. Unless the Church doubts, she cannot fear. she cannot despair. Unless the Church denies, In the darkest days, when the confusion seems greatest, the conflict most unequal, she can look out on the great battlefield and cry "History's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." But is it for the Church alone, is it not for the whole world that this truth of God's sovereignty shines? To our eyes the conflict of life and death, of good and evil, seems to be undecided, and we think it may be perpetual. The dust blinds us; the uproar bewilders us; as far as our sight can pierce we see nothing but the rolling strife,-sin always in arms against holiness, the created will always resisting and defying the creator. But Christ sees that the conflict is decided, though it is still in progress. Christ sees that the victory is won, though it is not yet manifest. On the hill of the cross the captain of salvation met the captain of sin and conquered him. Calvary is victory. Through death Christ hath overcome him that had the power of death, that is the devil.1 Satan has received his mortal wound; and if he still fights more fiercely, it is because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.2 The day is coming when he must perish; the day is coming when sin and strife shall be no more; the day is coming when Christ shall put all enemies under his feet and shout above the grave of death, "O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end"; the day is coming when the great ship of the world, guided by the hand of the Son of God, shall float out of the clouds and storms, out of the shadows and conflicts, into the perfect light of love, and God shall be all in all. The tide that bears the world to that glorious end is the sovereignty of God. “O mighty river, strong, eternal Will, In which the streams of human good and ill 1 Heb. 2:14. Rev. 12: 12. 1 Cor. 15:25-28. VIII SERVICE THAT strange and searching genius, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in one of his spiritual phantasies has imagined a new Adam and Eve coming to the earth after a Day of Doom has swept away the whole of mankind, leaving their works and abodes and inventions, all that bears witness to the present condition of humanity, untouched and silently eloquent. The representatives of a new race enter with wonder and dismay the forsaken heritage of the old. They pass through the streets of a depopulated city. The sharp contrast between the splendour of one habitation and the squalor of another fills them with distressed astonishment. They are painfully amazed at the unmistakable signs of inequality in the conditions of men. They are troubled and overwhelmed by the evidence of the great and miserable fact that one portion of earth's lost inhabitants was rich and comfortable and full of ease, while the multitude was poor and weary and heavy-laden with toil. This feeling of sorrowful perplexity over the unevenness and apparent injustice of human life, which the prose poet puts into the heart of his new Adam and Eve, is really but a reflection from the tender and pitiful depths of his own. Who is there that has not sometimes felt it rising within his own breast, this profound sentiment of inward trouble and grief, this feeling of spiritual discord and wondering repugnance at the sight of a world in which the good things of life are so unequally distributed, in which at the very outset of existence, before the factor of personal merit or demerit, the element of work and wages, enters into the problem at all, so much is given to one man and so little to another man that they seem to be forever separated and set at enmity with each other by the unfairness with which they are treated? This sentiment has been strangely deepened and intensified in the nineteenth century by innumerable causes, until it has become one of the most marked characteristics of the present age. Never before have men felt the sorrows and hardships of their fellow-men so widely, so keenly, so constantly as to-day. In one sense this is the honour and glory of our age. |