Sunday Morning at the Christadelphian Synagogue, Birmingham, No. 20
From Shorthand Notes by brother J. Butler, (revised.)
p. 137THERE are three things that are true—that are governing elements in our spiritual relations—that require to be distinctly realised before an active spiritual life is possible; and yet that without a special effort, will be overlooked even by those related to spiritual things. They are trite, common, undisputed, and yet not generally acted on, though recognised theoretically by most people. They are all of them brought before us in the breaking of bread in a special manner, and yet we may break bread often enough and not see them. In general terms, they may be described as the past, the present and the future. In all of these, the truth is contrary to the appearance, and requires an effort to get at, and continual exercise therein, to be influenced thereby. First, take the past. Of this, as natural men, we know nothing. As natural men, we only know what we see and hear. Things that happened before our time are nullities, so far as individual experience goes. In the strictly natural state—that is, the ignorant state—we should be uninfluenced by the past, and controlled only by impulses native to a creature whose impressions are limited to what he can see and hear for himself. A good specimen of this creature is to be seen in the “savage;” a modified specimen in the agricultural clodhopper; and the same thing in a milder degree, in the uneducated denizens of large towns. These, unacquainted with facts that could never come within individual cognizance, and can only be known by evidence and testimony, have the contractedness of character that belongs to finite faculty in a purely natural state. They see and do not understand. They are ignorant of the world they live in; of what has been its history; and of the great movements in progress, as bearing upon the past and future. They are consequently lacking of interest in life, and unfitted for intercourse with those whose mental vision has been enlarged by knowledge. Now, we are all by nature related to this state. The necessity for “education” before even a superficial polish is taken on, is evidence of it, though the fact will be admitted without the citation of evidence, as a fact self-evident in the lamentable state of society that prevails on the face of the globe.
p. 138The first great feature of the truth shines out brilliantly against the black background of natural vacuity. There are facts to be known before a true foundation for a spiritual character can exist—facts unknown except on testimony—yet facts, the absence of a knowledge of which, constitutes an effectual barrier to fellowship with God. These facts in brief, are the facts relating to what has heretofore been done of God on earth. We must have a knowledge of the past in so far as God is in it, and we must cultivate that knowledge with assiduity, so that the knowledge will become conscious power internally. If we neglect assiduous cultivation, we will never get to the point of power, because the present, ever acting upon our senses, suggests that the past has not been, and will obliterate the writing that knowledge engraves on the mental tablet, and destroy the power that comes with the knowledge. Do we not see the need for the table? Week by week, we are reminded by these silent emblems, that though we have never seen him, there has appeared on earth a Great One, in whom are bound up the destinies of the world; that his wonderful life and death had relation to mankind of every age; that Jesus of Nazareth, raised from the dead, is the only name given under heaven whereby we may be saved; that he is the centre around which all permanent mundane development will take place; that he is the head under which the economy of human affairs will ultimately be established; that his gospel is the only joyful sound there is for human ears: that his precepts are the only truly profitable rule of life: that his cause on earth is the only one worthy of espousal by those who have aspirations beyond the lot of mortal experience. This is powerful knowledge. These are great facts, in reference to which our memories require to be continually refreshed. They are facts despised by our contemporaries of the respectable school who glorify a knowledge of the classical past, that is, the Pagan past; the past of the Greeks and the Romans: the past of superstition and beggarly philosophy, but who pour contempt on the Jewish past which is the only past of any lasting individual consequence. We must accept the reproach connected with our preference for the Jewish view of history It is the only gold in the rubbish of the past. It is the gold of the sanctuary—the pearl of great price, though cast out as worthless. A man ignorant of the history of Rome or who would presume to call in question the authenticity of the Greek classics, would be unfit for modern society. A knowledge and recognition of history are the qualifications of membership in educated circles. So in relation to the great society to which we are called by the gospel—the community of God’s elect in their future-day development. There is a history to be known and cherished, and our meeting this morning has expressly to do with that history. It is the very business of this morning to revive that history before our minds. We all know it, but we need it recalled continually, because if we trust to the merely natural man,—that is, to what we are hearing and seeing from one week’s end to another, we shall not be able to realise that history, and consequently will not be affected by it, but be like the hundreds and thousands around us whose actions are shaped exclusively by present expediency and comfort. Like them, we shall act from the force of the impressions p. 139made on the mind by simply what we see, and we know that “the things that are seen are temporal,” while the things that are not (now) seen, but which God has promised, are eternal. The history of Jesus is, with the world, fast passing away into the region of fable; with us, it is the most real and important history on record—a thing to be dwelt on continually, fed by the incessant reading of the word that we may be thoroughly influenced by it in all our thoughts, schemes, and motives.
The first feature, then, of our standing of the truth, is an abiding memory of what God has done in the past. This history we know is not confined to the individual appearance of Jesus though that event was the central star of the heavenly glory. The coming of Jesus was the culmination of a long process of communication to men. As Paul put it “God at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past to the fathers by the prophets, and in the last days spoke by a son.” By line upon line, by precept upon precept, God spoke to his people during many generations, the process growing brighter and brighter as time rolled on, till it ended in the great light of the apostolic age when first individually, then multitudinously, the apostle and High Priest of our profession unveiled the way of life for the nations. Let us walk in that way of life. Let the memory of these past times be ever with us. It will save us many a cloud, for the memory of the past will nerve to endurance in the fleeting present, and beckon us onward to the glorious things that are before—even “the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” The chafings of the present bear heavy when the great things of the past are hid from view. The things of the past are the guarantee of those that are to come. The historical picture helps the prophetical, and aids us in our determination to plod through this toilsome journey to eternal life before us as the goal of our endeavours.
Next to the past, we must apprehend the present in its true relations. This also requires effort; for here also the appearance is contrary to the truth. The present seems the only reality, while in fact, it is the most unreal of the three. It is, in a high sense, nothing at all. This is apparent when we go back 500 years. Where are the men that were alive then? They were in their day as full of zest as we, as full of projects, as engrossed with cares, business and domestic, as full of thoughts and loves and hatreds, as the present busy generation: where are they now? You walk through the old churchyards, and step upon slabstones worn bare by time. There are traces of inscription, but they are scarcely visible. You get down on your knees, and can with difficulty make out the prominent letters of inscriptions which, when the stones were first laid in their places, were cut with a depth and distinctness that promised to defy the effects of time. The names and ages and other particulars concerning the sleeping mortals beneath, are no longer decipherable. If this is the case with the inscriptions that were to have memorialised the men of former generations, where are the men themselves? Why, you could not put your hand upon a single atom of dust that you could say belonged to them. If you were to dig, you could not discern between them and the surrounding clay, They are gone, they are dead; they are perished from the memory of the living. Nobody remembers them. Those who were well known, and perhaps much lamented at the time their bones were laid in mother earth, have not a line written in contemporary recollection. If they were to come above ground, they would be total strangers. The friends they had, died soon after them, and as years rolled on, this ephemeral race multiplied in successive generations, and the dead went completely out of mind. So the men that were great and important in this day, are now literally nobody; their affairs are not; their love and their hatred, are now perished. Now, this is the lot of all living—speaking, of course, apart from the coming of the Lord, which we hope will soon put a different face upon the scene, so far as those are concerned whose names are inscribed on a roll that no lapse of time can make old, that is, the book of the Eternal Memory. If you put in the coming of the Lord, the argument as to the unreality of the present is all the stronger; but speaking apart from that event, the entire disappearance of us and our affairs from the place now knowing us, is the upshot awaiting us. It is only a question of time, and very short time, for the longer one lives, the faster does time seem to fly. The present is transient—a mere flitting view—as transient in relation to eternity as the prismatic colours that dance in the spray of the waterfall, when the sun shines upon it. It is very important to remember this. It is for want of thinking about it, that people allow themselves to be entrapped into petty ways of acting. If they would take a wide view with their mental eye, they would have their minds cast in a p. 140nobler mould; and they would not make the mistake of expending their energies on objects which perish with time. They would respond to the prayer of Moses, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” This is the true use to make of the fleeting term of our existence. The men of past generations who acted with this wisdom are not perished as the foolish are. They live in the memory of God. Their wisdom is a germ from which their being will spring forth anew in the great day of account; but where are the men who simply live for the present? who live but to feather their own nests, to make themselves comfortable? to set themselves on high: where are they when the undertaker screws the coffin lid upon them, and the grave-digger lowers their corrupt remains among the worms? Gone, completely gone! They have not laid up for themselves treasure in heaven; they have no store against the time to come. Their treasure and their store were piled on earth. Jesus recognises the difference between the two kinds of economy, in saying that Mary had chosen that good part which should not be taken away from her. The only “good part” are thoughts, words and deeds well-pleasing to God, written in His memory by present development and exercise. The great lesson we learn from the present, is that it is only wisely used in proportion as it is consecrated to the attainment of the high calling in Christ Jesus.
If so much light is thrown by the past and the present on the course of life that we ought to pursue, what shall we say about the future? Why that the light it sheds is like the light of the sun—blinding to look at it. The future is too great to realize. We can realise the past, because we know, on the whole, it was pretty much what the present is. And we know it from experience; but, in the future, we get into a region beyond experience, and, therefore, beyond our grasp, though it may come into the compass of our knowledge by faith. Yet, let us glance at it for a moment. We know that in a short time, the state of things on the face of the earth will be completely changed. Human society, as now constituted, will be broken up; all the laws men have made for themselves—political, municipal, social, and domestic will be blown to the winds by the breath of God in Jesus Christ, and an entirely new system will be established, based upon perfect holiness, perfect righteousness, perfect neighbourly feeling, perfect brotherly love; and all who stand in the way of the great revolution will be broken to pieces. Those who will carry out this revolution will be those of all ages whom Jesus shall pronounce worthy, by reason of their faith and obedience. These, made in nature equal with the angels, will have the wealth of the whole world placed in their hands, and armed with power to execute the will of their captain, such as no human being ever had before—a power that will be superior to all the armour-plated ships and fields of rifled ordnance that may be brought against them, and with which they will break in pieces every obstruction to the divine government. Their mission will be to bring everything into subjection to God’s king—to exact from every tongue, and every knee, and everything that breathes upon earth that homage due to the man whom God has ordained to rule the world. Those only will be admitted to association with the great fraternity who have chosen now, in this present time, when there is darkness and night brooding over all, to identify themselves with the preliminary and humble form in which this work exists. When we think of this, we can estimate aright the conduct of the man or woman who gives way to the pressure of present expediency, becoming a slave of this life, and driving to a remote distance, as it were, the things that belong to Christ. Such a man or woman, knowing the truth, is what the Bible calls a fool. We are not permitted to apply the term personally, but we are permitted to speak the truth in the abstract. We are not permitted to judge each other, but as brethren and sisters mingling together, with a common object, we are permitted to exhort one another, and so much the more, as we see the day approaching. The only way to stand approved by him whom we serve, when he comes in his glory, is to have good sense enough to lay hold, with all our hearts, on the things that pertain unto him, and to devote our lives to the doing of those things that he requires of us. He has given us a rule plain enough: “He that doeth the will of my Father, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.” None others have any chance. Christ himself said there would be certain parties who should come to him at his return, expecting he would take them into his company, but what does he say to them? “Depart from me, ye workers of iniquity; I know you not.” Please, p. 141therefore, remember, that there is something more to do, than simply believing the gospel, and being baptised. We must through this present life be controlled by the will of Christ, as expressed in his commandments; and in order to this, we must make ourselves acquainted, and keep ourselves, by reading, familiar with these. We cannot, as some did 1,800 years ago, recline on the greensward, and listen to the mellifluous words that flowed from his mouth, who spake as never man spake; but, thank God, we can ponder that great portion of his words which have been rescued from the dead past, and written down. We have them here in our hands, and what shall we say of ourselves if we are not wise enough to appreciate the pearls that are contained therein. The exhortation to everybody is, “Get wisdom; do not be foolish; wisdom is the principal thing. Search for her as for hid treasure; embrace her, and she will bring thee to honour. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her. She is more precious than rubies, and all the things thou canst desire, are not to be compared unto her; length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honour.”
EDITOR.