Men in the Making

by Ambrose Shepherd

Do you say that you have felt nothing of this convicting and convincing power? Then I ask: Have you ever passed through an hour of serious inquest with your own soul? Have you ever tried to know yourself even as you are known? The debate cannot be all on one side. A man only knows that he is ignorant through the need of a knowledge he has not got. Before I can persuade you that Christ is your Saviour, you must realize that it is a Saviour you need. Before you can start out for Christ you must come to yourself. And while men make a mock of sin, while they regard it as a matter of indifference, or profess to explain it away under the terms of science and philosophy, we need not wonder that they have so little faith in higher things. We need go no further for an explanation of the thoughtless unbelief which is eating its way like a festering sore to the heart of our modern world. If the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life sum up the totality of our being here, why should that crowd on the artist's canvas be represented as moved by an anguish that touches no chord in its soul; which is, indeed, foreign to its every thought, sympathy, and pursuit? So long as men are indifferent about the very question, Why that anguish? vain is the appeal, "To you is it nothing your Saviour should die?" So long as men are utterly unconcerned about the fact, and nature, and effects of moral evil, then selfishness will remain for men the only recognized law of self-preservation.

And here is where I come into line with the practical side of the Christian evangel. The Cross of Christ is no arbitrary arrangement. It is not the expedient of a system cunningly devised by priest, theologian, or Church. It is the grimmest, sanest, divinest thing ever set up in this human world. The Cross is symbol of the only Power that can enter the lists against selfishness, and enter to throw it. And let me plead with you to think about this: every wrong in the world has selfishness, if not for its root, yet at its root. Cast out the selfishness which is sin, and you cast out the first and the last thing that stands between us and the new heaven and the new earth. Think of this, and you will better understand the anguish of Him who carries the sorrow, and is wounded in the wounds made by man's inhumanity to man. Refuse to think of it, and cease to wonder why countless thousands mourn; why the strong oppress the weak; why might is worshipped as right; why men seem to fear nothing but the hell of not making money. Think of it, and cease to wonder why men's bodies and souls are sacrificed in what is little better than a murderous struggle to exist; why one man has so much more than he earns, and others earn so much more than they have. Think of it and cease to wonder why our age is distinguished by a bad pre-eminence of restlessness, by feverishness, a panting for excitement, and a poisonous atmosphere of pessimism.

The Cross of Christ means the life that lives in unselfish service as against the selfishness that is death and defeat. It means not only individuals and Churches, but the race, redeemed and lifted from the dark and narrow life of self, into the life and light of the kingdom of God. Can we wonder, then, that the rejection of the Cross blasts our beliefs in everything divine and hopeful, and is accompanied everywhere by a "melancholy introspection and lack-lustre view of human life?" Recall then in this connection what I have said about sin, and the relation of Christ's death to the forgiveness of sin. What I am saying now does not include all that is implied in that relation; but see in it what I have just put before you, and you will realize that I am not talking in mere morbid terms, nor in those of theology except so far as it is the theology of life. Long as men are willingly in their sin—which means selfishness in all its deadly forms—can we wonder at the unbelief portrayed on that canvas? Can we marvel why the Christ is still despised and rejected?

It may be asked, and justly, what are the professed followers of Christ doing to convince men of their need of Him as their Saviour; to convince them by lives that are the evidence of triumph over sin? What are Christian people, what are the Churches doing to fight down the wrongs, the hurtful conditions, the curse-centres that degrade men, keep them ignorant, and as by a satanic ingenuity hide the real Christ from those who most need to find Him, and are the least able to oppose the things that make Him so misunderstood and even unknown? How far are we responsible, not only for the deliberately cultivated wickedness of men who choose evil as their good, but for the indifference that passes by only because our lives have never compelled its attention? The Church is a Church but to the extent that it is the organic expression of Christ's life, the visible Body of His soul. What, I ask in all faithfulness, are we doing to make real and living to men the presence of a Lord who is ever suffering in their sin and for it? The artist was well inspired to give his picture a twentieth-century setting. What an amount of grim Calvary there is in Glasgow every day under the shadow of our Churches; ah! and behind the sanction of their power. That is the word that should smite us; it is the word that must be said—behind the sanction of their power.

The world would begin to see Christ, if we ourselves would see Him crucified, not merely in the remote Palestine of the first century, but, I say once more, in this Glasgow of to-day. In the foul slum, in the haunt of shame, in the abode of crime and wretchedness, in the places where children are robbed of their birthright before they know what things mean; in the sweater's den, in the heartless side of business competition, in the drink hells, in frivolous pursuits and brainless amusements, in the insolence of wealth, and the sullenness of poverty—in every place or thing where despite is done to the Divine Humanity. Let us feel that whatever wrong is done to a single human being, throughout the world-wide family of man, is literally done to Jesus Christ, and we shall better understand that central Figure in the artist's picture. Let us see Christ crucified in whatever evil is done, in whatever good is left undone that we could do, and sin will become to us not a term only, not a thing to be excused and explained away, but a real and tremendous horror. We shall feel it to be what it is, a stab struck at the living heart of Jesus Christ. As it has been truly said: "Fellowship with Christ's sufferings will become less of a mystical phrase, and more of a vital fact."

"To you is it nothing, all ye that pass by?" As I sat and looked at that picture, this was the question that oppressed my thoughts. And then the further question forced itself—Why, in so many cases, and to all human seeming, is it just that—nothing? It is not enough to talk of sin, and unbelief, and indifference, outside our life: they are real enough, but do they suggest no responsibility on our part? Let it be a call to prayer, an incentive to unceasing watchfulness lest one should be passing by because there is nothing in us which constrains him, or persuades her, to look and be saved, to look and live.

I said at the opening of this address that I would tell you later why I include it in this series. I am not sure that I can keep my word. What has been said will glance from your mind unless you have, like Luther, and for the same reason, wrestled with the question: "How shall a man be just with God?" But assuming that as yet this is outside your experience, still you know the difference between what may but arbitrarily be called sin, and sin that is what it is called. Believe me when I say that the first, and worst, and nearest of all problems for each man of us, and for societies, is the fact of sin; and that with it no one deals, or can deal, save Him upon whom the chastisement of our peace was laid, and with whose stripes we are healed. What is the exact relation between the death of Christ and the forgiveness of sin no one can tell us; but that there is a relation charged with redeeming power is not a theory about Christianity—it is Christianity.

I read some time ago that a "Van Missioner," who was preaching Unitarianism in the villages of Hampshire, found himself at one of them interrupted by a number of farm labourers, who began to sing—

"What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus!
What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
It washes white as snow,
No other fount I know."

To the modern enlightenment which patronizes Jesus as a teacher and rejects Christ as a Saviour, the theology, or sentiment, in these lines is not so much crude as grotesque. At the best it is but curiously reminiscent of the ignorance of a by-gone day. Doubtless this well-meaning man had much to say worth hearing; but he was talking in the name of religion, and to these villagers there was in it the lack of the one thing, which is the lack of all. Theology apart, these simple folk found in these crude lines the heart of saving truth. It is my conviction that they were right. In this conviction I live, and in it, by God's grace, I trust I may die and live again.