from afar off with “Keep quiet, I am in God’s hands”—those very utterances of humanity which seemed to us most noble, most pure, most beautiful, most divine—been all in vain? Mere impertinences, the babblings of fair dreams, poured forth into no where, to no thing, and in vain? Has every suffering, searching soul which ever gazed up into the darkness of the unknown, in hopes of catching even a glimpse of a divine Eye, beholding all, and ordering all, and pitying all, gazed up in vain? Oh! my friends, those who believe, or fancy they believe, such things, and can preach such doctrines without pity and sorrow, know not of what they rob a mankind already but too miserable by its own folly and its own sin—a mankind which if it have not hope in God and in Christ, is truly, as
Homer said of old, more miserable than the beasts of the field.
Westminster Sermons.
When the human heart asks, Have we not only a God in Heaven, but a Father in Heaven? that question can only be answered by our Lord Jesus Christ. Truly He said, “No one cometh unto the Father but by Me. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath revealed Him.” And therefore we can find boundless comfort in the words, “Such as the Father is, such is the Son and such the Holy Ghost.” For now we know that there is A Man in the midst of the throne who is the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of His person—a high priest who can be touched by the feeling of our infirmities, seeing He was tempted in
all things like as we are. To Him we can cry with human passion and in human words, because we know that His human heart will respond to our human hearts, and that His human heart again will respond to His Divine Spirit, and that His Divine Spirit is the same as the Divine Spirit of His Father, for their wills and minds are One, and their will and their mind is boundless love to sinful men.
Yes, we can look up in our extreme need by faith into the sacred face of Christ, and by faith take refuge within His sacred heart, saying, If it be good for me, He will give what I ask; and if He gives it not, it is because that too is good for me, and for others beside me. In all the chances and changes of this mortal life we can say to Him, as He said in that supreme hour—
“If it be possible let this cup pass from Me, nevertheless not My will but Thine be done;” sure that He will present that prayer to His Father and to our Father, and to His God and our God; and that whatsoever be the answer vouchsafed by Him whose ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts, the prayer will not have gone up to Christ in vain.
Westminster Sermons.
I have been praying long and earnestly, and have no fears now. “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, believing, ye shall receive.” “Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief.” Those two texts were my stronghold when the night of misery was most utterly dark, and in the strength of them we shall prevail. Fret not