SUNDAY READINGS.
SELECTED BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D.D.
[Sunday, July 5.]
The Influence of Jesus.—(I note again, as a characteristic of the morality of sonship, the way in which it secures humility by aspiration, and not by depression.) How to secure humility is the hard problem of all systems of duty. He who does work, just in proportion to the faithfulness with which he does it, is always in danger of self-conceit. Very often men seem to have given up the problem in despair, and they lavish unstinted praise upon the vigorous, effective worker, without any qualifying blame of the arrogance with which he flaunts the duty that he does in the world’s face. “The only way to make him humble,” they would seem to say, “would be to make him idle. Let him stop doing duty and then, indeed, he might stop boasting. His arrogance is only the necessary price that the world and he pay for his faithfulness.” To such a problem the Christian morality brings its vast conception of the universe. Above each man it sets the infinite life. The identity of nature between that life and his, while it enables him to emulate that life, compels him, also, to compare himself with it. The more zealously he aspires to imitate it, the more clearly he must encounter the comparison. The higher he climbs the mountain, the more he learns how the high mountain is past his climbing. It is the oneness of the soul’s life with God’s life that at once makes us try to be like him, and brings forth our unlikeness to him. It is the source at once of aspiration and humility. The more aspiration, the more humility. Humility comes by aspiration. If, in all Christian history, it has been the souls which most looked up that were the humblest souls; if to-day the rescue of a soul from foolish pride must be not by a depreciation of present attainment, but by opening more and more the vastness of the future possibility; if the Christian man keeps his soul full of the sense of littleness, even in all his hardest work for Christ, not by denying his own stature, but by standing up at his whole height, and then looking up in love and awe and seeing God tower into infinitude above him—certainly all this stamps the morality which is wrought out within the idea of Jesus with this singular excellence, that it has solved the problem of faithfulness and pride, and made possible humility by aspiration.
And yet, once more, the morality of Jesus involves the only true secret of courage and of the freedom that comes of courage. More and more we come to see that courage is a positive thing. It is not simply the absence of fear. To be brave is not merely not to be afraid. Courage is that compactness and clear coherence of all a man’s faculties and powers which makes his manhood a single operative unit in the world. That is the reason why narrowness of thought and life often brings a kind of courage, and why, as men’s range of thought enlarges and their relations with their fellowmen increase, there often comes a strange timidity. The bigot is often very brave. He is held fast unto a unit, and possesses himself completely in his own selfishness. For such a bravery as that the man and the world pay very dear. But when the grasp that holds a man and his powers is not his self-consciousness, but his obedience to his Father, when loyalty to him surrounds and aggregates the man’s capacities, so that, held in his hand, the man feels his distinctiveness, his distinctive duty, his distinctive privilege, then you have reached the truth of which the bigot’s courage was the imitation. Then you have secured courage, not by the limitation, but by the enlargement of the life. Then the dependence upon God makes the independence of man in which are liberty and courage. The man’s own personality is found only in the household of his Father, and only in the finding of his personality does he come to absolute freedom and perfect fearlessness.—Phillips Brooks.
[Sunday, July 12.]
True Christianity.—Lord Jesus Christ, thou eternal and only Prince of Peace! Thou most blessed and truest rest of faithful souls! Thou hast said, Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and ye shall find rest to your souls. In the world ye shall have tribulation, but in me ye shall have peace.