How deep that goes into one's doctrine of human nature! Never believe that the sinning self is the true self. Your real personality is the potential good in you. The moment that good springs into life you have a right to say: "Now I know what I was {147} made for. I have come to life. I have discovered myself." And then there is the religious aspect of this same self-discovery. No sooner does this boy come to himself than he says, "I will arise and go to my father." The religious need follows at once from the self-awakening. Nay, was not the religious need the source of the self-awakening? What was it that brought him to himself but just the homesickness of the child for his father's house? His self-discovery was but the answer of his soul to the continuous love of God. Before he ever came to himself the father was waiting for him. Antecedent to the ethical return was the religious quickening. That is the relation of religion to conduct. You make your resolutions, but it is God that prompts them. Your self-discovery is the drawing of the Father. Your true self is his son. How natural it all is,—an infinite law of love at the heart of the universe—that is the centre of theology; a world that permits moral alienation through the free will of man,—that is the problem of philosophy; he came to himself,—that is the heart of ethics; I will go to my Father,—that is the soul of religion.
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LX
POPULARITY
Luke xix. 37-43; Matthew xxi. 17-23.
(PASSION WEEK—MONDAY)
The ministry of Jesus is as a whole not easy to arrange in any fixed chronology. The order of events seems often to vary in the different gospels, and sometimes these unstudied narratives seem in positive conflict. But as the story draws to its close the paths of narrative begin to converge, and as we approach the last days and enter on the last week the incidents of each day become perfectly distinct, and one can trace the life of Jesus as it moves on from his triumph of Palm Sunday to his tragedy of the cross. As we enter then to-day on the anniversary of the last week of the life of Jesus, the week before Easter Sunday, let us glance at some of the hurrying events. And for today consider the contrast which presents itself between the entrance of Jesus at Jerusalem on Sunday morning, and his return to the city by the same road on this Monday {149} morning of his last week. Yesterday he came over the brow of the Mount of Olives, surrounded by an enthusiastic throng, the centre of their popularity. To-day he comes along the same road, unattended and alone, the crowd slinking away from him, his popularity gone. And how does he bear himself through these shillings of opinion? He simply does not manifest any consciousness of change. He is as undisturbed by neglect as he was yesterday by success. On Sunday, while the people were spreading their branches beneath his feet, he looked across the valley to the city and wept as he looked; and to-day, coming with no popular applause, he enters straight into the city and asserts to its leaders his supreme authority. In the midst of popularity he seems saddened, and in the midst of neglect he seems stirred to a defiant boldness. In short, he is unscathed alike by what seems to be success and what seems to be failure. He goes his way through it all with his eye on that great end which gives him peace amid the throng, and courage amid the solitude.
That is the only way in which one can maintain himself among the shifting currents {150} of popularity. It comes and goes like a tide. The man who tries to lean on it is simply swept by the rising tide into self-conceit, and then stranded by the ebb of that same tide on the flats of despair. Popularity is as fickle as the April winds, and one can trust it as little as he dare trust the New England climate. It is only he who can be wholly self-controlled amid the triumphs of his Palm Sunday who can move on with equal self-control to the bearing of the cross with which that same week may close.
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