“Through the great, sinful streets of Naples, as I passed,
With fiercer heat than flamed above my head
My heart was hot within me, till at last
My brain was lightened when my tongue had said
Christ is not risen.”
And men who are truly in earnest about faith and life, and who are perplexed and distressed by the contradictions and insincerities that meet them, must often be moved as he was.
And yet, when we look closer, and consider that the battle of spiritual progress has this peculiarity attached to it, that it has to be fought over again, in every generation, and in every separate individual soul, the result is less surprising. Remembering this, we do not expect the victory of the last generation to save us from defeat or failure.
And this has to be borne in mind equally in regard to the continuous life of societies and to our own separate lives. Thus in such a society as this, if our predecessors uplifted the standards of conduct, inculcated high principles, and inspired their generation with a strong pervading spirit, this should make it easier for us to do likewise; but it does not insure our doing it. All this higher life will die in our hands if the same regenerating spirit is not alive and working in our hearts also. So, again, your individual victory over sin in the power of the Spirit in you, does not save my life from having to fight the battle for itself and win its own victories.
So that, however perplexing the phenomena of life may seem whilst we look at them in the mass or from the outside, if we read the Gospel of Christ as a message to our own souls a great deal of the perplexity disappears. And it was with this personal message that Christ came, and there is no hope of our understanding His mission, or of living in the
light of His transforming spirit, if we think of it in any other way than this.
The purpose of His revelation is to crucify the selfish instinct in us, and to rouse us to the life of self-devotion, to the idea of consecrated energies; and this being so, all Christian life is of the nature of a warfare; and a warfare which begins afresh with each generation of men; because selfishness, with all its tribe of attendant appetites and passions, springs afresh in every single soul, and is nurtured, strengthened, cultivated, by so many of the conditions of life.
If, then, the Spirit of Christ is really to prevail in our life, it must be by effecting our emancipation from selfish instincts, and rousing in us the spirit of devotion to the good of other lives.
In proportion as you diminish selfishness in your own life or in any other, by fostering generous affections and cultivating the spirit of social duty and religious aspiration, by walking in the footsteps of Christ and living in the light of His presence, you are laying
the only possible foundation of any lasting progress, you are following the one true method by which the mystery of sin is to be overcome.