CONQUER YOUR WILL.
I think the genealogical table was put in the first chapter of the New Testament, not only to show our Lord's pedigree, but to show that a man may rise up in an ancestral line and beat back successfully all the influences of bad heredity. See in that genealogical table that good King Asa came of vile King Abia. See in that genealogical table that Joseph and Mary and the most illustrious Being that ever touched our world, or ever will touch it, had in their ancestral line scandalous Rehoboam and Tamar and Bathsheba. If this world is ever to be Edenized—and it will be—all the infected families of the earth are to be regenerated, and there will some one arise in each family line and open a new genealogical table. There will be some Joseph in the line to reverse the evil influence of Rehoboam, and there will be some Mary in the line to reverse the evil influence of Bathsheba. Perhaps the star of hope may point down to your manger. Perhaps you are to be the hero or the heroine that is to put down the brakes and stop that long train of genealogical tendencies and switch it off on another track from that on which it has been running for a century. You do that, and I will promise you as fine a palace as the architects of heaven can build, the archway inscribed with the words: "More than conqueror."
ADOPTED CHILDREN.
But whatever your heredity, let me say, you may be sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty. Estranged children from the homestead come back through the open gate of adoption. There is royal blood in our veins. There are crowns in our escutcheon. Our Father is King. Our Brother is King. We may be kings and queens unto God forever. Come and sit down on the ivory bench of the palace. Come and wash in the fountains that fall into the basins of crystal and alabaster. Come and look out of the upholstered window upon gardens of azalea and amaranth. Hear the full burst of the orchestra while you banquet with potentates and victors. Oh, when the text sweeps backward, let it not stop at the cradle that rocked your infancy, but at the cradle that rocked the first world, and when the text sweeps forward, let it not stop at your grave, but at the throne on which you may reign forever and ever! "Whose son art thou, thou young man?" Son of God! Heir of mortality! Take your inheritance!
THE MOTHER OF ALL.[ToC]
"And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man."—Genesis 2:21, 22.
It is the first Saturday afternoon in the world's existence. Ever since sunrise Adam has been watching the brilliant pageantry of wings and scales and clouds, and in his first lessons in zoology and ornithology and ichthyology he has noticed that the robins fly the air in twos, and that the fish swim the water in twos, and that the lions walk the fields in twos, and in the warm redolence of that Saturday afternoon he falls off into slumber; and as if by allegory to teach all ages that the greatest of earthly blessings is sound sleep, this paradisaical somnolence ends with the discovery on the part of Adam of