Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn | Page 2

unknown, but sublime and perfect, obedience. He had been pointing a Samaritan woman, sitting by the wellside, to the salvation of God; and though she was but one, and that to human eyes an unworthy subject,--though she was a Samaritan and an open sinner,--his soul found such intense pleasure in bringing her--as the Father had sent him to bring men anywhere--to the knowledge of the truth, that fatigue and hunger were forgotten, and all his energies were absorbed in the delight of the task. In this I think Christ appears simply Divine. No later fame or success, no gaudy robes of human praise, no gilded crown of human admiration, are needed to adorn him. He discloses the very ideal of a godly life. All our poor efforts at obedience, all our faint aspirations after the knowledge and love of God, all our unfulfilled prayers, and falling flights, and unredeemed promises and sin-stained attempts to serve, confess the ideal perfectness of him who could truthfully say, "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work."
I. Let us first, then, draw a little closer to this peerless soul, in which there was such perfect sense of the worth of infinite things, and let us note more particularly, and appreciate as far as we are able, this phase of the character of the Son of Man.
I have said that Christ was a very natural man. But he was more than that. I am sure that none can study his character without admitting and admiring the perfect proportion in which truth evidently lay in his mind. This is one of the rarest beauties of character. Most of us are very one-sided. We can grasp but a part of truth; and in order to grasp that part firmly, we have to absolutely let other truth go. In order to be devoted to duty as we see it, we commonly have to leave other duties untouched. Our spiritual growth ought to take just this direction of including broader views of truth and duty, of obtaining a conception of life in which the various elements shall be held in their proper relations and proportions; no one allowed to eclipse the others, but each modified to a proper extent by the presence and influence of the rest. I say this is a rare achievement. No one but Christ has ever achieved it perfectly. It is easy to see that even the apostles, inspired as they were, did not equally appreciate all sides of revelation. They have their distinguishing doctrines and points of view.
It is still easier to see that Christian churches and theologians differ for this same reason, and to a much greater extent. No creed, no church, no theology, that builds on the Word of God, can be wholly wrong. Its difference from others must lie in its partial appreciation of the truth, in its inability to take in all truths in their relative proportion. And so in literature and science and philosophy some men are impressed with material evidences, others with moral. Some men are poets, others are logicians; some critical, others dogmatic. The hope of the future for the Church and for humanity is in the slow approximation and combination of these partial views, until at last, "in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, we shall come unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Meanwhile, at the beginning of our Christian history, Christ stands perfect. To see this is to appreciate his authority. As Paul said, He is the corner stone of the spiritual temple which the Divine Spirit is building.
I do not mean that he taught explicitly all the truth which later times have discovered, or which after him apostles taught. But he laid the living germs of all later religious truth, and he held them in such perfect proportion that when the long course of history shall be finished, when that which is in part shall have been done away, and that which is perfect shall have come, the result will be but the reproduction on a large scale of the already perfect stature of Christ.
And this is particularly manifested in Christ's views of life. His peerless spirituality did not make him an ascetic. His clear vision of the future did not lead him to despise the present. His love of God did not destroy his love of nature or of man. His hatred of sin did not cause him to shun the sinner. Hence, though our Lord was the model of a religious man, he was no enthusiast, still less a fanatic. The enthusiast is a man who sees but part of truth and magnifies it out of