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

in which he moved. All the more precious, therefore, is
this revelation of his inner life. What a soul was his! The thought
uppermost in his mind was devotion to the Father's will. The joy which
most gladdened his lonely life was the joy of 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