PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
The Greatest Thing In the World and Other Addresses
Drummond, Henry, 1851-1897 · 33,030 words · 100 reading sections
A VERY IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE
in religion, because--and it is a very strange thing--very few people know the difference when they begin to talk about religion. They often tell boys that if they seek the Kingdom of God, everything else is going to be _subtracted_ from them. They tell them that they are going to become gloomy, miserable, and will los…
113 wordsSECTION 62EVERYTHING ELSE WORTH HAVING
is to be _added_ unto us. If there is anything I would like you to remember, it is these two arithmetic words--"first" and "added." I do not mean by "added" that if you become religious you are all going to become _rich_. Here is a boy, who, in sweeping out the shop tomorrow, finds a quarter lying among the orange box…
936 wordsSECTION 63THE OLD THINGS WILL DROP OFF
of themselves. This is what is meant by the "new heart." It means that God puts into us new thoughts and new wishes, and we become quite different.…
28 wordsSECTION 64III.
Lastly, and very shortly. What was the third head? "Grammar." Right. Now, I require a clever boy to answer the next question. What is the verb? "Seek." Very good: "seek." What mood is it in? "Imperative mood." What does that mean? "A command." What is the soldier's first lesson? "Obedience." Have you obeyed this comma…
203 wordsSECTION 65HIS WASTED LIFE.
God wants boys' _lives_, not only their souls. It is for active service that soldiers are drilled, and trained, and fed, and armed. That is why you and I are in the world at all--not to prepare to go out of it some day, but to serve God actively in it _now_. It is monstrous, and shameful, and cowardly to talk of seekin…
362 wordsSECTION 66THE GREATEST NEED OF THE WORLD.
God is all for quality; man is for quantity. The immediate need of the world at this moment is not more of us, but, if I may use the expression, a better brand of us. To secure ten men of an improved type would be better than if we had ten thousand more of the average Christians distributed all over the world. There is…
185 wordsSECTION 67RESOLUTION.
In will power, in mere spasms of earnestness, there is no salvation. Struggle, effort, even agony, have their place in Christianity, as we shall see; but this is not where they come in. In mid-Atlantic the Etruria, in which I was sailing, suddenly stopped. Something had gone wrong with the engines. There were five hun…
230 wordsSECTION 68ONE AT A TIME
and crucifying it steadily, I hope in the end to extirpate all." To this, unfortunately, there are four objections: For one thing, life is too short; the name of sin is legion. For another thing, to deal with individual sins is to leave the rest of the nature for the time untouched. In the third place, a single combat…
196 wordsSECTION 69I COPY THE VIRTUES
one by one." The difficulty about the copying method is that it is apt to be mechanical. One can always tell an engraving from a picture, an artificial flower from a real flower. To copy virtues one by one has somewhat the same effect as eradicating the vices one by one; the temporary result is an overbalanced and inc…
219 wordsSECTION 70THE VERY YOUNG MAN'S METHOD;
and the pure earnestness of it makes it almost desecration to touch it. It is to keep a private note-book with columns for the days of the week, and a list of virtues, with spaces against each for marks. This, with many stern rules for preface, is stored away in a secret place, and from time to time, at nightfall, the …
225 wordsSECTION 71I. THE FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION.
A formula, a receipt for Sanctification--can one seriously speak of this mighty change as if the process were as definite as for the production of so many volts of electricity? It is impossible to doubt it. Shall a mechanical experiment succeed infallibly, and the one vital experiment of humanity remain a chance? Is c…
499 wordsSECTION 72SOMETHING OUTSIDE THE SOUL OF MAN
that produces a moral change upon him. That he must be susceptible to that change, that he must be a party to it, goes without saying; but that neither his aptitude nor his will can produce it, is equally certain. Obvious as it ought to seem, this may be to some an almost startling revelation. The change we have been …
660 wordsSECTION 73THE SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF SANCTIFICATION
is compressed into a sentence: Reflect the character of Christ, and you will become like Christ. You will be changed, in spite of yourself and unknown to yourself, into the same image from character to character. (1). All men are reflectors--that is…
42 wordsSECTION 74THE FIRST LAW
on which this formula is based. One of the aptest descriptions of a human being is that he is a mirror. As we sat at table to-night the world in which each of us lived and moved throughout this day was focused in the room. What we saw when we looked at one another was not one another, but one another's world. We were a…
263 wordsSECTION 75NEVER BE BLOTTED OUT.
What I am reading in him meantime he also is reading in me; and before the journey is over we could half write each other's lives. Whether we like it or not, we live in glass houses. The mind, the memory, the soul, is simply a vast chamber panelled with looking-glass. And upon this miraculous arrangement and endowment …
139 wordsSECTION 76THIS LAW OF ASSIMILATION
is the second, and by far the most impressive truth which underlies the formula of sanctification--the truth that men are not only mirrors, but that these mirrors, so far from being mere reflectors of the fleeting things they see, transfer into their own inmost substance, and hold in permanent preservation the things t…
339 wordsSECTION 77II. THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE.
If events change men, much more persons. No man can meet another on the street without making some mark upon him. We say we exchange words when we meet; what we exchange is souls. And when intercourse is very close and very frequent, so complete is this exchange that recognizable bits of the one soul begin to show in t…
370 wordsSECTION 78IT WAS CHRIST.
On the Damascus road they met, and from that hour his life was absorbed in His. The effect could not but follow--on words, on deeds, on career, on creed. The "impressed forces" did their vital work. He became like Him Whom he habitually loved. "So we all," he writes, "reflecting as a mirror the glory of Christ, are cha…
123 wordsSECTION 79ALWAYS AT OUR BEST.
While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or speak ungenerous words. Their mere presence is elevation, purification, sanctity. All the best stops in our nature are drawn out by their intercourse, and we find a music in our souls that was never there before. Suppose even _that_ influence prolonged through a month, a…
434 wordsSECTION 80REGENERATION
that mortal men should suggest _God_ to the world! There is something almost melting in the way His contemporaries, and John especially, speak of the influence of Christ. John lived himself in daily wonder at Him; he was overpowered, over-awed, entranced, transfigured. To his mind it was impossible for any one to come…
225 wordsSECTION 81FRIENDSHIP IS A SPIRITUAL THING.
It is independent of Matter, or Space, or Time. That which I love in my friend is not that which I see. What influences me in my friend is not his body but his spirit. He influences me about as much in his absence as in his presence. It would have been an ineffable experience truly to have lived at that time-- "I thin…
829 wordsSECTION 82NOT AT THE ORDINARY ANGLE.
"Things which are not seen" are visible. For a few short hours you live the Eternal Life. The eternal life, the life of faith, is simply the life of a higher vision. Faith is an attitude--a mirror set at the right angle. When tomorrow is over, and in the evening you review it, you will wonder how you did it. You will …
485 wordsSECTION 83ONLY ONE WAY
in which faith is got, and it is the same in the religious world as it is in the world of men and women. I learn to trust you, my brother, just as I get to know you, and neither more nor less; and you get to trust me just as you get to know me. I do not trust you as a stranger, but as I come into contact with you, and …
523 wordsSECTION 84A CERTAINLY SUCCESSFUL MEANS
of sanctification. "We all, with unveiled face, reflecting in a mirror the glory of Christ (the character of Christ) assuredly--without any miscarriage--without any possibility of miscarriage--are changed into the same image." It is an immense thing to be anchored in some great principle like that. Emerson says: "The h…
236 wordsSECTION 85SPEND TIME
in cultivating the fellowship and companionship of Christ. And there is nothing so much worth taking into our lives as a profounder sense of what is to be had by living in communion with Christ, and by getting nearer to Him. It will matter much if we take away with us some of the thoughts about theology, and some of th…
235 wordsSECTION 86III. THE FIRST EXPERIMENT.
Then you reduce religion to a common Friendship? A common Friendship--who talks of a _common_ Friendship? There is no such thing in the world. On earth no word is more sublime. Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is. God is love. And to make religion akin to Friendship is simply to give it the hig…
286 wordsSECTION 87THE PURSUIT OF CHRIST?
When shall we substitute for the "it" of a fictitious aspiration, the approach to a Living Friend? Sanctity is in character and not in moods; Divinity in our own plain calm humanity, and in no mystic rapture of the soul. And yet there are others who, for exactly a contrary reason, will find scant satisfaction here. Th…
835 wordsSECTION 88Part 88
To await the growing of a soul, nevertheless, is an almost Divine act of faith. How pardonable, surely, the impatience of deformity with itself, of a consciously despicable character standing before Christ, wondering, yearning, hungering to be like that! Yet must one trust the process fearlessly and without misgiving. …
214 wordsSECTION 89LIKE CHRIST
is the only thing in the world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly, and all lower achievement vain. Those only who make this quest the supreme desire and passion of their lives can ever begin to hope to reach it. If, therefore, it has seemed up to this point as if all depended on pa…
880 wordsSECTION 90DEALING WITH DOUBT.
There is a subject which I think workers amongst young men cannot afford to keep out of sight--I mean the subject of "Doubt." We are forced to face that subject. We have no choice. I would rather let it alone; but every day of my life I meet men who doubt, and I am quite sure that most Christian workers among men have …
187 wordsSECTION 91CHRIST WAS VERY FOND
of these men. The outsiders always interested Him, and touched Him. The orthodox people--the Pharisees--He was much less interested in. He went with publicans and sinners--with people who were in revolt against the respectability, intellectual and religious, of the day. And following Him, we are entitled to give sympat…
69 wordsSECTION 92THE ORIGIN OF DOUBT.
In the first place, _we are born questioners_. Look at the wonderment of a little child in its eyes before it can speak. The child's great word when it begins to speak is, "Why?" Every child is full of every kind of question, about every kind of thing, that moves, and shines, and changes, in the little world in which i…
390 wordsSECTION 93GREAT INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY.
It teaches us sympathy and toleration with all men who venture upon the ocean of truth to find out a path through it for themselves. Do you sometimes feel yourself thinking unkind things about your fellow-students who have intellectual difficulty? I know how hard it is always to feel sympathy and toleration for them; b…
161 wordsSECTION 94THE CHURCH'S TREATMENT OF DOUBT
in the past? It has been very simple. "There is a heretic. Burn him!" That is all. "There is a man who has gone off the road. Bring him back and torture him!" We have got past that physically; have we got past it morally? What does the modern Church say to a man who is skeptical? Not "Burn him!" but "Brand him!" "Bran…
190 wordsSECTION 95CHRIST'S TREATMENT
of doubt. I have spoken already of His strange partiality for the outsiders--for the scattered heretics up and down the country; of the care with which He loved to deal with them, and of the respect in which He held their intellectual difficulties. Christ never failed to distinguish between doubt and unbelief. Doubt is…
285 wordsSECTION 96HUMAN VERSIONS
of Divine truths, and hence the varieties of the versions and the inconsistencies of them. I would allow a man to select whichever version of this truth he liked _afterwards_; but I would ask him to begin with no version, but go back to the facts and base his Christian life upon these. That is the great lesson of the …
386 wordsSECTION 97IN REVOLT
against the kind of religion which we exhibit to the world--against the cant that is taught in the name of Christianity. And if the men that have never seen the real thing--if you could show them that, they would receive it as eagerly as you do. They are merely in revolt against the imperfections and inconsistencies of…
181 wordsSECTION 98UNNECESSARY CARGO
that has been in his way. Thirdly: _Talking about difficulties, as a rule, only aggravates them._ Entire satisfaction to the intellect is unattainable about any of the greater problems, and if you try to get to the bottom of them by argument, there is no bottom there; and therefore you make the matter worse. But I wo…
270 wordsSECTION 99THE PRACTICAL SIDE OF MAN'S NATURE.
Entreat him not to postpone life and his life's usefulness until he has settled the problems of the universe. Tell him those problems will never all be settled; that his life will be done before he has begun to settle them; and ask him what he is doing with his life meantime. Charge him with wasting his life and his us…
241 wordsSECTION 100OBEY CHRIST;
and, doing His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God. That, I think, is about the only thing you can do with a man: to get him into practical contact with the needs of the world, and to let him lose his intellectual difficulties meantime. Don't ask him to give them up altogether. Tell him to solve t…
335 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg source record →
Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.