And, pitying,
Counts it a Ghristlike thing —
Not to despise
The fallen one who at the wayside lies —
But, for His sake,
A brother's part to take.^
II.
The Special Kesponsibility of the Christian.
1. The question, Where is thy brother ? comes to those who follow Christ, not only as it comes to other men, but also with another meaning, a meaning which enables us to give a very blessed answer to it. Abel was a type of Christ. Abel's sacrifice is the first recorded type of the sacrifice on Calvary. He who died on the cross is our Brother. As we hear the voice of God calling to us, Where is thy brother? we answer, Here is our Brother, crucified for sin, buried, risen, ascended, seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high, ever interceding for us. It is a new demand, a new question.
O sweetest Blood, that can implore Pardon of God, and heaven restore,
The heaven which sin had lost: While Abel's blood for vengeance pleads, What Jesus shed still intercedes
For those who wrong Him most.
2. And not only is Jesus the Brother about whom the question is asked of each of us, Where is thy brother ? but in Him we all are brethren. Again, the question comes with a new meaning. " A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." Accordingly the perfect life does not consist in the cultivation of
» E. H. Dirall, A Believer's Best, 67.
140 AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?
an isolated personal perfection. Christ lived in God; He was detached from the world, He spent whole nights in prayer ; but the account of Him is incomplete until we add, " He went about doing good." " He came to seek and to save the lost." " As I have loved you," He said. In these solitary hours which He spent in communion with the Father He renewed the fires of His love for men, maintained and augmented His strength for serving them. While deepening His own delight in the Father's love. He added intensity to His passion for raising the most miserable of mankind into the same transcendent blessedness. And so the true imitation of Christ includes not only the discovery of the immeasurable strength which a devout soul may find in God, but the actual use of that strength for the service of mankind.
IT There is a passage which I dare say some of you may remember in one of Cardinal Newman's sermons, preached and published before he left the Anglican Communion, in which he presses upon his hearers with all his characteristic earnestness the obligation to attempt the ideal Christian life. He asks, " Where should we find that ideal Christian life ? " and he answers : " In the humble monk and the holy nun, in those who, whether they remain in seclusion or are sent over the earth, have calm faces and sweet plaintive voices, and spare frames, and gentle manners and hearts won from the world and wills subdued, and for their meek- ness meet with insult, and for their purity with slander, and for their courtesy with suspicion, and for their courage with cruelty ; yet they find Christ everywhere, Christ their all-sufficient portion, to make up to them both here and hereafter all they suffer, all they dare for His name's sake." Now, God forbid that I should withhold sympathy and reverence from saintly men and women who in evil times have forsaken the world in order to find God. No doubt among those who have taken the vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience there have been many who took them not merely to make sure of eternal blessedness for them- selves, but that they might be free to serve others. Honour, all honour, to their memory ! But in Dr. Newman's account of the men and women who have maintained the Christian tradition from Apostolic times to our own, the passion for serving and redeeming man receives no place. By prayer and fasting, and poverty and severe discipline, they have overcome temptation to sin, and become saints. There is something wanting in the picture. A few years ago I met with a young woman earning eleven or twelve shillings a week in a Birmingham warehouse,
GENESIS IV. 9 141
who had been filled with affectionate pity for another young woman, a member of my church, who had worked with her and who, through illness, had lost her situation and her wages. She took the sick girl to her own poor lodging, fed her, nursed her, cared for her. I am afraid my friend had not the gentle manners and the sweet plaintive voice of Dr. Newman's charming picture. But that seems to me the true imitation of Christ.!
H I remember, too, another young woman who came to me in great trouble, and told me that her father was drunk two or three times a week, that he insisted on having a large part of her earnings to spend it in drink, and that when he came home at night with drink in him he often beat her; life was becoming intolerable to her. She wanted to know whether it would be right for her to leave him. Her mother was dead ; her father, if she left him, would be alone ; was it her duty to stay ? I told her that in my judgment his treatment of her had released her from the obligation, but I asked her whether it would be possible for her to be happy at night if she went elsewhere, whether she would not be always thinking that in his drunken fits her father might come to harm, and whether she could not regard the care of this unhappy man, with all the suffering and misery it brought upon her, as the special service to which Christ had appointed her. She looked up, hesitated for a moment, and then said, " I will" I do not think she would have made a good model for an artist painting a saint. She did not live in a picturesque convent, but in a back court in Birmingham. Her dress was not picturesque, but the somewhat unlovely dress of a poor working girl Yet that seems to me to be the true imitation of Christ. Let me finish the story. She came to me three months later, and told me, with the light of joy on her face, that her father had never come home drunk since that night she had resolved to care for him for Christ's sake.*