IF There is a hymn of Newton, eight stanzas, " In Evil long I took Delight," which I call " Two Looks." The stanza, " I saw One hanging on a tree," introduces the first. The other is intro-
' R. C. Trench, Sermons New and Old, p. 106.
ri8 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
duced by the words, " A second look He gave," and the lyric con- cludes in these words —
Thus, while His death my sin displays
In all its blackest hue, Such is the mystery of grace
It seals my pardon, too.^
III. A Vision of Duty.
Great events in history are dated — the battle of Waterloo, the passing of the Eeform Bill. Most men have also in their own life one or more events to which there is an exact date attached. Isaiah had such an event. It was his call to the work of his life. " In the year that King Uzziah died," he says, " I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne. . . . And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send ? "
He describes the event vividly. We see it clearly with him. We seem to stand with the young prophet at the very mouth of Heaven ; all mean and low ambitions die away ; there are lightnings and thunderings and voices ; the tremendous forces which we always knew must be at the centre of the universe seem about to be revealed.
But the most touching part is yet to come : so far it has been only what we expect ; if we had thought about the matter at all, we should have known that the power which can daily keep twenty million flaming suns circling round itself must be terrific ; we should have guessed that when we could get clear goodness disentangled from the evil of the world, its Author must be Holy, holy, holy, and make the seraphim bow down in awe, but what we should never have dreamt is what comes next ; a voice comes from the centre of the burning light ; the Godhead has a need ; " Whom shall I — the true God — send, and who will go for us — the Three in One ? " — The Godhead asks for men.
II In his controversy with John Stuart Mill, the French philosopher Comte said : " My Deity (Humanity) has at least one advantage over yours — he needs help and can be helped." Mill met the charge by the saying, that the theist's God is not omnipotent, " He can be helped, Great Worker though He be."
* C. S. Robinson,
ISAIAH 119
But we are not compelled to doubt or deny the omnipotence of Deity before we can believe that our part in the Divine movement of the world is not a passive one ; that we are not simple recipients and blind instruments, but allies and helpers of the Eternal Power.
The subject contains (1) the Divine call, and (2) the human response to it.
i. The Divine Gall.
" Whom shall I send, and who will go for us ?" I. How do we hear it ? It is probable that we hear it first as a call from below, the cry of human need. There is a cry which comes swelling up from sickbeds, from hospitals, from men in doubt, from men in trouble, from men struggling with deadly temptations, from lads adrift, from children left upon the world, from girls driven by poverty to the .streets, from heathen lands, from Africa, from India, from China — " Whom wilt thou send ? and who will come to us ? "
IF One time at a meeting of the General Assembly, an effort was made to raise funds enough to send a young Princeton graduate to India as a missionary. A teacher in a home mission school was seen by her hostess to slip a gold ring from her finger and put it on the collection plate. Asked afterwards by the lady whose guest she was why she did it, she replied, " Because I had no money, and because I knew what it would mean if the effort to send this missionary failed." Not long before, she had been told that she would have to give up her own school because there were no funds to support it. But she would not give it up. She held on with magnificent heroism, and she contributed the ring with all its sacred associations to help another to do what was so near her own heart.
Next morning a commissioner brought the ring into the General Assembly and told the story of it. It was worth about five dollars. " I will give five dollars to send the ring back to the young woman," said a minister. " I will give five dollars," said the stated clerk. A newspaper reporter handed up five dollars to the platform. Pastors, missionaries, visitors came forward readily with the cash, each one eager to have some share in restoring the ring. In less than ten minutes more than three hundred dollars had been passed up to the desk. It was all caused by the vision they got of the self-sacrificing love that flamed in the heart of that little woman, making her glad to do something for her dear Master.^