2. We reject Christ when we refuse to suffer.
We hide our faces from " the Man of Sorrows " when we wish to make this world a paradise of rest, when we neglect the duty of knowing and acquainting ourselves with the burdens which are borne by men, and begin to plan for this world as if it were a place for happiness and repose. There is no rest here ; woe to the man who attempts to make it a place of rest. Oh ! there is a false view of things which we get when we try to shut out the thought of suffering. Think of the young man and the young woman who make gaiety their home day after day and night after night, and think of Christ with the sick and maimed around Him ; think of one who surrounds himself with the entertainment of this world, and think of one whose day is spent in passing from one sick chamber to another.
The more deeply we enter into the meaning of Christ con- sidered as the Divine Man, the more distinctly revealed it becomes to us that what His life was our life is intended to be. I believe that in our best and truest Christian moments nothing less meets the demands of our own minds and hearts, than that we should become inwardly in our animating spirit, and out- wardly in our relations with the world in which we live, reduplications in small of Him whom we call Master. That we try to satisfy ourselves with less than this we should all be prepared to admit. There are instincts and there are impulses and ambitions that shrink from coming under the sovereignty of a commitment so cordial and entire. That accounts for the dis- proportionate emphasis so customarily laid upon the commercial
' A. Shepherd, Men in the Mahing, p. 193.
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feature of the atonement. It is pleasant, it fits our languid and criminal tastes to believe that Christ's work was accomplished by His sacrifice upon the cross, in such sense that we are saved by the sheer transaction of crucifixion. It passes as the orthodox view of redemption. It is easier and it is lazier to believe in a Christ that is going to pay my debts for me than it is to grow up iu Christ into a Divine endowment, that shall be itself the cure for insolvency and the material of wealth Divine and inexhaustible. You have really done nothing for a poor man by paying his debts for him, unless in addition to squaring his old accounts you have dealt with him in such manner as to guarantee him against being similarly involved in the time to come. Emphasise as we may the merely ransoming work of Christ, we are not made free men by having our fetters broken off, and we are not made wealthy men by having our debts paid. It is not what Christ delivers us from, but what He translates us into that makes us saved men in Christ. That brings us on to the clear ground of the positive feature of Christian character ; and there is no more distinct or comprehensive way of stating that positive feature than to say that it involves being in our limited capacity exactly what He was in His infinite capacity. Christ as we know Him in history is nothing more or less than the ideal man actualised. The essential features of Christ we are therefore to look upon as prescriptive. Christ's being. His experience, His relations to men, the attitude in which He stood towards what concerned His contemporaries, the feelings which their concerns excited in Him — all of that becomes practically just so much direct ordinance binding itself upon us closely and authoritatively. What He was in His Divine way we are bound to become in our human way.
IT You cannot drift down the tide of event and be a Christ man or a Christ woman. The world is to be saved ; the tide is to be reversed. Man inspired of God is to do it ; and you cannot buckle yourself down to that problem in Christian wholehearted- ness and not grow sober under it. A thousand torchlights and ten thousand brass bands will not convert tlie world-tragedy into a world-comedy, or crinkle the fixed lines of your seriousness into merriment. Now you see the philosophy of the sober Christ. He flung Himself against forty centuries of bad event, and the Divine Man was bruised by the impact. He stood up
284 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
and let forty centuries jump on Him; He held His own, but blood brake through His pores in perspiration, and about that there is nothing humorous.^
3. We reject Christ when we refuse to relieve suffering. There is an evil which is done in this world by the " want of thought " ; that is the sin of those who go through life, not suspecting, and not caring to inquire, how much there is of human desolation. And there is an evil which is done in this world by " the want of heart " ; that is the sin of those who are familiar with all that you can tell them of misery, and still go on feasting, and dressing, and amusing themselves, and doling out with a grudge the driblets of their income in the sacred cause of benevolence.