1 C. W. Emmet.
176 THE PERFECTION OF SORROW
suffering God's most holy service ; if patience and self-sacrifice have come in any way to be a habit of human life, — the power in this change has been Christ. But because these two — to say, " Thy will be done," and to sacrifice self — are for us men the hardest and the most unnatural of things to do, Jesus Christ, in making these a conscience and a habit upon earth, has indeed performed the very highest service for man of which man can conceive.
T| A little book, entitled The Man of No Sorrows," which presents a counterfeit Christ as the real friend of the modern advancing age, startles at first by its apparent audacious blasphemy ; until we perceive how in the end the real Christ comes back, at the call of the agony of the world which banished Him — the world which has fallen from the pinnacle of selfish luxury and callous enjoyment to the very depths of hideous anarchy and despair. In repentance and horror the false Messiah cries aloud in agony to the Man of Sorrows, who returns in tender mercy to a world in the very throes of death, and casts across it the colossal shadow of His rejected cross, which shall heal its sin, and its violence and its woes.1
Tf One Sunday evening in December, Thackeray was walk- ing with two friends along the Dean Eoad, to the west of Edinburgh — one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening — such a sunset as one never forgets ; a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom ; between this cloud and the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip colour, lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness ; every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The north-west end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance, and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross ; there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what all were feeling, in the word " Calvary ! " The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine things, — of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation ; expressing his simple faith in God and in his Saviour.2
1 E. Hieks, Our Life Here, 42.
2 Dr. John Brown, ffarce Subseoivee, iii. 189.
The Death of the Soul.
JER.-MAL. — 12
Literature.
Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 103.
Campbell (R. J.), The Song of Ages, 91.
Clifford (J.), Daily Strength for Daily Living, 261.
Davidson (A. B.), The Book of Ezekiel (Cambridge Bible), 132.
Davies (T.), Sermons and Homiletical Expositions, ii. 130.
Hntcliings (W. H.)> Sermon Sketches, ii. 289.
Kingsley (C), All Saints' Day Sermons, 238.
Lewis (H. E.), By the River Chebar, 57.
Miller (G. A.), The Life Efficient, 227.
Moore (A. L.), Some Aspects of Sin, 78.
Skinner (J.), The Book of Ezekiel (Expositor's Bible), 143.
Stevens (W. B.), Sermons, 17.
Tulloch (J.), Sundays at Balmoral, 148.
Churchman's Pulpit : Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, xii. 444
(J. Tulloch). Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., v. 24 (R. W. Dale).
«78
The Death of the Soul.
The soul that sinneth, it shall die. Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive. — Ezek. xviii. 4, 27.
1. In these simple words the Prophet was directed to answer the sad proverb in which the popular voice had summed up the teachings of Hebrew history. " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge," it was said. Here was a sufficient account of their national ruin ; here was the secret of their anguish as they lay in captivity. As men will, the Jews eagerly caught at any theory of life which would divert responsibility from themselves. The Babylonian exile was their misfortune, not their fault. It was the fault of their fathers, for whose sins it was that things had come to such a pass. So they said to Ezekiel, as they had said to Jeremiah, " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." That the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children was a familiar thought to them. They had been taught from the earliest days of the nation that idolatry — the worship of strange gods — would entail an inheritance of evil upon posterity, and the truth of the lesson had been learnt by a bitter experience. But self -excuse is self-accusation; and when the Hebrews began to appeal to that national heritage which should have been a source of strength as a cause of weakness, it was plain that the conscience of the nation was at fault.
2. Ezekiel met the fixed iron fatalism of the people — the plea, " It is all a matter of heredity " — with the all-encompassing and indefeasible doctrine of the personal responsibility of each man for his own sin, as distinct from the distorted notion of inherited and transmitted guilt and suffering they were proclaiming. God