1. Salvation provides free access to God. When the Lord said, " I will ; be thou made clean," when He had put forth His healing hand, from that moment the man had a right of approach to the place where God's honour dwelt — he might again tread the courts of the Temple ; he might again offer his gifts ; he might once more worship with the worshippers. And this is the great fruit of the sacrifice of Christ — of the "I will; be thou made clean," pronounced concerning each and all of us — that it procures us admission into the holiest, into the presence of God, and so brings us under the mighty healing influences which are ever going forth from Him, that having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, purged from dead works, we are able to draw near in faith, and hence- forth to serve the living God.
1 B. C. Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord, '226.
216 THE LEPER
TJ The Son of God, at once above our life and in our life, morally Divine and circumstantially human, mediates for us be- tween the self so hard to escape, and the Infinite so hopeless to reach ; and draws us out of our mournful darkness without losing us in excess of light. He opens to us the moral and spiritual mysteries of our existence, appealing to a consciousness in us that was asleep before. And though He leaves whole worlds of thought approachable only by silent wonder, yet His own walk of heavenly communion, His words of grace and works of power, His strife of Divine sorrow, His cross of self-sacrifice, His re- appearance behind the veil of life eternal, fix on Him such holy trust and love, that, where we are denied the assurance of know- ledge, we attain the repose of faith.1
2. Salvation links men together in a holy fellowship. As the Lord sent this suppliant, before an outcast, back to the society of his fellows, a cleansed man, no longer obliged to cover his lips in shame, no longer with a miserable sense of something that separ- ated him from all his race, even so He gives unto His redeemed and sanctified a ground of true communion and fellowship one with another — He takes away the middle wall of partition that was between each man and his brethren, having slain the enmity and the selfishness by His cross.
^f I have endeavoured in my tracts to prove that if Christ be really the head of every man, and if He really have taken human flesh, there is ground for a universal fellowship among men (a fellowship that is itself the foundation of those particular fellow- ships of the nation and the family, which I also consider sacred). I have maintained that it is the business of a Church to assert this ground of universal fellowship ; that it ought to make men understand and feel how possible it is for men as men to fraternize in Christ ; how impossible it is to fraternize, except in Him.2
3. It will be said that in any case the days of isolation are gone, and gone for ever. Nation can no longer hold itself aloof from nation, and people from people, as if they did not share a common humanity, hardly as if they lived in the same world. We are daily being forced into closer contacts, welded into closer unities. Well, what is to be the consequence of all this ? With- out the touch, the healing, cleansing, life-giving touch of Christ
1 Life, and Letters of James Martineau, i. 286.
2 The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i. 258.
ST. MATTHEW vm. 2, 3 217
and His gospel, without the higher life of a genuinely Christian civilization, it may mean a disaster fearful to contemplate, whose proportions we can scarcely imagine. On the one side it can mean only destruction to the races of heathendom. It is a well- known law of ethnology that, unless there be some assimilating, unifying power such as the gospel alone can furnish, the weaker always perishes rapidly before the stronger. The contacts of trade, commercialism, and militarism bring invariably in their train contagion and infection. The heathen are apt pupils of evil. With a fatal facility they learn the new vices of the soldiers, sailors, and traders of so-called civilized and Christian peoples, and add them to their own native vices and diseases. And the combination means nothing less than destruction.
There are consequences that run in the other direction also. With these ever closer relations of commerce and conquest which are fast knitting all the world into one come new and fearful dangers to ourselves. Up from the uncleansed life of heathendom shall sweep mighty plagues, both physical and moral. That life has diseases to give us whose horror we never dreamed of. It has sins to teach us which even in the depths of our depravity we have not imagined. And soldiers and sailors, traders and merchants, wanderers in far lands, away from the restraints of home, acquaintance, and familiar associations, are apt pupils in such things. That is what contact without Christ is bound to mean. If, through that inevitable touch of people upon people, virtue does not go out from us to them, then contagion and in- fection are sure to pass from them to us and us to them. If we will not share with them our highest life, our nobler ambitions, our blessings, above all, our gospel, then they will share with us their plagues of soul and body. Therefore alongside the ware- house, the barracks, and the saloon, which always mark the first wave of an advancing Western civilization, must be built the Christian school, the hospital, and the church.