She lifted their heads with her tender hands. And sustained them with rods and osier-bands; If the flowers had been her own infants, she Could never have nursed them more tenderly.
And all killing insects and gnawing worms, And things of obscene and unlovely forms, She bore, in a basket of Indian woof. Into the rough woods far aloof, —
In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full, The freshest her gentle hands could pull For the poor banished insects, whose intent, Although they did ill, was innocent.''
3. Man in the economy of God is king of the world, but he has lost his sceptre, has lost the key of the mysteries of the world in which he lives, and cannot govern it as he ought to govern, is unable to realise the creation that lies beneath
^ 6. Campbell Morgan. =* Skeiley, " Tins bensitivo Plant."
494 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
him. Therefore the kingdom of man is a devastated kingdom, because he is a discrowned king ; or in the language of Isaiah, "the earth also is polluted under the inhabitants thereof." Man's moral disease has permeated the material universe ; or as St. Paul says, " the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now . . . waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God." Man's moral regeneration will permeate the material universe, and issue in its remaking.
Turning to the Book of Psalms, that wonderful literature of Hebrew expectation and hope and confidence, we hear one of the singers of Israel as he first inquires —
What is man, that thou art mindful of him ?
And then, as in harmony with the original story of creation, he declares —
Thou hast put all things under his feet:
All sheep and oxen.
Yea, and the beasts of the field;
The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea.
Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
We pass to the New Testament, and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, a logician as well as a poet, declares, after quoting from the singer of Israel, that all the Divine intention is seen realised in Christ as representative Man. "Now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus." He thus affirms that while all things are not yet seen under the perfect dominion of man, Jesus is seen, the risen Christ, and the vision of Him is the assurance that the whole creation will yet be redeemed from its groaning and travailing in pain, and realise the fulness of its beauty and glory.
Perfect I call Thy plan:
Thanks that I was a man !
Maker, remake, complete, — I trust what Thou shalt do!*
* B. Browning, "Rabbi Ben Ezra."
The Crowned Saviour.
Literature.
Aitchison (J.), The Children's Own, 157.
Arnold (T.), Sermons : Christian Life and Doctrine, 54.
Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, 616.
Chadwick (G. A.), The Gospel of St. Mark, 442.
Gregory (J. Robinson), Scripture Truths made Simple, 113.
Jones (J. D.), The Gospel of Grace, 134.
Krummacher (F. W.), The Risen Redeems, 212.
Mackenzie (W. Lomax), Pure Religion, 28.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions of Holy Scripture, St. Mark, ix.-xvi., 312.
Morgan (G. Campbell), The Crises of the Christ, 347.
Winkworth (S.), Tauler's Life and Sermons, 334.
The Churchman's Pulpit, pt. 17, Ascension Day.
The Church Pulpit Year-Book, 1908, 111.
Five Minute Sermons. Paulist, New Series, i. 264.
Sermons on tha Gospels, Advent to Trinity, 259.
496
The Crowned Saviour.
So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken unto them, was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God. — xvi. 19.
How strangely calm and brief is this record of so stupendous an event ! Do these sparing and reverent words sound like the product of devout imagination, embellishing with legend the facts of history ? Their very restrainedness, calmness, matter- of-factness, if we may so call it, is a strong guarantee that they are the utterance of an eye-witness, who verily saw what he tells so simply. There is something sublime in the contrast between the magnificence and almost inconceivable grandeur of the thing commu*iicated, and the quiet words, so few, so sober, so wanting in all detail, in which it is told. That stupendous fact of Christ sitting at the right hand of God is the one which should fill the present for us all. Even as the Cross should fill the past, and the coming for Judgment should fill the future, so for us the one central thought about the present, in its loftiest relations, should be the throned Christ at God's right hand. It is that thought of the session of Jesus by the side of the Majesty of the Heavens that brings out the profound teaching of the Ascension, and the practical lessons which it suggests.
The story of the Ascension of Jesus is given three times in the New Testament. It is given in the verse of the text (if the last eleven verses formed no part of the original Gospel by St. Mark, they still contain a very early testimony to the current belief of the primitive Church) ; it is given very briefly in the concluding verses of St. Luke's Gospel ; and it is given once again by St. Luke with more circumstantiality and detail in the opening chapter of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. All three accounts are marked by a certain reticence and reverent ST. MARK — 32