5. And yet, in spite of all, He persisted in His endeavours to reclaim the lost. He threw Himself into the work of rousing and alarming Jerusalem, as though its future might instantly be transformed. From the Mount of Olives He descended straight- way to the Temple, and the last week of His life was spent in daily intercourse with its chief priests. How vain, as it then appeared, were all His words! How little availed His sternest tones to stir the slumberous pulses of His time ! How unmoved
' Father Didon, Jesus Christy ii. 175.
ST. LUKE XIX. 41, 42 411
(save by a bitter and personal animosity) were the leaders and teachers to whom He spoke ! And when that scornful indifference on their part was exchanged at last for a distinctive enmity, with what needless prodigality, as doubtless it seemed even to some of His own disciples, He flung away His life ! Flung it away ? Yes, but only how soon and how triumphantly to take it again ! The defeat of Golgotha meant the victory of the Kesurrection. The failure of the cross was the triumph of the Crucified ; and, though by living and preaching He could not conquer the in- difference or awaken the apathy of Israel, by dying and rising again He did. It was the chief priests who amid the anguish of Calvary were the most scornful spectators and the most relentless foes. It was " a great company of the chief priests," who, on the day of Pentecost, scarce fifty days after that dark and bitter Friday, " were obedient unto the faith." And thus the tide was turned, and though Jerusalem was not rescued from the vandal hordes of Titus, Jerusalem and Judaea alike became the home and the cradle of the infant Church.
The Winning of the Soul.
«IS
Literature.
Brooke (S. A.), The Kingship of Love^ 144.
Cox (S.), Expositions, ii. 149.
Herford (B.), Anchors of the Soul, 160.
Home (C. S.), The SouVs Awakening, 253.
Jones (J. D.), The Hope of the Gospel, 98.
Lamb (R.), School Sermons, i. 191.
Maclaren (A.), The Beatitudes, 118.
Martin (A.), Winning the Soul, 3. •
Parks (L.), The Winning of the Soul, 1.
Smyth (N.), The Reality of Faith, 135.
Snell (B. J.), The All-Enfolding Love, 17.
De Soyres (J.), The Children of Wisdom, 92.
Vincent (M. R.), The Covenant of Peace, 269.
Voysey (C), Sermons, ii. (1879), No. 8.
Watkinson (W. L.), The Ashes of Roses, 31.
Watson (F.), The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, 310.
Christian World Pulpit, Iv. 212 (J. Brown) ; Ivii. 86 (F. Lynch); Ixxx.
300 (F. Y. Leggatt). Church of England Pulpit, xxx. 303 (J. Seller) ; xliv. 292 (E. M. Venn) ;
Ixii. 39 (W. C. E. Newbolt).
The Winning of the Soul.
In your patience ye shall win your souls.— Luke xxi. 19.
Our Lord's sojourn upon earth was now drawing to a close ; and, in proportion to the magnitude of approaching events, His state- ments rose in dignity and importance. Not like a false teacher, seducing with pleasant prospects, but as one who would not conceal the dark future, however disheartening it might be, He draws up the veil, and bids His disciples behold, as in a mirror, the scenes of trouble and conflict in which they would have to wrestle ; He causes to pass before their eyes, as in a vision, the fiery persecu- tions and sanguinary struggles in which Christianity was to be cradled and baptized ; and, addressing His followers as those who were to share in the suffering — nay, to go hand in hand into the furnace — He assures them with the promise "In your patience ye shall win your souls."
^ In the Authorized Version this verse is treated as if it were merely an exhortation to the disciples to be patient under the pressure of persecution and peril. But that is not what our Lord said at all. He did not bid these disciples possess their souls in patience. He said a far more striking and significant thing. He said that it was by patient endurance they were to win, to get possession of, their souls — " Ye shall win your souls " ! It is a notable and suggestive saying. It is perfectly true that some of the commentators take all the suggestiveness out of it by explaining that it really means nothing more than this : that, if the disciples remain steadfast in the midst of all their troubles, and do not turn apostate, then they shall win life in the resurrec- tion of the just. This is, indeed, how the Twentieth-century Testament translates the verse : " By your endurance you shall win yourselves life." But I cannot help feeling that such a translation is a case of conventionalizing and stereotyping what is a very unconventional and unusual expression. At any rate, I am going to take the phrase at its face value. " Ye shall win — ye shall gain possession of — your souls." And the main and
4«5
4i6 THE WINNING OF THE SOUL
central suggestion of the phrase to me is this : our souls are noi given to us ready-made, finished and complete. They have to be made. They are prizes to be won. We do not start with them — we gradually get possession of them. "Life," says Browning somewhere, " is a stuff to try the soul's strength on and educe the man." I know of no sentence that constitutes a more illum- inating commentary on this word of Christ's. The soul is not an inheritance into which we are born ; it is something we make and fashion and win for ourselves out of the varied discipline and experience of life.^