T[ Often in our own time the Gospel has proved its undimin- ished power to save. It arrested the gentle and erudite Thomas Bilney of Cambridge when in 1517 he read the Greek Testament of Erasmus. So truly did it win the young scholar for Christ that he became one of the most zealous reformers of England, and one of the first martyrs of the sixteenth century. It was the sublime words of the Gospel truth, " Now unto the King eternal, immortal and invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever," entering the stately mind of young Jonathan Edwards, that turned him from darkness to light, and from sin to the service of God. It was the same power of God, which through the faithful labours of Dr. Moffat in South Africa, civilized and saved the savage outlaw African, changing the daring ruffian into a gentle and child-like follower of Christ, even to the close of his life.2
5. And it is the power of God to every one that believeth. It is at once a very broad and a very narrow Gospel. It knows no natural or social distinction between man and man. It declares that "there is no distinction." What we regard as differences between one man and another are mere surface differences. Morally, all belong to the same category, " all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." This Gospel is broad, like the heart of God. " To every one that believeth." But it is narrow also. It is to those that believe, to those alone. We must attend 1 J. C. Lambert. 3 J. Little.
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to its word. We must feel the need of its healing. We must yearn for its touch. Knowing it is of God, we must trust in its mercy. That is the narrowness of the Gospel. It is the 'power of God, but it cannot save us apart from our moral consciousness, our repentance, our desire, our consent. Our heart must respond to the tender breathing love of God.
T[ That Paul knew well what work this Gospel had to do in the world is evident from this chapter — a chapter that cannot be read in public. The appalling meaning of sin both for the body and for the mind is expressed in three phrases : " God gave them up unto uncleanness " ; " God gave them up unto vile affections " ; " God gave them up to a reprobate mind." Whatever you may think or say about Paul's theology, profound thinker as he was, his knowledge of human life was not academic. He held by a theory of sin which, as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton says, " accounts for White- chapel," and accounted for an ancient Eome that was far worse than any modern London. He toned nothing down. He faced the grim facts of life like a wise and skilful surgeon who must track a loathsome disease down to its malignant roots. Paul speaks here of men " who refused to have God in their knowledge," whose lives were — note the awful phrase — " hateful to God." 1
Tj " I am not ashamed of the gospel " — that is easily said by a man who has received it as a decent tradition, and has never tried to do anything with it; but when people are in earnest about their faith and their duty they are much more likely to confess that sometimes they have been ashamed. It is easy to say, " Of course, Christ can save any man " ; but when you have realized the desperate conditions of a single family or a single individual, and go to better these conditions by some Christian influence, you may well have visitings of doubt: I wonder if many of us, with a real will to help, could walk along the Cowgate on a Saturday night, and watch the people without some inward disquiet : — women whose features have been marred by the blows of husband and lover, and marred more sadly by a life of riot and idleness ; men who have grown grey without the discipline of settled labour, and without the ministry of purifying thought, the bondsmen of our society for whom the pleasures and the interests and the teachings which are most to us have no existence; lads clustering idly at the corners, with bad secrets passi g round, waiting for the vice or the crime which will catch them down to a lower depth. You believe that Christ can save all; but if you were asked to speak of Christ to these, the
1 C. S. Home.
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difficulties in them and in yourself would gather up before you, and if you began it would be with a burdened feeling that nothing great would come of it. Habit and circumstance are strong, and the wood, it seems, is too rotten to hold the nail. That is the test which searches men, and it was in presence of this test that Paul said, I am not ashamed. Knowing all the disadvantage and the unlikelihood, he believed that Jesus Christ could make the balance even.1
Can peach renew lost bloom,
Or violet lost perfume,
Or sullied snow turn white as overnight?