^ G. Matheson, Times of Retirement, 92.
2 H. S. Holland and W. S. Rockstro, Jenny Lind the Artist, i. 55. REV. 2 1
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iv. The Evidence of the Newness.
1. The first evidence will be the death-hlow of evil — What are the present evils under which the creation groans and travails ? Suffering is one. It is Stoicism, not Christianity, that says suffering is no evil. Sickness and weakness are evils ; feebleness of hand and step ; toil and want ; old age, solitary and begrudged and despised ; sorrow and crying, not to be comforted because the loved one is not. All these things will depart on that day, because that will be the execution-day of sin.
^ If the end of Providence were to secure this race in a garden of Eden, lapped round with comfort where no one should ever taste hunger or pain or loss, then let it be freely granted that this world is a conspicuous failure. It is so badly arranged and so loosely governed that it would bring scandal on a human monarch. Things are so much out of joint that we are obliged to seek for another working theory of life than the garden one, and we find it in the New Testament. Jesus and His Apostles teach that the supreme success of life is not to escape pain but to lay hold on righteousness, not to possess but to be holy, not to get things from God but to be like God. They were ever bidding Christians beware of ease, ever rousing them to surrender and sacrifice. They never complained of their own hard lot, but rather considered that it was gain. Winds blowing off the snow breed hardy men, and fierce seas breaking on rocky coasts make skilful seamen ; and if the mind of God was to compel this race up the arduous road that leads to perfection, our dark experience is an open secret.^
2. The second evidence of the renovation will be the re- instalment of God. — The Seer saw no temple therein. Why? Because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. He saw no sun. Why ? Because the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. What is the occasion of sickness ? It is because the Healer is absent from the earth. Of Death? Because the Life-giver is not at hand. Of loneliness ? Because sin has taken away our Lord. But thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
^ Do we not believe in the mission of the Christ on earth ? Do we not believe that the Kingdom of God can come, and His
1 John Watson, The Potter's Wheel, 134.
REVELATION xxi.
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will be done, on earth ? It was just this that our Lord taught to be saving faith. His offer of salvation was conditioned ; it de- pended on a corporate repentance from all acquiescence in evil, a joyous corporate expectation of the perfect good. It is this joyous expectation that ought to be embodied in all our creeds. It is this faith that the Kingdom of Love is at hand that we should be reciting at all our formal worship. It is by this faith, and by this faith alone, that we can accept the full salvation of our Lord Jesus Christ which has been so often rejected.
The revelation of the Gospel, if we judge of it by its main drift and most salient characteristics, was certainly to declare God's intention of bringing about a renovated earth — to proclaim that it was to come, not by coercion, but by the power of love ; not by God without man, but by God within man, who is able
" To accomplish all — more than all things. Far transcending all our prayers, all our imaginings, To an extent whose measure is that mighty impulse which thrills us through" (Eph. iii. 20, Way's translation).
Loving-kindness springs naturally from this realization of God's love and power ; and the strength of man's corporate im- pulse of faith and loving-kindness is the measure of God's power on earth.i
V. The Results of the Newness.
1. The "far-off'* is brought nigh. — He who was a stranger to God becomes a child in his Father's house, an heir of God, a joint- heir with Jesus Christ. When John Wesley was dying, in a brief moment of returning consciousness, he asked, "What was the text that I preached upon last Sunday ? " And when one stand- ing beside him repeated, " For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich," he exclaimed, " Yes, that is it. There is no other."
^ In the supreme and central fact of the Kesurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the great utterance, " Behold, I make all things new," finds its typical fulfilment. It is the verity and the hope of the Kesurrection that strikes the keynote of the New Testament : the idea of renewal, of a new beginning, of a new spiritual impulse. The latest book of the Old Testament, Ecclesi- astes, sums up the experience of humanity before the Saviour's