Jesus Exultant;
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
+ ' 6> <* 4? *. **A* ^°^ ,0 w '^cy **^ 4 o • Wffls ^ v 'bv* f. «,. .,* .vs*£ I*" *!l DANIEL STEELE. JESUS EXULTANT; OR, CHRIST NO PESSIMIST, And Other Essays. BY / DANIEL STEELE, D. D., RECENT PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY. AUTHOR OF "LOVE ENTHRONED," "MILESTONE PAPERS," " ANTINOMIAN1SM REVIVED," " COMMENTARIES ON LEVITICUS, NUMBERS AND JOSHUA," " HALF HOURS WITH ST. PAUL," "THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER," AND CO-AUTHOR OF " PEOPLE'S NEW TESTAMENT COM- MENTARY," AND REVISER OF " BINNEY's THE- OLOGICAL COMPEND IMPROVED." BOSTON AND CHICAGO : CHRISTIAN WITNESS CO. 1899. &«&*¥£ 24104 Copyrighted, 1899, By The Christian Witness Company. TWO COPIES REC IVEO, 111899 DeMcator^* To the Memory of my Mother, Clarissa Brainerd Steele. 1788—1853. PKEFACE. The sunset hour of life's brief day has afforded me leisure, and God has given strength to review the themes which have engrossed my thoughts during its early and midday hours. So many and so emphatic are the daily commendations of some of the fruits of those hours of happy toil, which are in the form of books, that the writer has been encouraged to gather another basketful of the same kind of fruit and send it to the world's autumnal market ere the winter's snows shall have covered his orchard. This basket contains a greater variety than he has ever set before the Christian public. He has purposely omitted the culture of one species — the crab apple. The special purpose of the first two chapters is to cheer the hearts of all Christian laborers with the assurance of the ultimate evangelization of the whole world by the agencies now employed in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, and to counteract the depressing effects of that theory of the last things which teaches that the world will wax worse till the end of the present age. The seventeenth essay institutes a search among all the schools of philosophy for a measure large enough to ascertain the proportions of man. The search demonstrates that the gospel of Christ is the only mirror in which man can get a full-length view of his own greatness. The latter part of this chapter the reader will find more interesting than the beginning. D. S. Milton. November 7, 1S98. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. Jesus Exultant 1 II. Wesley Expectant 30 III. The Whole Family in Heaven and Earth . 41 IV. Beholding and Sharing Christ's Glory ... 63 V. The Call to Preach the Gospel 81 VI. St. Paul's Only Theme 98 VLL The Kingdom of God 118 VIII. The Day-Star in the Heart 144 IX. The Words of Eternal Life 165 X. The Sons of God 183 XI. Power from on High 200 XII. The Holy Spirit's Earthly Temple 223 XIII. Buying and Selling Truth 234 XIV. The Unsearchable Riches 253 XV. Knowing by Obeying 278 XVI. The Greater Works of Believers 295 XVII. What is Man? 309 JESUS EXULTANT. CHAPTEE I. JESUS EXULTANT.* " Jesus exultavit Spiritu Sancto."— Luke x. 21, Vulgate. A peasant youth went forth one day from a mean and obscure country village in the East with the idea that he would conquer the whole world. The method of con- quest adopted by this aspiring mechanic in the humble walks of a private citizen was as novel as his scheme ap- peared to be chimerical. He did not employ the printing- press to laud his merits and create public opinion in his favor. This instrument of power had not been invented and enthroned over civilized society. This young artif- icer, who had just left the workshop with callous palms, had no intention of raising a new political party to lift him into supreme authority by its votes as a demagogue identifying himself with the "dear people" of whose rights he was, by loud profession, to be the philanthropic champion. It was not in his programme to amass vast armies and direct them with Napoleonic strategy over bloody battlefields to the empire of the world. It was judgment in the * « He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set earth."— Isaiah xlii. 4. 2 JESDS EXULTANT. not his purpose to intensify race prejudice and to hurl the strongest nation against the weaker ones in accord with the wicked maxim of tyrants, "divide and con- quer;" nor did he organize secret leagues sworn to com- pass his ambitious design. Nor did he plot to crown him- self lord of all by the employment of human cunning and Jesuitical intrigue in the cabinets of kings. He re- lied only on that intangible abstraction which men call truth. This was his victorious sword. His bullets and bombs, his cannon balls, grape and canister shot were words which have been contemptuously defined as "mouthfuls of spoken wind." His agents were to be no astute diplomatists skilled in making the worse appear the better reason; no philosophers from the Porch or the Academy, but a company of ordinary craftsmen drilled only in the rudest forms of labor. "With a manifesto as magnificent as the supremacy of the world, and with weapons so impracticable, and agen- cies so insufficient, this uncultured, untravelled, un- known young man began to astonish and alarm his fam- ily and narrow circle of friends by declarations implying that his scheme of universal conquest was absolutely certain of accomplishment. He even coolly assumes it as a fact already accomplished. Hear him incidentally drop the assurance of his ultimate triumph over all the nations of the earth. Of a woman who had at great self- sacrifice expressed confidence in his character, sympathy with his purpose and loyalty to, his person, he said: "Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole woeld, that also which this woman hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her." Thus when sur- JESUS EXULTANT. 3 rounded by a beggarly retinue of a dozen common work- ing men, as feeble a military force as FalstafFs regi- ment, together with a few women gathered from homes of poverty, and possibly from haunts of vice, this villager of Galilee assumes without the least waver of doubt that, beyond oceans yet unnavigated, and through islands and continents yet undiscovered, his heralds will surely make their way and lift up their voices to proclaim his right to rule the world, despite the foreseen and foretold re- sistance of every nation to the proclamation of this new King. And what is still more wonderful, the sovereignty at which he aimed is far more difficult than that acquired and exercised by the Alexanders, Caesars and Napoleons of history. It was not the subjugation of men's persons by physical force, but the conquest of their hearts by a purely spiritual power working through the enlighten- ment of the intellect, the conviction of the moral reason, and the persuasion of the will. It is a harder task for a man to make another love and obey him with a disinter- ested affection and a genuine loyalty than it is to make a million men fear, cower and bow the cringing knee at the behest of armed power. This young man aimed at a still higher mark, the radical transformation of the whole human race from sensual to spiritual; from sinful to holy; from slavery to lust to the freedom of purity; from the yoke of unholy tempers and degrading passions to obedience to conscience; and from a love of falsehood to delight in the truth. He purposed to re-create fallen humanity by extracting the inveterate, hereditary prone- ness to sin which sooner or later breaks out in personal sin entailing guilt. If you wish to realize on a small 4 JESUS EXULTANT. scale the ease or difficulty of this transformation, try to lift some sinner out of the miry pit in which he is rapidly sinking. Go to yonder fallen sister and try to lure her back to the path of virtue; go to that vile rake boasting of his fiendish skill in pushing frailty off the precipice of infamy, and turn him into a self-sacrificing missionary to the Congo State, willing to lose his life to save a soul; join a woman's crusade against the saloon and try to breathe humane feelings into the flinty heart of the money-worshipping dramseller; or attempt the reforma- tion of one poor, bloated, beer-soaked, blear-eyed sot, lift- ing him out of the gutter and so transfiguring him as to be a fit companion of saints in this world and worthy to be enthroned with archangels in the world to come. Go try to inspire generosity in the heart of that aged miser sleepless on his bags of gold. Endeavor to effect a radi- cal change in these characters whose evil habits are as changeless as the spots of the leopard or the hue of the Ethiopian, by turning their natures from their down- ward course and making them run uphill toward holi- ness and heaven. Go forth and try to make all bad peo- ple love you, not by warm hand-shakings as a candidate on election day, not by patting vile men on the shoulder and calling them "jolly good fellows," not by flattering their pride and excusing their vices, but by scathing re- bukes for their misdeeds, and you will begin to realize the magnitude of the work to which this Hebrew Ee- former confidently put his hand. By uncovering every man's sins he proposed to attach him by cords of love to his own person. It was the attempt to perform the pro- phetic miracle of changing the thorn into the fir tree and I JESUS EXULTANT.