George Jackson

“ Life is like a great tree which casts forth on every side its far-spreading branches. Yet all that moving, breathing mystery of twig and branch and foliage springs from a single root. To us the mystery is baffling in its complexity: we have looked at the branches. To God it is simple, clear: He sees the hidden root from which it springs. So that, to go back to our former illustration, it is only our ignorance which compels us to speak of "alpacas" in the moral world. To perfect knowledge they will prove to be, as Mr. Selby says, either slightly-disguised sheep or slightly-disguised goats. ”

“ Is not this disparity the very sign-manual of the Holy Spirit's presence? "Why," asked Peter, when the multitude were filled with wonder and amazement at the healing of the lame man, "Why fasten ye your eyes on us as though by our own power or godliness we had made him to walk?" Work that is really of God can never be accounted for in that fashion. There is always a something in the effects which cannot be traced back to a human cause. Let "our own power and godliness" be what they may--and they can never be too great--they are all vain and helpless apart from the power of God. ”

“ Look at the very form of Peter's question: "How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?" "My brother" the wrong-doer, myself the wronged--that is what we are all ready to assume. But what if it is I who have need to be forgiven? But this is what our pride will not suffer us to believe. That "bold villain" Shame, who plucked Faithful by the elbow in the Valley of Humiliation, and sought to persuade him that it is a shame to ask one's neighbour forgiveness for petty faults, or to make restitution where we have taken from any, is always quick to seize his opportunity. ”

“ If Jesus was only a brave man, paying with His life the penalty of His bravery in the streets of Jerusalem, it is wasting words to call Him "the Saviour of the world." If His death were only a martyrdom, then, though we may honour Him as we honour Socrates, and many another name in the long roll of "the noble army of martyrs," yet He can no more be our Redeemer than can any one of them. But it was not so that Christ thought of His death. The martyr dies because he must; Christ died because He would. The strong hands of violent men snatch away the martyr's life from him ”

“ We cannot open the Gospels, as we might some modern theological treatise, and read out from them a scientific exposition of sin--its origin, its nature, its treatment. The New Testament is not like a museum, where the flowers are dried and pressed, and the fossils lie carefully arranged within glass cases, and everything is duly classified and labelled. Rather it is like nature itself, where the flowers grow wild at our feet, and the rocks lie as the Creator's hand left them, and where each man must do the classifying and labelling for himself. ”

“ To be good as Christ was good, here in very truth is the summum bonum of life, the greatest thing in the world, that which, before all other things, a man should seek to make his own, There are times, perhaps, in the lives of all of us when we are tempted to doubt it--times when the kingdoms of this world, the kingdoms of wealth and power and knowledge lie stretched at our feet, and the whispering fiend at our elbow bids us bow and enter in. ”

“ We can pass new laws; only the grace of God can make new men. "For my part," says Kingsley once more, speaking through the lips of his tailor-poet, "I seem to have learnt that the only thing to regenerate the world is not more of any system, good or bad; but simply more of the Spirit of God." "Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God." ”

“ Build what we may on the unrevealed mercies of the future for them that live and die in the darkness of ignorance, let us build nothing for ourselves who are shutting our eyes and closing our hearts to the Divine light and love which are already ours.
"Behold, then, the goodness and severity of God;" and may His goodness lead us to repentance, that His severity we may never know. This is, indeed, His will for every one of us: He has "appointed us not unto wrath, but unto the obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ." If we are lost we are suicides. ”

“ Wherefore, let us take heed lest, by our sullen refusal to forgive, we be thrusting some penitent soul back into the miry depths, whence, slowly and painfully, it is winning its way into the light and love of God.
Let us forgive for Christ's sake, because of that which God through Him has done for us. When, day by day, we pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us," what we are asking is, that God will deal with us as we are dealing with others. Do we mean what we say? Are we showing a mercy as large as we need? ”

“ We have no theories of God and the universe which bar the possibility of His intervention in the little lives of men. There is nothing incredible to us in the doctrine of a particular Providence. But where, we ask, is the proof of it? We would fain believe, but the facts of experience seem too strong for us. A hundred thousand Armenians butchered at the will of an inhuman despot, a whole city buried under a volcano's fiery hail, countless multitudes suffering the slow torture of death by famine--can such things be and God really care? ”

“ Just as a lover of pictures will sometimes discover a portrait, the work of an old master, marred and disfigured by the dirt and neglect of years, and will patiently cleanse and retouch it, till the lips seem to speak again, and the old light shines in the eyes, and all its hidden glory is revealed once more, so does Christ bring out the Divine image, hidden but never lost, in the sinful souls of men. ”

“ He who strives to bring into the grey, monotonous lives of the toilers of our great cities the sweet, refining influences of art, and music and literature, he who helps his fellows to see and to love the true and the beautiful and the good, is not one whit less a benefactor of his kind than he who obtains for them better food and better homes. Man shall not live by bread alone, and they who use their wealth to minister to a higher life serve us not less really than they who provide for our physical needs. ”

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"The infinite worth of the human soul"--this is a discovery the glory of which, it is no exaggeration to say, belongs wholly to Christ. It is said that one of the most magnificent diamonds in Europe, which to-day blazes in a king's crown, once lay for months on a stall in a piazza at Rome labelled, "Rock-crystal, price one franc." And it was thus that for ages the priceless jewel of the soul lay unheeded and despised of men. Before Christ came, men honoured the rich, and the great, and the wise, as we honour them now; but man as man was of little or no account. ”

“ He "that studieth revenge," says Bacon, "keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well." "If thou hast not mercy for others," says Sir Thomas Browne, "yet be not cruel unto thyself; to ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies." There is no misery worse than that of a mind which broods continually over its own wrongs, be they real or only fancied. There is no gloom so deep and dark as that which settles on a hard and unrelenting soul. ”

“ What is to become of the countless multitudes in heathen lands who die without having so much as heard of Christ? How will God deal with those even in our own Christian land to whom, at least as it seems to us, this life has brought no adequate opportunity of salvation? What will happen in that dim twilight land betwixt death and judgment which men call "the intermediate state"? Will they be few or many who at last will be for ever outcasts from the presence of God? ”

“ But for them, too, the path leads to Gethsemane, and some day they also will lie prostrate in an agony, under the darkening olive trees. And some there are to whom life seems but one long Gethsemane. In that dread agony God help us to pray! Nay, what else then can a man do but, as Browning says, catch at God's skirts and pray? But that he can do. Death may build its dividing walls great and high, such as our feet can never scale; it cannot roof them over and shut us out from God. ”

“ What is the significance of the parable of the leaven hid in three measures of meal, and still more, of that group of parables which depict the growth of the kingdom--the parables of the sower, the wheat and tares, the mustard-seed, and the seed growing gradually? Does not all this point not to a great catastrophe nigh at hand, which should bring to an end the existing order of things, but rather to just such a future for the kingdom of God on earth as the actual course of history reveals? ”

“ As we have opportunity we are to do good unto all men. The same lesson with, if possible, still greater emphasis, Christ taught in the Upper Room: "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." A love that goes all the way with human need, that gives not itself by measure, that is not chilled by indifference, nor thwarted by ingratitude, that fights against evil until it overcomes it--such was the love He gave, and such is the love He asks. ”

“ If love will not let you mock your child, think you, will God be less good than you yourselves are?
But more even than by His words did Christ by His life reveal to us the Father. "He that hath seen Me," He said to Philip, "hath seen the Father." In what He was and did, in His life and in His death, we read what God is. We follow Him from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from Nazareth to Gennesaret, from Gennesaret to Jerusalem, to the Upper Room, to Gethsemane, and to Calvary, and at every step of the way He says to us, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." ”

“ Into Thy hands--thither Jesus passed from the Cross and the cruel hands of men; thither have passed the lost ones of our love; thither, too, we in our turn shall pass. Why, then, if we believe in Jesus should we be afraid? "Having death for my friend," says an unknown Greek writer, "I tremble not at shadows." Having Jesus for our friend we tremble not at death.
Further, Christ taught us, the heavenly life is a life of service. Every one knows how largely the idea of rest has entered into our common conceptions of the future. ”

“ I dare not say to myself, and therefore I dare not say to others, that, let a man live as he may, it yet shall be well with him in the end. The facts of experience are against it; the words of Christ are against it. "The very conception of human freedom involves the possibility of its permanent misuse, of what our Lord Himself calls 'eternal sin.'" If a man can go on successfully resisting Divine grace in this life, what reason have we for supposing that it would suddenly become irresistible in another life? ”

“ The Greek Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the various Protestant Churches, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Christian men and women out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation,--all unite to confess the glory of Christ in the words of the ancient Creed: "I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God." ”

“ We need to learn to count more on God, to grasp more fully the glorious breadth of promise which He has given us in His Spirit, to remember that, not only in the Church, but in the world--which is His world--that Spirit is always present to testify of God, to convict men of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.
And yet, while we encourage ourselves with thoughts like these, we dare not forget that men may resist, they may grieve, they may quench the Holy Spirit. He is grieved whensoever He is resisted; He may be resisted until He is quenched. ”

“ It is the evening hour, and as the bell rings which calls the villagers to worship, the workers in the field lay aside the implements of their toil, and with folded hands and bowed heads, stand for a moment in silent prayer. It is a picture of what every life should be, of what every life must be, which has taken as its pattern the Perfect Life in which work and prayer are blent like bells of sweet accord. ”

“ Is there one among us who is tempting a brother man to dishonesty, to drink, to lust; who is pushing some thoughtless girl down the steep and slippery slope which ends--we know where? Then let him stop and listen, not to me, but to Christ. Never, I think, did He speak with such solemn, heart-shaking emphasis, and He says that it were better a man should die, that he should die this night, die the most miserable and shameful death, than that he should bring the blood of another's soul upon his head. ”

“ There is no deliberate intention of setting ritual above righteousness, but it is so much easier to count one's beads than to curb one's temper, so much easier to fast in Lent than to be unswervingly just, that if once the easier thing gets attached to it an exaggerated importance, fidelity in it is allowed to atone for laxity in greater things, and the last result is Pharisaism, where we see conscience concerned about the tithing of garden herbs, but with no power over the life, and religion not merely tolerating but actually ministering to moral evil. ”

“ This two-fold note sounds through all Christ's teaching. And the reason is not far to seek. As Jesus looked on life, He saw how the passionate quest for gold was starving all the higher ideals of life. Men were concentrating their souls on pence till they could think of nothing else. For mammon's sake they were turning away from the kingdom of heaven. The spirit of covetousness was breaking the peace of households, setting brother against brother, making men hard and fierce and relentless. Under its hot breath the fairest growths of the spirit were drooping and ready to die. ”

“ The reward of work well done is more work; faithfulness in few things brings lordship over many. Have we not here a ray of light on the mystery of unfinished lives? We do not murmur when the old and tired are gathered to their rest; but when little children die, when youth falls in life's morning, when the strong man is cut off in his strength, we know not what to say. But do not "His servants serve Him" there as well as here? Their work is not done; in ways beyond our thoughts it is going forward still. ”

“ Care is the cancer of the heart, and if our words can go no deeper than they have yet gone, it can never be cured. It is an inward spiritual derangement, which calls for something more than little bits of good advice in order to put it right. And if, again, we turn to the words of Jesus, we shall find the needed something more is given. The care-worn soul, for its cure, must be taken out of itself. "Oh the bliss of waking," says some one, "with all one's thoughts turned outward!" It is the power to do that, to turn, and to keep turned, one's thoughts outwards that the care-ridden need ”

“ The old question challenges us with a force the Psalmist could not feel: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou are mindful of him? and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" The infinity of God, the nothingness of man: the poor brain reels before the contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask, that He whose dwelling-place is eternity should care for us even as we care for our children? ”

“ Verily this law of love is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.
There is no room to do more than mention the fact which crowns the revelation of this new law of righteousness. Christ's words about goodness do not come to us alone; they come united with a life which is their best exposition. Christ is all His followers are to be; in Him the righteousness of the kingdom is incarnate. From henceforth the righteous man is the Christ-like man. ”

“ We cannot separate men thus because human character is so complex. But complexity is a relative term; it depends on the eyes which behold it; and our naming a thing complex may be but another way of declaring our ignorance concerning it. We all know how a character, a life, a course of events, which, on first view, seemed but a tangled, twisted skein, on closer acquaintance often smooths itself out into perfect simplicity. And there is surely no difficulty in believing that it should be so with human life when it is judged by the perfect knowledge of God. ”

“ They who strive to save their fellows, they who go down into the depths that they may lift men up, see so much of the darkened under-side of human life, they are brought so close up to the ugly facts of human baseness, human trickery, human ingratitude, that, unless there be behind them the staying, steadying power of the faith and love of Christ, they cannot long endure the strain; they grow weary in well-doing, perchance even they grow bitter and contemptuous, and in a little while the tasks they have taken up fall unfinished from their hands. ”

“ We are interested in them, for the most part, when, by their work, or their wealth, or their fame, they have added something to themselves; in other words, we become interested when they become interesting. But that which gave worth to man in Christ's eyes lay beneath all these merely adventitious circumstances of his life, in his naked humanity, in what he was, or might be, in himself. This is why to Him all souls were dear. We love them that love us, the loving and the lovable; Christ loved the unloving and the unlovable. He was named, and rightly named, "Friend of publicans and sinners." ”

“ That Jesus, if He were merely a good man, with a good man's consciousness of and sensitiveness to His own weakness and limitations, could yet have arrogated to Himself the right to be the supreme judge and final arbiter of the destinies of mankind, is simply not thinkable. And the more we ponder the stupendous claim which Christ makes, the more must we feel that it is either superhuman authority which speaks to us here or superhuman arrogance. Either Christ spoke out of the depths of His own Divine consciousness, knowing that the Father had committed all judgment unto the Son ”