SERMON X - William Elbert Munsey
CHRIST THE WAY (DISCOURSE II.)
” I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” — John 14:6.
WHEN the great question of death and continued life was presented to man’s power of choice, alas! he chose Death. This involved: —
I. The destruction of the harmony of man’s relations with God. I have shown you that man’s capacity for moral character is threefold ; expressed by the words intellect, sensibilities, and conduct. I have shown you that the character of spiritual life is also threefold, having a principle, essence, and development, its principal faith in God, its essence love to God, its development obedience to God. I have shown you that each part of man’s threefold capacity for moral character has its corresponding and appropriate element in the threefold nature of spiritual life ; and that before man fell, being in a state of life, faith in God, the principle of spiritual life, was lodged in his intellect ; love to God, the essence of spiritual life, was lodged in his sensibilities ; and obedience to God, the development of spiritual life, was lodged in his conduct — the last of which, at least, as an abstraction.
Now, corresponding with man’s threefold capacity for moral character, and with the threefold nature of spiritual life, sin is also threefold in its character — having a principle, essence, and development. The principle of sin is unbelief in God, the essence of sin is enmity to God, the develop- ment of sin is disobedience to God — each part correspond ing respectively as the antipode of the several parts respect- ively of spiritual life. Now, any man can see that when sin enters the soul, its principle, unbelief in God, naturally takes the place of faith in God, the principle of spiritual life in the intellect ; its essence, enmity to God, naturally takes the place of love to God, the essence of spiritual life in the sen- sibilities ; and its development, disobedience to God, natu- rally takes the place of obedience to God, the development of spiritual life in the conduct — and the man is dead. All the elements of spiritual life being superseded by their con- traries, as matter of course the man is spiritually dead ac- cording to the laws of cause and effect — spiritually dead, in- dependent of any executive power to enforce the penalty of his transgression.
The penalty of sin is no arbitrary punishment inflicted by God upon the sinner because the sinner sins, but is the natu- ral effect of sin as its cause. Sin, and its penalty, spiritual death, are cause and effect; and, as such, are so inseparable that the one never did or can exist without the other. Notice how naturally sin produced death, in the sin of the first woman. When Eve, in answer to Satan’s question whether God had forbidden her and Adam to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden, told Satan that God had forbidden them to eat of the fruit of one under the penalty of death, he said to Eve, “Ye shall not surely die.” Eve believed the tempter and disbelieved God — and unbelief, the principle of sin, took the place of faith in God, the principle of spiritual life in the in- tellect — and thus far she died. Unbelief, of itself, would have been followed by the other elements of sin superseding the remaining elements of spiritual life, issuing in total death ; but all these steps are further illustrated in the narrative.
Satan furthermore said, ” Hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree in the garden ? ” — ‘ the prohibition is unreason- able, God is a tyrant ‘ — ” for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” — ‘His motive is a bad one, He is acting in bad faith in relation to yon, He is en- deavoring to prevent you from working out a destiny in keep- ing with your nature, of being wise and great as Himself.’ Again Eve believed the tempter, and enmity to the prescriptive, tyrannical, and unreasonable God the essence of sin immediately took the place of love to God, the essence of spiritual life, in the sensibilities — and she now was nearly dead — but one thing more remained, and that quickly followed. For “she took of the fruit” of the tree, “and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her ; and he did eat” — and disobedience to God the development of sin took the place of obedience to God the development of spiritual life in the conduct; and she and Adam were dead, dead, dead — constitutionally dead, their children were begotten, conceived, and born dead, dead, dead, and we are their children.
As life is man’s normal state, so death is his abnormal state. Sin cut off his access to’ the tree of life, and banished him from the garden of Eden, the type of his innocent and happy state. It severed the bond of connection which bound man to God, and upon which bond his spiritual life depended. It destroyed the attractive power of love, the centripetal force which bound man to God his centre — to God the source of man’s life, light, and heat — and his individuality, the cen- trifugal force, no longer countervailed by love, flung him from his orbit travelling out in the hyperborean realms of night and death — a blasted, black, and frozen orb, doomed and damned to wander in outer darkness beyond order’s circle and heaven’s smile. Separated from God, the source of his life, man was dead ; and moral decay commenced its dreadful ravages, hellish vermin rioted in the moral rottenness of man’s ruined nature, and a fetid mould grew upon the damp walls of God’s deserted sanctuary in the human soul. Separated from God the source of his light, man’s mental and moral powers were darkened. Created to be a receiver and not a source of light, every power of man’s nature was plunged into midnight darkness by his awful fall, incapable of consistent, normal, and self-ameliorable action.
Indeed, man in losing light, lost his moral agency — lost all power to choose right. In a state of life, his will voluntarily chose death, and as far as his own power was concerned, his decision was final. Hurled by the active engines of his own individuality uncountervailed by the attractive power of love, beyond the luminous circle of God’s influence, he moved rapidly out to the sunless regions of barbarism. Separated from God the source of his heat, upon whose potential and dynamic energies all the phenomena of his spiritual life de- pended, all man’s moral powers lost their tendencies to good, their aspirations for the divine, their vital force and vigorous action ; and as plants deprived of solar heat must certainly die, so every plant of virtue, every floral grace, every vine of holy affection chilled, withered, and died. Like the vege- tation of any material orb, if the orb is separated from its sun, will freeze to its extinction ; so every good plant in human nature, when man was separated from the source of spiritual heat, froze to death ; but the metaphor fails us fur- ther, for man’s sterility was only confined to the good, for every abominable weed and bramble of inordinate passion and gigantic iniquity grew and flourished in wild and tangled exuberance and luxuriance.
Love, the bond of connection between man and God being sundered, an awful mutual enmity was engendered between the two. Man’s enmity to God was capable of malignancy and hatred, but God’s enmity to man was not. God was angry with the sinner, but He was not, nor could He be, implacable and revengeful. Wrath in God is not a passion. God’s enmity to the sinner was judicial, and judicial only — God was man’s enemy. Man could no longer commune with God, but disinherited and disowned, he was driven out of his Father’s house, a miserable and unlovable orphan. Sin destroyed the harmony of his relations to God, but could not destroy his immortality ; hence if left to himself an eter- nal orphanage — he could never be a child of God again save in the sense of adoption, and not even in this sense without the severest legal process.
2. Death involved the destruction of the harmony of man’s relations with the universal system of God. The destruction of his harmonious relations to God, and the con- sequent degradation of his soul, threw him out of harmony with the spiritual above him ; and the deleterious influence of sin upon his body threw him out of harmony with the material below him. Both of these propositions are capable of an elaboration and illustration which would form a volume as large as the Bible. I dare not advance beyond the limits of their mere statement.
3. Death involved the destruction of the harmony of man’s relations with the laws of the universal system of God. The laws of the several parts of God’s system — the physical, spiri- tual, and moral — are a unity. Sin changing man’s aspect to the moral law, reducing him from the harmonious relations of an obedient subject to that of a guilty criminal, changing his relations to the constitutional laws of spirit or mind, and to the laws of nature, so that he could obey neither, and in the effort to obey one had to disobey another, and was subject to the curse of all — the laws of nature entailed suffering, labor, and death upon his body ; the laws of spirit or mind by the unnatural conjunction of spiritual and physical causes as related to the complexity of man’s constitution, entailed labor, perplexity, disappointment, and darkness upon his mind ; and the violation of moral law entailed spiritual death upon his soul.
4. Death involved the destruction of the harmony of man with all his social and domestic relations. As upon the proper adjustment of the earth’s relations to the sun depends the harmony of its relations to the other planets, so, upon the proper adjustment of man’s relations to God depends the harmony of man’s relations to his fellows. Upon man’s love to God, depends his love for his fellows. And when sin severed the bond of love, — the centripetal force which bound man to God, man’s individuality, the centrifugal force, threw him out of harmony with God, snapping every bond of social love, therefore destroying his harmony with his fellows. In man’s individuality is the root of selfishness ; and as man’s in- dividuality, the centrifugal force, was now unbalanced by love to God, the centripetal force, his selfishness developed into most inordinate and monstrous proportions. As the root of selfishness is in man’s individuality, so the root of every form of sin is found in selfishness. You see that man’s individuality, the very power which flung him out of harmony with God and his fellow, is the causative fountain of all sin. Out of harmony with God and his fellow creatures, he became inordinately selfish with respect to both. Out of the disjunc- tive of man’s social relations, consequent upon the disjunc- tive of his relations to High Heaven, spring all social evils which have ever inflicted mankind.
Sin interfered seriously with man’s domestic relations. In the sin of the first pair, the proper adjustment of the masculine and feminine, the intellectual and emotional, sides of generic man, was changed with respect to each other — Adam from passion obeyed the woman, thereby subordinating the intellectual and masculine to the feminine and emotional. This infringement upon God’s arrangement was productive of the greatest evils. Woman immediately swung out of her lelations from the side of Adam, and vibrating like a pendu- lum swept into the regions of the abjectest slavery. Cursed be the man who makes sweet woman his slave. The length of the arc of her circle was so vast that ages elapsed before she in turn swept back to her proper place, but when she did come back she paused not but passed on beyond it, and be- came man’s mistress, for whom many a knight in medieval chivalry shivered his lance, imperilled his life, and perpetrated the darkest crimes. Still the pendulum sweeps — and the family constitution lying at the foundation of all social, municipal, civic, and political institutions, the evils rising from the maladjustment of man’s domestic relations have ascended into every department of human life, and like the frogs of Egypt filling the land with their foul slime and lugubrious croakings.
5. Death involved the destruction of man’s harmony in and of himself . Sin subverted the constitutional order of man’s nature, elevating the material and sensual over the spiritual and intellectual. God made man right side up, sin turned him wrong side up. As a result, the will lost its power of control overman’s passions and affections. God never intended the sensive and sensual in man, in society, or nations to govern, but to be governed by the intellectual and rational. Nothing can be more destructive and ruinous than for the sensive and sensual to usurp the governing either in man’s nature, in society, or in nations. Sin invert- ing the order of man’s original constitution, the sensive and sensual untrammelled by the legitimate powers of man’s higher faculties immediately assumed a monstrous development, and ran riot over the intellectual and rational in man — and, deprived of all intellectual checks and counter-checks, lost harmony among themselves, and changed the soul into a bat- tle ground where hellish passions warred and howled in in- fernal anarchy, and demolishing the beautiful temple of rea- son, and tearing up the very foundation-stones of God’s sacred altar where in olden times piety kindled its worship fires, and entombed will and conscience beneath the blasted ruins ; while above the desolating rage of the conflict the Devil’s horrid laugh could be heard ringing, fiends respond- ing in choral shrieks as they whirled in the dizzy dance, their fiery feet saltating like lightning upon the wincing and blis- tered fibres of a soul stricken down with convulsive agony.
Man was now deprived of the image of God, dismantled of his nobility, and brought under the authority of Satan by his own dreadful act — unconditionally surrendering to diabo- lical power without ever striking a blow for God and free- dom, and treacherously giving up the keys of the soul’s cita- del placed in his keeping, and betraying into the hands of the enemy the garrison within — and he deservedly fell under the execrations of universal being. The normal relations of man’s complex constitution being destroyed by sin, and his soul becoming a Pandemonium for contending hobgoblins, every string of harmony within him was thrown out of tune, and stridulous discords went hoarsely screaming and croaking among the dismal ruins of his fallen nature — and owing to man’s relations to universal being, went jarring and grating throughout the system of God, disturbing the sweet melodies of that universal diapason which rolls in eternal music from the circumference of created being along all the high- ways of sound up to God the causative centre of all. The logical ground of man’s happiness being found in the proper adjustment of man’s relations with himself and universal be- ing, he was now logically and constitutionally unhappy — yes, worse ; logically and constitutionally miserable — yes, worse than this ; logically and constitutionally wretched — unhappy, miserable, wretched.
To say nothing cf the sufferings of man’s body, which were only consequential upon the great penalty, every chord of harmony now sundered was bleeding and smarting with lancinating pain; his mind was aching with the memories of lost blessings ; the nobler faculties were writhing with anguish under the red-hot iron feet of a sensual despotism. Remorse, whose serpent skin was but a sting, poison exuding from every imbricated scale, crowded and wedged itself in the heart, throbbing with the inexpressible agonies of its distention and the contact of the incessantly stinging surface of the horrid body of the monstrous beast, and from thence protruding, from auricle and ventricle, its hideous heads, gnawed with its fiery fangs every sensitive cord of man’s con- scious being. To complete the fearful climax of his suffer- ings, Despair, the odious bird, which had hovered in the rear of the fallen angels when cast out of heaven, and had brooded over hell’s damned for untold ages and hatched out new horrors for them, now ascended upon roaring wings from the pit, and fixed its penetrating talons in the sinner’s soul, and more terrible than the vultures which fed upon the viscera and renascent viscera of Tityus, commenced to glut its craw with the lacerated fragments of man’s ever-reproduc- ing vitals, smotheringly crushing him to the earth and shut- ting out the light of hopeful day with the jet-black plumes of its circumvesting pinions. O, this was death — death in- deed !
Such was the choice of our progenitors, and the state of death into which they fell has descended, ex traduce, to us. But the natural man now does not exhibit all the phenomena of spiritual death as here described, but does exhibit some of the phenomena of spiritual life given. Why is this so ? I answer : Man from Cain till now has been under a dispensation of grace, therefore subject to the ministrations of the Holy Spirit. Every manifestation of spiritual death wanting in his character and conduct as here described, is owing not to him- self, but to the restraining power of the Spirit of God ; every manifestation of spiritual life as seen in his unconverted state, is owing to the quickening of the same Spirit. So teaches Christ, when He says, “It is the Spirit that quickeneth.” If it had not have been for a dispensation of grace, Adam and Eve would not have been permitted after they sinned to propa- gate their species. It would have been unjust and ungood in God to have permitted us to have been born under the dreadful penalty of death brought on us solely by the act of another, without any remedy in our reach whereby we might escape if we chose to do so.
That all of us do suffer in a measure the penalty is no reflection upon God’s Justice and Goodness, for what we do suffer, if we comply with the conditions of grace, is made to entail upon us a commensurate personal good — a good be- yond any we would have received had we not suffered at all. If we receive our very existence in virtue of a dispensation of grace, it is presumptive that all the moral vital phenomena of that existence is in virtue of the same dispensation, the executive power of which is the Holy Ghost, an agency whose administrations reach beyond the limits of published religious truth touching “every man that cometh into the world.” Such the state of spiritual death is characterized by positive phenomena, yet of itself it is nothing but a nega- tive state — a negative state whose positive state is life. With respect to the nature and manifestations of life I could not have made any great error, for the elucidation is strictly philosophical and Scriptural ; therefore in the elucidation of the nature and manifestations of death I am compelled to be right in the main, as they are arrived at in virtue of an an- tithesis between a positive and negative.
I have now presented you man in a state of life, as God made him, and in a state of death as sin made him. Christ says, “Jam the way,” and I have presented you the termini of the way — Death — Life : Death, the state into which man fell, and from which ” as the way ” Christ must lead ; Life, as the state from which man fell, and to which as “the way” Christ must lead. But to open such a way involved the removal of many and great difficulties. These difficulties are symbolized by the cherubim and flaming sword which were ” placed at the east of the garden of Eden ” to guard ” the way of the tree of life.” To the enumeration and na- ture of these difficulties I now invite your attention.
1. The first difficulty was God’s moral law. God could not make a moral being without making a moral government ; He could not make a moral government without moral law ; He could not make a moral being and place him outside of His moral government, or beyond the obligations of moral law. God made man under moral law ; man violated that law ; the law could not forgive, or waive its penalty, without destroying itself; God could not forgive from mere prerogative ; the law could not be repealed or set aside; man could not recall his sin; and man’s obligations to obey the law being infinite, the guilt of his disobedience was infinite, and the law demanded his infinite death, and he being finite could make no satisfaction. Also, the moral law being a duplicate of God’s infinite holiness by transcript, nothing less than an equal holiness could satisfy it. Poor man ! his case seemed hopeless.
2. The second difficulty was God’s infinite Justice. The end of Justice is to sustain the righteous law of God’s right- eous government. Justice conforms in its nature to every righteous principle involved in heaven’s righteous government; and recognizes the natural rights of all parties, and requires their strict conformity to their respective relations. It recognizes God’s right as a lawgiver and governor, and man’s place and duty as a subject. It requires as a matter of right that the sinner should suffer in proportion to the guilt of his offences, and the guilt of man’s offences being estimated from the infinite nature of man’s obligations to obey law, it required in his case death — death totally, and continued infinitely.
3. The third difficulty was God’s infinite Holiness. God’s holiness is the totality of God’s moral character. It is essentially hostile to everything that is wicked — wicked- ness is its contrary. Its hostility to wickedness must neces- sarily be avowed, positive, and active. Neutrality, negative- ness, and non-action involve its destruction. Being infinite, its hostility must be infinitely avowed, infinitely positive, in- finitely active — demanding infinite death upon the sinner. As the sinner himself was but finite, and not capable there- fore of suffering infinite death as to quantity, it demanded infinite death as to duration — unending spiritual death.
4. The fourth difficulty was God’s infinite Majesty. The guilt of sin must be in proportion to the difference of the majesty of nature between God and man. The majesty of God’s nature is infinite ; the majesty of human nature is but finite. There can be no proportion between the infinite and finite, because the one cannot be rendered more or less by the addition or subtraction of the other. Between the majesty of God’s nature, therefore, and the majesty of human nature, there was an infinite difference — and the guilt of man’s sin which was a direct insult of God’s majesty was in- finite, and that majesty demanded that the penalty should be infinite.
5. The fifth difficulty was the existence, stability, and authority of God’s government. Such is the relation be- tween law and government that if the law can be violated with impunity, the authority of the government, and as a consequence its existence, is destroyed. Penalty is a neces- sity to law and government. If man, however, could have recalled his offence, or in some way could have compensated the government of God by an equivalent for his offence, the case would have been different ; but as it was, man was doomed.
6. The sixth difficulty was found in the loyalty and purity of other intelligences. To save the loyalty and purity of the whole social confraternity of spiritual beings, to give them a proper estimate of the importance of their own personal loy- alty and purity, to sustain the authority of God over them, to make them properly appreciate the exceeding sinfulness of disloyalty and impurity, and to deter them from doing like- wise, it was necessary that disloyal and impure man should be thrown out of the great social brotherhood, and cursed with the fullest penalty of the law he violated. The same reason which would throw him out of the fraternal circle would keep him out ; the same reason which would require the penalty once inflicted would require the infliction forever.
7. The seventh difficulty was found in the unity of the system of God. The unity of God’s system is so perfect that the introduction of a foreign body into the system, or an in- jury inflicted in any part of the system, affects the whole sys- tem summoning and aggregating in affecting the power of every part of the system to expel the foreign substance, and repair the injury done. This is called the recuperative power of the system, and is itself always the child of a per- fect unity. Now, sin, by a figure of speech, is a foreign sub- stance in the system of God, and being itself the violation of law the basis of all order, is essentially disorganizing and ruinous, and because of man’s relations in the unity of the system it affected universal being in its universal unity. The recuperative power of the system was immediately exerted to cast sin and the sinning subject out of the system, to heal the injuries inflicted by sin’s introduction, and resist the disintegrating and disorganizing effects of sin, defending and preserving the very existence of the system itself. From the very laws of self-preservation sinning man could no more be permitted to remain in the system of God, than a planet ignoring the laws of attraction could be permitted to remain in the physical system. The same law, also, which would expel guilty man from the system would keep him out of it forever.
8. The eighth difficulty was diabolical power. Man volun- tarily yielded to the temptations of the Evil One, and God oermitted him, as a part of his punishment, to pass under Satan’s power — which power Satan would not be apt to sur- render without a desperate resistance. All the energies of hell would be exerted to defeat man’s redemption, and un- dermine the pillars and pull down the arches of any way, bridging the awful gorges of human corruption, and perdition’s bottomless pit, leading from death to life.
I have presented to you Death — Life ; and the difficul- ties to remove in the opening of the way from one state to the other, by which man might escape from death to life. When life and death were placed as alternatives before man’s power of choice, he chose death, and God drove him out of the garden of Eden, and placed cherubic sentinels and a fiery sword, ever-turning and ever-flaming, to guard it. The garden was representative of man’s happy state, the tree of life of what constituted it as such, and the guard of the difficulties to a restoration.
Man was driven out of the garden — else, he never would have left it ; nor did he dare linger a moment or take one last sorrowing look at his lost Eden, and say farewell to its flowers, and bowers, for the sword of incensed Justice was burning and brandishing just behind him, and God’s consuming wrath was coming upon his heels like a tempest. In terror he fled over the threshold of Paradise ; its portcullis coming down behind him like lightning, and the appulsion of its gates swinging to, sounding like the thunder’s quickest clap, bolts and bars sliding rapidly in socket and groove and changing into staples unbreakable. In his awful terror onward he fled, passing over hell’s closed mouth as he ran, which hell when he had passed and it was now between him and his Eden, opened its horrid jaws, and the waves of woe surging up through its infernal throat rolled high upon the land, melting and washing the sands from beneath his feet, and dashing their lurid spray into his face.
Man’s spirit was not created as a source of light, but simply as a receiver of light. God was to man’s spirit the only source of illumination. Being driven out of the garden, and therefore away from God as the dispenser of both light and life, man was driven into the Night of Death. The darkness of that night was more than the mere absence of light — it was a darkness which was of itself something. It was a massive darkness hammered into man’s soul till it was dense and pon- derable, and added to continually rose in black embankments instinct with wrath to heaven. In this night nothing could be seen but the fiery circlings of the flaming sword, and the dire flashings of the wings of the cherubic guard, sentinelling Eden’s bolted gate ; unless hell’s intervening gulf boiling like a caldron, and bubbling to the brim, occasionally emit- ting a smoky blaze which threw a cadaverous glare around.
But still this light was not the light man lost, and could no more substitute or form a part of the light of man’s spir- itual day, than the spontaneous flame of phosphuretted hydro- gen exhaled from the decomposing bodies in the graves by their own corruption can substitute or be said to form a part of the light of the glorious sun. The light man had when driven out of Paradise was the light of his own corruption and death, and that fearful illumination by which his mind realized the dreadful significance of his choice, when, in the hour in the face of life he chose death. Not a solitary wave of spiritual life ruffled over the face of the darkness, not a single ray of the light of spiritual day filtered through the gloom tc illuminate his way. His was the rayless, beamless, starless, and unbroken night of death — an ocean night, full of shriek- ing fiends, damned goblins, and chilling horrors. Paradise’s sun had set in blackest clouds, and, O, such a night as that was !
Man thought all was lost — and as far as his own power to save himself was concerned it was certainly so, he was lost, and lost forever. But, lo ! a star was flung sparkling from heaven into the very bosom of the enveloping gloom, and hung solitary and bright high up in the darkness above his head. Five brilliant points it had: “The seed — of the woman — shall bruise — the serpent’s — head.” It looked like a quinquangular block of diamond cut out of heaven’s crown, and suspended by a golden thread from the throne of God, was dropped into man’s sunless firmament as the centre, prospectively, of all those constellations which were to suc- ceed each other in the darkness, and illuminate that long, long night which was destined to stretch away unbroken from Paradise to Calvary, and during which the earth sabled with mourning, and barefoot, was to tread in penance her orbit four thousand times. And as the ages accumulated, and the night continued, these constellations, star by star, were born, and types and promises of various magnitudes glittered in the ebon vault above ; and by and by so great their number a sweet shower of twinkling rays rained upon the abodes of fallen men, and glistened and glanced upon the world. Pompous symbols also went dancing down the stream of time, and planted the flowers of hope along both of its shores.
But still it was night, and the night progressed, till far down earth’s history the voice of an impatient world was heard, — ” Watchman, What of the night ? Watchman, What of the night ? ” A church had already been constructed — built of symbolic stones, stuccoed with types, and delineated with emblems. It had its altar around which its services were performed in splendid ritual, and stately towers upon which watchmen sat and timed the night, and looked away through prophetic glasses to catch the first glimpse of com- ing day, and announce it to the world. So high these tow- ers, and so powerful these glasses, a blush of day could be detected far below the earth’s horizon. But the question rang out ” Watchman, What of the night ? ” ” Watchman, What of the night ? ” The time of the night the watchman gave not, but simply answered : ” The morning cometh,” adding — ” and also the night : if ye will inquire, inquire ye : return, come.” (Is. xxi. 11, 12.) This watchman passed away, and others took his place, and for three hundred years prophesied of the coming morning. But ” the darkest hour is just before day,” is the homely proverb, and so it was in this case : for all the wratchmen died upon wall and tower, all the prophets were buried, their glasses were bro- ken, and their harps unstrung were hung upon the altars of a church which now, itself, seemed but ready to crumble into irredeemable ruins. For four hundred years from the death of the last prophet man received no revelation from heaven. Symbols, types, and emblems seer||ed to have lost their meaning; the constellations of Heaven’s promises dimmed in the deepening night; earth appeared forsaken and forgotten ; the sleepless guards appeared more forbid- ding and vigilant, and hell-born Despair pitched his pavil- ions upon the sterile and blasted fields of man’s lost estate.
But man’s extremity was God’s opportunity. Suddenly a beam of light running up the eastern sk^ culminated in a bright morning star, hanging over a manger. A strange ex- citement thrilled along every fibre of universal being, and electrified the universe. Heaven, hell, and earth were ex- cited. Some momentous event in whose issue man’s des- tiny was involved was abont to take place — some anthropo- logical and ethnological period in the history of man of such essential and vital significance to him that the very destiny of his race depended upon the catastrophe. Earth, itself, was about to become a stage for the enactment of some fearful tragedy in whose final act man’s eternal salvation or damnation was involved, and heaven, earth, and hell were to be represented in the dramatis personam. The morning star of the world was smiling upon the wing of the night ; and angelic legions flashing along all the paths of space, and coming in from all the universe, descended, and rank above rank, from horizon to zenith, crowded the firmament, suspensive and anxious witnesses. Hell was fully aroused and determined not to relinquish its prey ; and fallen angels, their chains clanking, ascended from perdition’s caves and dungeons, and stirred the Stygian deep between man and his lost Eden, till its black waves emitting sulphurous flames and evolving dingy smoke, rose to the sky, and roared in thunder around the wheels of the chariot of the rising morn- ing, and essayed to wash out all the stars of hope shining above, and to render impossible a way across the angry bil- lows and foaming floods for man’s escape from death. Poor, fallen man, with pale brow and quivering lip, gathered up his children, and in despair and terror waited what he be- lieved to be his certain doom.
But, hush ! — Attention ! — Lo ! coming up from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah, glorious in His apparel, travel- ling in the greatness of His strength, ” One mighty to Save.” The baptismal waters of Jordan still glistened upon His locks, and girded with Omnipotence, He came upon the scene like a rushing hurricane, and with one stroke of His trident, levelled the towering waves and regurgitating breakers, with the same blow striking Devil and demons down to the profoundest hell, and threw a solid pavement across the Tartarian gulf. Angels shouted in joyous wonder, heaven’s dome reverberant, while onward the mighty Saviour went. His feet retrod the way of man’s retreat, and ascending to Paradise He emptied sacrificial blood from redemption’s urn, upon the flaming sword, extinguished and sheathed it, removed the guarding cherubim and placed them dazzling with love, anti- posited on the ends of the Mercy Seat, unbarred and un- bolted the gate, opened the way to the tree of life, and turning about, His life blood streaming, just before He fell a slain conqueror, slain for us, and poured like a flood of glory down the narrow way the central truth of Salvation’s scheme, ” I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE.” Now, the darkness of four hundred centuries began to give way, and the stars which shone in man’s moral firmament began to fade before the superior brightness of the coming light. First, the Orient kissed by Royal Day blushed in maiden beauty; then a wave of glory surged up against the horizon and fiery lances thrown by the strong arm of the new-born morning flashed up the sky and unhorsed Night’s black squadrons, which, panic-stricken, fled to Limbo ; then the sun of life which had set in clouds behind Eden’s guarded walls, arose and shot its beams in level splendor over Calvary’s crest, glimmering in the blood of the cross, and burst in glory all over the world.