ternoon,
and yet shall love his God and his fellow-man as himself. If he cannot,
if he cannot, what business have you to be doing them? If he can, what
business have you to be doing them so poorly, so carnally, so
unspiritually, that men look on them and shake their heads with doubt?
It belongs to Christ in men first to prove that man may be a Christian
and yet do business; and, in the second place, to show how a man, as he
becomes a greater Christian, shall purify and lift the business that he
does and make it the worthy occupation of the Son of God.
What shall be our universal law of life? Can we give it as we draw
toward our last moment? I think we can. I want to live, I want to live,
if God will give me help, such a life that, if all men in the world were
living it, this world would be regenerated and saved. I want to live
such a life that, if that life changed into new personal peculiarities
as it went to different men, but the same life still, if every man were
living it, the millennium would be here; nay, heaven would be here, the
universal presence of God. Are you living that life now? Do you want
your life multiplied by the thousand million so that all men shall be
like you, or don't you shudder at the thought, don't you give hope that
other men are better than you are? Keep that fear, but only that it may
be the food of a diviner hope, that all the world may see in you the
thing that man was meant to be, that is, the Christ. Ah, you say, that
great world, it is too big; how can I stretch my thought and imagination
and conscience to the poor creatures in Africa and everywhere? Then
bring it home. Ah, this dear city of ours, this city that we love, this
city in which many of us were born, in which all of us are finding the
rich and sweet associations of our life, this city, whose very streets
we love because they come so close to everything we do and are, cannot
we do something for it? Cannot we make its life diviner? Cannot we
contribute something that it has not to-day? Cannot you put in it, some
little corner of it, a life which others shall see and say, "Ah, that
our lives may be like that!" And then the good Boston in which we so
rejoice, which we so love, which we would so fain make a part of the
kingdom of God, a true city of Jesus Christ, we shall not die without
having done something for it.
I linger, and yet I must not linger. Oh, my friends, oh, my fellow-men,
it is not very long that we shall be h
|