'A Sermon Preached by Dr. Fleming in St. Coluntba's, Pont St., Belgravia, London. The Collection was for the Foreign Missions of the Church of Scotland "Wollow me and 1 vill make you fishers of men." St. Matt. 16: 4
The weeks which immediately followed the first Easter—the day of the Resurrection—were, in a spiritual sense, the honeymoon of the Faithful. Six weeks of rapture followed the great moment when the Divine Bridegroom and Iis Bride, the Church, entered upon the certainty of a union thenceforward sapable of no divorce. There might be a period of apparent separation, ut, if s0, it would the more, and not the less, be a time of spiritual oneness, Those whom God had easier to preach missionary sermons. Indeed, almost my only difficulty is this, that the duty of the Church to be nary—the necessity that she must be propagandist or die—seems 30 clear and obvious that {t'must almost be a waste of time ito repeat and multiply the argue in support of a thesis {brought home to one how true it is! evident. Yet, on reflection, i
how paradoxically true it is—that it is the self-evident in life which is often in most need of reiterated Joined together no man would be able again to put asunder. "Lo, Tam with you alway" was the nuptial promise of the Bridegroom to the Bride. Neither things present, nor things to come, nor life, nor death, nor any other' creature, would be able to set them apart.
These weeks, then, which followed the Resurrection, and which we have been feller anniversary since Raster Day, with more or less attention, were a period of rhapsody in the adolescent Christian Church.
We do not read that they were weeks of evangelistic work. Anything, indeed, which we hear of the disciples doing, during that period, indicates a rather surer i demonstration. The risk and folly of vice, for example, is writ large enough, in all conscience, upon the} face of all experience from the) beginning of the world, Yet, even! for the benefit of those of" mot solentine training and intellectual predilection, the danger and stupidity of vicious living has always to be! insisted upon and" demonstrated afresh. Similar illustrations could be indefinitely multiplied. The duty, and necessity of intensive and worldwide propagandism on the part of Christianity is just one of those propositions which, although self-evident, nevertheless have again and again tobe demonstrated. It is the root-callings." go acfishing,"
Peter, and launched his boat. The spiritual side of his life, and of the lives of the other fathers and brethren, seems to have been confined to the delight of realizing that Jesus lived, and was with them still For the rest, they appear not even to have thought of making plans for their religious future. They were spiritually residents in those mountaintop tabernacles which the three disefples had coveted on the day of the Transfiguration; and these tabernacles of communion they would be content indefinitely and complacently to abide.
But it was not so to be. We have reached to-day the fifth Sunday after Haster; and when the early Church had reached that stage in its history was within four days of the day of Ascension; as we, in anniversary, are now. And swiftly, ten days thereafter, they were to reach Pentecost-—Whitsunday—the day of Descent of the Holy Spirit. Now, what did that involve? We know now that it involved the end of the halcyon weeks of Christianity. It meant that the Church of Chri must now no longer merely rhapit must get back to work; it must get down to business. The promise of the Holy Spirit, and the Wencent of the Spirit, would mean the bestowal of an armoury of practical gifts, and, by their aid, the disciples were to be called upon to get to grips with those everyday and often anxious problems with which the religion of Christ is so intimately and intensely concerned. Peter and the rest must roll up their secular fishing-nets once for I. They must remember—what weir Master" had said to them, von after their first vocation will make you fishers of men.'
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.