Notes of a Sermon Preached by the Rev. C. E. Darwent, m.a., in Union Church, Tientsin, Sunday Evening, July 3
Lewt; 1. Kings XIX. 11 & 21. "And he said, 'Go forth and stand upon the mount before the Lord.' And behold the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake, fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fre a still, small voice".
Last week we saw how Elijah was in the depths of pessimism, sitting under a juniper tree. God's message of cheer was a remarkable one; not at all what we should have expected. I think, we should all have expected God to say, "O Elijah, thou hast forgotten Me; thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation. Things may look bad, but the cause of religion is mine and thou mightest have remembered that I have all power and might." But that is just what God did not say. It is very remarkable. He didn't point to himself as the guarantee of the future of religion, but to men; there were 7,000 men as faithful as the prophet and these faithful men are as great a rebuke to pessimism as the power of God.. I suppose, that the optimism of most religious people is based on their faith in God.
There is the over-quoted bit out of Browning, that has been a good friend to all kinds of _preache' "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But that is absurd rubbish. God was in heaven and yet Christ was crucified. God requires men to the channels of his grace to the world.
Waar 1s AN Optimist?
What would have become of Christianity, if Jesus Christ had not been able to raise a band of disciples? He once said, the "'harvest is great'; but as there were no reapers it went unreaped, in spite of God being in heaven. God is in the world now, i and_ things; are far from "right with the world," far indeed. Men to carry. out God's will are wanted. If good men, good workers fail, then' we are in our proper place under the juniper tree. And this is the call to us and the message. If in addition to God there are the "Seven Thousand," if the church and al] good men are fighting sin in the name of God, we have a right to be optimists; but if the Church grows slack and unfaithful, then we should be bound to sit} mories of violent deeds in order to under the juniper tree, because it) justify his own. It was in Horeb, is not in human nature apart from grace to redeem the world; man cannot spin his salvation out of his own nature, as a spider spins a web out of its own bowels. And, further, this must be said, no man, who does nothing on Sundays, on week-days, for the cause of God who does nothing but pursue his own interests and pleasures, living a self-enclosed life, has any right to be an optimist at all. He is not one of the "Seven Thousand," and if all were like him, the future of humanity would be black indeed. The ordinary cheerful soul, who never prays or does Christian or shows any interest in religion, yet calls himself an optimist, may not know it, but he is a great ignoramus.
And now we come to this vision, which has fascinated man's mind in all ages. Its beauty and truth are so exceeding great. God passed before him. This seems impossible. Yet it is what God is doing every day before all of us. There is not a man in this place to whom this has not happened to day; only we veil our faces in a mantle of worldliness and do not sec Him, And then all the scenes of the vision are true to the locality, the mountains of Horeb, where Moses saw the bush burn and not be consumed. It is a wild volcanic region. The Near East was then more volcanic than it is now. The Bible is full of allusions to earthquakes "the hills skipped like rams."' Even in the time of the Crusaders there were years in which it was impossible for them to dare to live in a stone+duilt house on account of earthquakes. And so we have the eyelunic wind, the earthquake, the fire as forms of the manifestation of God.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.