Notes of a sermon preached by the Rev.
E, Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin, Sunday evening, November 7, Text, I, Timothy IL 3 and 4. "This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; who willeth that all men shall be saved, and come to a knowledge of the truth."
I, know no more beautiful collection of words than this. That God, the Eternal, Who made this marvellous universe, Whose mysteries baffle all our scientific societies, has something that He is more interested in than the universe, namely men, you and me, is surely the greatest marvel of all That He has good will towards us, and is always willing for us a great and inderful thing is indeed something to glory in. Nobody is what we call "a nobody" if this is true, as we believe it is. The thing that He wills us to have, if we will, is called by Paul, salvation. And it is this, that I want to speak about to-night. What do we think about salvation to-day? Do we believe we need it? Is it such a great thing after alit. That is what people ask, Is Christianity a salvation?
Tus Unarrarxante rus Desirep.
Now I propose to begin by re marking on a permanent feature of human nature, that has been observed in every age. It is, that man seems always to be anxious to get hold of a thing he has not got, and on the other hand, man is apt to think very little of a great thing, when once he has obtained possession of it. We are all like that, The poet Goethe was an example of it. He was eaten up with ambition to be a painter. No doubt he was envious of the glory of men like Rafael. One would have thought he would have been content to be one of the great poets of the world. 1 suppose the really great poets, those in absolutely the first flight, are Homer, the Greek; Virgil, the Roman; Dante the Italian; Shakes-peace and Milton, the Englishmen I should place Goethe sixth. One would think he would have been satisfied with such a gift; but no; he wanted something he had not got. We are all alike. Those of us who are not musical, and are useless at a party, would give all our gifts, such as they are, to be as musical as some of our friends. It is always so. Artists from countries that have no mountains go to Switzerland to paint mountains; yet I cannot recall the name of a single famous Swiss artist. It does look, as if those, who have mountains before their eyes all the time, think little of them.
Mopern an ANCIENT.
And it looks as if that were just the case with salvation, that those who know it pay little attention to it, while those who do not know anything of what Christianity! teaches is the real thing are yearning for it. Man never is, but always to be blessed." Let us take a modern and an ancient parallel. Consider first ourselves, the people of this generation. We are by universal consent in a moral, social, and spiritual mess.
one denies that Statesmen, social reformers, editors, conferences, societies of innumerable miscellaneous charities; everybody who imagines himself anybody, with a scheme in his head, is concerned at the state of the world. We are told that "we are not out of the wood," though the war has been finished, as we are reminded for two years; and all the publicly spirited people are frantically hunting round for some power or principle to get the world out of the wood, to bring it back to sani and moral health. Yet you notice that none of them, outside the church, ever dream of recommending the stricken world to try the religion that the late belligerent nations profess, the Gospel of Christ, which calls itself salvation. Any played-out theory of socialism, or economic readjustment is recommended, but not the thing that we are supposed to believe Jesus Christ came to give, salvation. But it is not only in regard to public matters, that this is true. T often think, that there is a bias] h against it. Do people ever wonder nowadays whether they are saved? There is the famous story of the late Professor Huxley. He was taking a holiday at Llandudno, 1 think it was, and one day someone on the Parade gave him a tract, that asked him whether he was saved. He wrote a furious letter to one of the papers, denouncing tt as an outrage that he should have been asked such a question. What a pity, is it not, that great scientific men are not labelled. "Superior quality"? So it is. How many people ever worry themselves about this thing called salvation? There is a case of men having the Gospel, and not caring anything about it, not valuing it; that is ourselves.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.