A Sermon Preached by the Rev. A. N. Rowland on July 16 in Union Church, Shanghai men, according to my Gospel, b. John &, 17-27, Rev. 5). source of a great hope and part of a glorious Gospel. It was close akin to the hope of immortality, for would immortality be tolerable apart from the reign of justice? The two ideas rose side by side. You cannot yead the Book of Revelation, without realizing that the very soul of Rife hereafter is that justice will be done. That is the ground of the worship in heaven.
Indeed the whole of the New Testament bears witness to the early Christian joy that the world's judgement is going to be put into the hands of Christ. This was to be the light of the new day, that "God will judge the secrets of men's lives by Jesus Christ. "That is part of the Gospel," says the apostle, ''part of my good news."
Mepizvat Groom.
But this prospect became strangely clouded. The faith remained, but it lost its insparition and its joy. It was darkened, no doubt, by the fears of men's consciences. The figure of Jesus became more and more forbidding in the imagination of the Church. His coming to be our Judge was thought of as the shadow of doom, as a dies irae. You know with what terrors the enactment of divine justices was pictured by the fears of the Church—vast scenes of awe and horror painted by the classical Italian artists. It was on the ground of this fallacy that the worship of the Virgin Mary and the invocation of the saints were founded. And if ever these excrescences are to disappear it will be by restoring the original faith of the Church, that if justice is put into the hands of Christ it: is for the removal of fear and a reason for joy. There is still a popular notion that we need a Gospel because Christ will be our Judge, but according to St. Paul this is itself the Gospel.
Il Just a few points in elucidation of this truth before I have done. With us who live to-day.the fact of divine justice is I think more a. concern of the conscience than of the imagination. And shall I not say it is a more refined conscience than existed in the Middle Ages? It should be so seeing that it has been in touch with the open Bible for more than 300 years.. We are not satisfied with a rough and ready classification of those who are destined for heaven or, for hell. It is true there -are some whom, when their crimes against the! humanity are first reported, we chésrtiilty consign' to the worst. of fates—monsters of cruelty, like the last Sultan of Turkey (at whom Joseph Parker once threw his verbal thunderbolt), or the vile creatures who make their money out of the poverty and helplessness of their fellows. But even then we check ourselves, knowing that the short. plummet of our wrath' does not fathom the deep things of a man.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.