THE PREACHER'S THEME
unrhetorical statement of fact. You remember Wordsworth's plaintive cry to the shade of Milton, whose mighty voice had long since ceased to speak:
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters.
But if men, looking out upon the stricken human scene to-day, are fain to cry, "Christ, Thou shouldst be living at this hour: the world hath need of Thee!"—back comes the answer with a thousand trumpets in it, "Should be? He is!" "I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore." And you, the commissioned servants of the Lord of the Resurrection, are to tell men that the same Jesus who was with Latimer and Ridley in the fire, with Margaret Wilson tied to a stake on the Solway Sands, with Bunyan in prison, with Gordon in Khartoum, with Shackleton on the great ice-barrier, with Paul in the wilds of Asia, with John in the convict-mines of Patmos, with Peter in the Roman arena—that this same Jesus still travels through the world in the greatness of His strength, mighty to save, still meets the troubled heart with the divine promise, "Lo, as I was with all those others, so will I be with thee!" Nothing else your ministry may achieve will be of much account unless you show men that Christ, and get their eyes open to the real presence of the risen Lord. If in the grace of God you can do that, they will bless you for it, and the power of the Spirit will go through the Church again; and hearts will burn with that authentic fire
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