THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD, A Life for a Life and other addresses, A Changed Life, THE PROGRAMME OF CHRISTIANITY, THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH, PAX VOBISCUM, and STONES ROLLED AWAY and other addresses, Henry Drummond [digital book reader txt] 📗

see that, upon merely psychological principles, the man who understands his nature and applies that remedy for his case when he finds himself becoming a lower man than he ought to, is bound to get the victory. It is not by magic that men are able to succeed in living a high and Christian life. It is by living according to nature and according to the revelation of our higher nature. It is by living along the line of the laws under which this system of our human nature is founded. That is put in other words by Christ, where he says, "Abide in me"--the same thing on a still higher plane. The man who lives with Christ cannot sin. "If any man sin," John says, "he hath not known Christ." Sin is abashed in the presence of Christ. The man who lives in Christ as his ideal finds in Him a continuous living Saviour, drawing him away from himself and making it impossible for him to live for himself.
Let no man here to-night think or say that he can get victory over sin alone. He cannot get that out of religion unless he gets a great many other things as well, and is compelled to accept them. Deliverance from sin is only one of the functions of the new nature; and a man is not a new man if he has got only one arm. The one arm is to fight sin. He must be a full, perfect man; and the man who has simply got the muscle in his spiritual nature which is to deal with sin is not a Christian man at all necessarily. The man who attempts to live in one function alone will find it impossible. Religion is not a blue ribbon to wear against a single set of things. It is not an inoculation against a single disease. A man must accept Christ all around, not only as his Deliverer from sin, but as his friend and guide, his ideal and Saviour. He must walk his whole life, and every day of his life, in the spirit, not merely rushing into the top story when temptations are at his heels, but dwelling there, in that place where the air is always sweet, where the company is always pure, and where there is nothing to hinder the soul from communing with God and with the stars. If a man can continuously live in that region, he is bound to grow better and better. That is the picture of temptation chasing a man who walks in the Spirit. He hears its bark and feels its bite, like a dog's; but if he is off its ground it cannot touch him. Just in proportion as we live in the higher regions are we able to evade temptations.
In dealing with others, it is not enough to preach to them, to give them tracts, texts or prayers: but we must give them a new environment, in which the new nature can bud and flower and grow into perfection. Gentlemen, it is not such an easy business to save a man as some people think. It is not to be done by a few earnest words. That is why so many college men have been passed over untouched by our college Y. M. C. A.'s. It is not because we do not have meetings enough, not because we do not know the Bible well enough, not because we are not earnest enough; but it is because we do not proceed rationally enough. It is because we do not sow seeds for individuals and live so that they may be compelled to live this higher life with us. We do not do our work half thoroughly enough. Unless we lay down our lives to save men, we are not following the Master as we ought. It is good business to devote our lives to individuals. It may not be so picturesque, but individual work, where every man singles out his individual to help and save, and stands by him, if multiplied through the universities, would soon win our universities for Christ.
Make a continuous effort by will power and prayer power and the power of the Spirit of God to walk in the spiritual region; for nature abhors a vacuum. If we allow any pause to occur in our high living, if we leave this place, the enemy will come upon us, and we will be worse off after this Conference than we were before it.


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THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND YOUR PART IN IT
"The futility of saving men by speech" is not a whole truth, but it is the large part of a truth. Imagine a life-saving crew trying to save wrecked mariners simply by calling to them, and not throwing out a life line or putting off in a boat after them! It is a case of life for life--a man laying down his own life for others, as Christ did.
In talking to a man you want to win, talk to him in his own language. If you want to get hold of an agnostic, try to translate what you have to say into simple words--words that will not be in every case the words in which you got it. It is not cant. Religion has its technical terms just as science, but it can be overdone; and, besides, it is an exceedingly valuable discipline for one's self. Take a text and say, "What does that mean in 19th century English ;" and in doing that you will learn the lesson that it is the spirit of truth that does one good, and not the form of words. The form does not matter, if it does you good and draws you nearer to God. Do not be suspicious of it, if it is God's truth, in whatever form it may be.
One has to do a great deal more than display his Christianity. He must not only talk it, but live it. What is the secret of Christianity? It is not picking out a man here and a man there and making them fit to go to heaven. Christ came to this world, as He Himself said, to found a society. Have you ever thought of that conception of Christianity? For hundreds of years it has been utterly lost sight of. It is only lately that men are getting to see the great Christian doctrine of the Kingdom of God. This great phrase was never off Christ's lips. "The Kingdom of God" is by far the commonest phrase in His speech. Have you ever given a month of your life to find out what Christ meant by "the Kingdom of God?" Every day as we pray, "Thy Kingdom come," has our Christian consciousness taken in the tremendous sweep of that prayer, and seen how it covers the length and breadth of this great world and every human being? Christ was continually telling what it was. The Kingdom of heaven is like unto this. The kingdom of heaven is like unto that. If there is one thing more prominent than another in Christ's language it is in explaining what the kingdom of heaven is, and in what the subjects of that kingdom are to busy themselves. The kingdom of God is a society for the best men working for the best end, with the highest motive according to the best principle. The Kingdom of God was to come without observation. Christ likened it to leaven, and one cannot get a better understanding of the meaning of His phrase than by taking His own metaphors. The world is sunken, Christ said, and it must be raised. Leaven comes from the same word as lever. It is that which lifts, elevates, or raises. Christ founded a society of men for the purpose of raising men. This leaven was not to disturb the form of or overturn any institution. When you put leaven into a vessel with anything that is to be leavened, it does not affect the outward form of it; but it changes its spirit.
The Kingdom of God is like leaven. It is to act, raising men by contagion, by the contact of one life with another. Did you ever put a little leaven under a microscope? If you did, you found it was a minute plant, perhaps one six-thousandth of an inch in diameter, with such an amazing power of propagation that, simply in contact with the dough, it has the effect of lifting it by means of the life that is in it. And so the virtue of the Christian's life, not by tempting it in the way of forcing it, but by its spontaneous, natural and beautiful goodness, reacts upon others. When men observe the fragrance of Christ and are reminded of Him, a longing comes over them to live like Him and breathe that air and have that calm, that beauty of character, and all that unconscious influence going out as a contagion to others. By these men the world is raised.
But that is not all. The world is not only sunken, it is sinful. Those of you who know life even an inch below the surface, know that even in this Christian country, in our great cities, the world is rotten. Have you ever thought of the sin of the world? Think of the sin in your own being. Think that the man in the next house has the same amount of sin in him, and all the people in your street are like that. Multiply that by the number of all the streets in your city, and that by the number of cities in your country, and that by the number of countries in the world, and you have a ghastly spectre under which your imagination staggers.
That, however, is only a single glimpse of this sinful world, for the sin can be taken away: "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." How does He do it? By forgiving the sin of the world, and by taking it away, through you and me and other subjects of His kingdom.
Christians, the followers of Christ, He said, are the salt of the earth, and it is that salt that takes away the rottenness of the world. He takes away the guilt and the power of it, and you help Him to remove it by being salt in the society in which you live. Salt is that which keeps society from becoming rotten. You put salt upon fish or meat to prevent it from becoming rotten; and it is the Christian men and women in this country who prevent it from becoming absolutely rotten. Christianity is the great antiseptic of society. If you were to take Christianity out of New York, Chicago, Berlin, or Paris, those cities, in a few generations, would go to pieces, even physically, and be swept off the earth. Now, we are to be the salt of Chicago, New York and the great cities of the world. It is our business to make cities and to keep those cities sweet--not only to scavenge away the rottenness after it has grown there, but to prevent the new generation that is growing up from becoming rotten. The work of salt is to prevent this, as well as to cure it. Keep those children pure to the end of their lives. We do not emphasize half enough the prevention side of Christian society. We do not emphasize half enough the making of Christian environment in which a Christ-like life