What is the
meaning of this sort of talk that we hear about a faith that they held
once, but they have outgrown? What is the reason of this expectation
that seems to have spread itself abroad, of necessity that the boy who
had a religion should lose his religion some time or other, and that by
and by he should take up a man's religion somewhere upon the other side
of the gulf of infidelity and godlessness, through which he has passed
in the mean while? You expect your boy of ten years old to be religious
with a child's sweet, trusting faith; and you hope that your man of
forty and fifty, beaten by the world, is to have found a God who can be
his salvation. But the years between? What do you think of your young
men of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and thirty years old? To have
outgrown the boy's faith, and not to have come to the man's faith? That
seems almost to be an awful fate and destiny which you expect for them.
But if our faith be this, then there shall be no need, no chance that a
man shall outgrow it. Know Christ with the first conceptions, imperfect
and crude, of his boy's life, and he shall go on knowing more and more
of that Christ. That friend, the Christ he knows at twenty-five, shall
be different from the Christ he knew at ten, just exactly as the friend
I know at fifty is different from the friend I knew at thirty, twenty
years ago; and yet He is the same friend still, forever opening the
richness of an ever richer life, filling it with new experiences, with
new manifestations of Himself.
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