I was driven to church when I was a boy, in those old
Puritan days. I went to school, where they forced prayers upon me all
the time. I was made to be religious, so now I cannot be religious." Was
there ever a more dreadful thing than for a soul to say that, because,
it may be, of the unwisdom, or the imprudence, the overzeal and the
mistaken zeal of other men, we have not got the full blessing of that
rich, open, free life with Christ which the youth may have, and
therefore we will abandon the privileges of our higher life which is
given to us in our manlier years? It all comes of this awful way of
talking as if religion were the duty and not the inestimable privilege
of human kind. The Christ stands before us and says, "Come to me." You
say, "Must I?" And He answers, "You may." He will not even say, "You
must." You may. And duty loses itself in privilege, and the soul enters
into independence and escapes from its sins, fulfils its life, lays hold
of its salvation, becomes eternal, begins to live an eternal life in the
accepted and loving service of Christ.
Now just one word, my friends. If this be so, whether you to-day are
ready to make Christ your master and your friend or not, do not, I beg
you, let yourself say that it is a silly or unreasonable belief, thus to
know of a spiritual presence which is here among us, in which God is
really in humanity. Do not let yourselves say, my friends, that the man
who gives himself to Jesus Christ and earnestly tries to enter in deeper
and deeper into his life and tries to do his will, that he may know the
Christ and know himself in the Christ more and more--dare not call that
brother a fool, as you have sometimes called your Christian man who
watched scrupulously over his life and prayed, yes, prayed, the thing
you think perhaps the foolishest thing that man can do, the thing that
is the most reasonable act that any man does upon God's earth.
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