The Fundamentals - 1917: Vol.2

234

The Fundamentals ness and the beauty that can come into life from a real accept­ ance of this revealing of His. “In that day,” He says, “ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me; and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself unto him. If a man love me, he will keep my word; and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him.” I remember an interview I had some years ago at Ashe­ ville. As we sat under the trees, the man with whom I was talking told me he had had a home; he was sure it was the sweetest home that could be found in all the Southern States; and he did not have it any more. The eye that had marked his coming and brightened when he came watched for him no more, and little arms that had been thrown around his neck, and that made his home-coming in the evening a very taste of heaven to him, were no longer there to greet him, nor any little voice to call to him as he came. And he told me that when first that great eclipse fell upon his life it seemed to him that the whole thing was done and that a man was not war­ ranted in trying to live any more. But he found here in this 14th chapter of John these great assurances of which I have just been speaking, that there was another eye that could take the place of that eye that had waited in the years that had passed, other arms that could take the place of those little arms that were now busy with the other children round about the throne of God in heaven. There had come back into life the tenderness—and mark you, that too is a thought that came when Jesus Christ revealed the Father in Himself— there had come back into his life the tenderness and the joy and the gentleness that he had known before, simply because now he had come a little more fully to realize what it was that Jesus Christ by His life and teachings had exposed for the life of man.

Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker