349
June 1927
T h e
K i n g ’ s
B u s i n e s s
Do you remember Elizabeth Browning’s description of a good woman ? “She never found fault with you, Never implied your wrong by her right : Yet man at her side grew nobler—girls purer ; None knelt at her feet confessed lovers in thrall; They knelt more to God than they used-—that was all.” That is the Christian. Emanating a subtle virtue— radiating perfect life—touching only to heal and bless and inspire, because dwelling always under the hand of Jesus,
A L and of L ight Does not Livingstone tell us that the one thing which made the loneliness and darkness of his life in Africa tolerable for him was the remembrance of Christ’s prom ise: “Lo! I am with you alway” ? The touch of Jesus changed the Dark Continent into a land of light. When a search party was looking for the lost expedi tion of Sir John Franklin and his men, they came upon a boat full only of skeletons, telling all too eloquently how the brave men had died. But at the bottom of the boat a Bible lay open at Psalm 139 and marked at verses 9 and 10 —“If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.” The divine touch had turned all their darkness and hopelessness to golden promise. You have your cross, my friend,1so hopeless and dark and mysterious. Why it ever came you cannot tell, and you shrink from it with bitterness and fear. Let Jesus touch it. Let Him bear it with you, and a strange light will break forth from its murky depths, and flashes of reason will play through and through its mystery, and all its leaden gloom will be changed to golden brightness. Jesus has a golden touch. And what is more we may share that golden touch. Jesus makes a gift of His power. It is His purpose, His plan to share it. He touches one in order that He may touch another. Think of Peter, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I unto thee. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth I say unto thee, rise up and walk. And he took him by the right hand and lifted him up,” That is the kind of thing that has been going on for centuries, too. By one arrested soul Jésus reached a thousand more. And what a gift to possess ! Always to bring out the best in people,, never the worst. Always to light up the possibilities of a given set. of circumstances, never their limitations. Possessing a divine magnetism which draws the hidden goodness of souls to the surface and attaches the life to God. Ah !. that is a gift indeed. Yet many have-possessed it. The strength of the true Christian in every generation has been that in His presence men have found their lives “touched to nobler issues” ; they found it impossible to speak the mean word, to do the mean deed ; they have felt obliged to be their best and live for once up to their ideals. A P athetic S tory Frank Boreham reminds us in one of his essays of that pathetic story in Oliver Twist of the touch of Rose Maylie, in the sweetness of her pure girlhood, upon the soiled, war ped soul of, Nancy. Nancy burst into tears: “Oh! lady, lady,” she cried, clasping her hands passionately before her face, “if there were more like you, there would be fewer like me, there would, there would !” It was the golden touch of pure love revealing the hid den gold beneath the dross. Aloofness from men is the last thing we should expect to find in Christian men and women. Exclusiveness, that baneful practice of the society of the world which sets liv ing souls in iron rings of caste and knows not how to bridge the gulf between the lower and the higher—that kind of thing is utterly alien to the spirit of Jesus. Jesus sought, aye, and seeks contact. He wants to get in touch. If you give your hand, the first thing He will do with it will be to place it in thè hand of a less fortunate brother
O Love That Will Not Let Me Go W E are told that when G e o r g e Matheson realized that he was going blind, he wrote a letter to his fiancé offering to release her from her covenant of love because of his certain blindness. To his surprise and deep regret, she ac cepted the proffered release.
The young poet-preacher was plunged into a verit able Gethsemane of sorrow. In time, however, his feet found the Rock of Ages and he became aware of another.who was “acquainted with grief.” He went to his desk and, in the travail of his soul, a great hymn was born. Sore and sick at heart for the love that had let him go, he wrote : “O Love that will not let me go, Then, as victory over his impending affliction found utterance, he wrote that wonderful second stanza, a prayer of resignation with which few of us could face, the defeat and disappointment of blindness : “O Light that followest all my way, I yield my flickering torch to Thee ; My heart restores its borrowed ray, That in Thy sunshine’s blaze it’s day May brighter, fairer be.” Mounting yet higher, with the same note of noble victory, he wrote : I rest my we.ary soul in Thee; I give Thee back the life I owe, That in Thine ocean depths its flow . May richer, fuller be.”
“O Joy that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to Thee ; - I trace the rainbow through the rain, And feel the promise is not vain, That morn shall tearless be.”
And finally conscious of the spirit of victory in Him who transformed the cross from a symbol of .defeat to an emblem of supreme victory, he penned the closing lines :
“O Cross that lifteth up my head, I dare not ask to fly from Thee ; I lay in dust life’s glory dead, And from the ground there blossoms' red— Life that shall endless be.”
man.
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