IV. AIMING AT COMPLETENESS-2 COR. XIII. 9, V. KICKING. AGAINST THE PRICKS-ACTS IX. 5, I. THE MINISTRY OF GREAT CITIES.1 I have much people in this city.'-ACTS XVIII. 10. WO memorable instances meet us, one in the Old Testament, the other in the New, of the work which the servants of God have been called to do in the great cities of the world. To Jonah, the son of Amittai, the word of the Lord came, saying, 'Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.’2 He shrank, as he might well do (sinful as the shrinking was), from encountering that wickedness, from facing in its living horrors all that dread ferocity and brutal lust which seem even now to glare upon us from the sculptured stone. He shrank from uttering the threat. Yet more did he shrink from the thought that the God of his fathers had any care for such 1 Preached at the Bishop of London's Ordination, Trinity Sunday, 1865. 2 Jonah i. 2. A a people, any message for them. Was it not better to leave them to live and die in their iniquity? Was there not a broad gulf between the elect people and the heathen who knew not God? Why should he be called to bridge over that gulf? So it was that, stifling at once his sense of the wrath of God against all evil, and of His tender mercy towards all evil-doers, he fled from the presence of the Lord. Any enterprise, any perils seemed preferable to the task to which that presence called him. We know the issue of that wonderful history: how the prophet learnt at last that he could not flee from the Divine voice; how when he went he found an unexpected capacity for good, a repentance truer and wider than that which he had met with in the princes, the priests, the people of Israel; how he grieved that the effect of his own preaching as a prophet should have been to rob him of the glory of uttering a true prediction; how he was taught that the mercy of God was wide beyond all his poor and narrowing thoughts. 'Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night; and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city?" Men care for their transient interests, their home affec1 Jonah iv. 10, II. tions, the systems, habits, prepossessions, which The lesson which St. Paul was taught, as in the words which I have read, was essentially the same. True it was that here there was no shrinking from the task. A necessity was laid upon him, and he accepted that necessity as the great blessing of his life. To him had this grace been given, that he should preach the great mystery of the gospel, which he of all human teachers was the first to grasp in its fulness, the unity of mankind in Christ, Christ the head of every man; Jew and Gentile, alike in their sin and their redemption, alike in the history of their fall and in their capacity for restoration, all concluded under condemnation, that all might be the objects of a boundless mercy. And yet here, too, as the very words spoken to him implied, there had been a shrinking and a 1 Matt. xi. 21. |