The Call of the Cross: Four College Sermons

All truth that has vitalizing power comes home to men in visions. The visions may be of the head or heart. Through whatever tributary the waters first are seen to be flowing they must all merge in the main current of experience, or the vision is no real vision but some cheap fancy, such “stuff as dreams are made of.” The contents of this little volume are a real vision. The author is distinctively a seer. The one vision under which may be classified all the others is a divine-human life, real to thought, actual in living, realized already in part, to be perfected in a kingdom of God on earth, ON EARTH, nota bene. Christianity is more than any church or all churches, more than any and all creeds. Christ has not come into the world to establish salvation by the ark theory of separating a few from an inevitable general wreck. Christ has come to redeem humanity. That redemption is established; but redemption is essentially a process. Consequently, the completion must be wrought out through the ages of humanity’s development. The Hebrew root from which is derived the word Pharisee is a verb signifying to separate. That is the spirit of Pharisaism. “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate,” is fatal or vital according to whether the injunction be considered as a means or an end. The original Pharisees mistook it as an end. They brought upon their heads the accumulated woes from the lips of Jesus. He taught and lived and died for the exact reverse of that spirit of Pharisaism. The only separatism that true Christianity knows is a withdrawal in order to gain an accumulation of power for service. Christianity is not separation but permeation. The church is not to withdraw itself into an organization gathered out of the world; it is to pour itself in the consecrated sacrifice of service into the world. The two disciples who were on the mount with Jesus wanted to take advantage of their opportunity to make a little private high church establishment and suggested that they abide there. The lower section of Raphael’s g