Sunday at Home.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 16, 15 July 1893, Page 10

Sunday at Home.

SERMON SNAPS.: —life troceives from what ; is his frflmyarin his hands —Dqns; : —We are* hqCthe Brethren of Christ because has assumed our nature; Christ--assumed bur : nature because we were his brethren. The incarnation la not. Jan after-thought • • • • • R® clung,to us through death, and so saved us. There is solidarity between the human race and Christ.— Dam;. —Earnest conviction is contagious. A premature certainty of creed is often followed by a toollatc rejection of it.- The man who believes without inquiry when he is young often has his doubts at the wrqng time wlien he is old. They are then, especially‘dangerous, like whooping cough and the measles in an adult, but do not cherish,doubts as good or a mark of intellectual pre-eminence. Be strong, yet meek : meekness and gentleness are stronger than all bluster. There is more force in sunbeams than in electricity. There is more electricity in a gentle shower than in thunder and lightning.—Macearex. —Holiness is more than goodness, more than purity, more than righteousness ; itembraces all these in their ideal completeness, but it expresses besides the recoil from everything which is their opposite.—Driver. —The Bible is not a mere book of devotion, and still less, of course, a mere book of general, literature, the literary remains of the Hebrew people. Viewed from the merely devotional or literary point of view, the Bible, in some parts, may be inferior to other books that might be named. But in this respect it is unique, that it is a literature which providentially grew up around a historical revelation of God in Israel, and which performs for that revelation the function of an atmosphere diffusing the sunlight so that the knowledge of God is spread abroad over all the earth, and in virtue of this function, it may, in an intellectual sense, be called an authoritative book.—Bruce. —I had a schoolmaster, who declared that if he was only allowed four books he would choose the Bible, Euclid, Plato, and Shakespeare.—Bipon. —God is to be trusted for what he is—not simply for what he has said.— Fairbairn. —lt was in a dim uncertain twilight, with feebly shining lanterns, the wisest and best of men sought-to make out the nature of God and his purposes regarding man ; but in Chi is t God has made noonday around us.— Dods. ON PREACHING, Addressing the jubilee meeting of the Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland in Edinburgh the other week, Dr Alexander Maclaren, of Manchester, who now holds the premierjplace among living English preachers, said—lf the church preached Christ, a new impulse of power would come in the measure in which they faithfully and earnestly preached it. He meant preaching —he did not say to argue about it, nor to make sermons which were pretty little essays, nor which were -obviously the ventilation of thenown views. If he might venture on such a heresy in the presence of so many grave and reverend seigniors, he would say ‘ Burn your manuscripts, and never write any more to be read in a pulpit.’ Whatever else they might do with their pen he potently believed that the worst tiling they could do with it was to write sermons with it. They might write anything 'else they liked, and the more the better, and the closer the thinking that preceded the pen’s use, the better ; but ‘ let me freely speak unto you,’ and if that was done he believed their church, and all churches, would have God’s blessing.”