SUNDAY COLUMN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 59, 2 November 1912, Page 2

SUNDAY COLUMN.

THE PULPIT OF TO-DAY. “THE COMMON PEOPLE.” Ey Rev. C. Silvester Horne, M.A.M.P. “And the common people heard Him glady.”—Mark xii, 37.

There is a sense in which I think it may ho said that this is one of the most surprising statements in the New Testament. What we call “common people” are credited, as we know, with certain virtues of an elementary character, especially by candidates who are in search of their suffrage; but we have rather come to believe that they are indifferent to high-toned opinion, incapable of the finer feelings, impatient of lofty, spiritual ideals: indeed, idealism of any sort is supposed to be contrary to their love and little prejudices. They are lovers of clap-trap, we are continually told, who need to be entertained with highly-spiced rhetoric, tickled and humoured with all the arts of the demagogue. This is the unflattering estimate which we are encouraged to form of the common people, and judged by this standard Christ’s attempt to teacli them must have been labour lost. He certainly did not flatter. He pricked the bubble of their patriotic expectations. He prophesied the decline and fall of their splendid and beloved city. Hb drew for His followers in glowing pictures of success. “Ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake,” he said. That was not exactly an attractive message. Nor did He appeal to''them to take up the cross and to follow Him from any motive of base popularity-hunting. No one who ever spoke the truth to men was ever so guiltless of that offence. But in addition, according to our usual notions his ministry was over the people’s heads; it set in too high a key; His teaching was too spiritual, or, to use a philosophic phrase, too transcendental. True, His discourses were not made up of abstract and logical arguments; they were full of simple, unaffected and natural illustration; but even so, the suggestion of a meaning after which the mind had to reach often left His hearers mystified. “Why speaketh Thou unto us in parables?” they said. And many sayings were, hard. There was such a blunt, direct, uncompromising mortification to all the popular hopes and the fashionable beliefs.

These were His public utterances, and when He came to talk to individuals, man by man and woman by woman, units in the multitude of the common people, He did not change His tone. Amazement falls upon us still in these later days as we stand and listen to Him discoursing to the Samaritan woman, with the soiled life and the stained soul, of the nature of Deity, of the spiritual character of worship. That is not how—l do not speak in any critical spirit!—but that is not how a modern Missioner would have dealt with that woman. He would have applied to her arid to her misdeeds the chastisement of straight and burning speech; he would have argued of death and judgment; he would have spoken freely of the wrath to come. But not a word of this fell from the lips of Jesus. He treated this common woman with her lost character and her life of shame, with undefinable respect, until, as He spoke to her, she must have felt, I suppose, that the God whom she had forgotten for years was near her, round about her, verily talking to her by the lips of the speaker. I do say that Christ’s methods were as unlike those of popular evangelism, as we know it, as could well be. Simple sayings, heavily freighted with meaning; natural illustrations of supernatural truths; familiar descriptions of a world and a life absolutely unreal to the average soul. And yet “the common people heard Him gladly,” the common people hung upon His words, and when the ecclesiastics would have silenced Him or done Him hurt, “they feared the people.” To what wonderful cause are we to ascribe this power of Christ over the common people? Now let it be remembered that this particular power was not due to what He did, but what He said. It was not what they obtained of temporal benefit, but what they heard; it had no reference to the bread that perisheth, but to what He described as the bread of life. It was His message, not His miracles. There were, as we are told, times in His ministry when the crowd mistook the purpose of His coming and looked to material advantages. But as He spoke to them they grew conscious that they were greater than they knew, and that they needed most what He had to give and what they could get from none other. Christ’s greatness, began, will you remember, where the greatness of every other teacher ended. That was what He meant, I suppose, by “fulfilling the prophets.” Where the prophets ended He bpgan. They conducted men to the mystic threshold of the invisible, and then Christ took them by the hand and led them across the frontier right into the kingdom of God. What was dark speculation to the most far-seeing of others was firsthand knowledge- to Jesus Christ. Christ spake as one who had come straight from the bosom of the Father. He was in the world, but not of it, living, moving, having His Being in the unseen. (To be continued.)