SUNDAY COLUMN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 77, 23 November 1912, Page 2

SUNDAY COLUMN.

THE PULPIT OF TO-DAY. “THE COMMON PEOPLE.” By Rev. C. Silvester Horne, M.A., M.P. “And the common people heard Him gladly.”—Mark xii, 37. (Continued.) lAoid I tell you tin’s—men of the world are men of the world. They need nobody to rise up and teach them the facts of their own sphere. What they do not know about the world is not worth knowing. But they recognised in Christ one whose knowledge began where their knowledge ended, one who

knew what was above and beyond sense, a Teacher sent from God. i say here to-day, in the heart of this city—it is a great mistake to suppose that the man in the street is just the materialist and nothing more. God never made any man just a materialist and nothing more. In point of fact, the religious teacher who under-values his audience loses his power over them. Jesus never addressed men and women as if they had no deeper needs, no higher aspirations, than could bo met by the material sataisfactions.. In other words, He never let His mission down, He never lowered His ideals, Ho never cheapened and vulgarised His ministry, He never descended to one unworthy artifice, He imitated no tricks of the rhetoricians. He assumed universal instincts and institutions to demand God for daily food, redeeming love for daily satisfaction, and He was right. His knowledge of the common heart was just as unerring: “the common people heard Him gladly.”

I want to say, then, that I discover the reason of Christ’s attraction for the common people in His knowledge of the common heart and the common needs. He know, mind you, that the lowest needs the highest; He did not try to satisfy its hunger with the husks that, the swine did eat. He offered the highest even to the man in the street, and He succeeded. He offered God who is a Spirit to the woman of Samaria and He succeeded. He assumed a sacred thirst in the souls of fishermen and tax-collectors and representatives of ordinary humanity, and he was right. He lodged eternity in the heart of time, and the common folk were the first to recognise the gift, because He treated them with respect. Above all, He believed right through that the supreme need of

man is God—and nobody need begin to preach who does not!—and that all other Gospels are simply quad; remedies, and He was right. He made no mistake; He put first things into the first place. “Temporal necessities,” he said. “Yes, they will 1 be added: your heavenly Father knows that yon have need of all these things: but God and His righteousness first.” He held the.water of eternal life to the lips of commun humanity, find the common people drank it gladly. The Divinity of Christ is nowhere more attested to my mind, than im His knowledge of the human heart and Hi; faith in man. I should like to think that everybody listening to mo this morning lias read the brief but very powerful essa} on Charlotte Bronte, by that exceedingly clever twentieth century writei Mr Gilbert Chesterton. Will you let me read you this passage? “Charlotte Bronte’s work,” he says, “represent: the great assertion that the humdrhn. of life of modern civilisation is a dis guise. . . Her heroine was the common spinster, with the dress of Merino but the soul of freedom. It h significant to notice that Charlotte Bronte, following, consciously or, un« consciously, the trend of her genius was the first to take away from tin heroine of a novel, not only the artificial gold diamonds \>f wealth and fashion, but even the natural gold and diamonds of physical beauty am. grace. She felt that the whole of the exterior must be made ugly, that she might show that the whole of.the interior was sublime. She chose the ug best of women in the ugliest of centuries, and revealed in them, too, the hells and heavens of Dante.” ' Now all that is, to my thinking, finely said and wisely said. We talk of mean streets; we talk of common lodging-houses; we talk of dull and dingy holes. But tell mo, men and wo men, what is it lives in those places? Shall I tell you? Passion and sentiment, joy and sorrow, tragedy and romance, love and hate, make theii way up and down those crazy stairs. Selfishness and unselfishness, cmw and chivalry, pride, malice, charity, all dwell together in those narrow rooms. Beneath that humble roof, within that squalid garret, there are. a® Mr Chesterton said, all the heaven; and hells of Dante. What laughtei find tears! What deeds of unbridled passion and sublime generosity! Behold, this is the common people. 7\ncl mind you, when your stories are writ ten by a Miss Bronte you will learn that this is life; woven in all thes< strange strands—incongruous medley of incompatibles, tragic unity of irre concila.ble elements, but never com mon, always sublime, the life to whicl Jesus Christ held the key, the key e its reality and its redemption. (To bo continued.)