Cannon Farrar on Idolatry.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XIX, Issue 1782, 13 January 1886, Page 3

Cannon Farrar on Idolatry.

Preaching recently at Trinity Church. New York, Cannon Farrar took for his text, “ Little Children keep yourselves from Idols." Here is a noble passage from the sennon'.—St John tells you what God is in three sentences, "God is righteous, God is light, God is love.” The Idols which represent Him as a God of arbitrary caprice, treating men as though they were dead clay, to be da'bed about and shattered at his win ; idols which won d represent His justice as alien from ours, and those things as good in Him which would be evil in us, are shattered on the rock of the truth that " God is righteous." Idols which represent Him as delighting in narrow formalism, selfsatisfied security and bitter exclusiveness, making dull and acrid dogmatists of the sole elect, rejecting the brighter, bolder, larger natures, as though He loved the jagged tbistlesand dwarfed bush better than the rose of Sharon and the cedars of Lebanon ; idols of the sectarian, idols of the fanatic, [idols of the Pharisee, idols of those whose ignorance would label themselves as the only Christians and only Gospellers, are shattered by the ringing hammer-stroke of the truth that

“ God is light." Idols which represent Him as the only living life, turned towards self or folded within, caring nothing for the endless agonies of the creatures He had made; burning with implacable wrath against little deviations of opinions, regarding ever the sins of the child as deserving of infinite punishment; idols of the zealots, idols of the ecclesiastics, idols of those who think their puny wrath can work the righteousness of God. are dashed to pieces by the sweeping and illimitable force of the truth that “ God is love." These axes and hammers of the Word break down the carved images of idols and thsir temples, whether they be reared by sympathising theology or by ruthless syllogism, by religious hatred or by selfish guilt. And so. little children, keep yourselves from idols. St John will not merely lead you to what is abstract; he will point you to One whom he has seen and heard, whose hands had the handling of the Word of life ; to One who, in the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of his person, read the revelations of your Saviour. Do not go to human systems ot theology ; do not seek human conceptions of art in order to understand him. If you trust even to Thomas a Kempis, he will draw yon a plotura of Christ, nlllch leaves out of sight altogether the most essential feature of His ministry—that he went about doipg good. If you rely on religious teachers, they may offer you a dead Christ for a living Christ; an agonised Christ for an ascended Christ; an ecclesiastical Christ for a spiritual Christ; a Christ for the elect few for a Christ for the sinful many ; a petty formalising, sectarian Christ for the Royal of the great free heart of manhood ; a Christ of the fold for a Christ of the one great flock ; a Christ of Gerizem or of Jerusalem, or of Rome, or of Geneva, of Oxford or of Clapbam, for the Christ of the Universal Worlo.

The sermon made a profound impression, and is printed in part by the English morning papers.