The Stark County Democrat. [volume] (Canton, Ohio) 1833-1912, 1895-01-10
CHRIST rs THE LIGHT
MANS DEPENDENCE ON GODS PROM
iss OF ETERNITY.


| blloweth me shall not walk in darkness, but
| Ihall have the light Of lifo.-John viii, H.
/ have already called your attention
10 the fact that the first utterance of
these words came from the lips of Jesus
Christ when he stood in all those rich
belongings of Judaism which served par.
TALLY as a background and partially as
an illuminating circumstance of his
whole life and career. You see him there
with his soul looking backward into the
history Of Israel ON that fateful night
when Pharaoh lost his slaves, when
there had been born out of the agony Of
Israel a now nation, when the common
wealth Of HCbrewdom first found its
| own consciousness. The mind of Jesus
in looking back there to that first feast
Of Tabernaclcs, on that evening of so
much distress and of so much hope, be-
holding within it all something essen
TALLY human, something larger than
Judaism, something rs great as the in.
terosts of mankind, just as at that hour
when at the feast of Tabernacles again,
after SO many centuries have slipped
away this man of men, this son of hu-
, manity, always a jew, intense in his pa
triotism and emphatic in all his Judaic
relations, utters the word that belongs
| to the race, word that runs its line Of
prophetic illumination around the plan.
ct, Il am the light of the world -
Lifted out of an Abyss.
What a contrast this scene presents
Here is woman, made out of our com.
mon clay, experiencing all that human
life means in its precious flower of wom-
anhood; with all that deep abyss of
darkness that comes because lofty noun
tains rise upon the surface of our human
life; with all these intense midnights Of
| moral gloom that exist because there is
such overpowering splendor in this
| moral universe; woman taken in the
midst of her sin Shall the old feast Of
Tabernacles, with all its ritual and men,
ories, swallow up the ideal of this Jew,
who is also the Son Of man? Is the light
that shall fall upon earth for earth's end
less benefit and for earth's redemption
| to be so stainless that it cannot fall into
the dark experience of this moment and
! redeem it? He answers all this by turn
ing away from the poor sinner only aft
er he has flooded her whole heart and
poured into her deepest darkness the IL
lumiuation Of his own personality and
his own life by saying, II am the light
Of the world" 1t is an amazing an
nouncement, and an announcement that
falls upon our thoughts this morning,
as l, 300 years away from that hour we
look for the hard problems and consider
the difficulties of the life with which
we have TO do.
In the first place, the physical world
itself is problem 1t is such q problem
as it was not 1874 years ago. Man has
developed. Mans life has deepened.
Mans questions are harder and vaster
because they involve his deeper insight
and the discovery Of richer opportuni.
ties. Mans problems have engaged
themselves with the majestic interests
with which his whole life has to do TO-
day, as his life has broadened and height
ened, and as it has come more and more
into connection with infinite treasures
which were not apparent save in the
mind Of the Nazarene peasant 1894
years ago.
Scroll OF the Passing Years.
Aswe look upon our planet sometimes
it seems as though it were q series of
scrolls, and every new generation has
come and lifted from that series of
scrolls one new one, which it alone
could read, more deep in interest, more
poetic in meaning, moro prophetic in all
its outlook, than any other scroll that
had been read, and that generation has
looked with sort of pity upon the gen.
Grafton that has preceded it as it has
said, mo generation like ours ever went
into the meaning of the world" 1t has
repeated the innocent egotism Of the
generation preceding, for that genera
tion said to the generation that went be-
fore, mo generation has ever read this
world as our generation has. " And so
on for these 1894 years humanity has
been coming to this planet, ON which it
has had to live its life and work ont its
destiny, and today, with our nineteenth
century science, with our finer insight,
growing out Of all the heredity of the
belongs to our time, we read scroll that
seems to be different scroll, that is
really the same scroll, and we are get
ting meanings and wonders out Of it
that no other age has found. So with
mans increasing life comes mans in
creasing wonder, and the tiniest thing
In the world grows more and more won
derful as mans life deepens. There is
no difference between the grain Of sand
that your man of the nineteenth century
puts under his microscope and looks at
with all his accumulated knowledge of
chemistry and physics and that same
grain OF sand where the rough foot Of a
barbarian on the seashore away back
yonder struck as he landed upon the
roast from his dugout 1t is the same
grain Of sand. 1t is the same humanity
which is looking at it, but between the
man who looks at it through his micro
scope, with all his modern understand
ing Of its rare treasures, and that man
Of ignorance and barbarism back there
we have realized in our power all the
accumulated meanings, and all the ex-
traordinary knowledges, and all the ma
jestic experiences that have made the
man Of today different from the man of
that farcff yesterday. The two stand on
the same planet made up Of countless
millions Of sands like those, and SO
made up Of all these grains of sand that
they unite themselves with that far
reaching philosophy of the universe in