El Paso daily herald. (El Paso, Tex.) 1881-1901, 1898-12-20
FIRST METHODIST CHURCH.
Sermon on the TWO Great Command
mentS

Sermon on the WOOredt command
ments
The following is the text and part OF
the discourse of Rev. A. M. Lnmpkin
of the First M. E church Sunday morn
log.
thy God with all thy heart and with
ali thy mind. This il the first and
great Commandment. The second is
like unto it. Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as tbyself. On these two com
indictments hang all the law and the
prophets. Matt. p ,(37-40).
7 his is the essence of the ten COM
mandmeuts a. cond ensed in the mind
of the Redeemer of the world.
The ten commandments stand as the
very center-the very beginning of the
entire Jewish and Christian dispense
ton. In some regards 1T least they
may be considered the most important
part of all the revelation that God has
made to the world. The remainder of
the scriptures were written by inspired
men; a fact that places then pre-emi-
nently above all other books. But the
ten commandments were w.ltten on
stone, by the finger Of God himself,
amid the st akiEg of the earth and the
thunders and lightnings of Mt. Sinai.
But of all those Christ placesthose that
1 have chosen rs my text rs the great
est. They are the greatest because
they include all others They become
therefore the very centers. the very
nucleus, the very germ of the entire
Christian dispensation. Can l make
my thought more clear by illustration?
Let me see.
take the oak whose giant form has
struck it's roots deeply into the noun
tain side, and defied the storms and
Ill nf hol q
gray-headed man whence came the
oak tree? But he says, l cannot tell.
He remembers we'll when in his young
er days he could shake the tree with
one hand and measure its height by
his own, but that was not the begin
ming of the tree. I ask another who is
q little older. Ee tells me that as q
boy he carried an acorn in his pocket
from the neighboring forest and plant
the oak tree; but even this WAS not the
beginning. There was something yet
the boy had never seen.
/ take the acorn as it was and burst
1t open. There in one end l find .
little en- bryo, little germ not larger
than a point, and SO far as human
knowledge or discernment is concerned
we call this the beginning of the oak
tree. So l take the Jewish and Chris
are but one) that has spread itself over
the world and taken root in thousand
places and 1 ask whence it's source?
Whence its beginning? l search for
one old enough to tell me but ind him
not.
1 take history and go back for
five times a hundred years,
and see the feeble light of the Chris
tian dispensa,ion shining through the
a ~ly 10 ia
was not it's beginning. 1 90 back an
other Thousand years, and 1 see the
whols Christian world rejoicing in the
cOnvestion of the emperor of Rome.
fact tina, gives Christianity mightier
power than it ever had before, and yet
l am sure this WAS not the beginning,
Again l go back some 300 years and I
see Paul as he takes the world in his
hand aud goes forth to Antioch and
Ephesus and Phillippi and Corinth and
Athens and plants the word even as
the boy plants the acorn, and from
this the system spreads but we have
not found the beginning yet. There
is an embryo we have not seen, We
take the word even as we took the
acorn and begin to examine it.
We turn pastEthe psalms and past
the prophets on back to the law and to
the .ten!commandment We look closely
in these and there we find implied but
not exactly expressed the thought of
my text, Love the Lord thy God with
ali thy heart and thy neighbor as thy
self.' We have at last found the seed
from which the entire eystem of Christ
tianity sprang. There is another fact;
learned 1t when l was q baby, That
in some seeds there are two germs. and
other grow. So in this seed from
which the Christian system has grown,
there are two germs, one of religion
and the other of morality.
A mans religion is the relation that
he sustains or that he believes himself
to sustain to God. His morality is the
relation that he sustsins or that he be-
lieves himself to sustain to- his fellow
man, and in an embryonc form are
the text, Love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart and soul and mind, and
thy neighbor as thyself' - These are
the two embryos, religion and morali-
ty both springing from the same seed :,
the one Of which may be developed and
the other not. A mao may be exceed
ingly moral and yet in his heart hate
God. He may pay his debts, provide
for his family, and be truthful and no.
nest with his neighbor and this may
be his boast, and yet be an avowed in
fidel. He is keeping but half the
law, and the smaller half at that, and
if Gods word be true, in the end he
will be "lost" Whatever that word may
mean.
On this account some relig ionists
have cried out against morality,
really believing that the worse O man
is the better Christian he makes when
once converted. But the theory is
wrong from beginning to end. Morality
is the next best thing to religion.
And if we can't or won't be religious
we ought at least to be moral, at least
Tn he decent