Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1908-10-18

ly? oh. no. Again his mother. speaking
through him. saves him. Again it is writ
ten. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy
God
Hungry. weak. famished. the voice says
to Him again: Here you are in this soil
tary place. going through this spiritual
experience. You need something to eat:
You are surrounded by stones; command
that these stones become bread; hasten
the natural process. discount your life
now; granted that God will make bread
out of these stones in the course OF mil
lion cons, If it is not your will 20 wait.
young man. If you share the divine ma
ture. command the stones to become
bread now; you will never need it more.
The clean. strong man answers. again
from His mothers lips: 1t is written. man
does not live by bread alone. L can indeed
make bread out of stones. and l am doing
it now; but the kind of bread l crave is
not the kind you mean. AT last, the
whole circuit completed. He says to this
lower self. Begone. begone, get thee be-
hind me, thou tempter'; and forthwith. the
itself and angels came and ministered
unto Him.
Observe it was after that heart
searching experience that He comes back
into his own country town. That is the
test for any man. The hardest place to
live the new life is in your own home.
We all know ii. There we are without
honor, people call us by our first names.
They think Of US as they left US years
ago, they asked us to join them in the
same miserable habits wherein we fellow
SHIPPED. perhaps when We knew no bet
ter. He comes back to put the thing to
the test at home. saying, If L have gained
the victory, the SeVereSt place to try 1t j
not in Jerusalem. where the excitement
of the great city and the shouts of the
populace will goad me on; but 1T is 49, the
sleepy village of Nazareth where they all
know the carpenters father, and HIS
mother and think of me only as an ap
prentice So he goes to Nazareth. Now,
what lies in His mind as He formulates
before these people His divine mission?
These are His words: r have come to con-
vert the world to release the world from
with larger and divner hope He links
his fortune with the greatest of Hebrew
prophets. Isaiah. The nation of Israel
had been sold down into Babylon as pris
oners. Their religious worship was
broken up, their customs abrogated. They
were without hope, and almost without
God in the world. Isaiah arises and
breaches his sermon. The spirit of the
Lord is upon me, to revive you. to bring
you hope, to bring you out from your
bondage. to bring you back from Zion
The Master finds in those words precisely
His mission. 1t is the thing, he says,
that l wish to do. Men have sold them
selves for nought They shall be re-
deemed for nought They have gone off,
it were into a far country. They
have left their primitive instincts. They
have disobeyed. or rather disregarded the
behests of their best nature. They have
shut themselves up into caverns. Now
the spirit of the Lord Is upon me. 1t is
no theory. l know it. My work is to COM
fort them that mourn. to bring out of
bondage those who are slaves to their
ton that this day is the acceptable year
of the Lord.
Briefly He set himself to this three
fold task, first to comfort the world in
all of it's sorrows, to reveal to man the
infinite worth of man as man, and to
awake out of sleep this dormant spiritual
capacity which is the birthrght of
child of God. There is one expression
which the Master used more than once,
which hints the way 1t lay in His mind.
He says, The Son of man came to seek
and to save that which is lost What
was that? 1t was the sense of moral
worth. There was danger of that being
lost out of sight. Says Matthew Arnold.
in his epic making Literature and Dog
ma" If We We're to describe the work
of Christ in word, we should say this
Jesus Christ came to restore to man his
men, He did come to give them eternal
life, but the way He saves them and the
way He gives them eternal life is by
restoring their intuition. The Son OF
man has come to seek and to save that
which is loSt-the sense of moral value,
the sense of your own infinite worth by
virtue of your being a humn being, not
by virtue of your being cultured or ig
norant, but by virtue of your being
human being, the untouched and undevel-
oped and unmeasured capacity of the hui
man spirit here and foreVermOre. That is
the thing which has been lost. The
NaZarene comes and throws himself into
that task with all His life and with all
sure of His endless life that He can af-
ford to be not too careful of laying 1t
down. lay down my life He says; mo
man taketh it away from me-. And In
those last days there must have echoed
through His mind that very first strug-
gle of the temptation. Instead of argu-
ing the matter He says to his tormentors
DO you not think that even now, sur
rounded by Roman guards and a mob
with stones and lanterns, do you not
think that even now 1 can pray to my
Heavenly Father and He shall give me
more than ten legionS of angels?' The
died. the mob won the day. If Jesus was
so sure that He could draw upon the spir-
itual realities. why did not the ten
legions of angels materiahze?' For, the
same reason that the stones We're not
turned into bread: for the same reason
that He was not reckless and did not
jump from the church spire. That was
not the kind of angels whose guardian
ship He needed. The angels Of the good