The mirror. (Stillwater, Minn.) 1894-1925, 1913-09-18

BILE. All the rest of the worlds wise |
teachers have declared that it is only the
good and worthy who can be saved, the fit |
who alone survive; that the man who has |
defled his soul and lost his souls pure
beauty is incapable of moral recovery and |
spiritual renewal; he is fit only to be
thrown on the rubbish heap while the world !
marches on to its lofty goal. But Jesus
Christ declared that He could save every
man, could cure the most hopelessly di-
seased soul and could even make the soul
that was dead to live again. The miracle
of all miracles is that He has proved able
to keep his promise.
1t is one thing to say that every man
can be saved but quite another to say that
every man is worth saving. Yet the second
great point of the Gospel is just that very
truth, that every man is worth saving.
Here again Jesus was the first and the last
to assert such thing What! that poor
degraded wretch sunk in infamy and vile
ness worth saving; that forlorn woman who
has sunk so low that she neither feels
shame nor knows how bad she is, worth
saving! | can understand how strong,
splendid, talented man could be accounted
as worthy, or how that sainted and sanity
woman of the pure heart could be regarded
as worth saving. But that poor, debased,
broken spirited creature, the outcast who
cares for no man and for whom no man
cares, to be worth saving! That is more
than the world ever has or ever will admit.
But Jesus regarded every man and every
woman, not only in the beautiful period of
innocent youth, but in the last hopeless
stage of later to be worth saving. In his
eyes soul was a soul, radiant with the
spotless holiness of God, every sinner a
possible saint, needing only to be washed
to become clean, only to be saved to be-
come pure, only to be brought back home
| to the Fathers house to become son and
true child of God. Strange that these
poor buns and corner loafers should by
their profanity scum the only Person Who
alone of the world had a good word to say
of and to them.
And thinking of the wonderful trophies
Jesus has won, the sinners He has rescued
from sins hellish bondage, the souls He
has freed from the poison that corrupts and
defles, He is proved to have again spoken
the truth. In the picturesque phrase of a
| book every one of you ought to read,
! s'The Dry Dock of Thousand Wrecks,
| He has taken the poor, dismantled, useless
hulks that were adrift on the sea of moral
disaster, repaired them, made them capable
of withstanding the heaviest storm of temp
tation and sent them forth on long voyages
laden with cargoes of precious freight, to
enter at last the harbor of safety and peace.
| From these two points, which you
must believe after you have discovered you
both need to enter into the beautiful King
dom of God, the third point naturally fol-
| lows. 1t is this: that every man can, if he
will look upon himself as still "hopeful
case, not forced by his many defeats and
disasters to consider his state as beyond
remedy. This Gospel came offering God $
great gift of Hope to us all. Jesus de-
SPARED of no man. Then neither need
you nor to despair of ourselves. You
have seen Hope typefed by the figure of a
maiden, radiant with youth, as though
Hope belongs only to the young. But the
hopefulness of youth is the bouyancy of ig-
norance, like that of the bird soaring aloft
to unknown realms in the sky. Hope is
more truly symbolized by the figure of one
who has known the fierce conflict, suffered
the agony of defeat, measured the power
and force of evil and who nevertheless does
not doubt but that right shall win and fall
en- he shall rise and stand triumphant at
the last. On the face SCARED with the
marks of the battle is the look of a con-
hdent peace and trust-the look of undyine
hopefulness. The Apostle of Hope, St.
Paul, had felt the strain and the sorrow,
had known the bitterness of defeat, and
after youth had passed away saw still the
shining portals. 1t was Paul, the old war
rior of many conflict, who said: "And
now abideth Hope;' for Paul had discov-
cred at last that we are saved by hope
when Christ is in us the ''hope of glory
And that discovery made by us today give
us courage to attempt the impossible ane
achieve it, to advance, though with falter
ing, hesitant step, over the threshold to en-
ter the open door, which in Gods mere,
stands never shut day or night; open tina
you and l may pass through to new lif
and new natures, and to the new heart.