The Church and the Crowd; An Interpretation of the Answer of the Church to the Challenge of the Day (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917. Excerpt: ... IV THE CALL TO READJUSTMENT "rWHE first shall be last and the last first." There is a peculiarity about the language of the Great Teacher. Into almost every sentence that He uttered may be read a significance more lasting than its literal meaning. After two thousand years of profound study, of critical and reverent scholarship and of interpretation by the pulpit of every age, we have not as yet understood, much less exhausted, the full meaning of His sayings. Life alone is the full interpreter of His words. We shall not take His words here for their obvious meaning and in their familiar interpretation. Beneath them rest a deeper meaning and a wider force than that of a final distant judgment, when the greatest here shall be among the least there, the lowest shall be the highest, the last shall be the first. In this world now, in your day and mine, in these present lives of ours, this principle is at work. It is not an arbitrary upsetting and overturning of things by an over-ruling Providence, but simply a righteous readjustment and restoration of the things which we have permitted to be wrested from their proper places. We have been slow to learn that nothing can remain permanently out of its place in this world which belongs to the God of Law and Right and Love. All too slowly have we adopted the old adage that "nothing is settled until it is settled right." A man may place unrighteousness first, may even give his whole life over to it, but somehow and some time righteousness will regain and retain its usurped dominion, though to win it must crush his biggest ambition and destroy his dearest idol--though he lose his life before he can gain it, though the struggle last through this and on into the other life. The world may repudiate first things, the huma...