Sunlight and Shadow in the Christian Life; Sermons Preached for the Most Part in America (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.1889 Excerpt: ... SERMON VIII. Cfje principle of a Boole life. "The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himselffor me."--Gal. ii. 20. TTERE is one of those outbursts of enthusiastic devotion, one of those warm expressions of personal experience, not uncommon in S. Paul. It is valuable to us as an exhibition of a very noble character, and an inspired statement of a Divine revelation. Truths are always more telling to us--being human creatures, with one life to live and one death to die--when they are presented in no merely dry and scholastic formula, but rather in a living and concrete form. S. Paul is teaching us a great truth, a truth of the highest significance--a truth which, for our salvation, we must in some measure make our own; and he teaches it with a life, a vigour, a reality which helps us to feel that it is not in the air and far above us, not a mere theory or a matter for academical discussion, but something strictly human and necessarily personal, even though it be Divine. Indeed, it is ever thus that he, and with him all the greatest and best men of Christian history, descends from the highest heights of religious contemplation to the most strictly practical consequences in common life. S. Paul's life, as the lives of every one of us must be if they are to be true to their dignity, true to their possibilities, was animated by an energetic principle. Here, then, as Christianity teaches it, we have the true principle of a noble life. I. "The life which I now live." If any man may be said to have literally lived his life, that man was S. Paul. It had ever been so. As far as we can trace back his history, we find him no dreamer, but in intense activity on whatsoever path he moved. In his early devotion t...