The Sermons of Henry Ward Beecher: In Plymouth Church, Brooklyn

No one can fail to observe, in reading our Lord's discourses, how unlike a king or great person he carried himself upon earth; how he loved to bring home his heavenly nature to his disciples and friends by all the figures and symbols which belonged to domestic life. That which belonged to us-whatever was human-he selected as a garment, and clothed himself with it. He was parent, brother, friend. He was for the hungry, bread; and for the thirsty, water. He was the light-a star sometimes, and a candle at other times. He was a vine. He was a husbandman. He was a shepherd. He was a merchant, a rich proprietor, a householder. Almost every element of use, in one way or another, he attaches to himself, either as a title, or by some parable.

Into this peculiar method of representation, no one of his apostles entered with such fullness of sympathy and such richness, as Paul. It would be interesting, if we had time, to run through the variations. which Paul produced on this theme. For I think it can be shown that in his hands there is scarcely one great elemental law, hardly a familiar phenomenon, in the world, which, in the Gospels and in the Epistles conjointly, is not associated tenderly with the name of Jesus. Christ. Our text is a very striking instance under this head. Bold as the Hebrews were on matters where we are exceedingly sensitive, it is. yet without offence that Paul represents himself as a mother, without saying so. He says:

"My little children, of whom I travail in birth again."

They were carried in his soul, yet unborn. In another place he says:

"Though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel."

Kindled with this imagery, his mind shot along the figure, and took another form of it, without note or warning; and he says that Christ was being carried in them, as it were, a babe unborn. They

SUNDAY MORNING, October 24, 1869. LESSON: EPH. IV. HгмNS (Plymouth Collection). Nos. 142, 381, 1251.

were the mothers, and Christ was to be born into their souls. This having Christ in us you will all recognize as a not unfamiliar thought; but the apostle's idea is that we are Bethlehem, as it were—that we are the stable, as it were. No, we are the mother, as it were.

Christ is being born into each one of us, severally, a babe; and our Christ, even when grown to years, and mature, is, after all, the Christ that was born in us.

Without stopping to illustrate other points in the figure, we shall carry it out in some particularity in regard to practical developments in Christian life and experience.

Christ was God. He was sent to interpret to men God's nature, his disposition, his sympathy and love; to show men that, on the very field where all their defeats occurred, it was possible for one to live purely and truly in his body and in his circumstances. Christ took upon himself the human body. In Scripture language, he was God manifest in the flesh. He took upon himself the form of a servant. He was very God, walking in the limitation and circumscription of the human body, this limitation and circumscription making him man. And there is no other manhood which is like that. Our manhood is but a faint and far-off dream and image of that. We come to true manhood only when we come to it through divinity. But our Saviour did not descend from heaven like a sun full-orbed, glorious. He came into the world as a babe. He went to the lowest bound of human weakness. He opened the door into life through which every babe comes. Nor did he then suddenly unsheath his bloom, and instantly spring up in fragrant beauty. He was as a root out of dry ground, according to the prediction of the prophets. He was a babe. He as a babe grew, came into boyhood, and passed through, gradually, all the stages of unfolding. He was a real boy. He had the imperfections and limitations of other boys. He experienced their nascent hopes and desires. Then he passed to immature manhood; and then to full manhood. Пle went through a long line of natural development, that he might be tried just as we are tried.

Now, although the apostle nowhere carries out this into a full allegory, yet it may be clearly seen that this thought dwelt in his mind; viz., that as Christ came into this world, and was first a babe, and then a youth, and finally a man, so there was an order in the stages of our personal experience; and that Christ in us was born, first as a babe, and went on through all the stages of youth up to maturity; so that we have in the spiritual experience of our nature the parallel, the analogue, of that which Christ himself went through.

At its first entrance, this divine, disinterested and authoritative love in the human soul is not in full power. The first experience in

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