Acts 7:44

Acts 7:44

I. The wandering of the Israelites was all a parable. It was, if we may trust apostolic teachings, all a Divine shadow of that great invisible and spiritual society, the yet more mysterious Ecclesia, "the Church throughout all ages" on its mighty march through time, with all its attendant omens and prodigies, for such is the Church everywhere, a witness in the wilderness; such, indeed, is the Church; such are all its varieties of ordinance. It is the perpetual remonstrance against the sufficiency of the seen and temporal; it is a perpetual witness for the unseen and eternal; it is a perpetual testimony for the existence of a spiritual perpetuity and continuity; it is a mysterious procession; infinite aspirations are infused in the soul of man. The tabernacle of the testimony is the story of the Church and the soul a witness for faith. A world with no tabernacle of Divine testimony has a philosophy which only sees the worst, which goes on declaring its dreary monologue that this is the worst of all possible worlds, that sleep is better than waking, and death is better than sleep. In the presence of such thoughts, the sky shuts down upon us, there is no motive in life; as Emerson well says, "This low and hopeless spirit puts out the eyes, and such scepticism is slow suicide."

II. The pulpit has been through all the fluctuating ages a tabernacle of testimony in the wilderness. The pulpit is like that ancient tabernacle of my text, it rests, but it moves: it rests in the ancient truths it was instituted to announce. Christ is final; and, as has been truly said, "Christianity is a fixed quantity, not a fluxion, and Jesus Christ is all in all"; it is a spiritual universe; it has its immense and infinite announcements, which, like the definitions of mathematics and the numbers of arithmetic, are unchangeable and final we cannot go beyond them. We need no new Messiah; we shall find no wiser teacher, no more sufficient Saviour in any time to come. Christianity is complete, like the round globe and the blue sky. In giving to us the principles of the ultimate law of morality, He has exhausted the moral world of its treasures when He proclaims God for our Father. But what an unlimited progress is there in men's ideas and sentiments, and their application to religion; and should not the pulpit be the tabernacle of testimony to these, for the ideas of Christianity are progressive in the human mind? It is not the speculator but God Himself who goeth forth with our armies, who bids us to strike the tent and march forward to some spot where the future shall fulfil itself even as the past has been fulfilled.

E. Paxton Hood, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiii., p. 233