Blogotional

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Edgar Young Mullins, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky., 1899-1928; born Franklin County, Miss., January 5, 1860; educated at Corsicana, Tex., 1870-76; Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, 1876-79; ordained to Baptist ministry, 1885; graduated Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1885, D.D. and LL.D.; pastor at Harrodsburg, Ky., 1885-88; Lee Street church, Balti¬more, 1888-95; editor of The Evangel, Baltimore, 1890-95; pastor of First church, Newton, Mass., 1896-99; author of “Why is Christianity True,” “The Axioms of Religion.”


“We beheld his glory.” - John 1:14.

Some years ago a painter who admired the moral beauty of Christ ‘s character, but who refused to acknowledge that He was God, resolved to paint Christ’s portrait from the evangelical records. For weeks he read these simple gospels and opened his soul to every suggestion of beauty and moral impulse, permitting himself to be moved and swayed by all the grandeur and radiance of that matchless life, knowing that only thus could he catch and reproduce on canvas the face he would portray. But in his process of sympathetic study of Jesus his unbelief slowly passed away. First one doubt and then another was consumed, burned up, so to speak, in the flaming splendor of that marvelous life, and ere long the painter bowed before Christ in adoration and worship. Like a man who has gazed into a holy mystery, he came forth among his friends, a look of wonder and of praise upon his face, and exclaimed, “I beheld His glory.”

Men are denying today that Christ is divine. They are seeking to undermine that faith which has healed broken hearts, and has destroyed the power of sin, and comforted the dying for two thousand years. It is well that we ask and answer the question, Was He what lie claimed to be, the divine son of God and Savior of the world?

As evidence that Christ cannot be classed with other men, I invite your attention to the threefold glory of Jesus which we have beheld. First of all, we will glance at that glory as seen in the gospel records where the painter saw it.

If a meteoric stone should fall upon the calm bosom of the sea, the energy of its impact might be measured by the diameter of the circling waves which it would set in motion when those waves had reached their limit. So the claims of Jesus may be tested by the role lie enacted while on earth and by the effects which lie produced. Let us study, then, the circling waves of his power in a series of relationships sustained by Him.

Note, first, his relation to sin. He was Himself sinless. His inner life was a flawless mirror of stainless purity reflecting the image of God. He has challenged criticism for two thousand years to discover a flaw in his character. “Which of you convicteth me of sin? “remains as lie spoke it, the unanswered challenge of divine holiness. As has been said, He is the sun on which all the telescopes of time have failed to find a spot.

He was not only sinless - He forgave sin in others. Well did His enemies accuse Him of blasphemy when He pronounced the words to the paralytic, “Son, thy sins are forgiven thee,” unless indeed and in truth He was God, for God alone can forgive sins.

He transformed sinners. As a sunbeam falls on a mud puddle and draws up a drop of water into the clouds, distills it and purifies it of all foulness and sends it back as a snowflake, even so could He lay His finger on the stained life of a Magdalen and make it white as snow.

He shed His blood on the cross for the remission of sins, and He declared that remission of sins should be preached in His name to the end of time.

But sin is a violation of law, and this relation of sin raises another question, that of His relation to law. And so we find Him claiming to be lawgiver and king. “He that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them,” “Ye have heard it said, but I say unto you,” are forms of speech familiar on His lips.

But law suggests a kingdom and a scepter and a throne. So we find that He is King of a new kingdom among men. He claims that His kingdom shall endure forever and He shall reign in righteousness.

But a kingdom set up on earth implies con¬trol of providential events. For how shall such a kingdom survive through the ages un¬less the ruler can control the course of history? Read the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of Matthew, and see how calmly He anticipates the course of history, of earth¬quakes and wars, of famines and pestilences. Yet He says he that endureth to the end shall, be saved, and that He himself shall come again at the consummation.

Providence, again, is but part of a vaster system of nature. And we find that He is Lord of nature. He spoke to the water, and it blushed into wine; He spoke to the barren fig-tree, and it withered from the roots upward; He spoke to the loaves and fishes, and they were multiplied and fed the thousands; He spoke to the tempest, and it was hushed into silence. Nature was His servant. He was its Master.

Towards man He asserts the sublimest claims. He is the object of human faith; for Him all human ties must be severed if need be; for Him death is to be welcomed. He extends His arms and invites the race to come to Him for peace. “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

How sublime is this role enacted by the Nazarene! And to crown it all,, He claims. equality with God. Before” Abraham was I am.” “I and my Father are one.” Well has it been said: Jesus was either God or a bad man; for He claimed to be God.

And how simple the picture in the gospels; how consistent; how transparent and clear the story. His words about God are like the spontaneous warblings of some strange and wonderful bird. His deeds of power, His miracles of grace are as sparks emitted by some great fire. Yet how unaffected He is in it all! There is never any attempt at dramatic effect. In the moments of His greatest majesty He is as quiet and as unassuming as the shining of a softly beaming star. Homer’s gods are represented as shaking the heavens by their least act. The poet produces his effects by physical disturbances when his gods stir. Jove gives an affirmative answer to a petitioner, and this is Homer’s description of it:

“He spoke and awful bends his sable brows,
Shakes his ambrosial curls and gives the nod,
The stamp of fate and sanction of a god.
High heaven with trembling the dread signal took,
And all Olympus to the center shook.”

Contrast this with the quiet majesty and moral grandeur of Jesus stilling the tempest as He rises from His slumber and says to the rolling billows and raging winds, “Peace, be still.” Sometimes He unites in a single act the perfectly human and the perfectly divine in His nature. Humility nestles up by the side of majesty. Grandeur is adorned by lowliness, and extremes meet in perfect harmony. He is worn out with toil and asleep on the boat like any other, and in an instant stills a tempest. He stands weeping at the grave of Lazarus, like any other broken-hearted friend, and at once hurls the voice of command into the tomb and raises the dead to life. He allows Himself to be led away captive by his foes, but restores the severed ear of the high-priest’s servant, and says to the impetuous disciple, “Knowest thou not that I could call to my side twelve legions of angels? “ He allows Himself to be nailed to the cross, and to be laid away in the tomb, and then in undaunted might quietly opens his eyes and lays aside the grave-clothes, rises from the dead and ascends to the Father.

Surely we have beheld His glory in these pages, and any man will repeat the painter’s experience who allows Christ‘s image, as there portrayed, to have room in his mind and heart. I have read the tragedies of Shakespeare, and awe and horror have fallen upon my spirit at their close; I have gazed upon the Sistine Madonna, that masterpiece of the artistic genius of Raphael, and a sense of beauty has mastered me. I have been swung on shipboard by the mighty rhythmic force of the ocean, and a sense of its power has filled me. I have gazed on a clear night at the dazzling splendor of the milky way, and adoration and humility have combined to sway my soul with emotion. I have stood on the Gorner Grat, surrounded by cloud-piercing sentinels of snow-clad Alpine peaks keeping guard like tall archangels over diminutive man below, and wonder and awe have opprest me. But the image of Jesus Christ, as it towers in solitary grandeur before me in the New Testament surpasses them all. He inspires me with greater awe than Shakespeare, and greater majesty than ocean or Alps. He is more splendid than the milky way, and not afar from me, as it is, but near me. And if a human writer invented His picture as recorded in Matthew, then a Galilean peasant wears the literary crown of the ages and the genius of Raphael and Michelangelo pale into insignificance by the side of his. Nay, as Rousseau said, it would take a Jesus to forge a Jesus.

Again, “we beheld his glory” in history. The marvel of the ages is the Rock of Ages. The supremacy of Christ as compared with other teachers in all our civilization of the West is as the supremacy of the giant oak in the midst of a forest of saplings, or as the supremacy of the sun as compared with the planets in our solar system.

Dr. Fairbairn says, men have attempted in recent years to get rid of Christ in two ways. One is by critical analysis. They have taken the knife of criticism, and with it have cut and slashed at the gospel records, until one of them has said that there are but six or seven authentic sayings of Jesus in the entire New Testament. The other way is by logical analysis. They have tried to show that the decisions of the early Christian councils declaring Jesus to be God are unreasonable and absurd. But when they have completed their destructive work and done their worst, there stands Christ towering above the troubled sea of human speculation and doubt like a great and lofty rock at whose solid base the angry waves foam out their rage and dash themselves in vain. There stands Jesus in the firmament of human hope like a star of the first magnitude, above the multitudes of hungering and sorrowing and sinning humanity, growing larger and brighter and more splendid with each generation, until today all over the earth the nations are in commotion as they gaze upward and point with the trembling finger of yearning and hope to Him as the lodestar of their lives.

Look for a moment at His achievements in history. See Him as He moves westward in the person of the apostle to the Gentiles. He kindles a flame of faith in the islands of the Mediterranean. He plants His banner at Antioch. He sweeps through Lystra and Derbe, and Asia Minor begins to prostrate herself before Him. He plants His foot in Ephesus, and Diana begins to totter from her throne. Restless, He crosses the Hellespont, and at Philippi, amid the quakings of the earth, He wins trophies. In Athens, amid classic surroundings of the Acropolis and Parthenon and the chiseled beauties of Phidias and the glories of Praxiteles, His voice is heard calling men to repentance. At length in Rome itself He grapples with the world power. His crown flashes in moral beauty by the side of the crown of the Caesars; His throne rises, mystic, silent and invisible, but mighty in its movement as the silent stars in the bending heavens. When the empire is broken up and barbarians come in hosts, sweeping like a conflagration over that ancient empire, He lays His hand on their untamed spirits. Clovis is converted. The Goths are evangelized. The Franks and Gauls and Scandinavians come bending to Him. England owns His sway. America, through cavalier and Puritan and Pilgrim, is founded, and when the feet of those men touch our shores, the ”sounding aisles of the dim woods rang with the anthems of the free“ and in praise of the Nazarene.

A humble prophet of Nazareth has done all this. He has done it by the use of a single principle - indeed, by means of one despised virtue, self-denial. The cross is the keystone in the arch of his power. It is a true saying that, as chemistry is organized around the principle of affinity, as political economy is based on the single idea of value, as astronomy owes its origin and progress to the one law of gravitation, so Christ founded His religion on the one idea embodied in the cross, dying to live.

See, then, how He dominates the world; not, indeed, perfectly yet, but with increasing power. Look at the great creeds of Christendom, the Lutheran, the Calvinistic, the Westminster, the Philadelphia and New Hampshire confessions of faith. He is the center of them all. If you should go through the forest with an ax and cut a ring around the great trees, all of them would die. To take Christ‘s name from these great creeds would be to do the same for them. They would wither, their leaves lose their life and color, their sap cease to flow. They would perish.

The Church is His monument. She has had a long and checkered career, sometimes persecuted and driven into the wilderness, sometimes unworthy of her high calling, but even to-day she is the fairest among ten thousand institutions and the chief glory of this earth.

The Lord’s Supper, beautiful impressive memorial of His death, so simple that any child can understand it, yet so profound in its suggestions of divine love that no philosopher has ever fathomed its mystery to its depths, monument of quenchless love and gentle solicitude on His part and expressive of tender love on the part of His disciples, it stretches back through eighteen centuries to Calvary, filled with the aroma of His presence at every step of the way, and shining to the eye of faith through the ages like a chain of roses bedewed with tears of saints and woven by the hands of angels.

He dominates the greatest art of the world. This fact has often been pointed out, and has become commonplace. Go yonder to the art galleries of Europe. Gaze upon those yards upon yards, and furlongs upon furlongs, and miles upon miles of flaming canvas, the very crown and blossom of human genius, and what do you see? His figure, His mother‘s figure, His brethren‘s figures, His disciples, His enemies. They portray Him as babe in Bethlehem with the light bursting from His infant form, as boy in the temple, as teacher, as cleanser of the temple, as healer, being raised on the cross, being crucified, descending, ascending to glory, judging the world. As I stand there gazing I interrogate those great masters, and from their graves I seem to hear the answer from Murillo and Rubens and Raphael and the rest. “It was He,” they say, “ who touched my brush with celestial fire; His hands mingled the colors, and His spirit inspired mine to its great achievements.”

So, too, as I listen to the great masters of music, to Handel and Hayden and Beethoven, as the billows of harmony roll in upon me and catch me up and sweep me on, as the sublime strains of the “ Messiah “take my spirit captive and chain me to the flaming chariot of triumphant melody, I seem to hear the master of composition say: “ It was His breath through my soul which first fanned the flame of harmony; His hands first smote the chords of my being until they thrilled with the very echoes of heaven.”

What shall I say more? He is in our modern life everywhere: in our political econ¬omy seeking justice in all industrial condi¬tions, in our politics seeking to purge it of greed and graft, in our social life, in our literature shedding a moral radiance over it; in modern missions He is not yet conqueror, but He presides over the struggle.

“Careless seems the great avenger.
History’s pages but record
One death grapple in the darkness
‘Twixt false systems and the Word.

Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;
But that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth Christ within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.”

In the third place, we have beheld His glory in the realm of Christian experience. His glory shines on the pages of the New Testament. It rises to a new brilliancy as He marches triumphantly through history. But for the individual believer, that glory attains to its noonday splendor in the experience of his own heart.

Christianity adopts the scientific method of demonstration, viz., the method of experiment. Christian experience means Christian experiment. Make a trial of Christ and He will prove to you that He is real, a living Christ doing a divine work in the soul.

We have all seen the triumph of Christ in debased lives, men and women plucked as brands from the burning. A diamond and a piece of charcoal are essentially the same thing, or at least diamonds were made of charcoals; in her own mysterious workshop nature accomplishes this wonder. That is interesting, but it would be far more interesting if my scientific friend could tell me how I can transform charcoal into diamonds. Now this is the glory of Christ, that He does just that. Jerry McAuley was a charcoal, and Christ changed him into a diamond. S. H. Hadley, the bum, the drunkard and reprobate, was a black piece of charcoal, and so was George Muller, of Eng¬land. who began life as a burglar. Christ touched their lives and made them spiritual jewels, fit to adorn His own crown of glory.

Christ predicted that He would do just that. He said that men would believe on Him, that prayer in His name would open the gates of Paradise, that a cup of water given in His name would have eternal reward. What a magic name it is today in its power to renew human lives! According to the old story, George Washington while a boy went into his father ‘s garden one morning in spring and found to his wonder and delight that his name was growing on a garden bed, spelled out by the plants. His father, of course, had planned the surprise for George. But suppose the father had foretold that hundreds of years later his name, Washington, would be found spelled out by growing plants in other garden beds, and suppose the prophecy had come true, then we would conclude that he was in league with the cosmos, that he had super¬natural power. Now Jesus has done a more wondrous thing. He predicted that His name would be written in human hearts to the end of time, and that that name in the garden of the soul would keep it clean from weeds and briars, and to-day tens of thousands of men and women are witnesses to His power.

Experiment, I say, not in the vainly curious fashion, but in the high aim of moral purpose. Try Christ thus and He will give the proof of His power. The school children will recall the way the books prove that we have a blind spot. Hold a white piece of cardboard with black marks on it before the eyes, and move it up and down and back and forth until when it reaches a given point the black marks will vanish. Try this and prove it. Now Christianity says turn the soul towards Christ in all sincerity, and suddenly it will appear that you have not a blind but a seeing spot. You will behold His glory. A young woman scien¬tist who was a skeptic denied Christ‘s resurrection. The pastor in the neighborhood told her to give up speculation and try experiment, offer herself to Christ. She returned soon with radiant face, exclaiming,” I cannot yet prove by argument that Christ arose from the dead, but I know He is alive, for He has come to me and manifested Himself to me.” She beheld His glory in the holy place of experience.

Here, then, is the ground of our confidence. First, we believe because, as Professor James says, we will to believe, or because the Bible tells us to believe, or because some friend witnesses to us of Christ‘s power. But at length we believe because of what He does in us and. for us. That is the reason why destructive criticism cannot fundamentally shake our confidence in the Bible. In it we find reflected our own experience. If I look into a mirror which changes or distorts my face, I know it is an untrue mirror, but if it gives me back my own image, I know the mirror is true. Such a mirror is the Bible. It reflects truly my spiritual image.

Blind Bartimaeus, of Jericho, was healed by Jesus, and Dr. Dale has suggested that con¬ceivably his faith at first was based on the healing of the man born blind in Jerusalem, of which he had heard. Imagine a doubter seeking to destroy his faith by calling in question the story of the man in Jerusalem who was healed. “The story looks suspicious,” says the skeptic. “Why did Jesus put clay on the man‘s eyes, and send him off to wash in a pool? There must have been fraud somewhere.” What answer would Bartimaeus have given to such a doubter? He would have pointed to his own eyes. He would have declared, as the other declared, “Whereas I was blind, now I see.” I see the fair forms of nature and they all tell me I am no longer blind. The daisies that blossom at my feet, they tell as I gaze at their beauty that I am no longer blind; the white blossoms on the trees, the bloom on the grapes, and the hues of the pomegranate; the blue haze on yonder mountain, the fiery splendor of yonder evening cloud, and those burning stars above - these all are my witnesses; the faces of my friends which I now see, of my brothers and sisters, and the dear face of my mother - these all are my witnesses, all this beautiful wondrous earth of God’s, fashioned by His fingers, all proclaim my testimony. Yes, yes, I believe not because of what Jesus did to someone else, but because of what He has done to me that He is the divine son of God. I have beheld His glory with the eyes to which He unlocked the gates of light and bade me enter.

This, then, is the witness of experience, and every believer knows what it is in some measure. I went to Him in my bondage and sin, and He broke off the shackles and set inc free. I went to Him in doubt and perplexity, and. the light of day fell on my darkened path; in the lonely night of sorrow when friends and helpers failed me, He came into my life and bound up my broken heart. In doubt and despair and dread of the future, He gives me life and hope. We have seen His glory, then, on the pages of the New Testament record. It has flashed before us through eighteen centuries of history, as the rider on the white horse went forth conquering and to conquer. That glory has also shone forth within us, and we see it in the lives of others. We have seen it as it breaks forth in the faces of the dying who in His name greet death with a triumphant shout, and we seem to catch it in the notes of the redeemed host above who sing His praises and who proclaim that they owe their victory to Him, and shall spend eternity in telling it.

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