The Property Right we are to get in Souls.
I. God evidently means to make every community valuable to every other, and so far at least every man to every other. We see this on a magnificent scale in the articles of commerce. Here we find the nations all at work for each other in so many different climes and localities, preparing one for another articles of comfort, sustenance, and ornament, and then commerce, intervening, makes the exchanges, so that every people is receiving back to itself supplies that the whole human race, we may almost say, has been at work as producers to contribute.
II. Let us look a little into this matter of property and see how it comes. We get a property in things by putting our industry into them by ways of use, culture, and improvement. This makes our title, and then the ownership is bought or sold as by title. Just so when a Christian benefactor enters good into a soul: when he takes it away from the wildness and disorder of nature by the prayers and faithful labours he expends upon it, the necessary result is that he gets a property in it, feels it to be his, values it as being his. And how great and blessed a property it is to have, we can only see by a careful computation of the values by which he measures it. (1) First, as he has come to look himself on the eternal in everything, he has a clear perception of souls as being the most real of all existences more real than lands and gold and a vastly higher property, because they are eternal, and the title, once gained, is only consummated by death, not taken away. (2) Next, finding this or that human spirit or soul in a condition of darkness and disease and fatal damage, he begins forthwith to find an object in it and an inspiring hope to be realised in its necessity. He takes it thus upon himself, draws near to it, hovers round it in love and prayer and gracious words, and more gracious example, to regain it to truth and to God. (3) Then, again, as we get a property in other men by the power we exert in them, how much greater the property obtained by that kind of power which is supernaturally, transformingly beneficent, that which subdues enmity, illuminates darkness, fructifies sterility, changes discord to harmony, war to peace, and raises a spirit to be a temple of God's indwelling life. (4) Furthermore, when one has gained another to God and a holy life, there is a most dear, everlasting relationship established between them, one leading, so to speak, the other towards eternity, and the other beholding in him the benefactor by whose work and example he is consciously exalted for ever, and this gracious relationship will give them an eternally mutual property in each other. (5) The salvation of men is thus seen to be a work that ought to engage every Christian, and a work that, to be fitly done, must be heartily and energetically done.
H. Bushnell, Sermons on Living Subjects,p. 148.
Reference: 2 Corinthians 12:15. J. Armstrong, Parochial Sermons,p. 259.