The Re-gathering of the Saints.
We have now before us the time and the season of which St. Paul speaks in the text, and we have to observe that he uses it not as a terror but as an attraction "we beseech you" as those that would not part with it for their lives. The advent, a re-gathering, is in St. Paul's view a prospect full of consolation. What is it that makes the world the wilderness it is? In a large part it is that of which the re-gathering is a direct reversal dispersion. There are senses, no doubt, in which dispersion is tolerable; the separation and severance of nations, not more by dividing seas and deserts than by dividing tongues. It would be foolish to say that this is to any one man a loss or an affliction. It is as a type that we must read it if we would enter into its significance. Sin is the great dividing force. Sin divides even its joys. Where sin is there is selfishness. Hand may trust hand, lips may speak of love and vow affection, yet in the very sinning there is a breach, and in the recoil and rebound there is severance. Sin is selfishness hidden in the act; selfishness perceived in the consequences. Sin is dispersion alike in its loves and its remorses. Well may it close the dark category in the dark page of sorrow for one of light and gospel consolation.
II. On the loving heart of St. Paul a heart large without limit, yet stretched almost to bursting by the multitude of its sympathies, there lay the sorrow of the dispersion. He felt it in every sense; felt it in its very distance. Yet more bitterly did Paul feel this dispersion to be an intolerable burden of suspense and anguish, while he knew not for certain how a letter had been taken or an injunction obeyed, or whether a door had been opened for successful ministry. It is the division of bodies or the division of souls which distracts him. Even death and you might think that St. Paul would have been above it with his strong faith and bright hope even death troubled him. He felt as a dispersion that death which he dreaded not as a destruction.
III. Therefore, with St. Paul, as to all whose hearts are like his, big and warm in their affections and sympathies, there was a peculiar charm in the thought of the advent as a re-gathering. "I beseech you," he says, as though no other entreaty could equal it in strength, "by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto Him." Here we meet and part; we commune and separate with a sense of unrest and dissatisfaction which leaves us in the end desolate. To the friend of our soul we say not one half of that which we meant to say; we said not the thing which we meant, or he misheard or misinterpreted the thing spoken. Our love he read not; our passing humour he took as a change of affection; our soul speaking to his soul with the soul's voice was not recognised as the soul's, and we almost begin to say, "I will keep my love till it can speak the one tongue of the immortals." When Christ comes friend shall meet friend in absolute oneness no earthborn, sinborn cloud to come between; knowing at last as known, because loved as loving.
C. J. Vaughan, Penny Pulpit,new series, No. 514.