I. There are two different ideas about the way in which the problems of the world are to be solved, the salvation of the world, whatever it is, is to be brought about. Pure irreligion looks to man to do it. Let man go on thinking, inventing, planning, governing, and the result must come. On the other hand, a certain kind of religion looks to God to do it. Let men lie still, purely submissive, without a movement or a will, and God, in His good time, will bring the happy end. The first of these two ideas has no faith, and it fails. The other idea fails also. Man standing aloof, and expecting to see God redeem the world, sees no such thing. Then, too, there is a lack of faith; man learns that simply to trust God with expectation that He will do everything is not faith. Then, in the failure of these two ideas about the world's salvation, comes another, which is distinctly different from either. Not man alone, and not God alone, is going to purify the world. But man and God, made one by perfect sympathy, by the entire openness of life between them, they are the two together; nay, they two together are not two; they are the one which is to make the old world into the new world by the driving out of sin. The principle which makes God and man to be one power is faith.
II. In Christ there was the fulfilment of that which when men try to conceive of what the world needs most, is the complete expression of their fullest dreams man in God, God in man, the Divine and human perfectly reconciled, perfectly united; not two forces, but one force. That was the Christ who went from haunt to haunt of the devils, and bade them flee; and they, the devils of hatred, cruelty, lust, selfishness, brutishness, superstition they all fled at His presence. And now to fill the earth with Himself, that is His wish and purpose, that is what He is labouring for through all these slow, discouraging centuries, in which, beneath the turmoil and distress upon the surface, the watchful ear can never fail to hear below the sounds which tell us that He is still at work. What is the real meaning of His purpose? Is He not trying to make His brethren what He was, to assert in them, as it was asserted in Him, that it is an Incarnation, a God in man, that is to save the world?
Phillips Brooks, Sermons in English Churches,p. 179.
References: Matthew 17:19. Preacher's Monthly,vol. iii., p. 346; T. Kelly, Pulpit Trees and Homiletic Undergrowth,p. 36; S. Macnaughton, Real Religion and Real Life,p. 232.