I. There are two spheres of human duty, the individual and the social. Individually, it is our duty to "work out our own salvation with fear and trembling;" to listen to the voice of God, and hearing, to obey it; to "keep our bodies in temperance, soberness, and chastity;" to keep our minds in the love of that truth which maketh free; and so walk along the path of life that the heaven-appointed guardians of the human soul, the two great angels of duty and conscience, may hold us by the hand and never turn upon us their calm looks of awful indignation. But this individual duty cannot be performed without due recognition of our social duty. Our own souls will suffer, our Christian life will shrivel into a paltry and repellent thing, unless, in the spirit of love and not of officialism, of humbleness and not of religious superiority, we recognize our solemn responsibility to our brethren who are in the world, and learn out of noble motives to do noble deeds.
II. How are nations saved? When they are conquered? when they are in peril? In what way can deliverance come to them? It comes by the work of a single man, or by the united passion and energy of a whole people, or by both combined. Churches and religions are saved in exactly the same way. A decadent nation must pray, "O God, give us heroes, give us patriots, give us men." And a weakened Church and faith must pray, "O God, give us prophets, give us saints." One man who is in earnest, one man who can see the beckoning hands which others cannot see, and who amid the universal roar of base and virulent gossip has heard the "still small voice" which others cannot hear such a man will do more than a million of the languid and conventional. What made Christianity conquer the world? Not wealth, not learning, not eloquence, not crystallized dogmas, not the splendour of an amazing hierarchy, or the formalism of an external worship. No, but innocence; no, but absolute unworldliness; no, but the moral vividness of great examples; no, but the sincerity of faith which, seeing Him who is invisible, hurled itself against the unbelief of the world the force of a belief which counted all things as dross for the work of God. "You see the day is passed by when the Church could say, Silver and gold have I none," said Innocent
III. when he saw the bags of gold being carted into the Vatican. "Yes, holy father, and the day is also passed when the Church could say to the cripple, Arise and walk."
F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxvi., p. 1.
References: Matthew 21:28. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxiii., No. 1338; J. Morgan, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xx., p. 5.