-512a CHRIST'S POWER, OUR WARRANT AND THE WORLD'S HOPE. A SERMON BEFORE THE American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, AT THE SEVENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING, HELD IN BY GEORGE F. MAGOUN, D. D., PRESIDENT OF IOWA COLLEGE. BOSTON: BEACON PRESS, THOMAS TODD, PRINTER, CORNER BEACON AND SOMERSET STS. BV 2075 .A64 157999 SERMON. "AND JESUS CAME AND SPAKE UNTO THEM, SAYING, ALL POWER IS GIVEN UNTO ME IN HEAVEN AND IN EARTH. Go YE, THEREFORE, AND TEACH ALL NATIONS."- Matthew xxviii: 18, 19. THE latter verse is taken here simply for its connection with the former. I stop short with such a mere suggestion of the great command and commission, and ask you to take a step backward in thought, and dwell this hour on what is perhaps less familiar—the great reason therefor. Once already, on an earlier occasion, our Lord had given a world-commission to the eleven apostles; it is the peculiarity of this republication of it to all living believers called to a mountain in Galilee, including them, that the reason accompanies it. We drop the majestic attending circumstances. The whole church had never been eye-witnesses of his glory, as three of the eleven had been on another mountain. Perhaps those who still doubted needed some similar manifestations. There was but this one occasion when all were gathered about him personally. It may well have been the "all-absorbing subject of expectation after his resurrection." At least it was surely needful that the one central, supreme injunction, on which the world's conversion is now proceeding, should for once be supported by its warrant as it lay in the Redeemer's mind. the critics, if they will, dismiss "therefore" from his words as a gloss, though confessedly just and apposite. The logical connection is enough. All power is given unto me. Go ye, make disciples. Let A divine reason for any undertaking is ever better than a human_one. It must be closer to the heart of the matter. Human reasons enough and most moving we can find for the work that summons us here - sin, the bond of race, the common divine image, the laws of suffering in evil and of sympathy, the relations of the New Birth and the Cross to all well-being, goodness, and eternal life-though even these run back into the divine constitution of the world and law and grace. But Christ's power is a reason for Christianizing all nations which is all divine. If that were not his, it were not ours to save any; if he had not all power, we had not been sent into all the world, to all nations, to every creature; if he is not personally what he claimed to be, our missions are the idlest folly men ever wrought with pains and sacrifice and cost. Let us meditate on Christ's power as our warrant to evangelize and the world's hope. It is more than a convenience of thought to distinguish power from force if, indeed, the science of our day does not oblige us to do so. Had Christ affirmed that all force is his—and given it to us to so affirm in the face of a science coming after him—had this modern idea of force been then available some men of science would have raised a new point of controversy with religion. His claim is not that; it is one far greater. It is phrased here not in terms of dynamics or instrumental efficiency, even divine. It has been observed that he declined the use of force or the forces; there was in him something grander. Power stands behind force. The one directs, controls, or go back far enough -originates the other "No conceivable analogy" between them, as it is the last joint confession of physics and metaphysics that there is none between matter and mind.. Newton must have known the one to discover gravitation as an example of the other. Show that when muscle moves no force is created by mind, only transmutation directed, then this directing requires power. Resolve all force into motion (though this is rather a fact than a force), and still it calls for power. Assert that it is native to the molecule, as we know it is not to any mass of matter, and you have only slipped from physics into metaphysics, and are really thinking of power, and perhaps know it not. Define it as a tendency to act, this is the pressure of power. The materialist is already off his feet, indeed, when he admits force unseen besides phenomena a something |