Our Master | Page 3

which to guide their lives.
And what is true of Mohammedanism is true also of Buddhism--the
great religion of the East. Its teachers have largely ceased to be faithful
to their own faith; and, as a consequence, that faith is a declining power.
Beautiful as much of its teaching undoubtedly is, millions who are
nominally Buddhist are estranged by its failures; and are, with
increasing unrest, looking this way and that for help in the battle with
evil, and for hope amidst the bitter consciousness of sin.

Such is a cursory view of the attitude of the opening century towards
the great faiths of the world. Perhaps one word more than another sums
it all up--especially as regards Christianity--and that word is
NEGLECT--cold, stony neglect!
And yet men are still demanding standards of life and conduct. The
open materialist, the timid agnostic, no less than the avowedly selfish,
the vicious and the vile, are asking, with a hundred tongues and in a
thousand ways, "Who will show us any good?" The universal
conscience, unbribed, unstifled as on the fateful day in
Eden--conscience, the only thing in man left standing erect when all
else fell--still cries out, "YOU OUGHT!" still rebels at evil, still
compels the human heart to cry for rules of right and wrong, and still
urges man to the one, and withholds him from the other.
And it is--for one reason--because Jesus can provide these high
standards for men, that I say He is The Man for the Century. The laws
He has laid down in the Gospels, and the example He furnished of
obedience to those laws in the actual stress and turmoil of a human life,
afford a standard capable of universal application.
The ruler, contending with unruly men; the workman, fighting for
consideration from a greedy employer; the outcast, struggling like an
Ishmaelite with Society for a crust of bread; the dark-skinned, sad-eyed
mother, sending forth her only babe to perish in the waters of the sacred
river of India, thus "giving the fruit of her body for the sin of her soul";
the proud and selfish noble, abounding in all he desires except the one
thing needful; the great multitude of the sorrowful, which no man can
number, who refuse to be comforted; the dying, whose death will be an
unwilling leap in the dark--all these, yea, and all others, may find in the
law of Christ that which will harmonise every conflicting interest,
which will solve the problems of human life, which will build up a holy
character, which will gather up and sanctify everything that is good in
every faith and in every man, and will unite all who will obey it in the
one great brotherhood of the one fold and the one Shepherd.

IV.
Liberty.
The new Century will call for freedom in every walk of human life.
That bright dream of the ages--Liberty--how far ahead of us she still
lies!
What a bondage life is to multitudes! What a vast host of the human
race, even of this generation, will die in slavery--actual physical
bondage! Slaves in Africa, in China, in Eastern Europe, in the far isles
of the sea and dark places of the earth, cry to us, and perish while they
cry.
What a host, still larger, are in the bondage of unequal laws! Little
children, stricken, cursed, and damned, and there is none to deliver.
Young men and maidens bound by hateful customs, ruined by wicked
associations, torn by force of law from all that is best in life, and taught
all that is worst. Nine men out of ten in one of the great European
armies are said to be debauched morally and physically by their
military service; and all the men in the nation are bound by law to
serve.
What a host--larger, again, than both the others--of every generation of
men are bound by custom in the service of cruelty. It is supposed that
every year a million little children die from neglect, wilful exposure, or
other form of cruelty. Think of the bondage of those who kill them!
Look at the cruelty to women, the cruelty of war, the cruelty to
criminals, the cruelty to the animal creation. What a mighty force the
slavery of cruel custom still remains!
All that is best in man is crying out for emancipation from this bondage,
and I know of no deliverance so sure, so complete, so abiding as that
which comes by the teaching and spirit of Jesus. But, even if freedom
from all these hateful bonds could come, and could be complete,
without Him, there still remains a serfdom more degrading, a bondage
more inexorable than any of these, for men are everywhere the
bond-slaves of sin. Look out upon the world--upon your own part