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CHAPTER XII.

THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT.

"A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children, refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not."

§ 1. VICARIOUS IMMORTALITY.

THE tribe of Benjamin, refusing to surrender the men of Gibeah to the demands of justice, was in danger of becoming extinct. The other tribes, repenting of their solemn refusal of their daughters in marriage to the Benjamites, came together, and "lifted up their voices and wept sore; and said, O Lord, God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be to-day one tribe lacking in Israel?"

But the mother, whose life had been yielded in the birth of Benjamin, must grieve far more than the brethren whose indignation had so nearly destroyed the tribe. And though dead, she is represented in prophetic vision as the chief mourner on this occasion. Her sorrow is inconsolable; and her wailing is heard, in fancy, above the wailings of all the people. From Ramah comes the most piercing cry of anguish ;- Rachel, weeping for her children, refuses to be comforted, because they are not.

And so sad was the sorrow, that it is deemed the most suitable type of the agony of many mothers, bereaved, hundreds of years after, by the murderous hand of Herod, seeking the life of the infant Jesus.

But why such lamentation? The slain Benjamites had ended their earthly toils; the babes of Bethlehem were saved from a thousand ills of life. And in neither case do the mourners say aught that betrays

The dread of something after death,

That undiscovered country, from whose bourne
No traveler returns."

They are grieved only because brethren or children have ceased to be. They have, then, ceased to suffer. sorrow?

What cause for their

Such reasonings would indeed be insulting to a mother's love, and to the common love of man for his kind. But it is proper to state them; since they are identical with objections sometimes urged against the notion that the lost may cease to be. It is actually feared that Christians will not sorrow much, or be very anxious to save the perishing, if they may altogether perish. Hence we must inquire whether the mitigated doctrine of the divine penalty leaves a valid motive for evangelical and missionary labor.

At the outset we may reply that the Christian, though he expected himself to perish utterly, would show no greater love for man than Rachel did, if he should weep and pray that his fellow men might share with him a temporary spiritual life. For all who truly live, desire that their life may continue; in the being of others, if not in their own. And in the patriarchal age, when a personal future life was scarcely revealed, parents did look upon their children as the most natural continuation of their own existence. In the multiplying offshoots of their own lives they found their best assurance that they should not altogether die. In their posterity they found what may be called a vicarious immortality. Hence the Jewish proverb: "The childless are but as the lifeless." Hence also the peculiar love of offspring, which appears in the Mosaic law respecting the raising up of seed to one who had died childless; upon which one ancient writer remarks: "For since a dim hope only of the resurrection was yet given, they represented the promise of that which was to come by a kind of mortal resurrection, that the name of the departed might ever remain." In the same view Athenagoras says that man "begets children, not for the benefit of himself or kindred, but that, in the existence and longest pos

1 Africanus, Ep. ad Aristidem. c. 2; Routh, Reliqq. Sacr. II. 117.

sible continuance of his posterity, he may in their successive lives relieve the evil of his own death, and thus, as it were, immortalize that which is mortal." 1

The Hebrew love of offspring was in the case of Rachel enhanced by adventitious provocations; but her ambitious rivalries may have been far from selfish. Her bosom companion inherited a promise that in his seed should all the nations of the earth be blessed; and every noble sentiment-every feeling that impels us to honor the mother of Jesus as blessed among women-must also impel Rachel to desire a part in that lifetravail, that immortal honor. She might, then, as a pious handmaid of the Lord, utter the prayer, Leave me not childless, lest I die.

$ 2.

THE MATERNAL CHARACTER OF THE CHURCH.

The author of the "Conflict of Ages," assuming that the Redemption of man is a crisis in the history of the Universe, has extended the notion of the Church as the heavenly bride to include her relation to God as the instructress of new-created minds in all ages and in all worlds. In this eternal union and coöperation of the Church with God, in which the Church appears as the fostering mother of an ever extending family of the children of God,-it is thought we may find the key of the entire moral system (p. 508).

This view, we think, gives the earthly Church too vast an honor. But it may truly represent the feeling by which she is impelled in her efforts to extend the range of God's kingdom. As both human parents have one and the same affection towards their children, so the Church, as the spiritual mother of the regenerate, is impelled by the same love that sways the divine bosom. And when Zion is represented as travailing in birth and bringing forth children, we must regard her as desiring them for the same reason that God does,-sympathizing with the feelings that moved Him to the creation and redemption of The members of the true Church are co-workers with God. His emotions impel their hearts. His plans are their

man.

1 De Resur. c. 12.

plans. Their labors are the complement of His work. Their sufferings fill up that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ. Their joys are the same with his, in his mission of grace to mankind. In their proclamation of his love they show their own love also, which he has kindled in their hearts. In short, creative goodness, redeeming love, and the missionary spirit, are essentially the same feeling. They are the beginning, the continuing, and the completing, of the same divine work. They are diversities of operation by the same loving Holy Spirit that worketh all and in all.

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It follows that if from first to last God has encountered no emergency, if the Redemption was designed no more than the Creation to forestall an infinite evi',-if there has been no exigency of infinite justice,-no cry of anguish that might move the stones to pity,-if rather, God, when able to raise up from the stones children to Abraham, has preferred the methods of grace to the methods of power, and His love is constrained by no necessity but that of love,-then we should expect the Church to be moved only by the same love; and we greatly err when we seek to move her by any of those terrors. If in Christ "were hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” if His glory was seen as that of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, in order that the lavishing of divine attractions might win the regards of men, then the Church, with her bridal array, should win mankind by the methods of love, not of terror. But in fact the entire display of God's goodness and grace may be regarded as a divine suitorship; in which the wooing party is above all need of the return of love,-where the love is rather an overflowing fulness, asking the love of men for their own sakes. Thus in the quaint verse of Herbert:

"Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,

The Trinity and Incarnation;

Thou hast unlocked them both,

And made them jewels to betroth

The work of thy creation

Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure."

*

God has created intelligent beings that He might not be alone in His blessedness. And because His love is free, yet sincere, we may suppose He would rather not be, than be alone blessed. But to suppose that the refusal of His love leads Him to make the sinner ever wretched, is to suppose that He is needy. Rejecting this view, let us not again imply it, by any false view of the love of His Church for His creatures.

But the love of one who would rather not be, than be alone happy, is a parent's love, one which the true Church shares with God. This was the love which Moses expressed in his prayer for Israel: "Yet now, if thou wilt, forgive their sin; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written." This was the love of Jeremiah, who would that his head were waters, and his eyes a fountain of tears, that he might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of his people. And the love of the Church is often represented as a maternal passion. Unfaithful to God, and forsaken of Him, she becomes a widow, mourning her barrenness. Returning to Him, she is no more called a forsaken one, but Hephzibah, and Beulah. "For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee; and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee." But the same instinct which desires a spiritual seed and travails in birth for souls, makes the Church jealous for their salvation, as the mother is anxiously careful for the safety of her children. A mother's fear is the alarmed form of love. So that of the Church. As the mother is frantic, when her child is in imminent danger, so the Church is moved with terror, when the Adversary would destroy the objects of her love. But, like the mother's love, the just and salutary fear of the Church is never a panic terror for what the soul may suffer, but for what a redeemed creature may lose.

§ 3. THE MISSIONARY MOTIVE.

No human motive can endure, or can suffice for the various exigencies of duty, which is not truly healthful. The painful emotions can act only temporarily. They are made painful, be

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