"I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
"Was it then of the sinners first our Lord thought ere he came from
the bosom of the Father? Did the perfect will embrace in the
all-atoning tenderness of the divine heart, the degraded,
disfigured, defiled, distorted thing, whose angel is too blind ever
to see the face of its Father? Through all the hideous filth of the
charnel-house, which the passions had heaped upon her, did the Word
recognise the bound, wing-lamed, feather-draggled Psyche, panting in
horriblest torture? Did he have a desire to the work of his hands,
the child of his father's heart, and therefore, strong in
compassion, speed to the painful rescue of hearts like his own? That
purity arid defilement should thus meet across all the great
dividing gulf of law and morals! The friend of publicans and
sinners! Think: he was absolutely friendly with them! was not
shocked at them! held up no hands of dismay! Only they must do so no
more.
"If he were to come again, visibly, now, which do you think would
come crowding around him in greater numbers--the respectable
church-goers, or the people from the slums? I do not know. I dare
not judge. But the fact that the church draws so few of those that
are despised, of those whom Jesus drew and to whom most expressly he
came, gives ground for question as to how far the church is like her
Lord.
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