The Head (Continued)

He is the head of the body, the Church. — COLOSSIANS i. 18.

“is not the author of confusion.” So in the beginning he established a harmony on earth as per feet as that of heaven. Nothing was out of tune, nor was there a jarring note in all creation. But how many and great discordances have the devil and sin introduced? Can any man, who looks abroad on the world, shut his eyes to the fact that much is out of order, that many things are out of joint, and that we do not always find, to use a common saying, the right man in the right place? Sceptres fall from the strong grasp of great men into feeble hands. The sweat of labour stands on begrimed and dusty brows that are fitted to wear a coronet or a crown. He ploughs the rugged soil, who has a hand to guide the helm of church or state. Men sit in the pews, that have piety and talents to adorn the pulpit., Money flows in on those who, unlike the lake that gives as it gets, have no generous outgoings that correspond to their income; like water in foul stagnation, or wasted on a bed of sand, what is lost to others is no true gain to them. Poverty, on the other hand, though not the

u curse, is the cross of many a liberal soul. Many people in the world have the power to bless others, but are eaten up by their own wretched selfishness; while others have the will to do good, but lack the power. So many things are discordant, so different from what they should be, and but for sin had been, that religion only can reconcile a man to the world, and enable him, from circumstances which embitter and exasperate the spirit of the ungodly, to draw lessons of faith and patience. Yielding neither to envy nor to covetousness, a good man bows to the will of Providence. Using no violence to set wrong things right, he waits the advent of a better world, having “learned, in whatsoever state he is, therewith to be content.”

Among other anomalies, we see that the moral and physical properties of men are often out of keeping. I have found a kind, gentle, and most loving heart under a rough exterior, reminding me of the milk and meat stored up within the cocoa-nut’s dry, hard, husky shell. On the other hand, look at Absalom! What winning manners, what grace and beauty, how much of all that in form and features pleases the eye and ministers to the pride of life, are united in that man to the greatest moral baseness! as if God would show us in how little esteem he holds what he threw away on so bad a man; as if he intended to rebuke the silly vanity which worships at a mirror, and feeds on charms that shall feed the worms of the grave. Nor is his the only case where a fair form has lodged a foul heart, and crimes of treachery and murder have stained the hands of beauty.

Again, we often see that the mental does not correspond with the corporeal development. The finest genius has not seldom been enshrined in a poor crazy casket; or in a coarse one, like a pearl within its rough sea-shell. Little men have done mighty things. The boldest daring has been united with a puny presence; and how did that great emperor, who in our days aspired to be another Alexander, illustrate the poet’s words —

“The mighty soul how small a body holds.”

On the other hand it was, at least in some respects, a weak head that stood on the broad shoulders of Samson! Whom the Philistines could not subdue, a woman conquered, binding with her charms one whom they could not bind with their chains. He fell before the influence that in Solomon’s case made the wisest the most foolish of men. God says, In vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird; yet see how Samson walks straight in, snared by a cunning transparent to all eyes but his own. Enslaved by animal passions, asleep in Delilah’s traitorous lap, a fettered captive in the hands of the Philistines, there he lies, a great lion in the hunter’s net; reminding us, by way of contrast, of the words, “Wisdom is better than strength; wisdom is better than weapons of war.” An example, also of discordancy, but with mind towering aloft over matter, what a noble contrast does Paul present to Samson! There is nothing in the outward man to attract the gazer’s eye. According to ancient tradition, he was a poor, mean-looking figure. His presence, said his enemies, is weak, and his speech contemptible. But put his parchments before him, put a pen in his hand, and, higher than the bird ever flew from whose wing it dropped, he soars away into a hea ven of thought, or, coming down with an eagle’s swoop, descends further than any man before or since into the deepest depths of gospel mysteries. Or give him liberty of speech; place him on Mars’ Hill to expound his despised faith, or let him stand on his defence at the bar of kings, like a lion at bay. Indifference gives place to interest, contempt changes into admiration, the audience is hushed, and, amid breathless silence, he sways the multitude with a master’s hand, his puny form seeming to rise to a giant’s stature. He seizes error, and rends it as Samson rent the lion; he lays these arms of his on the colossal pillars of Time’s oldest superstitions, shakes the hoary fabric, and pulls it down into the dust, burying gods and goddesses in one com mon ruin.

The casket affords no test by which to estimate the value of the jewel. The boards and binding of a book suggest no idea of the brilliant thoughts that are scattered, like stars, over its pages. So, in this discordant state, you cannot judge the inner by the outer man, the head or the heart by the body which they rule and animate. That observation applies to the most sacred things. The church of Christ herself presents the greatest of anomalies. And it would do our Lord the greatest injustice, if, overlooking that fact, we were to judge the head by its body, and argue from what Christians are, what Christ himself must be.

Neither, in the first place, in our own, nor in any other existing church, do we see the real body of which Jesus Christ is the head. Its members consist of all true believers, and are dispersed over the wide lands of Christendom. Then, what are the best churches, at the best, but gold mines? Some may be, some certainly are, richer than others in the precious metal, yet all have their dross and rubbish. Nor, to continue the figure, shall the true church become visible, appear as a distinct and separate body, till the gold, gathered from a hundred mines, and purified by a Spirit whose emblem is fire, and presenting to the divine Refiner a perfect image of himself, is run into a common mould. Besides, while the materials of this church are widely scattered, and much of the ore yet lies buried in the mine, none of them are pure; none perfect. Who can say that he has no sin? There is no man that sinneth not. Nor is there any, though he has come in contact with the finest specimens of piety, arid has been happy enough to breathe the holiest atmosphere of Christian society, who is not ready with the wise man to say, I have seen an end of all perfection.

To change the figure, the materials of the heavenly temple are now under the hammer, and by hard strokes of fortune and rough providences, as well as by the ordinary means of grace, God is preparing these living stones to be removed by the hand of death, and set in a temple where no sound of hammer is heard. The church is in process of building. And no more than any other builder is Christ to be judged by his work, till he has brought his labours to a close. Then, when from the most excellent majesty, the voice once heard on the cross cries again, “It is finished,” when he shall bring forth the headstone thereof with shoutings of “Grace, grace unto it,” when the scaffolding of present ordinances is removed, when the heavens which concealed it are rolled up like a curtain, how shall that temple, of such proportions and surpassing splendour, stand forth the admiration of the universe, its greatest wonder, and God’s brightest glory! Then, to take up the metaphor of my text, the body will be worthy of the head, as the head is the glory of the body.

I. As Head of his church, our Lord Jesus Christ is the life of its members.

You do not need to be anatomists to know that, as the head is the highest, it is the noblest, most important part of our whole frame. Seat of the senses and shrine of the soul, it is more than any other part connected with life and its various functions. From this great source and centre of vital power the other organs draw all their energies. Paralyse those nerves which connect them with the brain, as the wires of the telegraph connect the different stations with the electric battery, and their powers are gone, instantly gone. Their functions cease; the eye has no sight; the ear no hearing; the lips no voice; the tongue tastes neither sweetness in honey nor bitterness in wormwood; the strong arm of labour hangs powerless by the side; nor is there power left to lift a foot, though the lifting of it were to save your life. The whole machinery of this wonderful frame stops, like that of a mill when you shift the sluices, and turn the water off its dashing wheel. Indeed so intimately connected are the head and the body, that one cannot exist without the other. In her freaks, no doubt, Nature does produce strange monsters, which, though deficient, some of this and some of that part, contrive to live; and it is marvellous to see what formidable lesions the body can suffer, of what valuable members it may be maimed, and yet survive. But the loss of the head is the loss of life. Death descends on the knife of the guillotine. A bullet whistles through the parting air, the lightning flashes, the sword of the headsman gleams in the sun, and — there is a corpse! before the eye has winked, the man is dead, stone dead.

In illustrating the doctrine and figure of my text, this leads me to remark —

1. As head of his church, Jesus Christ, by means of the connection which grace establishes between him and the believer, maintains our spiritual life. Without me, he says, ye can do nothing. As all our wishes, words, and works, however they may be expressed in looks, and sounds, and bodily movements, are born in the brain, there is not a good wish we ever formed, a good word we ever spoke, a good work we ever did, but Christ was its fountain-head. Separated from him, a believer were no better than an eye plucked from its socket, a cold dead hand severed from the bleeding arm.

Suppose that, by some strange chance, this connection were dissolved, what a deadly paralysis would seize the soul! There are few sights more pitiful than to see a man of robust strength, of eloquent lips, of eagle eye, of majestic port, of stalwart step, by a stroke of paralysis suddenly turned into a poor, stammering, tottering, impotent object, whom the touch of a child can prostrate in the dust. Yet he is only a feeble image of what we should become were the gracious communications of the Holy Spirit suspended. Deprived of the strength I draw from Christ, I could not stand a buffet from Satan’s hand. How should I be able to endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ, or fight the good fight of faith? However strong the hand of faith had been, it would now shake like an aspen leaf; and, now but the wreck of other days, gone were my power to sing the praises of God, gone my power to walk, or run in the way of his commandments. And this impotency, whether it spread over our souls like a creeping palsy, or came with the suddenness of a stroke, were but the dismal prelude to eternal death.

I have supposed, for illustration’s sake, that the connection were dissolved, but, blessed be God! that cannot be. “They shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.” With such an assurance from his lips, how may we say to Jesus, Thou hast set my feet upon a rock? Standing on its sunny summit, far above the surging waves of doubt and fear, what hinders us to exclaim with Paul, I am persuaded that neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate me from the love of God, which is through Jesus?

2. As head of his church, Jesus Christ is the source of our spiritual life. We must not confound the means of life with its first cause. The chamber in Shunam, where a pious woman had lodged the man of God, presents us with a fair and striking picture of what we may do in communicating the blessing of spiritual life to a soul dead in sins. Let us in fancy open the door, and. with feelings of awe and wonder, enter that room where Elisha, having left the mother below, has shut himself up with the cold unconscious corpse. The dead boy is lying in the prophet’s chamber, and on the prophet’s bed; as if, like a drowning one who catches a passing straw, the poor woman had thought, when she laid him there, that there might be something not only sacred, but life-restoring, that clung to the walls which had been hallowed by the good man’s prayers. He gazes fixedly and fondly on the pale placid ‘countenance; and having waked up his tenderest affections for the little dead creature he had often carried in his arms, and kissed, and blessed, Elisha turns from the lifeless clay to the living God. He kneels beside the dead. He prays for the dead. And in prayers a mother may hear, as, with beating heart, she sits silent, and listening, and hoping below, he pours out his very soul to God. The prayer ceases. It has been heard. The prophet knows it; and now rises to employ other means, nor doubts of their success. As one who, seeking another’s conversion, brings the truth in himself into kindest, closest contact with that other’s soul — soul to soul, and heart to heart, Elisha brings his own life as close to the dead as possible. Love revolting at nothing, he takes the corpse into his arms. He stretches himself upon the body ,- he puts his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his- eyes, and his hands upon his hands. The living heart of the prophet beats against the dead heart of the child, knocks there to waken it; he all the time pleading with God, entreating with tears that hang on the lashes of those closed eyes and bedew the pallid face of death. We know not how long the dead lay in the embraces of the living; but pains and prayer had their sure reward. A step is on the floor. The mother catches it. She starts. The door opens. “Gehazi,” cries the prophet, a summons rapidly followed by the glad command, “Call the Shunammite.” Hope sounds in that voice; joy leaps in her heart. She hastens up, she rushes in. He points her to the smiling boy, saying, Take up thy son, as with delirious joy and open arms she bounds across the floor to lock him in her long fond embraces.

Thus, simply as a medium or link which connects the living with the dead, a believer may be the means of communicating life. But the life which Christ gave you was his own. “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.” What Elisha did not, and could not do in that chamber for the child, our Saviour did on the cross for us. He died that we might live. He poured out his soul unto death. To fill our veins with blood, he emptied his own. He stretched himself out upon the cold corpse of a world to communicate life, and, while communicating it, expired. He breathed life into the dead, but it was his own. If any vital heavenly fire burns in you, it was Christ who kindled it; for the spirit life came not, like the natural, through father and mother, flashing, as an electric spark, from the first man along the linked chain of successive generations. Not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God, that life came when Christ impressed his kiss of love on death’s icy lips, just as that of Adam came from his Maker, when, stooping over the clay model of a man, God breathed into its nostrils the breath of life. And as, by his death, which was a satisfaction for sin, Jesus Christ purchased our life, by his life he now maintains it; so that, as the life of a pregnant mother is the life of the babe within her, his life is ours. Is the connection between these two so intimate, that she might address her unborn, saying, Because I live, thou livest also? Well, Jesus says more; he says, Because I live, ye shall live also. That mother may die. Hope has strewed her withered blossoms on a grave where the rose and the rose-bud lie buried together; and death, coffining the babe in a dead mother’s womb, by one fell stroke has inflicted a double blow on some childless, widowed man. But, in their life one with Christ, believers can never die. Never: for he dieth no more. That head bows on a cross no more; that eye darkens in death no more; that brow, crowned with glory, bleeds under thorns no more. “I am he that liveth and was dead.”

Thus, restored to life by Christ, and through your union with him safe from the second death, believers can dare, in a sense, to use his own great words, saying, “I am he that liveth, and was dead, and, behold, I am alive for evermore.” So long as Christ lives, you live; so long as Christ shall live, you shall live. Since your life is hid with Christ in God, why then should you dread the grisly king? Fear not the shaking of his dart. You are deathless men. Hear the voice of your Saviour. “I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish.” “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” Disease may rot off a limb; an empty sleeve, pinned to a breast hung thick with stars, and crosses, and medals, may tell of losses suffered as well as battles fought in a country’s cause; and accident may any day tear a member from our body, and separate it from its living head. But no accident, no chance, no, nor all the devils of hell, shall separate us from the love of Christ. I cling to that belief. Without it, where were the peace of the saints? where the promise and care of him who says, I will never leave you, let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me.

II. As Head of his church, Jesus Christ rules its members.

It is not pain that makes the insect go spinning round and round, to the entertainment of the thought less, not cruel, boy who has beheaded it. It has lost in the head that which preserves harmony among the members, and controls their movements, and prevents such anarchy in the body corporeal as there was in the body politic, when there was no king in Israel, and every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Seated, as becomes a king, in the highest place, the head gives law to all beneath it. The tongue speaks or is silent, the arms rise or fall, the feet walk or rest, the eye opens or shuts, as this sovereign wills; and, transmitting its orders along the nerves which, ramified through the body, reach the most distant members, it receives from all of them instant, implicit obedience. It rules with more despotic authority than any other sovereign. Its subjects never mutiny; they hatch no plots; they form no conspiracies.

Patterns of the obedience which we should yield to Jesus Christ, the members hesitate not to obey the head, even to their own loss and painful suffering. Take the hand, for instance. Archbishop Cranmer stands chained to the stake. The fagots are lighted. With forked tongues the flames rise through the smoke that opens, as the wind blows it aside, to show that great old man stand ing up firm in the fiery trial. Like a true penitent, he resolves that the hand which had signed his base recantation shall burn first; and how bravely it abides the flame! In obedience to the head, the hand lays itself down to suffer amputation; in obedience to the head, it flings away the napkin, sign for the drop to fall; in obedience to the head, as was foreseen by some of our fathers when they attached their names to the League and Covenant, it firmly signed the bond that sealed their fate, and doomed them to a martyr’s grave. Let the head forgive, and the hand at once opens to grasp an enemy’s, in pledge of quarrel buried and estrangement gone. Would to God that Jesus Christ had such authority over us! Make us, 0 Lord, thy willing subjects in the day of thy power! Ascend the throne of our hearts I Prince of Peace! take unto thee thy great power, and reign!

How happy, how holy should we be, were our hearts, our minds, our bodies, as obedient to the laws of his word and to the influences of his Spirit, as that hand and this tongue are to the head that rules them. Brethren, what else but this is needed, not only to preserve the purity and peace of our souls, but to restore purity and peace to distracted churches? My body knows and owns no authority whatever but its own head. Why should Christ’s church do otherwise? How many divisions would be healed, would she repudiate all government but his in things belonging to his kingdom, would she take his word as her only rule, and read it with the docile faith of a child, would she call none master but Jesus, nor admit anything to bind her conscience but the law and the testimony, would die throw down all sectarian walls and barriers, and make nothing necessary to church communion but what is necessary to being a Christian.

There is no essential difference between the Evangelical denominations. And what should hinder them from being as ready to love and help one the other as my foot is to run in the service of my hand, and as my hand is to work in the service of my foot, and as my eyes and ears, standing on their tower of observation, are to watch for the good of the body and all its members? Were there sympathy like that among the brethren, how soon would there be harmony in Jerusalem! What triumphs would crown her arms! what prosperity would bless her palaces! The sin, the shame, the scandal, the monstrous, unnatural, afflicting spectacle of Christian churches, up in arms against each other, and stunning the ears of a wondering, scoffing world with the din of battle, would cease, for ever cease. Let the fields of war present the horrid spectacle of men shearing off each other’s limbs, and plunging their swords into each other’s breasts, but who ever heard of a case so monstrous, as a man’s hands and feet and other members declaring war, one with another? Alas! such a sight the church of Christ has often presented. The most wretched reasons have been considered good enough for separating or remaining separate. Paltry differences have given rise to quarrels, and quarrels have given rise to blows, and blows have ended in running sores and bitter hatreds, and a bleeding, weeping church has been left, when asked about her wounds, to reply, “These are the wounds with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.”

Oh, that all our unhappy, unholy contentions would cease! How long, 0 Lord, how long! Come, Holy

Dove, arid sweep the storms away with thy snow-white wing, bringing from heaven the branch of an olive plucked from the trees that grow by the river of life. Yet vain meanwhile the wish! Never shall the ark rest, nor sweet peace brood, like a halcyon bird, on the troubled waters, till Christ receives the honour which is his due; till the Head that is in heaven rules the body that is on earth; till the names of fathers, both ancient and modern, are discarded, and no authority but Christ’s is acknowledged by a church which he has bought with his precious blood, and whose members, loved so dearly by him, ought so kindly and so dearly to love one another. “Even so come, Lord Jesus.”

III. As Head of his church, Jesus Christ sympathises with its members.

According to Solomon, “all the rivers run into the sea,” and were you to dissect the body you would find that all the nerves run into the brain. The head, is the centre of the nervous system. Beneath that palatial dome the soul dwells; and by the nerves which run out from that centre she corresponds with matter, looking through the eyes, feeling by the hand, hearing by the ears, speaking by the tongue, and, unless when she seizes the hours of sleep to rest herself or to roam away in dreams, thus holding communion with the outer world. The nerves form a perfect system of living telegraphs. By means of them the soul knows in an instant what passes in all parts of her realm, and takes immediate measures for the well-being of every member of the body.

Let the foot but touch a thorn, it is instantly with drawn. And how? Pain, thrilling along the nerves, flashes the danger upward to the head, which, by another set of nerves, flashes back an immediate order, so that before the thorn is buried in the flesh, the foot is with drawn. If but the wing of a gnat brush, if but a mote of dust touch the guardian fringes, the eyelid drops, like the portcullis at yonder castle gate, to keep out the enemy. Thus the head sympathises with all the body, and, sympathising, succours it.

Such is the sympathy between Christ and his people. Let that comfort, strengthen, cheer you. He is in constant, ay, in closest communication with every one of his members; and by means of lines that stretched along the starry sky pass from earth to heaven, the meanest cottage where a believer dwells is joined to the throne of God. No accident stops that telegraph. The lines of providence radiate out, and the lines of prayer radiate in. Touched with a fellow-feeling for your infirmities, Christ suffers all your wrongs, is sen sible of your every want, and hears every prayer you utter. You can never apply to him too often; you cannot ask of him too much. To his ear the needy’s prayers are sweeter music than the voice of angels, or the best strung harp in heaven.

In a distant land, how bitterly the poor invalid thinks of home! Oh! how he wishes he could annihilate the seas that roll between him and his mother, and remove his sick-bed, far from her kind attentions. A stranger in a strange land, the bitter tears rise the faster in his eye as busy fancy flies away, and the home of his boyhood stands before him, and the cool breeze wafting odours from the flowers kisses his cheek, and he passes under the shadow of the trees where he played a happy child, and, entering the well-known door, he hears his sister’s song, and a father’s merry laugh, and a mother’s sweet soft loving voice, and sees those that would hasten to his help, and hang over his bed, and smooth his restless pillow, and wipe the death-sweat from his brow, gathered, a bright and happy circle, by a fireside he shall never more see.

It is sweet to feel that any one cares for us; sweetest in suffering’s hour to have those near who love us, to see the glistening tear, and hear the kind tones of unwearying affection. But human sympathy, take it at the best, is liable to a thousand interruptions; and then we have sometimes sorrows that we bide from others, with which a bosom friend is not allowed to intermeddle. But, blessed Jesus! there is no sorrow thy people hide from thee, nor any pang thy members feel but it is felt by thee. Thanks be to God that, selecting from our frame its most sensitive and tender part, he has set this forth in an image which all can appreciate and understand. “He that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye.”

If, to words that so beautifully and fully set forth the tender sympathy which Christ, as their Head, cherishes for his beloved people, I could venture to add any that ever fell from mortal lips, I would select those of Margaret Wilson, Scotland’s maiden martyr. Some two hundred years ago, there was a dark period of suffering in this land, when deeds of bloody cruelty were committed on God’s people, not outdone by Indian butcheries. One day the tide is flowing in the Solway Firth, rushing, like a race-horse, with snowy mane to the shore. It is occupied by groups of weeping spectators. They keep their eyes fixed on two objects out upon the wet sands. There, two women, each tied fast by their arms and limbs to a stake, stand within the sea-mark; and many an earnest prayer is going up to heaven that Christ, who bends from his throne to the sight, would help them now in their dreadful hour of need. The elder of the two is staked farthest out. Margaret, the young martyr, stands bound, a fair sacrifice, near by the shore. ell, on the big billows come, hissing to their naked feet; on and further on they come, death riding on the top of the waves, and eyed by these tender women with unflinching courage. The waters rise and rise, till, amid a scream and cry of horror from the shore, the lessening form of her that had death first to face, is lost in the foarn of the surging wave. It recedes, but only to return; and now, the sufferer gasping for breath, her death struggle is begun; and now, for Margaret’s trial and her noble answer. “What see you yonder?” said their murderers, as, while the water rose cold on her own limbs, they pointed her attention to her fellow-confessor in the suffocating agonies of a protracted death. Response full of the boldest faith, and brightest hope, and all the divine unfathomed consolation of my text to you, she firmly answered, “I see Christ suffering in one of his own members.” Brave and glorious words! borrowed in that hour from the precious language of my text, and leading us to the apostle’s most comforting and sublime conclusion, “We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”