Loyalty to the Person of Christ
O a little deeper and you’ll find the emperor,” said the wounded soldier of Napoleon’s bodyguard, to the surgeon probing for the ball. And in the deepest soul of Dr. Gordon was the shrine of the personal Christ. The genius of his whole godliness was found in this personal bond. He was jealous of truth of which all sound doctrine is the crystallization, and all true life the incarnation; but to him the living Christ was the Truth, and no mere creed could satisfy the soul that longed for a person to believe and love; and error was repugnant mainly because it meant a denial, or at least a dishonor, of Christ the divine Teacher.
This personal center of the gospel and of the new life explains all that is otherwise mysterious about this man of God. His conversion was his turning toward Christ as his Saviour and Lord. He believed the message that God gave of his Son, that in him is life everlasting, and that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, nor come into judgment, but is passed from death unto life.
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LOYALTY TO THE PERSON OF CHRIST lOI
If he was not troubled with doubts about his own salvation, it was because he had learned, once for all, that the ground of hope is not internal, but external; not within us, but without us; not in any merit or works or feelings of our own, but in the perfect obedience and vicarious suffering of our great Substitute and Saviour. Instead of trying, he found peace in trusting, looking away to Jesus, as the Author and Perfecter of his faith.
It was said of Matthew Henry that, “when he lacked the faith of assurance, he lived by the faith of adherence.” He, of whom we write, talked little of the assurance of faith, yet he never seemed to be darkened by doubt, because he walked in the light by the faith of adherence, which became to him the faith of assurance by unconscious transfer. When the hand has hold of another’s hand, it is hard to doubt that other’s presence; and if we thought less of our own assurance, and looked more to the maintenance of an assured and uninterrupted fellowship with a personal Saviour, we should know that we are in him and he in us by the Spirit which he hath given us, and by the constant and conscious touch of holy contact.
There is such a thing as Isaac Taylor, in one of his chapters on “Holy Living,” calls the “Practice of the Presence of God.” “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age,” says the omnipresent Master; and there is no greater need than that this presence shall be recognized and felt. It cannot be detected by the physical senses, for it is not a sensible fact. But, to him who cultivates the sensibility to the unseen and exercises his inner senses to discern good and evil, the reality of the presence of Christ may become as indisputable as anything demonstrable by the bodily organs.
Such communion with a personal Christ assimilates character to his likeness. “Beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory.”
The rapid transformation of Dr. Gordon into the resemblance of Christ was patent to all observers, most of all to those who most closely observed him and best knew him. In the home, where it is most difficult to show piety, his piety not only was shown but it shone. Nearness of approach often dissipates the charm that invests others; but no one felt such absolute confidence in his genuineness and godliness as those who had most chance to detect the faults and the blemishes in his character.
Our Brother Gordon combined the Pauline and the Johannean temperaments in one, the active and the reflective; the combination is rare, and implies an equally rare type of character. Again, he blended to an unusual degree the intellectual and the afifectional. Most men whose minds are so intense as his, lack heart-qualities; they impress others as cold, giving out light but not heat, and so having little drawing power. This man beamed with the warmth of sunshine. You could bask in hi3 rays. There was about him a benignity, a benevolence, that compelled recognition. Much as he was admired, he was most of all loved.
All this was a result of the intense love he bore to the person of Christ. Had he simply studied Christianity as a system of truth, he might have been a righteous man, exhibiting a cold conformity to righteousness, as a marble statue, rigidly symmetrical and frigidly exact, conforms to the standards of art. But it was only when, penetrating beyond all mere doctrine, he found the person of Christ and fixed on him his gaze of adoring love, that he became the good man, and, like his Master, went about doing good, attracting to himself such devotion that for him hundreds would even have dared to die.
This generation has furnished no other man, personally known to me, who in these respects so resembled Dr. Gordon, as did Theodor Christlieb, of Bonn. Born in 1833 and dying in 1889, in his fifty-seventh year, his life had run over almost the same length of time and cycle of history, and his views of truth were strikingly like those of his American contemporary, even to such minute matters as divine healing and the Lord’s coming; and, like his American brother, he could say at the last, “I have not for an instant ever had the slightest doubt that I am an accepted sinner, and, if I have to take leave of all else, I shall never have to part from thee, my Saviour.” Christlieb also sought to train students for the work of evangehsm, and had the keenest interest in missions, as his well-known book on the subject attests. He was the opponent of rationalistic criticism, affirming that the one key to the word of God is not found in commentaries nor in the study of the original text, but can be given only by the Holy Spirit of God in answer to prayer. He, like Dr. Gordon, revered the pietists who had kept alive the slumbering embers of piety and missions amid the deadness of almost universal rationalism and skepticism. But most of all did these two men resemble each other in the blending of the active temperament of Paul with the reflective temperament of John, and in that intense loyalty to the person of Christ which made all other attractions fade and pale in his presence, as the stars retire at dawning of the day.
To a man, whose central passion was thus absorbed on the Christ of God, and who was accustomed to put Jesus before him in daily life, as the engrossing object of enamoring love, the standard of all excellence, the model for all imitation, the final Judge whose approval is the only verdict to be valued, it is not strange that a dream should crystallize about his divine Lord, and that the supreme question which that dream suggested was,” What would Christ say if he came to church?”