are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time 188 "And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us “And he dreamed, and behold, a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold, the angels of God 299 SERMON I. THE LONESOMENESS OF THE REDEEMER. "I have trodden the wine-press alone; and of the people there was none with me."—ISAIAH, lxiii. 3. To a refined and sensitive nature the most painful lonesomeness is not the want of aid, but of sympathy. The absence of human assistance is, indeed, sometimes a great blessing; it drives a man upon his own resources; it develops in him powers of which he was wholly unconscious; by a sharp but healthful discipline, it trains him to energy, courage, decision, self-confidence; above all, it educates the soul into a habit of direct communion with God, of immediate reliance on him. There will be always some imbecility of character, when placed in circumstances demanding independent action, unless one has acquired force and strenuousness of purpose by stern solitary wrestling with difficulties. But to be lonely in the other sense, to have none to encourage us, or care for us, or even understand usthis, this is to be alone; this is a solitude in which it is impossible for the human spirit long to sustain itself. Pride may for a while affect superiority; and keen sensibilities always seek to conceal and protect themselves by a mask of stoicism. But it will not do; it can not last; the cry for sympathy will come an authentic voice from the depths of human consciousness; and if there be no response, heart and strength will fail in the struggle of life. This sixty-third chapter of Isaiah breaks in very abruptly upon us. A strange vision rises suddenly before the prophet's eye. A lone warrior passes by him, moving in invincible strength, gorgeously attired, with the light of victory playing on his face, but all his garments crimsoned with blood. He is at once challenged by the startled seer. "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bosrah? this that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength ?” "I that speak in righteousness mighty to save." "Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat ?" "I have trodden the wine-press alone; and of the people there was none with me." These last words are our text; they speak of the lonesomeness of the Redeemer in his mediatorial work; and it is this thought which I propose as the subject of our present meditations. I. Now there is a morbid sentimentalism which is ever complaining of loneliness and want of sympathy, with which the gospel has certainly no sort of sympathy. Let such hypochondriacs imitate Jesus; let them rise above this fictitious, fantastic melancholy, and address themselves to a life of active benevolence, and their romantic disease will at once disappear. The victims of this picturesque misery are always lamenting that nobody comprehends them, but this is a great mistake. Every body understands this sort of querulous and pensive “ecstacy of woe," because all have indulged it, and all know, or ought to know, that it is only selfishness, pride, indolence, a want of sympathy with real miseries which appeal to us on every side for relief. Nor is the solitariness described in the text that of place. Jesus did not bury himself in a wilderness, he mingled freely with the multitude. Indeed, mere isolation from society is not solitude. The heart can make the desert or the hermit's cell populous with its own thoughts. The soul of the Christian is never so sure to find a ladder let down from heaven, and to entertain angels, as when, like Jacob, it communes alone with itself. Never is heaven so near, and the transporting visions of heaven so disclosed, as when, like John, we are surrounded by silence and solitude. It was, in fact, when the Saviour was most closely in contact with men, that he felt, and they felt, most solemnly, his mysterious separation from sinners-from those who were "from beneath," while he was "from above." The loneliness designated in the text was peculiar to the Redeemer. Its appalling, oppressive intensity we never can comprehend. But we will at once feel how alone he was entirely alone-insulated from all affinity with the whole moral and intelligent universe-if we consider, first, the strange phenomenon of his very being, the mysterious constitution of his person as "God manifest in the flesh.". In this view he might emphatically say, "Of the people there was none with me." Myriads upon myriads people the vast infinitudes of creation. |