War-Time Sermons

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... Ill the paradox of christianity1 The Foolishness Of God Is Wiser Than Men; And The Weakness of God is stronger than men.--I Corinthians i. 25. 1. "the Weakness Of God"--this is a strange phrase in the mouth of a religious man, and must needs move us to ask what it must be designed to convey. We speak of God as the Almighty, Allwise, Omniscient Person, Whose Will fashioned and Whose Power sustains the illimitable universe. If we are Christians we add to these attributes another and higher quality--" god is love." In Him we find the original Source of all those gracious sentiments which combine in our notion of Morality--justice, consideration, charity, purity, kindness. How, then, are we to bring the notions of " foolishness " and " weakness" into relation with God? St. Paul, we know, was an ardent thinker, and one, moreover, whose fervent mind could utter itself in 1 Preached in Durham Cathedral on Christmas Day, 1914. words of eloquence, passion, and pathos. His imagination took fire at the spectacle of Divine Activity, which he was actually witnessing as he went about preaching the Gospel. He saw the strangest paradoxes, not in mental theory, where perhaps paradox is normal, but on the plane of experience, where men commonly move along beaten paths of " use and wont." He saw success following on a course of action which might seem directly calculated with a view to failure. He saw a teaching, which seemed destitute of every element of attractiveness, winning the acceptance of men. He was, in fact, moving in a sphere within which the conventional estimates of strength and weakness, wisdom and folly, seemed