XXV. REST. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls." MATTHEW xi. 28, 29. No one, perhaps, ever read these words of Christ without being struck with their singular adaptation to the necessities of our nature. We have read them again and again, and we have found them ever fresh, beautiful, and new. No man could ever read them without being conscious that they realized the very deepest and inmost want of his being. We feel it is a convincing proof of His Divine mission that He has thus struck the key-note of our nature, in offering us Rest. Ancient systems were busy in the pursuit after happiness. Our modern systems of philosophy, science, ay, even of theology, occupy themselves with the same thought; telling us alike that "happiness is our being's end and aim." But it is not so that the Redeemer teaches. His doctrine is in words such as these: "In the world ye shall have"-not happiness, but "tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." "In me ye shall have peace." Not happiness, — the outward well-being so called in the world, — but the inward rest which cometh from above. And He alone who made this promise had a right to say, "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find Rest unto your souls." He had that Rest in Himself, and therefore could impart it; but it is often offered by men who have not the peace themselves. There are some, high professors of religion too, who have never known this real rest, and who at fifty, sixty, seventy years of age, are as much slaves of the world as when they began, desiring still the honors, the riches, or the pleasures it has to give, and utterly neglecting the Life which is to come. When we turn to the history of Christ we find this repose characterizing His whole existence. For example, first, in the marriage-feast at Cana, in Galilee. He looked not upon that festivity with cynical asperity; He frowned not upon the innocent joys of life: He made the wine to give enjoyment, and yet singularly contrasted was His Human and His Divine joy. His mother came to Him full of consternation, and said, They have no wine"; and the Redeemer, with calm self-possession, replied, "Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come." He felt not the deficiency which He supplied. 66 We pass from the marriage feast to the scene of grief at Bethany, and still there we find that singular repose. Those words which we have seen to possess an almost magical charm in soothing the grief of mourners congregated round the coffin of the dead, "I am the resur rection and the life: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die," speak they not of repose? But in the requirements of these great matters many men are not found wanting; it is when we come to the domesticities of their existence that we see fretting anxiety comes upon their soul. Therefore it is that we gladly turn to that home at Bethany where He had gone for quiet rest. Let us hear His words on the subject of every-day cares: "Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things; but one thing is needful." We pass on from that, to the state in which a man is tried the most: and if ever we can pardon words of restlessness and petulance, it is when friends are unfaithful. Yet even here there is perfect calmness. Looking steadfastly into the future, He says, "Do ye now believe? Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me." Once more, we turn to the Redeemer's prayers. They are characterized by a calmness singularly contrasted with the vehemence which we sometimes see endeavoring to lash itself into a greater fervor of devotion. The model prayer has no eloquence in it; it is calm, simple, full of repose. We find this again in the seventeenth chapter of St. John. If a man feels himself artificial and worldly, if a man feels restless, we would recommend him to take up that chapter as his best cure. For at least one moment, as he read it, he would feel in his soul calmness and repose; it would seem almost as if he were listening to the grave and solemn words of a divine soliloquy. This was the Mind of Him who gave this gracious promise, "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." We repeat these words as a matter of course; but I ask, Has that repose been found? — has this peace come to us? for it is not by merely repeating them over and over again that we can enter into the deep Rest of Christ. Our subject this day will be to consider, in the first place, the false systems of rest which the world holds out, and to contrast them with the true Rest of Christ. The first false system proposed is the expectation of repose in the grave. When the spirit has parted from the body after long-protracted sufferings, we often hear it said that the release was a happy one; that there is a repose in the grave; that there "the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." Nay, at times, perhaps, we find ourselves hazarding a wish that our own particular current of existence had come to that point, when it should mingle with the vast ocean of eternity. There is in all this a kind of spurious Pantheism, a sort of feeling that God is alike in every heart, that every man is to be blessed at last, that death is but a mere transition to a blessed sleep, that in the grave there is nothing but quiet, and that there is no misery beyond it. And yet one of the deepest thinkers of our nation suggests that there may be dreams even in the sleep of death. There is an illusion often in the way in which we think of death. The countenance, after the spirit has departed, is so strangely calm and meek that it produces the feeling of repose within us, and we transfer our feelings to that of the departed spirit, and we fancy that body no longer convulsed with pain, those features, so serene and full of peace, do but figure the rest which the spirit is enjoying; and yet, perhaps that soul, a few hours ago, was full of worldliness, full of pride, full of self-love. Think you that now that spirit is at rest, that it has entered into the Rest of Christ? The repose that belongs to the grave is not even a rest of the atoms composing our material form. There is another fallacious system of rest which would place it in the absence of outward trial. This is the world's peace. The world's peace ever consists in plans for the removal of outward trials. There lies, at the bottom of all false systems of peace, the fallacy that if we can but produce a perfect set of circumstances, then we shall have the perfect man; if we remove temptation, we shall have a holy being: and so the world's rest comes to this, merely happiness and outward enjoyment. Ay, my Christian brethren, we carry these anticipations beyond the grave, and we think the Heaven of God is but like the Mahometan paradise, a place in which the rain shall beat on us no longer, and the sun pour his burning rays upon us no more. Very often it is only a little less sensual, but quite as ignoble as that fabled by Mahomet. The Redeemer throws all this aside at once as mere illusion. He teaches just the contrary. He says, "Not as the world giveth, give I unto you." world proposes a rest by the removal of a burden. The Redeemer gives Rest by giving us the spirit and power to bear the burden. "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of Me, and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” Christ does not promise a rest of inaction, neither that the thorns shall be converted into roses, nor that the trials of life shall be removed. To the man who takes this yoke up in Christ's spirit, labor becomes blessedness, rest of soul and rest of body. It matters not in what circumstances men are, whether high or low, never shall the Rest of Christ be found in ease and self-gratification; never, throughout eternity, will there be rest found in a life of freedom from duty: -the paradise of the sluggard, where there is no exertion; the heaven of the coward, where there is no difficulty to be opposed, is not the Rest of Christ. "Take my yoke upon you." Nay, more, if God could give us a heaven like that, it would be but misery; there can be no joy in indolent inaction. The curse on this world is labor; but to him who labors earnestly and truly, it turns to blessedness. It is a curse only to him who tries to escape from the work allotted to him, who endeavors to make a compromise with duty. To him who takes Christ's yoke, not in a spirit of selfish ease and acquiescence in evil, but in strife and stern battle with it, the Rest of Christ streams in upon his soul. Many of us are drifting away from our moorings; we are quitting the old forms of thought and faith and life, and are seeking for something other than what satisfied the last generation: and this in a vain search for rest. Many are the different systems of repose offered to us, and foremost is that proposed by the Church of Rome. Let us do her the justice, at all events, to allow that she follows the Redeemer in this, it is not happiness she promises, she promises rest. The great strength of Romanism lies in this, that she professes to answer and satisfy the deep want of human nature for rest. She speaks of an infallibility on which she would persuade men, weary of the strain of doubt, to rest. It is not to the tales of miracles, and of the personal interference of God Himself; but to the promise of an impossibility of error to those within her pale, that she owes her |