The work of the Holy Spirit - pagina 505

;

IMPLANTED DISPOSITIONS conditionally

before

;

he mourns only that

God and with ;

all

it is

so hard to

465

become nothing may more sin-

the saints he prays that he

cerely deny himself, die to himself, and

know himself

as nothing

Measured by God, man has no value. All his endeavor to be something before God is ridiculous folly. Every pulpit ought to cast down, as with trumpet-tones, every mountain of pride, and humble man before God, so that, feeling himself a mere drop in the bucket yea, less than nothing he may find rest in the before God.

—

—

adoration of the divine Majesty.

Before

God man

is

not anything, not even the regenerate

man

but in His hand, by His ordinance, and in His estimation, he great that

His child,

is

so

God crowns him with glory and honor," loves him as makes him an heir of the heavenly bliss, and invites him "

spend eternity with Him. These two may never be confounded; man's absolute nothingness before God may never be applied to man as an instrument /;/ to

.

And man's mighty significance as God's instrument never tend to make him the merest something before God as

God's hand.

may

a being.

So we oppose pantheistic Mysticism and deadly Pelagianism. The essential mistake of the latter is, that it gives man as such a certain standing before God, and refuses to acknowledge that

even the most learned and most excellent, whose breath is in his nostrils, " Yea, wherein is he to be esteemed?" is less than nothing before God. And false Mysticisfn is that injurious tendency of the

human mind

which, in

all

ages and

among

of being nothing before God, denies

all nations, for

the sake

man's significance even as

God's instrument.

In its writings

reiterated that before

God

man

God he disappears and loses himself, And this being absorbed is pushed so far

that

is

it is

nothing, that in

God absorbs him.

nothing remains to which sin or guilt can be ascribed.

And

that

thus

the consciousness of responsibility and the conception of imputabil-

were lost. Christian men, carried away by the fascination of being nothing, have sung hymns and preached sermons very acceptable to the Buddhists of India, but entirely outside of the pale ity

of Christianity.

Man as God's instrument is significant indeed. In creating him from nothing He created, not nothing, but something; and that something was so important that 30

all

creatures

made

before him

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