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Rev Graham Harrison           Sunday April 26th a.m. 1998

1 Corinthians 1:19-21

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe [1 Corinthians 1:19-21].

What Paul is doing first of all is to go back to the Old Testament. You notice that introductory formula with which he begins verse 19, 'For it is written'. Wherever you come across that in the New Testament your attention is directed back to the Old Testament. The reference is to an Old Testament Scripture. It is actually from the prophecy of Isaiah, who was dealing essentially with the same sort of problem in his day. Here were his own fellow countrymen, his fellow Jews, and they were rejecting the wisdom of God. They dismissed that as foolishness and instead of that they were depending on what they reckoned was real wisdom. God was indicating to them that it was going to get them nowhere at all, so He puts these words into the mouth of Isaiah: 'For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent' [Isaiah 29:14]. Now that is a very strong statement. 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing' you could possibly translate it as 'I will set it to one side', 'I will sideline it'. That is what God is going to do with the wisdom of the wise, the understanding of the prudent; He is going to destroy it, He is going to put it to one side.

All of this occurs in what to me is always one of the most rhetorical passages in the New Testament. Paul has been explaining to them that he has studiously avoided 'wisdom of words' - all the tricks that the peripatetic Greek orators and rhetoricians would use. Yet it as if there is almost something naturally elevated from a stylistic point of view that flows out from the Apostle Paul at this time. He is challenging them: 'Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.' And by preaching of course, he is referring back to what he has mentioned in verses 17-18: 'For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel'. If you were to have asked Paul, what is it to preach the gospel, he would have answered you in terms of verse 18: 'the preaching of the cross' - 'For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness'.

So it is through this foolish thing that is preached, and what they evidently were beginning to reckon was a foolish way of communicating it - preaching - that God had determined to save them that believe. But he begins by making this assertion - I suppose you could say it is a promise, or from another point of view you could describe it as a threat - 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.' Here were these Corinthian Christians, Greek and Jewish by background, mostly Greek, who so stupidly were turning away from what Paul had given them, in order that, as they understood it, they might enhance the gospel with human wisdom. But God has said, as Paul reminds them, 'I am going to destroy the wisdom of the wise. I am going to bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.'

And it is a principle upon which God always works. Anything that comes as a threat and a challenge to the gospel, sooner or later is going to be cast down. In 2 Corinthians 10. Paul is dealing with the same theme. 'For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, (fleshly) but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, (reasonings) and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ' [2 Corinthians 10:3-5]. That is what God does, He casts down every thing, 'every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God'.

Try and cast your mind back in your imagination to the situation there in Corinth. You have this tremendous national history, this heritage that is yours as a citizen of this great nation of the Greeks - all the learned philosophers and historians, all the playwrights and the dramatists and the poets that stretch back in your national history for centuries behind you. Suddenly into your city there comes this little man, who apparently is not much to look at. We are not actually given a description in the Word of God of what he is like, except what we can infer from some of the things that he knew that they were saying about him in Corinth -' but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible' [2 Corinthians 10:10]. So, I think that we get the impression that he was not some sort of six foot he-man with bulging biceps and everything to impress people. No, tradition, such as it is worth, describes him as being rather a small man, not particularly handsome, indeed the opposite to that. Who would have thought that as a consequence of this little man coming to bring this new and strange teaching to Corinth, two thousand years on throughout the whole of the world, there would be men preaching the same message that he had come to Corinth to preach?

If you had stood up on the edge of a crowd in the market place at Corinth, listening to the Apostle Paul preaching, as he frequently did there, and if you had got into conversation with one of the other people in the crowd and had asked them: 'What do you think of what he is saying?' They might have said, 'Well, it is original, isn't it? We have not heard anything like it before, but I do not think that there is anything much in it. You get these wandering speakers, who come around with a bit of religion that they throw in. They are here today and they are gone tomorrow. I gather that ther e are a few people here in Corinth who are interested and indeed they have become his followers but it will be a bit of a damp squib! Give them a few months and he will just be history!' Had somebody then said, 'Do you not think that there is something more to it than that? Do you not think that there is something here that is going to outlast the teaching that we have had from Socrates and Plato and Aristotle?' You would probably have had a response like this. 'Have you taken leave of your senses? Are you really suggesting that what this little runt of a man is saying is going to outlast all the truth that those great figures of our history have taught us? You must be joking! It is absolutely ridiculous to make such a suggestion!'

Yet if I were to ask you, 'Tell me, can you enlighten me about Socrates and his teaching? What can you tell me about the ethics of Aristotle?' I do not think that I am denigrating you, but I suspect that most of you would know next to nothing about them. You might not even be able to spell the names of some of them, and I am not intending to insult you when I put it like that! But you all know something about what this man has said! You all know about Paul. You all know about the message, the preaching of the cross, that he went to Corinth and proclaimed and that you hear preached Sunday by Sunday here in Newport and that is preached throughout the world today. It is ridiculous, is it not, to think that what this man did has lasted, whereas if you want to find out what those great figures of intellectual history have said you have to go to the reference libraries in the universities and look them up. Even then probably you have to get a dictionary to help you understand some of the long words that they used!

But not so with the message of this man. God says: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe'. So here we are this morning, one little piece of evidence of the endurance of the message that this man preached - evidence of the power of the message that this man preached, of the unchanging validity and truth of the message that this man preached. Humanly speaking, I say, it is ridiculous - and yet history is testimony to the truth of what he writes here as he quotes from those Old Testament words of Isaiah the prophet: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.'

Sometimes it is very interesting to stand back from history and to try and get something of the broad sweep of what has happened. How at one time it seems there is a teaching that carries everything before it, and then something happens in history and that which has been so powerful and so influential is just consigned to obscurity. Come with me on a bird's eye view of history since the time that Paul was speaking there in Corinth. For more than three or four centuries after Paul was in Corinth, the great power was Rome. Then what happened? Was it something greater that came in? No, it was the barbarians. Rome was sacked by them and for hundreds and hundreds of years Europe, that had once flourished under the power and the authority of what seemed to be an absolutely invincible empire, entered that period that is known as Dark Ages. There, you might say, was this terrible sweeping away of all that had been great and glorious.

But then what does God do? He raises up another nation, the Turks. One of the things that the Turks did was to expand westward. In the year 1455 they sacked the city of Constantinople. Yet before that happened so many of the scholars that were there had fled taking with them many of the books and the manuscripts that they had there in Constantinople. They fled west. It was the beginning of what was known to history as the Renaissance. That was followed within fifty years or so by the great work of God known as the Reformation and all the darkness of the Middle Ages was swept aside as suddenly the light of the gospel of the Lord Jesus shined over much of the western world.

And then what happened? Oh when Christianity, as it were, went into decline as it became something formal and dead, the forces of evil rose up again. And they rose up in the same way as had happened in ancient Greece - they rose up by asserting human wisdom and the power of the human intellect and ridiculing the idea of thinking that God, if there was a God, could speak to men! You had the breaking upon Europe of what was known as the age of Enlightenment. Part of it was to result in the French Revolution. But it was a period of great scientific advance and discovery. The outcome of it was that people began to say, and many of you who were brought up not so very many years ago were educated under this system, that there is not such a being as God - or if there is, then you do not really need Him. You are a human being. Human beings have intellects; they are able even to explore the universe - to put men on the moon, to send rockets out into the far distant regions of space and look at the planets and the stars. What place is there for God in the age of reason?

But what has been happening in the last ten or twenty years? People are saying now, oh all of that is past, all of that is rationalistic. We are not in that age any longer; we are in the postmodern age. So what you are having are people arising who are dismissing scientific investigation and discovery and rationality. They say, we need something more than this. We need something that will touch our emotions. We need something that will move us at a deeper level. They are tending to disparage and to disown so much that was taken as absolute truth, when some of us were not very much younger. Postmodernism. I use the term, not simply to drop an intellectually fashionable term before you, but it is part and parcel of the modern age in which we live.

You see it working out in all sorts of ways. Take the moral realm, for example Today it is so common for people not just to be immoral but to be amoral - to say that there is not such a thing as structured morality. Do your own thing. Be what you want to be. Who is entitled to lay down a law as far as you are concerned? We see the devastating effects that it having on our own nation. But in reality it is all part of this - God coming, taking the icons and the idols that a generation raises up and then God smashing them and throwing them down. The only thing ultimately that lasts is this preaching of the cross, because of everything else God says: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?' And that is what God does. Whatever it is that raises itself up against God, whatever it is that claims to be authoritative in an intellectual way but rejects the truth of God, sooner or later God will cast it down.

Many of you, particularly perhaps the younger ones here, are used in school to being inculcated with the theory of evolution. An evolutionist comes and begins to hammer his teaching into you, as indeed so often happens in school, as though it were the absolute truth. He does not tell you that it is just a theory; he indicates to you that it has destroyed any idea of believing that things happened as described to us there at the beginning of the Bible. You do not need God, you do not need a plan of God; all has happened by a combination of time and chance. Y ou do not need a Creator. You do not need somebody who has acted in that miraculous and wonderful way, speaking a word so that out of nothing the worlds come into existence. That is the sort of teaching that has become so common. It has swept right across the intellectual framework of the western world. And what God says of that is this: ' I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?'

It is sometimes helpful to look at the great figures, so called, of the intellectual world. The ones that seem to carry everything before them - and then you look at them and you ask yourself a question of them, 'Where has their teaching got them? Has it helped them morally? Has it done anything to elevate them in the finer things of life?' I will take just a few names who are known to you all. Bertrand Russell, who was looked upon as the great intellect of the twentieth century - yet if you know anything about this life, what a sordid life it was. Not so very long ago that there were a series of programmes on the television in which his own children, who came incidentally through a variety of different mothers, were rising up against him and denigrating him. The man's life was a moral catastrophe.

Or take the high priest of evolution at the present time, a Professor in Oxford University. He is already on to his third wife. Or another scientist that seems to be looked upon as the guru of the modern intellectual world, Stephen Hawkins, actually a Fellow of my old college in Cambridge. One is sorry for him because he is a quadriplegic, paralysed in all his limbs. He cannot even speak, he has to use a voice synthesiser - a brilliant man, but even in that condition, he has divorced his wife and married his nurse. It is pathetic, isn't it, these great people who have such remarkable intellects are unable to cope with life; they are unable to live life. Here you have the explanation of it, God coming and God casting down anything and everything that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.'

Sometimes it is helpful to look back over recent history. Let me take you back into my own particular area and the sort of teaching that I was given when I was a theological student and was able to read back to some of the teaching that had gone before I ever came on the scene. Do you know what used to be the watchword of these people? They spoke of what they called 'the assured results of modern criticism'. It was a term that began to be used back in the nineteenth century, 'the assured results of modern criticism'. What they were saying was this: 'Here is something that archaeology has established. Here is something that the great linguists of the world as they have probed into these ancient languages, have shown to be the truth'. Then in the light of that they would come to the Bible. I think of one aspect in particular - they would come back to the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, the Pentateuch as they are called, they would say, 'You know, Moses could not have written those books. Moses could not have written them because writing was not invented when Moses was on earth.'

Then some of the archaeologists went on their 'digs' in the Middle East and they discovered that thousands of years before the time of Moses, people were writing! So the 'scholars' (so called) quietly forgot about what they had been saying about Moses and moved on to something else. Again it was the same thing, 'the assured results of modern criticism'. Out they would come with something that would disparage the Bible and once again something would come up that would contradict 'the assured results of modern criticism', so they would go silent on it. And again and again it is this principle, God humbling the proud, God bringing to nothing all the arrogant assertions of those who were trying to dismiss what God had revealed. It has happened again and again down through the centuries. ' I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.'

Now that is something that Christians ought to take to heart for their encouragement. One of the hardest things that we have to cope with is being looked down upon, being sneered at, being dismissed and rejected as people who really are ignorant, intellectually inferior. You do not like that, do you? It is humiliating when somebody comes to you and just dismisses you as though you were totally incapable, an idiot, who if you have anything between your two ears, it could not be described as a brain. Well, here is the promise of God: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.' From time to time just step back from your immediate situation; dabble if you like in history, take some of the great characters of history and begin to ask yourselves questions like this: 'Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world?' Those men who were so adept at arguing and who could tie you up in knots, where are they? No doubt they were there in Corinth. They looked upon themselves as absolutely wise. They were experts in their fields. They came to some of these Corinthian Christians who felt themselves to be so inferior as these people confronted them with their disputations and their arguments. But where are they now? We have the word of Paul, but we do not have what they were saying! 'Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?'

Now this is a principle in terms of which God always operates. It is as if God is saying to us: 'You know there is something that is always inadequate about the wisdom of this world. It cannot enable you to live. It does not bring you the knowledge of God and even less than that it does not enable you to cope with life. There is something woefully inadequate about it.' So here the Apostle Paul is really encouraging these Christians. 'You are feeling inferior,' he says to them. 'You are knowing the strength of this temptation to try and show that you are of superior intelligence, that the gospel is something that can knock spots off these Greek philosophers etc. I understand what the pressures are that are upon you. But do not panic in that way! Stand back from it all and just remember that what men call foolishness is the wisdom of God, and what men call weakness is the very power of God. God has promised to destroy the wisdom of the wise, God has promised to deal with, bring it to nothing, sideline, jettison it, throw overboard, all the understanding of the prudent.

Paul is encouraging them. God is wiser than men. The wisdom of God will stand when all the so-called wisdom of man has evaporated and has been lost to history. Just hold on to what it is that God has been saying to you. Then Paul continues like this: 'For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe'.

It is as if Paul is saying to these Christians in Corinth, 'There you are in this great Greek nation. You have got all this wonderful intellectual heritage behind you. You are feeling so inferior now that you have become Christians and now that you believe the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Listen to the things that they are saying about you. They are describing the very message of the gospel, the preaching of the cross, as foolishness. But, stand back from them and ask yourself these questions. Did Plato pick you up from the gutter? Did Socrates enable you to overcome temptation? Aristotle's Ethics, did they enable you to live a moral life? But the gospel did! The gospel came and there was power in the gospel! They said it was weakness, but it was power.' Do you remember how Paul puts it when he gives that terrible catalogue of debauchery and sin: fornication, idolatry, adultery, homosexuality, abusing children. Thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers, extortioners - such, he says, 'were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God' [1 Corinthians 6:11].

I was very interested to read John Calvin on this. I hope it does not tread on the toes of some of you who might consider yourselves to be old wives! He says: 'Man with all his shrewdness is as stupid about understanding by himself the mysteries of God as an ass is incapable of understanding musical harmony.' Then here comes the bit for the old wives, 'Philosophers, they are mostly sillier than old wives!' Now, pick your argument with John Calvin, not with Graham Harrison! That is his estimate of the philosophers, the great wise ones of this world. They are sillier, for the most part, than old wives.

It is what Paul is saying here: 'after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God'. In fact the world by wisdom today, says that there is not a God to be known. He is non-existent, you do not need Him, He is just some figment of the imagination of rather weak people like you and me who call ourselves Christians. We need some sort of crutch to help us limp through the world, so they say, and that crutch is what we call God. He is not really there but it gives us a bit of psychological help. So the world has dismissed God.

Yes, says Paul: 'after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching (the foolishness of the message that was preached) to save them that believe'. The Apostle had been able to come to Corinth and under the blessing of God accomplish this amazing result of people being lifted up from the hopelessness into which sin and immorality had brought them. Oh, the greatness of the gospel. You see these other things promise much but they deliver nothing. They are not able to give you help. They are not able to rescue you, they are not able to see you through the trials and the troubles of life. But the gospel does and it was tragic that these people, these Christian people there in the Church at Corinth, were going off in that direction. So Paul here, and then obviously later on in 2 Corinthians, has to harp back to the theme. He speaks of God: 'Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ' [2 Corinthians 10:5]. Thank God for that. Thank God for the truth of this old gospel, 'the world by wisdom knew not God'.

Perhaps some of you when you looked at the hymns this morning thought I had become a little bit senile. I know it is not Christmas so perhaps I ought to explain to you why we had what some might think is a Christmas Carol, the hymn that begins 'Earth was waiting, spent and restless'.

In the sacred courts of Zion,
Where the Lord had His abode,
There the money-changers trafficked,
And the sheep and oxen trod;
And the world, because of wisdom.
Knew not either Lord or God.

Then the Spirit of the Highest
On a virgin meek came down,
And He burdened her with blessing,
And He pained her with renown;
For she bare the Lord's Anointed,
For His cross and for His crown.

Earth for Him had groaned and travailed
Since the ages first began;
For in Him was hid the secret
That through all the ages ran-
Son of Mary, Son of David,
Son of God, and Son of Man.

Forgive me if I digress for a moment but we live in an age when so many people they want to sideline preaching. You can go to many churches and if you get a ten minute sermon you are lucky. They probably think it is an anniversary or something if you get one that long. They say, 'Well, you cannot communicate through preaching! People have got a short attention span - so many seconds, and you have got to change the subject all the time just as you see it happening on the television. People will not listen to men speaking, so instead of preaching, what shall we have? Well let us have drama, let us have a dialogue, let us have some sort of debate. Let us have a dance, let people act out the gospel - you know all the sort of things that have swept in to many churches. My answer to them is this: 'after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching' the foolishness of what was preached - but it was preached. It was not acted, it was not danced, it was not dramatised in some way or another. It was preached.

You see if ever there was a case for a culture demanding a non-preaching presentation of the gospel, it was Greece. If you have been to Greece, as I have, perhaps you have been to some of those great theatres that could accommodate thousands of people. These places had perfect acoustics. A person would speak down on the stage and you could hear what he was saying very clearly up in the highest ranks of those semi-circular seats that were gathered around it. The Greeks were great theatre goers. They were used to truth being given to them through a dramatised form in the various plays and dramas that were presented to them. So you could have argued, if ever there was a case for a Christian latching on to the prevailing culture, Paul should have done it there in Greece of all places. But He did not! He went and he preached. He did not have a musical back-up group. He did not have a band or anything like that. He went and he preached. And he preached this great message of the cross.

People no doubt said that it was foolish. But it worked and people were brought into the kingdom of God. There is nothing else that does work. There is nothing else that is going to save and to rescue sinners but this great message of the gospel that has to be taken to the ends of the earth. This is God's way of salvation, the only way of salvation - that the Son of God has left heaven, that He has come down to earth, that He has lived here amongst men - that He died on the cross, in weakness. But it was the mightiest power of God that was being demonstrated there as He died on the cross. Oh, people say, 'It is irrational!' But it is not. It is the supreme wisdom of God and that message, the message of the cross, is to be preached. It is that message that reaches down to men and touches them in the hopelessness of their despair and the wretchedness of the failure of their lives. It rescues them, it lifts them up, it gives them hope that they never had before. It transforms their lives.

Just over a week ago the wife of Sir Paul McCartney, one of the Beatles, died. Not all of you are old enough to remember the Beatles but I am. I was never one of their fans, I must admit. You remember what happened to the Beatles, don't you? They went to eastern mysticism, they dismissed Christianity - nonsense! They went to eastern mysticism and the Maharaji ... I forget his name now. They actually went to India and they h ad personal instruction from him. and they became great meditators. Well, the wife of one of the Beatles died just over a week ago. You saw it on your television screens, you read about it in your newspapers. I found it very sad, very moving - did you read what Paul McCartney said about the last moments of her life?

I want to read it to you: 'In the end, she went quickly with very little discomfort, and surrounded by her loved ones. The kids and I were there when she crossed over. They each were able to tell her how much they loved her.' Well, thank God for that. It is a blessing, isn't it, when you are passing from this world into the next if your loved ones are with you and if they can give you some sort of comfort, even the comfort of their presence. But then he goes on: 'Finally I said to her: "You're up on your beautiful Appaloosa stallion;"' I had to look that up. Apparently an Appaloosa stallion is a horse with a pale skin and dark spots on it. Then I looked in the paper and it showed a photograph of Linda McCartney obviously riding an Appaloosa stallion. This is what he said to her: '"You're up on your beautiful Appaloosa stallion; it's a fine spring day, we're riding through the woods. The bluebells are all out, and the sky is clear blue." I had barely got to the end of the sentence, when she closed her eyes, and gently slipped away.'

That is what eastern mysticism does for you. When you are stepping from time into eternity, all that your nearest and dearest can do for you is to tell you lies. To project you, as it were, into a world of unreality. God forbid that when one day, as we surely shall unless the Lord Jesus Christ returns first, you and I have to die. God forbid that there will be anybody by our bedside spouting such nonsense as that to us. I hope instead that we will have somebody who will be able to come and bring this old message of the gospel to us: 'I am the resurrection, 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' [John 11:25-26]. 'Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also' [John 14:1-3].

Or again my justification for the hymns. I know that it is not evening. 'Abide with me: fast falls the eventide' - do you remember how the last verse goes?

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies;
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

When Mr. Standfast had thus set things in order, and the time being come for him to haste away, he also went down to the river. Now there was a great calm at that time in the river: wherefore Mr. Standfast, when he was about half way in, stood a while and talked to his companions that had waited upon him thither; and he said, This river has been a terror to many: yea, the thoughts of it have also often frightened me. Now, methinks, I stand easy; my foot is fixed upon that on which the feet of the priests that hare the ark of the covenant stood, while Israel went over this Jordan.[Joshua 3:17]. The waters, indeed, are to the palate bitter, and to the stomach cold: yet the thought of what I am going to, and of the conduct that waits for me on the other side, doth lie as a glowing coal at my heart. I see myself now at the end of my journey: my toilsome days are ended. I am going to see that head that was crowned with thorns, and that face that was spit upon for me. I have formerly lived by hear-say and faith: but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with him in whose company I delight myself. I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of; and, wherever I have seen the print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my foot too. His name has been to me as a civet-box; yea, sweeter than all perfumes. His voice to me has been most sweet; and his countenance I have more desired than they that have most desired the light of the sun. His words I did use to gather for my food, and for antidotes against my faintings. He has helped me, and has kept me from mine iniquities; yea, my steps have been strengthened in his way.

Now, while he was thus in discourse, his countenance changed; his 'strong man bowed under him;' and after he had said, Take me, for I come unto thee! he ceased to be seen of them.

But glorious it was to see, how the open region was filled with horses and chariots, with trumpeters and pipers, with singers and players on stringed instruments, to welcome the pilgrims as they went up, and followed one another in at the beautiful gate of the city.

Which do you want?

Amen
 

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