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THE MISSION OF THE SON OF MAN.

"For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved."

JOHN iii, 17.

OVERY person has what we may call dominant

ideas, and these express themselves in characteristic words. The words of Jesus Christ which at once come into the mind-those that are peculiar to him and characteristic of him, great distinctive words -are "life," "love," "save," and "world."

To "life" he gave a new meaning. Life was not merely existence, but life was joyful or eternal existence, existence without end. Eternal life he gave, that is, joyful life, the life of a soul interpenetrated by the joy of God; a life that death has no more effect upon than acid has upon perfectly pure gold.

By "love," he meant not merely a sentiment, but a great natural social force; love that bound heart to heart; love that makes the family one; love that begets friendship and binds individuals into a nation; love that binds a soul to God and to its neighbor; the passionate force that holds the atoms of the social organism together.

Another word is "save," "salvation." It is equivalent to the word "health" when used of physical things. Of the body, we say it is in a state of health or in a state of salvation. The words are equivalent. Of the soul, we say it is in a state of salvation, that is, the

death principle is not working there; no insidious principle of evil is there; the soul is full of truth and love and justice; is sound, is whole; and in the older forms of the word, the words "hale," and "whole," and "holy," all meant the same thing.

So this word "world" used to-day, is a characteristic word. It is a word descriptive of the great idea that was in his mind. I shall put it in contrast a little later in the progress of this thought with the idea of individualism. The word "world" is equivalent in Christ's thought, with the word "whole," the whole of humanity. We look upon the great world round about us, and say there are twelve hundred million human beings now living. These are individuals; each is distinct in himself; each is personal, peculiar. The mass may be broken up into these social atoms.

And yet we know that these individuals that make up a world, are not like grains of sand; that they are as parts of a great organism; for, as we look at them closely, we see first, that the individuals begin to group into families-father, mother, children. And then we have families as units. The family is distinct from the individual; it is made up of the individuals, and yet the individuals are related to the family. They have different duties, different obligations, different functions. So the family is a social unit and a social whole. Then these families group together and make tribes and nations. A nation is simply a large number of families. There is the same blood, they bear in memory certain great ancestors; they hold dear certain memories or traditions, and look forward hopefully to certain results. They are circumscribed by rivers, mountains or seas; and within that space they have grown up to have a unique life. So we are dealing now with another social unit called a nation, composed of tribes; the tribes composed of family units. We

find that the nation has in itself certain national characteristics; a dialect or language, and customs peculiar to it. The national unit then, or the national whole, is made by the grouping of this vast number of human atoms. You can draw a nation up out of the mass of humanity and study it as a whole and predicate of it certain actions. It has written a characteristic sign upon the page of history, and has contributed certain characteristic things to civilization. It has a peculiar poetry-a folk-lore; it has given some one name to the constellation of great men. But the nation is only a part and not all.

We can not divide humanity into nations and study them separately. When we speak of the European nations, we know there is the German, Austrian, Italian, English, French, Scandinavian, Russian-each distinctively individual, and yet forming another larger social whole; and so we speak of the European nations and European civilization. There we have certain larger characteristics that distinguish them from the African and the Asian, from the Oceanican and the North and South American. We are dealing with a peculiar mass of people who have certain ideas and interests in common, which lead us to call them the European nations.

Then we may pass beyond these limits of geography, and say the races are to be looked upon as social wholes or units. There are certain characteristics of the African, of the Mongol, of the Indian, of the Caucasian, of the Malay races-certain things that mark them as distinct. A portion of the hair will enable the ethnologist to tell to just what great division or race a man belongs.

Then there is a larger whole which we call the world. It has certain common ideas, common hopes, common characteristics. The blood is red in the whole of it, and the great passion for justice, pity, and love, are

common now to the world-to the human world as

distinguished from the brute world. There, then, stands the great whole, the human world. We see how far we have gone from looking upon all these twelve hundred millions as individuals, in separating them in their interests, hopes, memories and characteristics from others. We know very well we can not take up one of them and hold him out and study him. Organic filaments, as Carlyle would say, have spun themselves out from him to almost every other person in the world; and when we try to draw one up alone, it is like drawing up a lot of magnetized nails we draw them all up together when trying to draw up one. Or like drawing up a flower-we draw up its roots with it.

So one man is related, in certain ways more or less plain, to every man. Now that is the idea of the whole, or the world. Let us put it in homely contrast with the old spirit when a man could pray, "God bless me and my wife, my son John and his wife, us four and no more." That is individualism or the family unit. That man's ideas have not expanded to take in any one beyond "us four and no more." What a narrow soul is that, we say. Its sympathies do not go out. It cares for nothing more than the "four and no more."

The way in which the world is being taken up into human thought, as a great whole, may perhaps be illustrated in this way: A man has invented a machine; it represents a new idea and he believes it capable of doing great work. Before he takes out a patent in this country he prepares to take out a patent in every European country too. He is not satisfied simply to have control of it in the United States; he wants to possess the world with it; he wants to control the earth, so far as that machine is concerned. The telephone patents are not only for America, but for Europe and perhaps

for Asia. The unity of the world as a great whole has entered into the mind of the last generation.

When a man has a great song, he wants every one to hear it. Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has been translated into almost every language; so have the sermons of Beecher; so have other books. It is not long after a man has written a book until some one in Italy has questioned whether it is not best to put that upon the list of forbidden books--the books that may not be read by the children of the church That is, the influence of an idea is not confined to the limits of a State or a Country, but is influencing the world. So we see how the world is a great whole-a great whole with its parts knitted together, and is under the influence of any great pervasive thought and any inspiring idea.

This illustrates to us the place of the word "world" in the mind of Jesus Christ. You remember how often he said the field was not simply that little area of Palestine "The field is the world;""Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature;" "The field is the world,"—that is, the great whole. "God so loved the world"-every one in it, not simply the Jew, but every one in the world-"that he sent his only begotten Son." Just as the father loves the whole family, not any one, but all, and thinks of them as a family. In each one he loves something distinctive, some peculiar grace of sweetness or usefulness, but the family as a whole.

"God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved." That is, it was an expectation of the salvation of the whole world that was present with him. It was not to draw a few persons from destruction, from evil and from possible pain, just as we would run into a building and draw out a few of those who might be in

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