But the invitation of Christ is in exactly that spirit—"I offer neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, death." "If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me."
The cross, when our Lord spoke those words, was quite a real thing. To take up the cross did not mean bearing life’s little inconveniences with equanimity. It meant literally to put the rope round one’s neck, and be ready simply for anything that might come. That is the spirit in which we are summoned to work for Christ. Can we rise to it? The Prince of Peace was not a "mild man." This is the vision that His disciple had of Him:
"His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire; and His feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His voice as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead."
Can we present the figure of Christ as endowed with anything like that compelling power? If so, we are worthy ministers. It not, we are making dull the one great adventure of the world.
There is only one way in which we can succeed. It is that we cling to faith in God, the Author of the drama, in which we play our part; God, Himself the Guide along the path we are to follow; God, not only the Guide, but the very Way in which we are to walk; God, not only the Guide and Way, but the Strengthener within our souls, enabling us to follow; and God the Guide, the Way, the Strengthener, Himself also the Goal to which we would come. "For in Him we move and live and have our being."
Yea thro’ life, death, thro’ sorrow and thro’ sinning He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed; Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
_I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty._
It is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of mind in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more easily if we look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It has been well said that the mediæval man looked upwards and downwards—to Hell and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a vertical plane; the modern man has a horizontal view, looking to the past and future—the past as it has existed, and the future as it shall exist, in the history of human society upon this earth. We need if possible to combine these two, but it is a very difficult achievement. With our point of view we inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a literal history of the future written before the event; but this is not its primary significance. The religious consciousness from which it springs was highly indifferent to the lapse of time: very likely the seer expected the speedy realisation of his vision so far as he thought about things in that way at all, but this was not his primary concern. Let us take a parallel, as was suggested a moment ago, from another field. The socialistic movement in its early days seemed committed to an immediate expectation of the millennium following upon a catastrophic change in the structure of human society. The arrival of the millennium now seems postponed indefinitely and evolution has taken the place of revolution as a method, and yet a socialist who is really in the movement does not feel any breach of continuity; he knows that he is one in spirit with the earlier writers and that they were never mainly concerned either with the date at which the millennium would come or the means by which they imagined it brought about, but precisely with the contrast between the ideal as they conceived it and the actual as they saw it.