In the contemplation of our theme, at once the explanation and inspiration of all that this marvelous Centennial means, the tumult and the shouting dies--the appropriate exercises of a glorious anniversary finished. Moses and Elijah (representative of the lesser mortals of our own past) from beneath the folds of our tertian glory glide, and we see no man save Jesus only. We are no longer in the presence of the banner-bearing multitude, lifting loud acclaim of congratulation and celebration; but, with Simon Peter, we feel that electric presence of the ages and the centuries, and we exclaim, "It is the Lord!"

      With no thought of labored argument, [480] but for the sake of early treatment in our theme, it may be affirmed that the acceptance and recognition of the historic Christ is indispensable to the recognition and appreciation of the spiritual dominance and the spiritual lordship of the Christ. It is this Christ who rules the world to-day in the realm of righteousness, in so far as it is ruled at all. To talk of the essential Christ, or of the ideal Christ, may be well enough for purposes of academic contemplation; but we, who have to go out and fight the battles of the world and uphold the causes that call for assistance, requiring in ourselves strength and power and inspiration, must hear the music of his voice and feel the touch of his hand and look upon that marred face--a face of beauty none the less; for there is naught more fair than is the smile upon his face.

      "Sirs, we would see Jesus," is the religious demand of this age--the Jesus in the beauty of his historic setting; the Jesus with his great throbbing heart of pity; the Jesus who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many; the Jesus of sympathy and consolation, who can take the meanest soul which shall trust him and transform that soul into a glorious temple, fit for the divine indwelling and presence.

      But I am speaking of the supremacy of Jesus Christ, the lordship of Christ, in some of the various departments in which that lordship has been actually proven and established. I maintain that Jesus Christ is Lord by right of what he is and by right of what he has achieved; and it will not be as a matter of divine decree, but as a matter of absolute justice, that the kingdoms of this world shall at last become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.

      Reference was made in one of the speeches this afternoon to the influence of the spirit of Jesus Christ in art, in science, in architecture, in literature. I ask the greatest artist who may have immortalized some canvas by the glory of his dream, "What spirit brought forth this great achievement?" "It is the spirit of Him who is the incarnation and the embodiment of all that is beautiful." For back of every physical expression of beauty is moral beauty, the beauty of truth, the beauty of purity, the beauty of holiness. In all departments, in all realms of activity, of whatever sort or variety or character or condition, whatever is congenial to Christ's spirit is Christ's. All things of beauty and nobility are his. Back of the canvas the painter is hidden; back of the sculptor the soul is hidden; back of the sculptor and back of the painter is the Christ himself.

      Everywhere, so far as this nineteen hundred years of history is concerned, we are forced to recognize the mighty presence of the spirit of Jesus Christ. It was that spirit that became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, which had always existed in the world in one form or another. Jesus makes precisely the claim for himself that I am making for him, when he says, "Before Abraham was, I am." In the temples of all the ages and of all the centuries,

E. L. POWELL.

wherever in the past time there has been high thinking and noble feeling and grand achievement, wherever there has been splendid exhibition of self-sacrifice and of noble daring, wherever men have loved one another, wherever the wilderness has been made to blossom as the glad place of God's universe, you have had the spirit of Christ.

      I want to speak just a word as to the supremacy of Jesus Christ in the world of the intellect. Taking him simply from the standpoint of a creative intellectual genius, he stands absolutely unique and solitary. No invention stands credited to his name. No star is named after him. No anticipation of the discoveries of science was his. But Jesus Christ did actually discover God to man, he did actually discover man unto himself, and he did actually point out the way by which man and God could come together, the one as loving Father and the other as loving and obedient son, paving the pathway for man to God and to glory. [481]

      I have not time to speak of the discovery of God by Jesus Christ, revealing him unto the world as the loving Father of all men, making them to know him and to love him as Father--no longer as a Jove, whose brow is clothed with thunder, but as One who takes into his great loving arms, with tenderness and compassion, all his wandering sons and daughters in all the wide, wide world.

      But, friends, what is it that makes Jesus Christ your Lord and mine? For my own part, I make the confession, here and now, I follow him as the Son of God, because he has proven himself to be the Son of God. And that which makes him to be the Son of God is the fact that he is absolutely without sin. It is because he is sinless that he is divine. Divinity is not something to be worn as a Shah wears the purple or as a king wears the crown. It is something that is inherent in character. Jesus has not divinity; he is divine. I will follow that moral beauty to the ends of the earth. It commands me. It is what he is that gives to him the right to speak. We must obey. No word that ever fell from his lips has not been endorsed by the universal human consciousness; and the marvelous part of it all is that, standing in the presence of this white Christ, there is this consciousness of sin on the one hand, leading us to get down into the dust and to say, with Simon Peter, "Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man." And, on the other hand, it is so glorious and so beautiful and so appealing and so marvelous, that the mightiest aspiration within a human breast is awakened and goes forth singing and sobbing together, into the arms of God.

      That, to my mind, is a sufficient argument for his divinity. But, it may be said, do you not believe in the miracles? Why, friends, if I want to prove that I am an artist, and I go and jump down from a steeple, that doesn't prove it. If I want to prove that I am an artist, I must do an artistic thing; and until I do that artistic thing, all the great things, the extraordinary things, together or singly considered, do not prove that I am an artist. When l draw the great picture, when I carve the great statue, I have established my right to be considered an artist. Jesus Christ wanted to prove that he was entitled to be called the Son of God. If you look at his miracles from the standpoint of their being extraordinary, there is nothing in the extraordinariness to prove that he is the Son of God. If you seek to prove that he is the Son of God because the things he did are startling and unusual, you have not furnished the proof. But if every one of these deeds tells of himself and what he is, then forget all about the extraordinary quality of them, and think only of them as declaratory and revelatory of the divine in him. Then your miracles become evidential.

      Then, again, the sinless character of Christ, his justice, his purity, his self-sacrifice--every deed that he did--was an expression of them. I go to look at high mountains, and one tells me to gaze upon Shasta or upon Rainier, and I am amazed in the presence of the glory and sublimity and of the beauty of it all. But I go outside of the walls of Jerusalem, and somebody talks about a little hill there known as Calvary; and I look up to that hill, in all of its symbolic relationship to nineteen hundred years of history, and the hill grows bigger and bigger, until it looms up so large that all the mountains of the universe are crowded into insignificance, and there is only one height where the great, worshiping heart of man can stand and feel the infinite pulse of the infinite God, as it goes out over a lost and ruined world, unwilling that any should perish.

      I believe that that cross of Jesus Christ is back to-day of all that is heroic. I believe that that cross to-day is the mightiest appeal of the church to this age, to this materialistic age in which we live. It is the distinctive note of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we say, with the apostle Paul, who knew the hot blood that God Almighty had put within a normal manhood, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Jesus Christ." And he was glorying in the one single cross that stood outlined against the sky yonder, he was glorying in all that that cross had made him to suffer. I will glory in the tribulations, I will glory in the suffering, I will glory in the death [482] itself, for his sake who loved me and gave himself for me.

      To give Christ peculiar dominance was the high end of these splendid men of this glorious past of ours. They stood for the lordship of Christ. I believe that perhaps it would be admitted that the greatest sermon, certainly the highest note ever struck by Alexander Campbell, was in the great sermon preached from the great text, "God, who in sundry times and in divers ways spoke in times past by the fathers to the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us through his Son." The supremacy of Jesus Christ. Now, in the presence of our Presbyterian brethren who are here (one of whom is my very dear friend, and certainly a beloved companion in spiritual arms in the days gone by, Dr. J. Kinsey Smith), I would like for their benefit to say that we have laid stress upon the ordinances, not because of any merit connected with these ordinances, not because of any magical influence associated either with the Lord's Supper or baptism, but simply and solely because of the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. If, for instance, baptism were an appointment of the church, then, for one, I would just as soon vote it in or vote it out; and I would have the authority of one member of that church, receiving that appointment from the church, to take part in the voting. But here is an ordinance, friends, that has been appointed by the authority of Jesus Christ. And I care not anything at all about its philosophical connection with pardon or the remission of sins. I look upon it simply as an act of obedience to the authority of Jesus Christ, and that ordinance stands or falls with me in connection with or in relationship to that authority. We haven't the right to change that ordinance. We haven't the right to substitute anything else for that ordinance. It simply stands associated with the commandment of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

      Another thing that these elders of an old time (if we may speak of old time one hundred years ago) emphasized, growing out of the recognition of the lordship of Jesus Christ, was absolute, uncompromising opposition to every other sort of authority over the mind or heart or conscience of men. Hence it was that Mr. Campbell and his associates opposed all clerical domination, not in a spirit of pure opposition or rebellion, but they did all this because of their jealousy for the rights of Jesus Christ, who was head of his own church and who could control and govern by his Spirit that church. And the great statement made by this same Mr. Campbell was that, as the Old Testament was a sufficient rule of faith and practice and word and ordinance in the Old Testament churches, so the New Testament is a sufficient rule of faith and worship and discipline and government for the New Testament churches. It was the authority of Jesus Christ that called forth this protest against any kind of authority that sought to substitute itself or to minimize the authority of Jesus Christ.

      Let us claim our liberty in the Lord Jesus Christ. And, by the way, nobody is trying to take it away from us. It may be little or it may be great, but whatever thought you have got, in God's name, give it out; nobody is trying to stop a good thought and nobody is going to stop or influence or hinder the one that gives it out, but will bless God for it. Do not let us talk as if liberty was something that somebody was trying to get from us. Stand fast forever in the liberty that is in our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

      But I am done, friends. I want to say this: One thing supreme and paramount, to which everything else is subordinate and subsidiary, is the lordship of Jesus Christ. Make way for the King! Let him be King who can pull the sword from the scabbard. Let him be King who can summon Excalibur by his power from the beautiful lake. Let him be King who can bring things to pass associated with all that is high and splendid and worthy in the world. Let him be King who has supremacy in the realm of character. Let him be King who rules men by the mightiest appeal to the human heart and affection that has ever been made in all the history of time. Make way for the King, and all else must give way before his conquering march. [483]

[CCR 480-483]