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Show Parson Simpkin Writes a Sunday Sermonette . for Readers of Tribune By THE REV. P. A. SIMPKIN. Hp HE time has, as never time had' before, at its very heart, a man. Were Jesus of Nazareth, the moral Master of the age, walking now among men, as He did in old Palestine, Pales-tine, surely a smile would light His face, even f.hough He looked through tears at a world crimsoned as never before with sacrifice. Once, as He spoke impatiently of narrow, ecclesiastical views, He took occasion to emphasize the value of a man, setting him above the petty valuations of the legalists more interested in-terested in forms of religion than in human life. Picturing the breaking of priestly restraints in the interest of the saving sav-ing of a sheep, Christ flung a word that startled them, doubtless, and that set above property or ritual values a common man in His ques- tion of "How much more value, then, is a man than a sheep?" TT was a far cry from His valuing of a common soul at His divine standard to those blessed and factual fact-ual privileges and rights that guarantee guar-antee in the free lands of the world the sovereignty of each common human hu-man life in today. God's social order is one that rests on the fact of human worth, and once it becomes a world possession its corollaries will all be written as plainly as are the fundamental guaranties guar-anties of liberty. Trembling in joyful expectancy in the central empires, the dreamers of the people, men with vision like Liebknecht and Dittmann, cry Joyfully Joy-fully that the day of the people is come and the long-blinded German folk begin to see that the thing they have worshiped has hidden by its bulk the true goal of development, the bringing of the people of that empire em-pire to the purple privilege of -autonomy in the great family life which is democracy. fTIO the Jew of old the sheep had p value as a great factor in his food and raiment. In his life, social and religious, the supreme thing wis his religion, sadly cumbered y priestly inhibitions. In them he lost the sense of man's value, as have the folk we fight lost theirs in a maze of false philosophy, kultur and ambition. All the values, gentle, pitiful, beautiful, beau-tiful, that have been mothered into l life under the growing ideal of the Nazarene, who brought to us the vision of human brotherhood, were to be swept aside by the mighty hand of brute force and trampled to dust under the brazen feet of its ambitions. ambi-tions. America, striking hands with the fret- lands of the earth, has gone to I the place sacrificial because she believes be-lieves that a man is worth more than all material things, and that for him and his"' inherit right to autonomy, to happiness, to gentle self-fulfillment as God's crtild, she is willing to die rather than see humanity lose 1 its dream and privilege. ALL softness which would end the agony that barbs our hearts, ere clearly has been writ the value and the right cf all human life, is soft folly. Worth more than peace, than happiness, than ease, than prosperity, than the unbroken family fam-ily circle, than the flower-strewn way of our dreams, is man, the simplest and humblest, no matter what his race, his color or his speech. Let us never forget that, nor cease to strive, to sacrifice, to will the sure or.mimr to the goal till that be real- Ized and the last relic of the old absurdity ab-surdity of any divine right over human hu-man lives, save only God's, is utterly destroyed. And in the sweep of sacrifice for human brotherhood, in the self-effacements self-effacements that glorify ua as we seek its realization, let us not forget that alj its sanctions lie in our common com-mon relationship to Him, the Father of all. WITH the somber shadow of death falling blackly across the path of the days, with the burdens that make multitudes unwontedly conscious con-scious of the need of God should come a stirring to the thought that eafh of us is God's child and each of usr should be finding the rich privileges privi-leges of intimate life with God the Father. Back of all social, national or world programs of a better order and a more perfect life looms His will who has bullded the ages. The dream of Jesus ended not in man being lifted above property, privilege and power of any human order; it ends only in the vision of man living as God's child. In the trenches the young men of the world are learning the value of those great verities and visions spiritual that savingly lift them above the petty and selfish considerations consid-erations that we so largely accepted as the order of life so brief a time agone. WE, too, ought, amid the care and ever-repressent circumstances of the days, to find time to lift a face upward to Him, God, as we run through our busy fingers the golden thread spun out of His heart, and at the thunderous loom where we all toil seek to weave It to the pattern of those spiritual values that shall throne man in the place of God's dreaming. For, only as the great eternal verities of religion order life can man continue ,to be worth more than a sheep or a satrap. |