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HUMAN WICKEDNESS OVERRULED.

THE

BACCALAUREATE SERMON, JUNE 21, 1885.

The wrath of man shall praise thee.- PSALM 76:10.

HE same great moral problems meet and puzzle men in every age. In early times the patriarch complained: "Wherefore do the wicked live, . . . yea, are mighty in power?" The psalmist bewailed the atheism of his day. Ecclesiastes dealt with dogged materalism. The oracles of the great prophets were largely a "burden" of reproach for audacious sin. The last of the apostles declared: "We are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness."

Were it not for such facts as these we might suppose the moral complications of the world to be vastly intensified with its age. As the thoughtful young man looks forth on the scene which he is about to enter, it might seem to him at times so filled with moral conflict, confusion, upheaval, and retroversion, as to defy all clear hope and vision. The perplexity of the patriarch is repeated in the college classroom. What does it all mean and what is the outcome? Meanwhile, as some of the worst physical maladies, so some of the worst moral diseases break out amid the stimulants of high civilization. Softening of the brain, failure of the heart, and malignant cancer find their parallel in the materialism of Moleschott, the extinctionism

of

Clifford and the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann.

The standing question of the ages has been, With God upon the throne, why so much evil in the world? Certainly the great God could have kept out all moral evil, for he could have refrained from creating any moral being. But what countless forms of blessedness would have been replaced by an eternal desert! Or he might have annihilated the sinner on the threshold of sin, or bolted fast his free agency in the hour of temptation. But this would have abandoned a moral for a forcible government. Unless we deny or disparage God, we cannot doubt that his universe is on the whole the best that could be. We therefore conclude simply, not that sin is the necessary means of the greatest good, but that it is incidental to the very best system. He did not desire it, but for sufficient reasons chose to suffer it. A father sends his child to the public school, not for the sake of the temptations and hurts he will there encounter, but notwithstanding them; because on the whole it is better for him than a private school or a home training. The evils are not desired, but endured, as incidental to the best system. To the grave question, What shall be done with these moral disorders not forcibly ruled out? Christianity alone makes answer in two utterances. One is When "I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end" — they shall all be rectified at last. The other is in our text: "The wrath of man shall praise thee." Sin entered the system. It was only evil; must it work

evil only? No; contrary to all its tendencies and aims. and efforts, God overrules and turns it to account. This heaving, seething universe is like some vast manufacturing laboratory, where all the refuse is by the master's skill wrought over to purposes of use and value. "The wrath of man shall praise thee." other words,

HUMAN WICKEDNESS SHALL BE OVERRULED TO

GOD'S GLORY.

In

I. In a more general way man's wickedness signally displays, by its strong contrast, God's glorious character. When a painter would show some brilliant effect of light, he lays near it on the canvas a heavy shade or even a daub of black. How intensely the lightning streaks down the midnight sky. Even so, from the dark background of an ingratitude that forgets all the day long shines the lovingkindness that remembers every moment; and the anger that flashes up on a single provocation seems to illuminate the longsuffering of our God. When you cast your eye over the annals of the race, and in the endless strifes, cruelties, and wrongs that make up history you read that man has been hate, a new glory invests the page that tells us "God is love." Did we ever so appreciate the blessedness of Christian society and character as when in some public place or conveyance we have been compelled to witness the conduct of a knot of brutalized men, filthy perhaps in person and manners, foul of speech, and low and beastly in thought and feeling, till

we shrank away with loathing in our hearts? Some years ago I was conducted through one quarter of a great city that was then abandoned to the sole occupancy of vice. There as you passed along with hastened step, and as the language of blasphemy, the brazen look, and squalid marks of unblushing guilt shocked your soul as sin never did before, you learned to prize, as never before, the homes where love and virtue dwell. Even so, when sin shall have wrought itself out in all its Protean shapes of horror and, with touch upon touch, painted its own repulsive portrait, then shall the universe gaze on the form and features of sin and on the face of God, and see by the contrast new brightness in the ineffable glory.

II. Human wickedness gives occasion for the more signal exertion and exhibition of special traits of the divine character. Some of the highest attributes of God could never otherwise have been fully unfolded to his creatures. The chief regalia, the choicest crownjewels of the Godhead, would have lain hidden in the casket.

Had there been no intractable materials it certainly would have been an amazing and incomprehensible wisdom to make and manage this vast universe, so interlocking, adjusting, balancing all its elements, parts, and occupants that countless forces shall concur and infinite diversities shall correlate and coöperate. And thus the atom and the nebula each knows its laws; the infusoria and the megalosaur have each their several times and spheres; the mote that floats in the

sunbeam claims kindred with the sun; the ray of light that has traveled a thousand years from its source finds its resting place in the eye of the astronomer by night; and the ascending series of life clasps the earth. with its roots and reaches towards heaven with its tendrils. When we reflect on this astounding compli cation of agencies so riveted together that

"From nature's chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth breaks the chain alike,"

how sublime the wisdom that has bound it all together, fitting each to the other and to the whole, and the whole to some glorious end! But how much more sublime does that wisdom appear when it plans that end, meeting and defeating hostile forces at every turn, overcoming at every point the open insurgency of the highest created agencies. It becomes thus the stupendous problem to convert determined discord into harmony, wilful repulsion into cohesion.

With the wisdom is joined the power. The antagonist force, bursting out at every point, at every point sooner or later is driven back. Then appear the resources of our God. Ancient Israel would have known little of the transcendent power of Jehovah but for the obdurate hearts, the high looks, and the stiff necks that went down before his successive strokes, till one and another and another perished from the way. From that day to this it would be almost comic if it were not tragic, to watch the vain attempts to frustrate the kingdom of God. Predictions and efforts

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