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In all your dreams of the future, how much space has been filled by this future which is no dream? Have you, in these past days, and do you, as a matter of habitual and familiar occupation of your mind, let your eyes travel on beyond and above the low levels of earth and peradventures, to fix them on that certainty?
And if, further, we consider the difference between the dim 'peradventures, the doubts and fears, the uncertain conclusions drawn from questionable, and often partial, premises, which confessedly never amount to demonstration, if we consider the contrast between these and the daylight of fact which we meet in Jesus Christ, His love, life, and death, then we can feel how superior in certitude, as in substance, the revelation of God in Jesus is to all these hopes, longings, doubts, and how it alone is worthy to be called the knowledge of God, or is solid enough to abide comparison with the certainties of the most arrogant physical science.
Now, the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ, 'the Word which ye heard from the beginning, which, I suppose, would roughly correspond with what is told us in our four Gospels; the word which these Asiatic Christians heard at first, the good news that was brought to them in the midst of their gropings and peradventures, commanded, in the first place, absolute trust, the submission of the will as well as the assent of the understanding.
"Three thousand dollars. Twice as much as the place is worth. He's holding out on me for revenge." "Ah, but how did you offer it to him, what? I mean to say, I bet you got your lawyer to write him a letter full of whereases, peradventures, and parties of the first part, and so forth. No good, old companion!" "Don't call me old companion!" "All wrong, laddie! Nothing like it, dear heart!
'He or she' is a very vile phrase; for the sake of novelty, let us make the feminine include the masculine, and say 'she' simply. Her conversation, then, instead of being peppered with archaic verilies and peradventures, would have been in form much like that of the rest of us.
But let us make God in Christ our hope, and pass from peradventures to certitudes; from 'To-morrow may he as this day would that it might, to 'It shall be, it shall be, for God is my expectation and my hope. We have an unchanging and an inexhaustible God, and He is the true guarantee of the future for us.
We have enough of man's peradventures about a future life, enough of evidence more or less valid to show that it is 'probable, or 'not inconceivable, or 'more likely than not, and so on and so on.
Now, as our spokesman for pessimism approaches the end which I fervently hope may be afar off life seems sweet. For Life I had never eared greatly, As worth a man's while; Peradventures unsought, Peradventures that finished in nought, Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately Unwon by its style.
And, first of all, there is the certainty about God's heart. Everywhere else we have only peradventures, hopes, fears, guesses more or less doubtful, and roundabout inferences as to His disposition and attitude towards us.
Then He has revealed His purposes; we are not left to grope in darkness, at the mercy of 'peradventures' and 'probablies'; nor reduced to consult the ambiguous oracles of nature or of Providence, or the varying voices of our own hearts, or painfully and dubiously to construct more or less strong bases for confidence in a loving God out of such hints and fragments of revelation as these supply.
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