Great Sermon By Mr. Spiers

Robert Spiers, secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Missions, of New York city, delivered one of the finest lectures ever heard in the Loud Lecture course before a crowded audience at the M. E. church Sunday night. His subject was, "The Face of Jesus Christ." Mr. Spiers spoke with great earnestness and force.

Everything in the Christian religion of our day and of the days since the birth of Christ, he said, is founded on the Light of the Knowledge of the Glory of God seen through the face of our Savior. When we are bidden to behold the light of his physical face, there is nothing that we can see. No one knows about his looks. When we speak as we do now of the Face of Jesus Christ we mean not his eyes, his nose or other physical features as we see them in the human face but we use the words simply in their metaphorical sense, as they convey the concrete truths of the gospel. The greatness of our religion comes because there is a vital and living relation between it and the face of our Savior.

The gospel is made up of two facts, two axioms without which Christian religion would be nothing today. The beauty of our Christian religion is that it is not founded on the sands of the stream that wash away, it is founded on historical occurrences that happened nineteen hundred years ago. The first of these two facts is that the gospel has to do with the face that was. Today the gospel deals not with a face that was but with the face that is.

The face of Christ is not only of history, but it is also of the conscience and the more we keep open our hearts the more we see of the divine light of his face.

In our poor, common, sinful lives we often measure our unselfishness and our purity of heart against his. But we only find that we are not of the same stuff. We often hear his death spoken of as a great sacrifice, just as if some great and noble person of our own kind had died for mankind. We say, that man who denounces himself as unworthy before us is greatest. But Jesus Christ defied anyone to find impurity or sin in him. He was faultless and did not need to ask forgiveness. If he had done so he would have been of our common, sinful makeup. If we cannot see in him the light of the knowledge of the glory of God we must indeed be blind.

Christ characterizes purity, love, forgiveness and humility as the four essentials of the Christian man. We owe all our conceptions of these four essentials to the face of the master.

The power of Jesus Christ to judge aright is questioned by none of us. Let any man stand before Jesus Christ once and all his meanness goes forever. Some are afraid to look upon the face of Jesus Christ, fearing that their higher life will die. But when we stand before that face and look upon its light the higher life lives and that which is low in us dies. My fellow students, can you, can any of us, afford to live out of the glory, of the face, of Jesus Christ?