Excerpt from Christian Character: A Sermon by the Rector of Calvary Church After the Death of the Senior Warder, James W. Brown

I use, Of certain words. It does not use them in the careless, extravagant, sentimental way that we Often do, but with a sense of their weight and 'value. There is no word that the Scriptures use more carefully that this word good. We see from our Lord's reply to the young ruler what a deep signifi cance He attached to it, Why callest thou me good? He did not care for the conventional use of the word; unless more was implied than was meant in ordi nary usage, He would have none of it. Again we see the great value of the word in the distinction which St. Paul makes. Scarcely for a righteous man - a just man, who fulfills his Obligations, and renders to every man his due - scarcely for a righteous man will one die. Yetperadventure for a good man - a kind, generous man who goes beyond his Obli gations and gives the best that he has some would even dare to die. And again in the text; there is no one in the Bible, so far as I know, who is called a good man save this Joseph Of Cyprus, whose surname was Barnabas.

Of course there has been only one per fectly good man, one perfect ideal Of goodness, and it is Of vital importance in all our efforts after goodness to keep Him before us as an example, an ideal, an in spiration, refreshing and renewing our conceptions Of what is best, and guarding us against merely sentimental or esthetic conceptions Of goodness. But while we must ever go to Him, the fountain head of goodness, it is also Of great import ance to cherish and keep before us its human reproductions in the life and char acter of those who even afar Ofi' have fol lowed in His steps, who with many failures and shortcomings have tried to be like Him And here we have one whom the Bible, with all its caution, callsa good man. Let us try, from the glimpses that we get Of him, to see what his goodness was like, what the Bible means by a good man.

First, he was a generous man. That he was just goes without saying; upright, honorable in all his dealings, wronging none, defrauding none, we may take that for granted. There is no goodness with out that. Goodness which does not rest on that basis is a sentimental delusion and a sham. He was generous with his money. It has been said that the last thing about a man to be converted is his pocket, and the trouble with much Of the religion of today is that it does not go deep enough to reach the pocket, Where the heart Often is. In a day when a special endowment Of generosity had fallen upon the Church, when many gave much, and some gave all, Barnabas is singled out, and mentioned as especially gener ous, as one who having landed property sold it, and gave the proceeds to the Apostles for the poor; mentioned no doubt because Of the sincerity and simplicity with which the gift was made, with no idea that he was doing any great or wonderful thing, that would be men tioned two thousand years after his death, but with such a conception of what Christ had done for him, that it seemed a na tural and a necessary thing to give all that he had to His service.

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