Excerpt from The Coming of Christ: A Sermon Preached Before the Evangelical Missionary Society, in the Federal Street Church, Boston, on Sunday Evening, April 25, 1841

1 know of no portion of sacred writ, which can suggest thoughts more appropriate to a missionary oc casion, than the narrative, from which my text is taken. There is to my own mind something surpassingly grand and beautiful in it. It has a deep significancy, and is as full of meaning to us at the present day, as it was to the Baptist. John, though he had foretold the Messi ah's advent, had very low and imperfect notions of his kingdom. He supposed, that he would have come in Outward pomp, in robes of power and state, at the head of conquering hosts. In the gloom of imprisonment, his faith in Jesus as the Messiah had grown dim. He asked for some surer token, some more resplendent sign, than had been given. He felt, that, if Jesus were in deed the promised Savior, he was dallying on his ca reer, wasting golden moments, and ungratefully leaving his faithful precursor to the horrors of a dungeon and the peril of a violent death. John therefore sent twoof his disciples, in the double hope, no doubt, of hearing somewhat that might confirm his own faith, and also of hastening the movements of Jesus towards victory and empire, if he were the true Messiah. Jesus makes no direct verbal reply; but acts an answer full of elo quence. Surrounded by the sick, and blind, and dis tracted, whom the rumor of his wondrous cures had brought from all the country round about, he heals this wretched multitude in the presence of John's disciples, and then commands them to go and tell John what they had seen and heard, thus tacitly saying to his forerun ner: One has come, who lifts off men's burdens and rolls away their infirmities, who cures the evils and dis pels the sorrows of mortality, who bids disease begone, and snatches the prey from the grave, who comforts the mourners, and proclaims glad news to the poor. Whom else, what more would you have? What seals of office could one hear more worthy of God, more manifest to man P Is not a healer of the griefs and ills of life he that should come - the very Messiah that was needed P Why then look for another? Why look for pomp or glitter, the sound of trumpet and the clash of arms, when love, which is holier and greater than these, has become incarnate, and is working its miracles among the lowly and desolate 1� Why look for another, when the poor and the outcast have found a sympathy and kindness unknown before, when man, as man, has had shed upon him those rays of compassionate fellow-feel ing, for which ever since the creation he has been yearning in vain The idea of this answer of our Sa vior is, that, wherever love is at work, there he, who should come, has come, - that in whatever company of.

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