Mark 5:18-20 And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him.… This condition of the human soul carries with it a mysterious power which all ages and nations have associated with the Divine presence. A man living in that high state of purity, rapture, and love, always seems sacred. He is like a man standing apart and standing above, and seems to have been one informed with the Divine presence. That is always efficacious upon the imagination of men, whether they are brutal, vulgar, or heathen. Anything that seems to represent the near presence of God stops them, binds them, electrifies them. A great soul carrying itself greatly in the sweetness and putty of love, in the power of intelligence, and with all other implements in its hand and around about it, suggests more nearly the sense of Divine presence than any other thing in this world. When the human faculties are centred upon love, and all of them are inflamed by it; when conscience, reason, knowledge, the will power, all skill, all taste, and all culture are the bodyguards of this central element of Christian love, they are really, by their own nature, what electricity is by its nature, or what light is by its nature. They are infectious. If you want to move upon the human mind, that is the one force that all men everywhere and always yield to. The glowing enthusiastic soul, even in its lowest moods, and from its lowest faculties, has great contagious power. If you raise man higher along the levels of wisdom and of social excellence, still more powerful is he; if you give him the dimensions of a hero and make him a patriot, and give him the disinterestedness of a glowing love of country and a love of mankind, still higher he rises and wider is the circle that he shines upon; but if you give him the ineffable presence of God, if God is associated in his thought and perception, as in his own consciousness with the eternities, if he has in himself all the vigour of Divine inspiration and walks so among men, there is no other power like Divine-crowned power, no sordid power, no philosophic power, no aesthetic power, no artistic power. Nothing on earth is like God in a man. (H. W. Beecher.) Parallel Verses KJV: And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him. |
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