| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 1 |
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The Bible abounds in exhortations to be strong. God is represented as serenely strong, and those who would be like him must also be strong. Weakness is never commended. God is infinitely patient with the weak. It was said of Jesus that he would not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax. In these words of inimitable beauty Christ’s sympathy with weakness is depicted. His whole life was in harmony with this representation. His gentleness was infinite. All weak and weary things found in him a shelter a friend.
One of the legends of the life of Jesus tells of a day when he was walking beside the sea, when suddenly a seabird, driven by a storm that had been sweeping on the farther shore, came fluttering towards him, and, panting, fell on the sand at his feet and died. Then he took the bird and laid it in his hand and breathed on it – when lo! The bird fluttered a moment and then flew aloft, its life restored. It is only a legend, and yet it was just in this gentle way that Jesus dealt always with human weakness and failure which fled to him out of life’s storms.
Yet his treatment of weakness was not that of compassion merely; he sought always to make the weak strong. He was a physician, whose mission it was not merely to nurse the sick, but to heal them. He was not satisfied to pity the feeble and the broken; he sought also to bind up and restore, to breathe life into that which was dead. In his hands the bruised reed became whole again, waving as before in graceful beauty. As he breathed upon the smoking flax, the dying spark was fanned into a flame, and the lamp burned brightly once more.
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