Christian Mission and Poverty

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Christian Mission and Poverty

an impassable gulf between the soul and true felicity, nor can anything heretofore done in this separate will afford us pleasure. 8. Section Eight To labor for an establishment in divine love where the mind is disentangled from the power of darkness is the great business of man’s life. Collecting of riches, covering the body with fine-wrought, costly apparel, and having magnificent furniture operates against universal love and tends to feed self, that to desire these things belongs not to the children of the Light. He who sent ravens to feed Elijah in the wilderness, and increased the poor widow’s small remains of meal and oil, is now as attentive to the necessities of his people as ever, that when he numbers us with his people and says, “You are my sons and daughters” (2 Cor 6:18)—no greater happiness can be desired by them who know how gracious a Father he is . . . Our hearts being thus opened and enlarged, we feel content in a use of things as foreign to luxury and grandeur as that which our Redeemer laid down as a pattern . . . “It is easier,” says our Savior, “for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). Here our Lord uses an instructing similitude, for as a camel considered under that character cannot pass through a needle’s eye, so a man who trusts in riches and holds them for the sake of the power and distinction attending them cannot in that spirit enter the kingdom. Now every part of a camel may be so reduced as to pass through a hole as small as a needle’s eye, yet such is the