THE ONE PATTERN by Bishop Simpson

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 13, 1880

THE ONE PATTERN.

By Bishop Simpson

WHAT a glorious fact it is that there is one life that can be held up before the eyes of humanity as a pattern! There were lips that never spake unkindness, that never uttered an untruth; there were eyes that never looked aught but love and purity and bliss; there were arms that never closed against wretchedness or penitence; there was a bosom that never throbbed with sin, nor ever was excited by an unholy impulse; there was a man free from all undue selfishness, and whose life was spent in going about doing good. There was One who loved all mankind and loved them more than himself, and who gave himself to die that they might live; there was One who went into the gates of death, that the gates might never hold us in; there was One who laid in the grave to take its damp, its coldness, its chill, and its horror, and taught humanity how it might ascend above the grave; there was One who, though he walked on earth, had his conversation in heaven, and took away the curtain that hid immortality from view, and presented us the Father—God in all his love. Such an One is the standard held up in the church of Christ; it is a church that rallies around the cross and that gathers around Jesus; and it is because that He is attractive, and lovely, and glorious, that they are coming from the ends of the earth to see the salvation of God.—Bishop Simpson