SMALL THINGS by Dr. Bushnell

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 13, 1860

SMALL THINGS.

By Dr. Bushnell

NOTWITHSTANDING the vast stretch and compass of the work of redemption, it is a work of the most humble detail in its style of execution. The Saviour could have preached a sermon on the mount every morning. Each night he could have stilled the sea, before his astonished disciples, and shown the conscious waves lulling into peace under his feet. He could have transfigured himself before Pilate and the astonished multitudes of the temple. He could have made visible ascensions in the noon of every day, and revealed his form standing in the sun, like the angel of the apocalypse. But this was not his mind. The incidents of which his work is principally made up, are, humanly speaking, very humble and unpretending.

The most faithful pastor in the world was never able in any degree to approach the Saviour, in the lowliness of his manner and his attention to humble things. His teachings were in retired places, and his illustrations drawn from ordinary affairs. If the finger of faith touched him in the crowd, he knew the touch, and knew also the faith. He reproved the ambitious housewifery of an humble woman. After he had healed a poor being, blind from his birth—a work transcending all but divine power—he returned and sought him out, as the most humble Sabbath-school teacher might have done; and when he had found him, cast out and persecuted by men, he taught him privately the highest secrets of his Messiahship. When the world around hung darkened in sympathy with his cross, and the earth was shaking with inward amazement, he himself was remembering his mother, and discharging the filial cares of a good son. And when he burst the bars of death, its first and final conqueror, he folded the linen clothes and the napkin, and laid them in order, apart, showing that as in the greatest things, he had a set purpose also concerning the smallest.

And thus, when perfectly scanned, the work of Christ's redemption, like the created universe, is seen to be a vast orb of glory wrought up out of finished particles. Now a life of great and prodigious exploits would have been comparatively an easy thing for him, but to cover himself with beauty and glory in small things, to fill and adorn every little human occasion, so as to make it divine, this was a work of skill which no mind or hand was equal to but that which shaped the atoms of the world. Such everywhere is God. He nowhere overlooks or despises small things.—Dr. Bushnell.