II.  PRELUDE:  THE CALL OF JESUS

     [Vox DILECTI]

     I heard the voice of Jesus say
       Come unto Me and rest;
     Lay down, thou weary one, lay down
       Thy head upon My breast. 
     I came to Jesus as I was,
       Weary and worn and sad;
     I found in Him a resting-place,
       And He has made me glad.

     I heard the voice of Jesus say
       Behold I freely give
     The living water; thirsty one,
       Stoop down and drink, and live. 
     I came to Jesus, and I drank
       Of that life-giving stream;
     My thirst was quenched, my soul revived,
       And now I live in Him.

     I heard the voice of Jesus say
       I am this dark world’s light;
     Look unto Me, thy morn shall rise,
       And all thy day be bright. 
     I looked to Jesus, and I found
       In Him my star, my sun;
     And in that light of life I’ll walk,
       Till travelling days are done.

     Horatius Bonar

It is a world of voices in which we live.  We are daily visited by appeals which are ministering to our growth and progress, or which are tending to our spiritual downfall.  There are the voices of nature, in sky, and sea, and storm; the voices of childhood and of early youth; the voices of playfellows and companions,—­voices long stilled, it may be, in death; the voices of lover and beloved; the voices of ambition, of sorrow, of aspiration, and of joy.

But among all these many voices, there is one which is most inspiring and supreme.  When the Vorspiel to Parsifal breaks upon the ear it is as if all other music were inadequate and incomplete—­as if a voice called from the confines of eternity, in the infinite spaces where no time is, and rolled onward to the far-off ages when time shall be no more.  Even so, high and clear above the voices of the world, deeper and tenderer than any other word or tone, comes the voice of Jesus to the soul of man.

Look, if you will, upon the World of Souls, many-tiered and vast, stretching from day’s end to day’s end,—­a world of hunger and of anger, of toiling and of striving, of clamor and of triumph,—­a dim, upheaving mass, which from century to century wakes, and breathes, and sleeps again!  Years roll on, tides flow, but there is no cessation of the march of years, and no whisper of a natural change.  Is it not a strange thing that one voice, and only one, should have really won the hearing of the race?  What is this voice of Jesus, so enduring, matchless, and supreme?  What does it promise, for the help or hope of man?

There are some who say that Jesus has held the attention and allegiance of the race by an appeal to the religious instinct; that all men naturally seek God, and long to know Him.  But if we try to define the religious instinct, we shall find it a hard task.  What might be called a religious instinct leads to human sacrifice upon the Aztec altar; directs the Hindu to cast the new-born child in the stream, the friend to sacrifice his best friend to a pagan deity.