Luke 7:1-10 Now when he had ended all his sayings in the audience of the people, he entered into Capernaum.… The discovery of the New World, as the continent of America and its islands are called, was not, like many discoveries, an accident; it was the reward of faith — the reward of Christopher Columbus's faith. He found fruits on the shores of Western Europe, cast up by the Atlantic waves, and brought there, as we now know, by the Gulf Stream, perfectly diverse from any that the temperate, fiery, or frozen zones of the Old World produced. So one day, let me say, strolling by the sea-shore, he saw a nut. He takes it in his hand, and looks at it; he takes it into his capacious mind, and out of that little seed springs his faith in another world beyond that watery horizon, where, as he believed, and events proved, the sea had pearls, and the veins of the earth were filled with silver, and the rivers that flowed through spicy groves ran over sands of gold. They thought him mad to leave his sweet bays, and his land, and his pleasant home, to launch on a sea which keel had never ploughed, in search of a land man had never seen. I tell that infidel that I know in whom I have believed; I can give a reason for the faith that is in me; and so he could. And so he launched his bark on the deep, and with strange stars above him and strange seas around him, storms without and mutinies within, no man of all the crew hoping but himself, with a courage nothing could daunt, and a perseverance nothing could exhaust, that remarkable man stood by the helm, and kept the prow of his bark onward and westward till lights gleamed on San Salvador's shore, and as the day broke, the joyful cry "Land!" rang from the mast-head; and faith was crowned with success, and patience had her perfect work. Now I look on that man, and the world has looked on him, as one of the finest types of a believer; but I cannot read his story without feeling that it puts our faith to the blush, and, as it were, hearing the echo from heaven of that voice that said, "I have not found such great faith; no, not in Israel." (T. Guthrie, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Now when he had ended all his sayings in the audience of the people, he entered into Capernaum.WEB: After he had finished speaking in the hearing of the people, he entered into Capernaum. |
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