to Christ. But to all of us He has the right to say, wherever we are,
'Come,' the right to say, 'Go,' the right to say, 'Do,' the right to
say, 'Be this, that, and the other thing.'

Absolute authority is His; what should be yours? Unconditional
submission. My friend, it is no use your calling yourself a Christian
unless that is your attitude. My sermon to-night has something else to
do than simply to present truths to you. It has to press truths on you,
and to appeal not only to your feelings, not only to your
understandings, but to your wills. And so I come with this question: Do
you, dear friend, day by day, yield to the absolute Master the absolute
submission? And is that rebellious will--which is in you, as it is in us
all--tamed and submitted so as that you can say, 'Speak, Lord! Thy
servant heareth'? Is it?

Further, the owner has the right, as part of that absolute authority of
which I have been speaking, to settle without appeal each man's work. In
those Eastern monarchies where the king was surrounded, not by
constitutional ministers, but by his personal slaves, he made one man a
shoeblack or a pipe-bearer, and the man standing next to him his prime
minister. And neither the one nor the other had the right to say a word.
Jesus Christ has the right to regulate your life in all its details, to
set you your tasks. Some of us will get what the world vulgarly calls
'more important duties'; some will get what the world ignorantly calls
more 'insignificant' ones. What does that matter? It was our Owner that
set us to our work, and if He tells us to black shoes, let us black them
with all the pith of our elbows, and with the best blacking and brushes
we can find; and if He sets us to work, which people think is more
important and more conspicuous, let us do that too, in the same spirit,
and for the same end.

Again, the owner has the absolute right of possession of all the slave's
possessions. He gets a little bit of land in the corner of his master's
plantation, and grows his vegetables, yams, pumpkins, a leaf of tobacco
or two, or what not, there. And if his master comes along and says,
'These are mine,' the slave has no recourse, and is obliged to accept
the conditions and to give them up. So Jesus Christ claims ours as well
as us--ours because He claims us--and whilst, on the other hand, the
surrender of external good is incomplete without the surrender of the
inward will, on the other hand the abandonment and s