^{pHARMONlESl " FOR EARTHLY LIVING
MALCOLM JAMES M9LE0D
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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, N. J. |
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PRESENTED BY nceton UniverBity Libra.ry F BX 9178 .M28 H4 1902 McLeod, Malcolm James, 186 Heavenly harmonies for earthly living |
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Heavenly Harmonies
FOR EARTHLY LIVING
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MALCOLM JAMES McLEOD
WITH PREFACE BY
HON. JOHN V. FARWELL
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Fleming H. Revell Company chicago, new york & toronto
MCMI
Copyright 1902, by Fleming H. Revell Company Copyright 1 90 1, by Bible Institute Colportage Ass'n
PREFACE.
Being in Pasadena, California, last winter, I at- tended services in Rev. Malcolm James McLeod's church, and was so impressed with his sermons that I requested copies for publication in order that they might have a wider circulation. To me they were spiritual poetry in prose, spiritual music in harmony with man's inmost needs and God's provisions therefor, spiritual philosophy and experience made vocal with Christ's gospel of salvation.
I bespeak for Dr. McLeod's addresses an enlarged usefulness, trusting that, as they proclaim the facts of sin and salvation, many readers may be transformed by the new birth and energized by the Holy Ghost.
John V. Farwell.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Harmony of the Christian Walk 9
Harmony with the Will of God 27
Harmony of the Work with the Worker 43
Harmony with Environment 54
Harmony through Experience 71
Harmony with the Christ-life 83
Harmony with the Christ-pity 99
Harmony and Communion of Public Worship. . . 112
CHAPTER I.
HARMONY OF THE CHRISTIAN WALK.
" Enoch walked with God." Gen. 5 :24.
The fifth chapter of Genesis is a monotonous record of names and numbers. It is like a walk in a forest of long-lived, leafless oaks. It is, moreover, a wilder- ness of wickedness. "The whole earth was corrupt and filled with violence." "It repented the Lord that He had made man." "Behold, I will destroy him with a flood of waters." One oak, however, in the heart of the wilderness was green, like the tree planted by the river whose leaf withereth not; for "Enoch walked with God."
Climate and soil do not account for everything. The palm tree grows on the edge of the desert, with leaf clean and green. It sends its roots down through the sand till it reaches moisture in the depths. The edelweiss, with dense clusters, flowers on the summit of the Alps. The "traveler's joy" blooms on the highest peak of Teneriffe. The samphire grows in clefts of the rock far above the reach of the sea. In Wyomingthe hot spring flows hard by the snow-drift. Sodom had its Lot, Egypt its Joseph, Babylon its Daniel. Abijah dwelt in the house of Jeroboam; and in this antediluvian chapter of the early twilight, bracketed with men whose alone biography is that they lived and died, is found a man who walked with God.
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10 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
Surely the record is remarkable. What reticence! What omission! He lived 365 years, and yet his is the briefest biography ever penned. Forster's life of Dickens covers three volumes. Washington Irving' s life by his nephew enlarges to four volumes. Masson takes six folios to complete the tragedy of Milton's career. Lord Macaulay fills eight duodecimos on six- teen years of England's history. It takes the author thirty-two volumes to tell Napoleon's story. But here a simple line is all. The description is pointed, yet pregnant. The words cut through the outer shell and with a single stroke lay bare the man. One could have wished, indeed, that the full record of his life had been chronicled, as also the story of his long-lived son, Methuselah, and many another Bible hero. But differently has it been decreed. Just one dip of the pen, one stroke of the pencil, must suffice. Oh, for grace so to live that when God calls us our monument may be immortalized with the noblest epitaph that was ever chiselled into marble — " He walked with God"!
A man's walk.
Now a man's walk is a revelator of the man. Gait and gesture are an index to character. You can form opinion, approximately true, from swing and carriage. The movement of hand and head and foot is pregnant with meaning.
He who walks erect and upright evidences emphasis, self-esteem. The gentle noiseless stepper is a schemer. The shambler is an idler. The short, quick, American step is full of business and "go." We all know the broad, swaggering bully, who stands with feet apart
CHRISTIAN WALK. ii
under lamp post and street corner. One walks "tall," another walks "awry," a third has a slouching gait, a fourth walks "heel and toe." We have students of phrenology and palmistry ; it is not strange that there should be a language in the walk.
Scripture figures it. We are to walk, " not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." We are to walk "worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called." We are to walk "worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing." We are to walk " circumspectly." We are to walk " in the light. ' ' We are to walk ' ' by faith. ' ' ' ' What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God?"
What, then, is implied in walking with God? Three things: Harmony, humility, holiness.
I. HARMONY.
Walking with God, first of all, implies harmony with Him.
Now, by nature we are not on good terms with God. "The carnal man is enmity against God," and there must first be reconciliation.
"How can two walk together, except they be agreed?" Amos asked that question, and, Bible or no Bible, there is remorseless logic in that little word "can." An appeal is it to the nature of things, and "the nature of things is the law of God." Harmony of sound is music. Harmony of word to thought is poetry. Harmony of color is beauty. The most beautiful thing in nature is the rainbow; God blends the colors. Harmony of cog and wheel and axle makes the perfect mechanism. Everything is in its place. Part answers part. The most perfect mech-
12 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
anism in the universe is the universe itself. No oiling does it need, no winding, no repair; every planet in its orbit ; every star in its appointed function. There the great system rolls without a murmur — for endless years the same. All thy works do praise thee, O Lord! Man alone mutinies and rebels.
Life, the philosophers are telling us, is correspond- ence with environment. In disease or death some- thing is thrown out of correspondence. The deaf man is thrown out of correspondence with the world of sound ; the blind man with the world of beauty. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Co-relation of part with part is intimate, and any interference means friction. The perfect workmanship is frictionless. Sin is disagreement, fermentation, rebellion, aliena- tion, estrangement, mutiny, discord — the one all- pervading discord of the universe.
The great dramatist in the Tempest makes Ferdi- nand and Miranda to fall in love at first meeting. A glance, he says, and they "changed eyes." The true Christian is he who has changed eyes with God. He sees as God sees. "There is not an honest student of the Bible anywhere," says Joseph Cook, "who is not willing to admit that salvation is harmony with God" — loving what God loves, and hating what God hates.
Whereso'er we differ, here we are at one. Heaven is not possible save as people are in accord with the divine law and the divine life. That is what Heaven means. No more can Heaven be got out of a dis- ordered character than can music be evoked from a discordant harp. Culture is pained by contact with coarseness. The eye of the artist is troubled with a
CHRISTIAN WALK. 13
false blending of color. The ear of the musician is tortured with dissonance. Handel tells us that a flat- ness felled him like a blow. And a high, lofty moral nature is wounded by the world's sin and shame, and shrinks with grief at its beholding. Love and hate can never be at peace. Corruption and cleanliness must necessarily quarrel. This is a law woven into the nature of things.
By no ingenuity could John Knox and Queen Mary live a happy life together. John the Baptist could never be at one with Herod ; no more could Paul with King Agrippa. When dynamite and fire sleep tran- quilly together, when lions learn to lie down lovingly with lambs, when leopards kennel peaceably with kids, then perhaps right and wrong may clasp hand friendly ; but till that time Christianity means war. Until a man is washed in the blood of Jesus from the guilt of sin and the power of sin and the love of sin, he cannot be at peace in the presence of infinite holiness.
Strike a note on the piano, and the corresponding string of the violin in the room vibrates. A voice has spoken, and kindred voices start up the echo. Like seeks like. Each note calls up its brother note. Strike all the keys together, and although there is discord at first, yet some strong notes will gather up and drown the others, and the final vibration in the distance is a soft, pleasing tone. This it is that makes it so hard to be a Christian. The more refined the music, the greater the risk of discord, and Christianity is the most refined music that was ever heard. The higher the note, the easier to detect a flatness, and the life of God in Jesus is the highest note that was ever compassed.
14 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
HARMONY THROUGH OBEDIENCE.
Let US remember that harmony comes through obedience.
If man is his own best friend, he is also his own worst enemy. We pull counter to the current of our being. There is harmony in music because in music there is no self-will. Music is built on law. Man did not make this law; he has simply discovered it. If he breaks it the music ceases. Each Haydn and Handel is as much bound by it as each amateur.
The same is true of man's relation to his every art. Find out its principles, and all the genius of that art is yours. But disobey its principles ; " try to excel in any other way than by conformity to its nature, and all that art contends against you, and balks you at every step." I cannot change ocean current or tide, but I can build my ship and stretch my sail, and by adapting me to wind and wave I can gain any Liver- pool or Queenstown. I cannot conquer lightning save as I learn the law of lightning and submit. "Obedience pulls the sting out of the lightning, and makes it harmless." Fire is a bad master; it is a good servant. By accepting its mastery I make it my slave.
So in the spiritual; we must obey God's law. Our will must be confederate with His will. When we put ourselves into right relations with divine forces, then will they do our bidding and be our friends. Obedience to the law of steel gives the engine its strength. Obedience to the law of stone gives the sculptor his Apollo. Obedience to the law of wood gives the side-board its glossy finish. Obedience to the law of fire gives the winter home its comfort.
CHRISTIAN WALK. 15
Obedience to the law of electricity gives the telephone wire its cunning. Obedience to the law of govern- ment gives the citizen liberty and happiness.
The old Greeks taught their children how to sing, because it taught them how to be obedient. This is a difficult universe to the man who drives dead against it, but to the man who has learned the secret of har- mony through obedience it is a happy place. Dis- cord is sickness; harmony is health. Discord is rest- lessness; harmony is peace. Discord is sorrow; har- mony is joy. Discord is death; harmony is life. Discord is hell; harmony is heaven. He who is in love and peace with his neighbors, filling the sphere where God has placed him, hath heaven in his heart already. Only through blue in the eye, the scientist tells us, can blue out of the eye be seen. Only through C in the ear can C out of the ear be heard. Only through Heaven down here can Heaven up there be interpreted. " The natural man discemeth not the things of the Spirit." That good German, Bengel, after a hard day's study, retired to rest. Some one in the adjoining room heard his prayer —
"Blessed Lord, we are on the same good old terms to-night."
Then the good man slept. His life was keyed to the divine life. His heart kept time to the pulse of God. He had peace.
II. HUMILITY.
The pulpit is fond of noting how the word humility has changed its meaning. In olden times it was a word of slaves. It was difficult to offer a man a greater insult than to call him humble. Humility
i6 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
was considered a loss of self-respect. Christ came. He took the hateful word and made it honorable. To-day it is called the Christian's loveliest virtue, and his crowning grace. It was pride that changed angels into demons; it is humility that changes demons into angels.
"The Christian," says Guthrie, "is like the ripening corn; the riper he grows, the more lowly he bends."
What is humility? It literally means a low esti- mate of self. But, then, all estimates are relative. The value of anything depends on the standard used. Everything hinges on the unit. You are sailing down the river, and you think your yacht passing swift until you meet a swifter. So long as a dwarf lives among dwarfs he thinks himself a giant. Saul was humbled when he saw Goliath. The Catskills are huge until they see the Alps — the Alps until they see the Himalayahs. The atmosphere is clear as crystal till the room is darkened and a ray of sunshine steals through the crevice ; then millions of floating particles can be detected. A poorly clad boy in the presence of one neatly dressed is conscious of his clothing. The little stain of rust is very prominent on a polished razor-blade.
Now, a man's standing according to the Bible is his standing in God's sight. The apostle writes, "We all have come short of the glory of God." God in the world must be the standard of the world. When you wish to learn the true character of your life, measure it by the laws of God. They that know their God will be humble. They that know them- selves cannot be proud. If prosperity raise thee to a dizzy height, then, lest thy head be turned,
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look up. Do not stoop till you are smaller than yourself. Stand up at your real stature by the side of something larger. For a little time walk with God. Look up and grasp His greatness; then look down and contemplate thine own littleness; thus is pride slain. A leading feature of true Christian per- fection is a consciousness of imperfection.
Do not try to be humble. Some of the proudest people are those who are trying to be humble. They are proud of their humility.
" The devil did grin, For his darling sin Is pride that apes humility."
Pliny said: "It is as hard to teach pride as to fill an empty bottle corked." Pride is the attic of the house — the highest room and the emptiest. It is a magnet pointing selfward. Proud people are unim- aginative. They are self-centered. They are so lifted up with what they are that they blind them- selves to what they might be.
The certain cure is a vision of the ideal: for the proud man is looking away from God. He has turned his back on the fountain of light. He has set himself against the spirit of incarnate Love, who said: ''Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, for I am meek and lowly in heart." Thus does he make of his life a discord, a jar.
Moreover, pride unfits for service. We cannot do the Master's work until we are "clothed with humil- ity," and have the Master's spirit. "I beseech you," wrote St. Paul, "by the meekness and gentleness of Christ." " In lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than himself.".
i8 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
Mr. Speer tells a story of a visit to a college in the South. It was a poor college, but one that sought to do the will of God.
"There were not many rooms in it," he goes on to say, "so the president gave me his room. I was awakened very early in the morning by my door opening. I did not want to appear inquisitive, so I lay quietly and said nothing. It was the president. I saw him take my boots, carry them into an adjoining room, kneel down on the floor and black them. That act went straight to my heart."
This is the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ, who "made Himself of no reputation, but took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."
Let us hasten to note the sad reflection that there is no vanity save in man. The wind giVes its music without boasting. The rainbow unrolls its gorgeous tints without noise or flourish. The modest violet fills the air with fragrant breath, its own little cheek hidden among the timothy. Gravity blows no trumpet on the corner to be seen of men. The night- ingale pours its little heart out — herself unseen amid the black leaves of the silent night. Man alone is pompous and elate. The infinitely little hath a pride infinitely great.
III. HOLINESS.
There is a series of English words that have the same root — health, whole, holy. They are all branches of the same stem. "They that are whole
CHRISTIAN WALK. 19
need not a physician, but they that are sick." Why? Because sin has halved us. Christian healthi- ness is Christian holiness. Christian holiness is Christian wholeness. A perfectly healthy life is a perfectly holy life and a perfectly whole life. Holiness is that state of the soul which results when the whole of it is healthy. This means strength, robustness, virility, all-roundedness, perfect development. Holi- ness is the completeness of character.
I like that picture of Jesus by Holman Hunt. There He stands, not the weak, womanly divinity- student figure that the old masters paint; but a strong, ruddy, wholesome lad, in bare foot and with a far-away look in His eye.
Now, God gives us the laws of spiritual healthiness in Scripture, and one of these is companionship. *' He that walketh with the wise shall be wise, but the companion of fools shall be destroyed."
Lord Bacon says : *' No man doth accompany with others but he leameth, ere he is aware, some gesture, voice, or fashion." Shakspere adds: "It is certain that wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men take disease , one of another. " * ' Evil communications corrupt good manners," writes St. Paul. There is an old Latin proverb: "If you live with those who are lame, you will learn to limp." He that comes from the stable has an odor of the horse. He that works with the chimney smells of its smoke. He who com- panions with the ugly soon undergoes a sinister trans- formation. He who frequents places where shame holds carnival, will soon bear the brand of vice. A man is known by the company he keeps. If that with which you consort is below you, it degrades; if above it,
20 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
uplifts. In electricity there are what are called induced currents. Here are two parallel wires. Pass a cur- rent through the first. A fainter throb will thrill the second. That is how they telegraph from moving trains. There is an electric contagion. Iron near a magnet is magnetized. There is a valley in California where nothing is grown but roses. During the flower- ing season it is a wilderness of flowers. It scents the atmosphere for miles. So saturated is the air with perfume that it clings to the clothing for days and weeks.
Saadi, the Persian poet, was one day bathing. A friend put into his hand a piece of scented clay.
"Art thou musk or ambergris?" asked the poet.
"I was just a piece of clay," it answered, "but being in the company of a rose-bush all summer, the quality of my sweet companion was communicated to me."
Well did the old philosopher say that each growing child should have every morning some beautiful picture to refresh the eye, some immortal music to delight the ear, and some perfect poem to read and tone up the sense of beauty. The soul living amid such loveliness must soon grow fair and lovely.
Astronomers are said to be men of tranquil tem- perament. Constantly dwelling on the "expressive silence" of the starry depths, their souls catch the spirit of the heavenly quiet.
This is the old mystery of environment. Certain animals take on the color of their habitat. Witness the sandy hue of the sole and flounder, the white of the polar bear, the stripes of the Bengal tiger. The chameleon takes its tint from the branch to which it
CHRISTIAN WALK. 21
clings. Wallace mentions the case of a parrot which changes its color from green to red when fed on certain fishes.
In nature environment is revolutionary. Do oranges grow in Florida? Climate, not soil, is the cause. Is the polar bear found in Greenland? Climate, not seals or fishes, is the secret. Is a man a companion of books? He shows it in his face. Is he a worker in coal? His body tells the grimy tale. Does he linger long 'mid honeysuckle and mignonette? There's a fragrance from his dress. Verily the body is the soul's interpreter. A man's embodiment is written' o'er with the history of his companionships.
Nothing writes so unmistakably as the company we keep. It was said of Keats that " his face was like the face of one who had seen a vision." So absorbed was he in the beautiful, so fondly did he love that vision splendid, that his very face took on the love- liness. Shakspere's face, we are told, bore the marks of meditation. There was a fulness and a calmness that came from brooding o'er the deep things of life. Charles Dickens pictures a monk beginning his career as a beautiful child. But he fell into sin. He pon- dered over vice during the day. He played with little angel demons in his dreams during the night. For him to live was iniquity. Soon the face of the inno- cent youth grew fiend-like and depraved, and he ended his career a bruised, broken-down, blotched criminal. By the which Dickens means that asso- ciating with sin will put a twist in the eye and a coarseness in the countenance.
When Da Vinci painted his "Last Supper," he had the faces of the eleven disciples completed before he
22 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
had secured a model for the portrait of either Jesus or Judas. He spent many months in unsuccessful search. One day, at a service in the great Milan cathedral, he caught the eye of a young man in the choir. " There's my man," thought Leonardo, as he studied the strik- ing features.
He sought him out and secured him to sit for the immortal painting to represent our Saviour.
Then Judas alone was left. The artist was many years seeking a model among the haunts of crime. It was in Rome it happened. There he met his Judas in a prison cell, and had him sketched. The pulpit has never tired telling the story to half-incredulous wor- shippers of Da Vinci's finding out, later, that these two men were the same; and the world will never cease to wonder how a face that was taken for the calm, strong gentle face of Jesus, could ever, by any mystery of iniquity, have its lines so defaced and its beauty so disfigured as to pose, only ten years after, as a prototype of Judas.
Thus in many ways and strange the face tells the story of the man. If holiness can write beauty on the facial features, sin can wash said beauty speedily away. For sin, like love, hath power to convert. We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the witchery of sin, are soon changed into the same image. It was a patent fact in the olden times that slave-owners, by living among their slaves, learned to copy their vices. Notwithstanding that they looked down upon them, they yet became passionate and cruel like the poor wretches whom they oppressed. Contrariwise, Plu- tarch tells us that he wrote his forty-six "parallel lives" of great and good men in order to fill his mind
CHRISTIAN WALK. 23
with pictures of the best and worthiest characters. Their virtues served him as a "looking glass in which he might see how to order and adorn his own life."
Think of that incident related by Henry Drum- mond. A woman, whose husband was dying, came late one evening and requested the preacher-scientist to come to her home.
"My husband is deein', sir. He's no able to speak wi' you, and he's no able to hear you. But I would like him to hae a breath o' you aboot him afore he dees."
Another story is told of Frederick W. Robertson. Stopford Brooke was writing his biography, and he went down to Brighton to gather information. He visited a book-seller who had known Robertson.
"Do you remember anything interesting about Mr. Robertson?" he asked.
The book-seller, after a little, took him into the room, and pointing to the great preacher's portrait on the wall, he said:
"Whenever I am tempted to do anything mean, I just run in here and look at that picture, and the pure face recalls me, to my better self."
If a picture of the great preacher had such power, what must the real man have been! Surely no one could have lived with Robertson without growing pure and good. What must it have been to have lived with Jesus? It is said of Lord Peterborough that when he lodged for a time with Fenelon, he exclaimed:
" If I stay here much longer I shall be a Christian in spite of myself."
Perhaps the most pointed story of all is told of John Wesley. Two rough boys filled their pockets with
24 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
stones, and stole into the room where he was to preach. When they looked on the old man's face, lighted up with such a glow of goodness, one of the lads whis- pered :
"He's not a man. Bill; he's not a man."
When the service was over and Wesley passed out, the same lad felt the sleeve of his gown, touched the arm and whispered:
"Bill, he is a man; he is a man."
John Wesley felt the touch, and turned. He saw the boy's admiring face, so early soiled with sin. He put his hand on his head.
"The Lord bless thee, my lad."
We do not wonder that he became in later life one of his band of preachers.
Perhaps from such stories as these we can under- stand better the narrative of Moses coming down from the mountain where he had been enjoying the com- panionship of God. His face shone so that the people were afraid to look thereon. Or that other narrative about the martyr Stephen. The council said his face was as though it had been the face of an angel.
Sweeter than any tint of painter, fairer than any touch of sculptor, is the beauty with which holiness brightens up the soul. It lights up the sunken eye of sickness. It warms the cheek of depression and des- pair. The old classics tell us that a woman cannot choose whether or not she shall be beautiful at twenty ; but it is her own fault if she is not beautiful at sixty, just as the maple gets gorgeous on the verge of winter. The Lord God is a Sun, and we will shine, too, if we get into the stream of His brightness. The vapor, apart from the sun^ is murky and black, but when the
CHRISTIAN WALK. 25
light pierces it at eventide, it enriches it. See it drinking in the beams of Hght! It blushes into gold, and crimson, and cinnabar, and purple, and all manner of infinite delights. Human life is nothing till you lift it into the sky. Let us mount nearer Heaven. Let us draw near to God, and our soul will be pure, our path luminous.
Walking with God, then, implies harmony, humil- ity, and holiness. "Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord." Christianity is the religion of com- panionship. The eagle cannot rise with one wing; nor can man. It is the highest type of friendship; nay, it is the perfecting of friendship. If we company with Jesus, we must have His mind, we must have His lowly spirit, and we will gradually grow into His like- ness. Justification is through the blood of Christ; sanctification is through the resurrection life of Christ.
We are shaped into the likeness of what we live with. We are shaped into the likeness of what we love. When Jesus was on earth, as many as touched Him were made whole. We all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, even as from the Lord the Spirit.
People speak of going to Heaven as if it were a concert-room, to enter which a ticket only is required. Nothing could be more unscriptural. Nothing could be more unreasonable. Heaven is not a place to which we are admitted, but a place into which we are bom, for " except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.' ' It is a little short of foolish, the way some talk of going to heaven when they die. They exclude God from their life on earth. They find
26 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
no joy in His presence here. Heaven would be a painful imprisonment to them. The presence of Jesus on earth was torture to the demons. " Who then shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart." And our hands are made clean and our hearts made pure as we trust in the cleansing blood of Jesus.
Enoch went to Heaven before he died; so must we. As the old theologians used to say: "We must have a little heaven to get to heaven in." Enoch kept step with Deity here below; so must we. His heart was knit to God by trust — complete, constant trust. For him to live was always "Nearer, my God, to Thee." That is what made of his life an epic of completeness.
CHAPTER II.
HARMONY WITH THE WILL OF GOD,
"Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful; but his delight is in the law of the Lord." Psalm 1:1.
One of the interesting chapters in the tragedy of great men is the story of Samuel Johnson. His life was tuned to the minor key. Ill health made him morbid; poverty made him sour. In Westminster Abbey he sleeps by the side of David Garrick — laughter and tears resting together.
Dr. Johnson wrote a famous book called Rasselas. He tells us he wrote it in the evenings of a week to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. It is really a search for the secret of happiness.
Rasselas, the son of the mighty emperor of Abyssyn- ia, was confined in a private palace until the order of succession should call him to the throne. The palace was situated in a rich valley surrounded on every side by mountains. It was entered by a canon cut under the rock, the mouth of which was guarded by huge iron gates forged by the giants of ancient days. In the midst of the valley a lake lay, peaceful, stocked with fish of every species and fowl of every feather, whom nature has taught "to dip the wing. " On the sides of the mountain were trees of every leaf. On the banks of the lake were flowers of every color. No wind but wafted spices; no garden but breathed
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28 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
freshness; no day but dropped fruits rich and rare. Every blessing of nature was there collected; every desire gratified. Nothing that art, music, novelty or merriment could do ; nothing that sense could wish, or appetite long for, was wanting to make life lovely in this blissful retreat.
And yet Rasselas knew not content in this happy valley. He longed for freedojn beyond the mount- ains. Alone would he wander in solitary walk, meditating escape. Week after week would he spend exploring the canons and clambering the cliffs to see if there was any aperture. Ofttimes would he look at the massive iron gate, guarded by sentinels who never slumbered.
Three years did he spend in this fruitless search, and then communicated his plans to Imlac. Imlac was one of the tutors of the royal family, and, walking one day through the groves with Rasselas, he was telling him the story of his life.
"Tell me, " said the prince, " tell me truly, art thou content in this valley, or dost thou wish again thy wandering life ? "
"Great prince, " said Imlac, " I will speak the truth to you. I know not one of your teachers who does not lament the hour he entered this abode. "
" My dear Imlac, " returned the prince, " I will open to thee my heart. I have long meditated escape. Teach me how to break my prison bars. Thou shalt be the partner of my flight. Yon gate is strong, yon mountain steep, yon sentinels ever sleepless. "
So the two became friends, and next morning started out to plan their escape. For days they scaled crag and steep, returning each evening to the
WILL OF GOD. 29
palace. Patience at last rewarded them with a fissure in the rock. They pierced the cavity, and issuing to the top of the mountain they beheld the Nile — a narrow thread — meandering beneath them. So, laden with jewels, they descended into the plain, and bade goodbye to the happy valley, as they believed, forever.
We will not attempt to follow them in their world- tour. Human life they studied in all its phases — greatness and lowliness, wisdom and folly, culture and coarseness, virtue and vice, hardship and ease, the task and the tool, the cloister and the market-place. They went to the temple of melody, where St. Cecilia sang. They went to the temple of laughter, where Democritus lived. They went to the temple of jus- tice, where Aristides sat. They went to the temple of wisdom, where Solomon dropped his mantle. But happiness was not. Rasselas came back a sadder and a wiser man.
The search for the blessed secret still goes on. Rasselas was not the first explorer in a region unknown; he will not be the last. The quest for happiness has engaged the minds of earth's wisest children since the days of Plato and Epictetus. For many it is life's summum honum: for all of us it hath attractiveness and charm ; for the Christian it is life's last reward. And our text lends a clew to the intri- cate pursuit.
"Oh the happiness of the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord. "
Happiness thus consists in being in harmony with
30 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
the law of God, and in finding in that law our medita- tion and delight. Let each soul ask itself, "What is the Father's will for me?" then be obedient to the heavenly vision ; thus will the blessed prize be won.
Perhaps we can simplify the search by limiting the field of exploration.
Happiness is bounded on the north by contentment of state, on the south by lowliness of mind, on the east by helpfulness of life, on the west by holiness of heart.
I. CONTENTMENT.
** I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therein to be content." (Phil. 4, 11.) Contentment is har- mony with the Father's will.
One of Addison's chapters in the Spectator is a dream which he entitles the ''Mountain of Miseries." The great essayist dreamed that a proclamation had been made by Jupiter that every mortal should bring his griefs and woes on a certain day, and throw them together in a heap, in a certain large plain that had been appointed for the purpose. So taking his stand in the center, he watched with a great deal of interest the whole human race marching up in line, and throw- ing down their several loads, which in time grew up into a prodigious mountain that rose above the clouds.
One poor old haggard wretch carried a bundle under her cloak. She threw it down. The name of it was poverty. Another, after much laboring, dragged a heavy luggage to the mass, which on opening was fotmd to be his wife. Old women threw down their wrinkles, and many negroes their tawny skin. There
WILL OF GOD. 31
were red noses, grey hairs, thick lips, bald heads and rusty teeth ; in fact the mountain consisted largely of bodily ailments. Rapidly the great massive bulk grew and swelled to ponderous dimensions, but strange to say there was not a vice, or a crime, or a frailty, or a passion, or a folly, or a sin. It was a sorrow, or a trouble, or an affliction, or a remorse, or a disappointment, or a physical distemper.
Standing and regarding very attentively this con- fusion of chaos and the thronging, surging multitudes that swarmed around the mountain, the dream was changed. A second edict proceeded and came forth from the god of the thunderbolt, that as every one had to have some burden there was to be an exchange, and each must return to his home with the bundle that had been assigned to him.
And now the hurry and nervousness were intense. Some who had brought sickness went away with poverty. Some who had carried hunger to the mountain bore away thirst. One lady exchanged a birth-mark for a bad reputation. A venerable hump- backed gentleman exchanged his deformity for a rebellious boy that had been thrown into the heap by an angry father. A certain old lady who came with a lock of grey hair, disappeared with the asthma. The whole plain was filled with murmuring and discontent. Every one was repining. There was perfect unan- imity in one thing, that the new affliction was worse than the old; " and I learned a lesson, " says the great essayist, "that our Heavenly Father knows best, and assigns to each soul the sphere for which it is best fitted, and the burden which it can most patiently bear."
32 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
Surely that old story of the aged hermit in the desert hath valuable lessons for us on the blessedness of trust, and the committal of our lives to Him who knoweth best. He planted an olive by his hut, and prayed for rain. So the gentle rain came down, and gradually grew to torrents. Then fancying some hot sun would hurry the water down into the roots to free the salts and phosphates and gases, and force them up into the leaves and branches, he prayed again, and the hot sun shot forth its fiery darts. Next, the old hermit imagined a cool wave might put snap and hardihood into the fibre. So he prayed a third time, when next morning hoar frost settled on the ground. Then thinking a hot wind, to swell the bud and push out the blossom, might be beneficial, he prayed once more ; so the south wind blew. In a few days the olive tree was dead.
The story goes on to tell how some few weeks later, visiting a brother hermit who had a large, beautiful olive at his door, he asked :
"Comrade, how came yon goodly tree? "
" I planted it, and left God to take care of it, " came the answer.
"Ah, I planted one, too, but it died. "
The divine Husbandman knows best where to plant us, beloved. He knows best how to care for us, too. He loves us. He will do nothing save what is for our good. If pnming and purging will make us more fruit-bearing, that is why He uses the knife. If dressing and grafting will improve the tone of otir lives, let us not rebel. It is only that we should bring forth more fruit, and that our fruit should remain. If
WILL OF GOD. 33
He transplant us it is for our own welfare. He knows where we will thrive best.
Let us be content to put ourselves entirely in our Father's care. Let us learn the secret of how to live in harmony with His will. The life of insurrection is a life of pain. " Every time the sheep bleats it loses a mouthful, and every time we grumble we lose a bless- ing." Only by living the life of trust can happiness be found. His is the glad heart who has mastered that contentment of state in which the apostle rejoiced. To long for the forbidden country is to invite uneasiness and heart-ache. For happiness is bounded on the north by contentment.
II. LOWLINESS OF MIND.
On the south, lowliness of mind. Lowliness is the second boundary to the happy life, for thus only can we hope to company with Him who said, "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. "
Paul says, " Do not think more highly of yourself than you ought to think. " ''In lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than themselves." "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who * * * humbled Himself. " The world has so little understood the Christian teaching that it uses the term 'poor-spirited' as a mark of opprobrium. The voice of the world is: " Happy the great, the rich, the powerful, the well-to-do! happy the life that lives in luxury ! happy earth's dignitaries ! happy those unap- proachable ones who wield the rods of empire and dictate the forms and etiquettes of life! 'I But such is
34 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
not the mind of the Master. His teaching is that the great are they who serve; the happy, they who minister.
There can be little doubt that in the science of living with men, to feel one's self-importance is to invite disquiet and aching of heart. For nothing causes such rankling pain as pride. " The proud man poisons his own banquet, and then eats it. " Augustus Caesar bethought himself a god, but how jealous and irritable it rendered his life! The ruling passion of Alexander Pope undoubtedly was vanity and love of applause, and how it soured and embittered his nature we all know. His was the venom of wounded pride. Macaulay says of him :
** His life was one long series of tricks. He was all stiletto and mask. To cheat and malign was his natural habit, if only reputation could be secured thereby, for admiration and applause were as neces- sary to him as the air he breathed. "
How pitifully ludicrous must seem to the all-seeing One the vauntings of our poor frail human nature! The old Roman emperors compelled obsequious courtiers to shade their eyes when being ushered into their presence, thus acknowledging the glare and dazzle of their glory. By some strange sophistry we convince ourselves of our distinction, that we forsooth are intellectual and great ancj learned, that our fellow- mortals should look up to us and kneel down before us and accept our dictum with lowly acquiescence. Surely the man who reasons thus is certain to be unhappy, because he is certain to meet with contra- diction. The man who feels that he is unappreciated and wronged and slighted unless he gets everything
WILL OF GOD.
35
he wishes, and in the way he wishes, is certain to suffer mortification and bitterness of soul, because he cannot possibly get everything he wishes and in the way he wishes. How much each Dolly Varden suffers for her self-admiring vanities! Our wonder does not greatly stir us when we read that Beau Brummel was imprisoned for debt and thereafter died in an asylum of remorse, for "pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. " Ofttimes we smile over Mrs Poyser's cock, who fancied the sun rose every morning to hear him crow. But are we not all apt to think that the whole world of men and things was created more or less as a sort of pleasureable adjunct to our convenience, that we are the whole triumph, that our fellow-mortals were made to tickle our vani- ties and minister to our wants, that even the stars were set up there in their lofty silence to "make the sky look interesting for us at night " ? " Fill a person with love for himself, " says a witty Frenchman, "and what runs over will be your share. " Aye, truly has it been said that love is the driving power that moves humanity, and 'tis flattery that oils the wheels.
Surely a few thoughts should serve to prick the bubble of man's complacency. What have I that I have not received? Where did I get it? How long may I hope to keep it? Let us but know ourselves, and we will not only reverence ourselves but also humble ourselves. Self-knowledge is the parent of self-abasement. For we are but empty vessels until filled with divine gifts, and even the vessel is His free sovereign bounty. No honest reverent soul can look back over the story of his life-history without feeling that God has made him what he is. Whenever a
36 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
Christian gathers up his experience into one comprehensive truth, that truth has always been, "By the grace of God I am what I am." He is a poor pitiable creature and calling for our forbearance, who does not realize that the best things in him are not self- wrought, but God- wrought.
Often we hear of self-made men. It is a catchy phrase, but false. No self-made men are there. That man who studiously stands before the mirror and makes devotion, is neither an excellent nor an admirable figure. If you have any real worth, dear reader, it is but a small fraction that you owe yourself. The true architects have been the parents who gave you birth, the teachers who taught you, the atmos- phere that nurtured you, and the good kind Father above who endowed you so munificently with health and reason and blessings unnumbered. By the grace of God you have what you have. By the grace of God you are what you are.
When we have that full consciousness deep-rooted in our hearts of our entire un worthiness, of how much we receive, of how little we deserve, then are we seek- ing the prize of happiness in its native home.
III. HELPFULNESS.
Bounded on the east by helpfulness of life. " Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." (Gal. 6:2.)
Lord Byron says: "All who would win joy must share it; happiness was born a twin." This is the peculiar significance of the Christian spirit. Selfish- ness for the moment is lost sight of. There is a loving contrivance on the part of every one to provoke
WILL OF GOD. 37
somebody else into being glad. The word miser and the word miserable have the same root-meaning. The miser is a miserable man. Selfishness is swift poison to the soul's peace. If in the kingdom of happiness discontent hath slain its thousands, and pride its tens of thousands, surely selfishness can claim its hundreds of thousands.
The chemist tells us that the carbon and the dia- mond are chemically identical, the only difference being that the charcoal drinks in every particle of light that falls on it, and remains dead black, while the diamond reflects all, and becomes the most brilliant of jewels. So there are grasping lives that are wholly self-centered, but tlie beauty of the life of Jesus was its considerateness, its helpfulness, its reflecting glory.
" I want it said of me, " said Abraham Lincoln, "by those who know me best, that I have alv/ays plucked a thistle and planted a flower wherever a flower would grow." A friend told me recently that he was once conducting the funeral service of a member of his church, and the wife of the departed told him that in thirty years of married life she did not remember one morning ever having passed without family worship, and that in all these years she never heard a prayer but had this sentence in it,
"Lord, help us to make somebody happy to-day."
Strange that we are so slow in mastering this lesson of the soul's delight! When we call to mind that it is written so plainly on every page of our daily living, how is it that we so easily mistake the letters? " Glad- ness is found in giving"; our consciences answer "yes." "More blessed to give than to receive"; 'tis the Scriptural and eternal law. How doth it happen,
38 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
then, that we persist in wresting Scripture and experience to our own discomfort? If happiness is found in making other people happy on the 25th of December, would it not be wise, some one suggests, to try the scheme on the 4th of July ? If it holds true on Sunday, would it not be well to test the plan on Monday ?
A lady paused in front of the village doctor's house, and inquired of the child playing on the door step if his father was at home.
" No, " said the lad, " he's away. "
" Where do you think I could find him? "
"Well," returned the little fellow, innocently, "you've got to look for some place where people are sick or hurt, or something like that; papa's always helping somebody. "
"When the sim shines, it shines everywhere," was Ruben's motto, and as we look into the great world of action we find this truth radiating everywhere. Xerxes proposed a reward to the inventor of a new pleasure. Every morning such rewards are offered in the court of the soul-kingdom, and each humblest life may pluck the prize. No day but lends its many opportunities for doing good. For neither gold nor grandeur can make the heart glad; that is alone the fruitage of loving service.
"You forgot to mention where heaven is, " said the good lady to her pastor after a sermon on the better land.
"On yonder hilltop stands a cottage, madam," replied the man of God; " a widow lives there in want; she has no bread, no fuel, no medicine, and her child is at the point of death. If you will carry to her this
WILL OF GOD. 39
afternoon some little cup of cold water in the name of Him who went about doing good, you will find the answer to your inquiry. "
Many will recall the sweet old legend of St. Chris- topher, who lived in a cave hard by a swift-flowing river, and whose duty was to take upon his shoulders and bear across whoever wished to gain the opposite shore. Many a tired traveler he bore across the flood, manfully buffeting the billows.
One night, weary from the day's toil, he fell asleep. Without was cold and dark and stormy. The river's current raged fiercely. Above the roar of the torrent and the screech of the winds he heard a cry, so spring- ing from his couch he plunged into the wild night, and taking his pole waded across the swollen rapids. Reaching the other bank, he saw a child of wondrous beauty pleading to be carried to the thither side. Taking him on his shoulders, he started across. Just as they were stepping into the dangerous channel in the centre of the raging flood, the child's sweet voice said, " When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee"; and then only did the old hermit know that it was the child Jesus whom he carried, and his arm became strong and his heart became light and glad. Shall we not learn the lesson of St. Chris- topher? Every deed of loving service to earth's humblest orphan child is remembered as done to Him who said, " He shall in no wise lose his reward. " He looks upon it as a personal favor. He takes it as to Himself, for "Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these, My brethren, ye did it unto Me. "
IV. HOLINESS.
Bounded on the west by holiness of heart. " Happy
40 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
the man that findeth wisdom. " (Prov. 3 : 13). And the wise king explains what he means by wisdom in another chapter, when he says: " The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. "
There is no happiness worth having that we cannot pray over, that we cannot take to the Saviour, and upon which we cannot ask His blessing. True, lasting happiness is found at the foot of the Cross, nowhere else. There we can have our sins forgiven and our souls washed in the all-atoning blood. There we can find peace of conscience and assurance of final victory, and go on our way rejoicing. The footpath to happi- ness stretcheth otit in the same direction as the foot- path to holiness, and each persevering pilgrim finds that the journey is not long till the roads meet and blend and acquire a new name — the straight and narrow way, which is the footpath to heaven. For the happiness of each tired traveler consists in finding out the way in which God is going, and going that way. Godliness gives real happiness; nothing else does. "You cannot grow the lilies of the kingdom of God unless you import the bulbs from heaven. "
Oh, yoimg men of pride and promise, know that happiness is only found in living the Christian life! Sin gives pleasure, but the coin is counterfeit. The pleasures of sin are for a season only. No matter how cool and inviting seem the paths of unrighteous- ness, know that lions lie in ambush, and ravenous beasts prowl about, and serpents lurk on either side, and the road gets gradually closer and narrower and more contracted, and the end thereof is death! Go east or go west, go north or go south, nature is surely on the track of every sin, with headlong haste, to hurt
WILL OF GOD. 41
and torment and to destroy; "for at the last sin biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." " Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. " Happiness, thus, is a spiritual attainment, not to be found in things. 'Twere idle to turn to gold and silver for gladness of heart.
In the olden times there is a story of a great king who was journeying through the land, and heard a shepherd making music with his flute. So pleased was he that he invited him to his palace to charm away the fret and fever of life. He found him so wise and trustworthy that he lifted him to the highest seat in the cabinet of his advisers. But soon the tongue of envy began to whisper poisoned words in the king's ears, that the shepherd was secretly plotting for the throne. It was noted that he retired each day to his chamber for solitude and quiet. The king, anxious to discover what he was doing, one day burst open the door, and there sat the old shepherd clad in his ancient garb, with the old flute in hand, trying to call back the joys of his early pastoral life. Worldly comforts had increased, fame had come unasked, ser- vants and gold, hardly to be counted, had leaped to his slightest nod, but they had only brought with them care and heaviness of heart.
There is a little tract published by the American Tract Society, entitled "Uncle Johnson." Uncle Johnson was a Virginia negro, who lived to the age of 120. One day when at work singing in his garden, his pastor looked over the fence and said:
*' Uncle Eb, you seem very happy to-day. "
42 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
"Yes, Massa, Fse jes tinkin'. "
" What are you thinking about? "
" Oh, Fse jes tinkin', " said the old darkey, and the tears raced down the channels on his wrinkled face.
"Well, what can it be you are thinking about that makes you so happy, Uncle Eb? "
"Oh, I'se jes tinkin' dat if de crumbs of joy dat fall from de Massa's table in dis world is so good, what will de great loaf in glory be! "
Scatter flowers as you go, dear reader; you have not passed this way heretofore; you will never pass this way again.
CHAPTER III.
HARMONY OF THE WORK WITH THE WORKER.
"Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matt. 7:20. "Believe Me for the works' sake." John 14:11.
A noted scoffer was once interrupted in his noisy excitement by two questions :
1. What would be the effect upon this world if everybody was a consistent Christian?
2. What would be the effect upon this world if everybody was a consistent infidel?
The argument is a crushing one, for of a truth Christianity can stand such a test with a glory that would astonish even the most ardent enthusiasts. And it is the one test, let it be admitted with sorrow, that a reviling world is not willing to have it judged by. We insist on reading the Master's challenge: " By their creeds ye shall know them," and: " Believe Me for the doctrine's sake." Do men gather grapes of thorns? Not in the first century, said the Master. Or figs of thistles? Not in the twentieth. Thorns bruise. Thistles bleed. All the thorn trees in Los Angeles County never produced a cluster of muscats. Jesus is simply enforcing the fact that a good thing cannot be begotten of a bad thing. If one finds a large custer of Malagas, he knows it was not plucked from a Canadian thistle. And if it can be shown that our faith yields good fruit and nothing but good fruit, then it must be a good thing; it must be an evangel. It needs must be a message of glad tidings
(43)
44 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
of great joy, for otherwise, what some one has styled the "greatest good that ever energized humanity" has proceeded forth and come from an evil — which were a self-contradiction.
One cannot help being drawn to these words be- cause of their sweet reasonableness. There is a ring about them that is refreshing. It cannot easily be imagined why any fair truth-seeker should be unwill- ing to have any debated question judged by this test, for it doth seem to be a test workable in all of life's movements. No art, no law, no litany, no cult, no implement, that cannot afford to accept this standard and abide by it, because of its final and essential fairness. A time there never was in the history of the world when such religious restlessness bestirred men's thoughts as is seen to-day; never a time when thinking men were calling so loudly for religious cer- tainty; never a time when simple ex-cathedra teach- ing carried such little weight. " Defender of the Faith" Henry the 8th called himself. "Defender of the Truth" the church aspires to be. And the one claim were vain and idle as the other, for ours is a world where only falsehood needs defense. No pro- tection does truth need; no buttressing. Truth can stand alone. Truth rejoices as a strong man to run a race. Defending the truth were like unto some Launcelot defending his sword. The best defence that can be made of any truth is to give it a trial.
Recently a Brooklyn carpenter invented a bullet- stopping shield consisting of three plates of a chemical combination of cotton, wood and felt. His claims were ridiculed until he made of himself a target
WORK WITH THE WORKER. 45
This is Christianity's challenge to the world. "Try me," saith the Lord. "Come and see."
Take an illustration from astronomy. Up to the seventeenth century of our era the path of the planets was believed to be circular. There were many facts which the circular theory failed to solve, and these increased until astronomers were perplexed. Then, in 1609, Kepler announced his elliptical theory. Pos- sibly no discovery ever created such a stir. At first it was ridiculed, but in a practical manner it worked. Difficulties it cleared away. It yielded fruit, and now for three hundred years — well nigh — it has never been doubted.
The rule is a good one. The proper test of every- thing, and the only fair test, is the fruit test. It is the test of reason, law, government, tool, art, industry.
Here is Christianity. What can it do in a practical way ? What kind of a community can it form ? What kind of a government can it formulate? What type of a man can it remake? This is the vital question. It thunders from the heights above, and the world is bound to answer it.
I. THE REALM OF LEARNING.
Let us look at the influence of Jesus Christ in the realm of learning. Nothing were more unfair than to speak of Christianity as hostile to the most daring thought. It lives upon thought, thrives by it, creates it. If Jesus is immortal love. He is immortal wisdom, too, for "thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind."
The story is told that, passing the college buildings
46 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
at Cambridge one day, a cynic accosted a gentleman coming down the stone steps.
"And what do you manufacture here?" was the question.
"Power, sir," said the gentleman, who chanced to be one of the professors.
"Oh, indeed! What kind of power?"
"Come along with me, sir."
He took him into a room. The wall was covered with pictures.
"These are some of our boys," said the professor, sweeping his arm.
The cynic looked up. There was Edmund Spenser, John Dryden, John Milton, Thomas Gray, Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson. They passed into another room, and there were some more: Oliver Cromwell, William Pitt, Lord Palmer- ston, William Wilberforce, Lord Macaulay, William Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Abraham Cowley, George John Romanes.
" See that seat there? That was Sir Isaac Newton's seat; the one behind it, Jeremy Taylor's; the one be- hind it. Bishop Lightfoot's."
And yet it was Christ who made Cambridge a reality. It was Christ who laid the basal beams of Oxford and Edinburgh and Glasgow and Dublin and Aberdeen. It has been claimed that there are not six colleges in the United States to-day that were not established as Christian colleges.
" I think the time is coming," said Bishop Newman, "when there will be a bronze statue in all our college halls erected to the Son of Mary, because to Him the college owes its life."
WORK WITH THE WORKER: 47
To-day Jesus Christ commands the world's intellect. He has the ear of university, congress and court. There is no speech nor language where His voice is not heard. His teaching is text, not commentary. Shakspere borrowed much of his raw material from Jesus. Milton was suckled at the breast of Bethle- hem. The green pastures of the New Testament color Dante's blood. Tennyson's "In Memoriam" is an exposition of Christian hope. Wordsworth takes an " excursion " into the fields of nature, and soaks himself in the New Testament he carries along. Similarly Coleridge and Browning; their brightness is derived from the great Sun that prevented them. They are interpreters, not revealers; satellites, not suns. The more they absorb of Him, the more brilliant their creations, as pearls increase in value by exposure to the glare of day. For all light is sunlight ; all learning is Christian learning. There is no Alpine edelweiss, blooming on summit cold and lonely, that is not the child of the sun. There could not be an iceberg without the sun. There could not be a Voltaire without a Christ. Take from Voltaire everything built upon the Christian idea, and the greater part of his ninety-seven volumes in Dalibon's edition would be disembowelled. Some one says that the greatest star is the one at the little end of the telescope. If that be so, then the Son of Mary must be the child supreme of genius, for nearly all mind stars of the first magnitude has He brought into vision. This surely must be the puzzle-lock of history — how a simple carpenter could make of Himself the centre of all culture, "focusing on Himself the light of the world's learning."
48 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
How much does each Rembrandt owe to Jesus? Where were Murillo without his Madonna? If the gallery were dismantled of what Christ inspired, how bare the walls! If the library lost what He evoked, how scanty the shelves! How much would remain? Apart from ancient classics, would anything remain? In the early centuries, literature was a tiny thread trickling from Helicon, and visited by scholars few and favored. Today literature is a full river, many branched, flowing almost entirely from the slopes of Calvary.
Frederick Harrison tells us there are now two million volumes in the world's libraries, and that every ten years the press issues enough new volumes to make a pyramid equal to St. Paul's Cathedral. Mr. Gladstone, in his famous tilt with the great agnos- tic, asked him publicly, through the pages of the Fortnightly Review, if at least one million of these two million books was not directly traceable to the Christian concept, and Mr. Harrison never answered him. Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the whole matter, for unless this be vain talk, it doth seem incredible that any fair lover of truth can dispute the influence of Jesus Christ in the realm of intellect.
II. THE SPHERE OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT.
Perhaps no literary man living to-day wields a greater influence than Count Tolstoi. For thirty- five years of his life he was a nihilist, that is, a man who believed in nothing, a man whose mission was to destroy. Then ten years ago he tells us his life underwent a complete transformation, and in the preface to one of his books he pens these words:
WORK WITH THE WORKER. 49
"All I have done, all I am doing, and all I hope to do are owing to Jesus Christ."
Though born to luxury, with untold wealth at his command, and gifted with the finest literary genius, this lofty nobleman has put all aside and lives in the simplicity of a peasant, working by the side of his servants, that he may be true to the life and will of Jesus.
Take another illustration. Who in this past cen- tury towers head and shoulders above every other heart as the highest representative of Jesus Christ in the world's social betterment? Most fittingly has he been called "that other disciple whom Jesus loved." Like Tolstoi, he was born to privilege and distinction ; a money king by legacy; a member of the English parliament from boyhood. Surely we are not over- reaching in our claim that no man in the past century so closely fulfilled the will of Jesus. It were a sight for angels to witness to see this child of leisure and luxury, when parliament closed at midnight, turning his back on homie and wending his way to Whitechapel in search of life's unfortunates. He loved music and the library. He loved the company of scholars and statesmen, but woe-alleviating was his passion. Forty industrial schools he founded for the poor, and thirty-five asylums for the homeless. All of his enormous income he gave away.
The day he died he arose in the House of Lords, and began this speech:
"I am now Hke Paul the aged. I feel the years telling on me. I have tried to do the will of Christ ; but I hate to leave the world with so much misery behind me."
so HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
Then, overtaxed, he was compelled to sit down. That night he asked his daughter to read to him the twenty-third Psalm, and before she had finished he had passed down to the dock where the Pilot was awaiting him, and there on the other shore Lord Shaftesbury lives immortal forever.
My dear hearers, everything in this world that is pure and good, Jesus Christ is at the root of it; "for by their fruits ye shall know them." Do we purge and purify the prison? We do it because He com- mands. Do we liberate the slave and preach deliver- ance to the captive ? We do it because He commands. Do we build the hospital and heal the bruised-bodied and broken-hearted? We do it because He com- mands. Do our sons go forth from seats of learning, with the culture of the schools crowning them, and do they bury themselves in the center of the world's sorrows? They do it because He commands. "In- asmuch as ye do it to one of the least of these My brethern, ye do it unto Me."
A rose-bud will blossom into a rose more rapidly if it is cut and placed in water than if left on the bush, but the cut rose bears no seed. When its leaves fall, all is over. Thus is it with the philanthrophies and charities that have blossomed on the stem of Christian truth. Severed, they cannot perpetuate themselves.
III. THE INDIVIDUAL AND NATION.
But once more let us notice the fruit that Chris- tianity has borne in the life of the individual and the nation.
In my little church out West I had two elders. One was an old officer in the army. All his life he had
WORK WITH THE WORKER. 51
lived among the Indians, that is, the part of his life he was not in jail, for he had spent six years of it in the penitentiary. He was what you would call by nature a rough, shaggy, iron old man. Up to twenty- five years of age he was a desperado of the Jesse James type, rifling stores, robbing banks, blowing up safes and holding up trains. Rumor had it that he had killed more than one man in his day, but of that he was always silent.
Then he met the power of God and was converted, and of his conversion I have no more doubt than of the apostle Paul's. He married late in life, and God had blessed him with a boy. And how he loved that boy ! How he dreaded that some day he might follow in his father's footsteps ! To see that big great brawny soldier, with an arm of steel and hand like an anvil, to see him go home and play the baby, was something like the magwey tree of Mexico which shoots up its tall, homely, thorny trunk like a tele- graph pole, then crowns itself with a perfect wreath of flowers. There is in geology a stone called the geode, a coarse bit of rock to look at, but split it open, and lo! a marvel. There flash before you grottos and crystals and wreaths and plumes and exquisite beauty. He was a human geode. To hear that old man talk in prayer meeting! Ah, he had been through the fire.
"Just to think that God has saved a wretch like me," he would say.
Then to hear him pray! The penitence, the peace, the gratitude. The softness of childhood, the fresh- ness of spring, were in his soul. I heard him pray one hundred times possibly, and never a prayer but had this sentence:
52 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
"How shall I ever thank Thee, Lord, for rescuing a poor wretch like me!"
Dr. Dixon tells the story of a poor little African boy who was sold into slavery years ago. He was carried to the coast, and after a varied experience found himself at work in a store at Lagos. He was thence shipped to America with other, slaves. The vessel was captured by an English cruiser, and carried its human cargo to Sierra Leone, where they were set free.
The boy received an education in a mission school. He was baptized in 1825 at the age of eighteen, and returned as a student and became a teacher in the Fourah Bay College. He was consecrated the first bishop of the Niger in Canterbury Cathedral. The University at the same time made him a doctor of divinity. He died in Lagos, December, 1891, a re- spected, scholarly man of God.
In his diary he describes a meeting with his savage mother, after being made bishop. He accidentally met her in the market place one day after a separation of twenty-five years. He says:
"When she saw me, she trembled. We looked at each other in silence. Big tears ran down her savage face. She called me by my name, and kissed me."
Oh, the perpetual miracle of humanity! From a poor, ignorant savage heathen woman sprang the bishop of the Niger. That noble man of God spring- ing from such an environment! "Believe me for Bishop Yulang's sake. By their fruits ye shall know them."
Oh, it is a magnificent thing today to be a Christian. It is to belong to that great army that is enriching knowledge, abolishing slavery, ameliorating war, un-
WORK WITH THE WORKER. 53
shackling fetters, elevating man. A diamond in the dark is dark. It is not fair to the diamond to judge it in the dark. A diamond has a right to be judged in the light. A picture has a right to be judged in the best light. Let us give Christianity at least the benefit of daylight. Why will men sweep all the dust into the air and then say there is no dust ? Confucius has had China in his grip for 2,400 years, and there is China today. Behold her! Behold her! The works of Christ are still wrought. His miracles are still here. Believe me for Formosa's sake. Believe me for Uganda's sake. For unbelief is ice. Unbelief is frost. Unbelief is superstition. Unbelief lives in the fog, in the chill. Christianity is literature, poetry, science, art, music, jurisprudence, inventiveness, faith, hope, love, heaven, home, Christ.
CHAPTER IV.
HARMONY WITH ENVIRONMENT.
"Let the sighing of the prisoner come before thee." Psalm 79:11. " Turn ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope." Zechariah 9 :12.
Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field has an interesting chapter in one of his books on his visit to Tangiers. Tangiers is a little town on the northern coast of Africa, famous for its prison, which has been called the "African chamber of horrors. " It is quite a considerable building. The governor lives in one end, the pris- oners in the other. The prison building itself consists of two rooms, one for the city and one for the country. Here the poor creatures are huddled together like cattle, some afHicted with leprosy, some with insanity, every known incurable disease being represented; while the desperadoes are hand-cuffed and chained around the ankles to the walls. None are compelled to work. In our penitentiaries we make the inmates work, but there they starve them; for that is their punishment — starvation slow but certain.
Sabbath morning came, and Dr. Field went to the governor and asked permission to give the poor wretches something to eat. The governor consenting, he sent a man to the market to purchase a wagon-load of bread. The loaves were carried out and laid on the floor outside the iron grating; then going round they distributed one loaf to each through the iron bars.
What a spectacle it must have been! "They snatched their share like greedy wolves," says Dr.
(54)
ENVIRONMENT. 55
Field. One poor leper took a huge bite out of his; thrust the remainder under his rags, and pressed it to his bosom. More like unto dumb, driven cattle they seemed than human beings made in our heavenly Father's image. Not one of them spoke, not one thanked him, not one even smiled.
When I read that story as only Dr. Field can tell it, I felt my very flesh creep; and when he gave it a religious turn and spoke of the millions of spiritual prisoners in the world to-day, who are living without hope, and without God — starving for the Bread of heaven and the loaf of life and love, chained to the walls of superstition and darkness — I thought I never heard or read a stronger plea. I thought a stronger plea could not be made for the great enduring problem of the heathen and unbelieving world.
Life is filled with prisoners, prisoners of hope, some of them; prisoners of despair, some; prisoners of the body; prisoners of the soul. If liberty is harmony with one's environment, slavery is rebellion against such environment; and many are the souls in bond- age. Hegel declared that the great fact of history is the struggle for freedom. "When I am dead," said one of the greatest of modern poets, "lay a sword on my coffin, for I was a soldier in the war for the libera- tion of humanity. "
We are all locked up, more or less, within walls of limitation and restriction. Dr. Hillis speaks of the prisoners of physical misfortune, the prisoners of misrepresentation and abuse, and the prisoners of unfilled ambitions; and doubtless these are a great army.
56 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
PHYSICAL MISFORTUNE.
Here are Robert Hall, and Richard Baxter, and Douglass Jerrold. Witness Florence Nightingale shut up in a sick room the greater part of her life; truly that room became her prison, and she a caged eagle. Witness Edward Pay son, William Wilberforce, and Robert Murray McCheyne, nicknamed "the skele- ton," who put the trumpet of the gospel to his con- sumptive lips for eight brief years, and fell on death at twenty-nine. Here is Alexander H. Stevens, who knew not a well day for over fifty years, weighing only eighty-five pounds; first using a cane, then a crutch, then two crutches, then an invalid's chair, in which he was wheeled into the hall of congress, and the chamber of senate, and the governor's mansion. Verily, his body was a cage against whose fleshly bars the soul was ever fretting for flight and freedom.
At twenty, John Keats and Robert Louis Stevenson detected a line of bright scarlet in their phlegm, and each knew that the die had been cast. Each saw the temple of fame inviting them onward and upward, and ventured to set foot therein, but ill-health stood lion- like in the path and disputed every inch of the climb. One night, just as he was retiring, Keats coughed upon the pillow-slip, and said to his friend:
'* Brown, bring me the candle and let me see this. "
After regarding it steadfastly he fell back calmly, saying :
"I know the color; it is arterial; that is my death- warrant."
He survived twelve months, but it was a life in death. Surely no youth can read the story of how these knights of the new chivalry fought hemorrhage
ENVIRONMENT. 57
and pulmonary attack and poverty, and held dissolu- tion at bay, without a tear of sympathy stealing into the eye and a note of gratitude into the heart.
For ten years Stevenson expected to die at any moment. The year before his death he wrote these words :
" For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick, and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed and out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness ; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific ; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on — ill or well is a trifle ; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic-bottle. At least I have not failed, but I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air over my head. "
MISREPRESENTATION AND ABUSE.
Others there are who are prisoners of misrepresenta- tion and abuse. The story of Joseph, of Daniel, of Galileo, of John Locke, of William Lloyd Garrison, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, are ever- fresh illustrations of the ingratitude and injustice of the human heart, of great gifts rejected and cast aside, of imselfish service disowned.
Dante was banished from Florence as a dangerous citizen, but that same city, not many years later,
58 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
begged for his ashes and the honor of entombing his remains. ** Surely no great man ever ate his bread wet with tears of greater bitterness than did the author of the Divine Comedy. "
Savonarola is strangled and burned in the market- place to-day at the instance of the pope. To-morrow, Michael Angelo is instructed to paint his portrait for the walls of the Vatican, as one of the sainted doctors of the church.
Perhaps man's inhumanity to man was never more strikingly illustrated than in the story of Firdausi, the great epic poet of Persia. How sore that life must have been through jealousy and treachery! For thirty years he sang his country's praise in many a noble number, for the which he received in his white- haired old age, at the hands of his fellow-citizens, banishment and exile. And the crowning touch of pathos is at the close, when one hundred thousand pieces of gold were brought to him in reparation for the wrong that had been done. As the camels bearing the treasure entered one of the gates of the city, Firdausi's dead body was being reverently borne by a group of strangers to its last resting place through another.
Jeremiah was one of the greatest of Hebrew prophets. He predicted the downfall of the theocracy and advised voluntary submission as the only means of escaping complete destruction; for which he was cast into a dungeon. After being set free, he was forced by the people to accompany them to Egypt, although he had advised against the expedition, as displeasing to God, and in Egypt they stoned him to death. It is interesting to read how after death he
ENVIRONMENT. 59
was turned into a hero, how his words were studied and memorized by his fellow-countrymen in exile, and how he came to be regarded as the prophet who should reappear again.
For some strange reason a prophet hath no honor in his own country. It seems as if great hearts must be unappreciated while living, else have their great- ness first recognized in some foreign land. Nations seem to prefer postponing their gratitude to earth's wisest teachers, keenest seers, and sweetest singers, till the hero is beyond reach of sight or hearing, till the hand, alas! is vanished, and the voice is still. The history of all reform seems to be the old story of some leader vilified in life, deified in death. Verily, the prisoners of misrepresentation and abuse are a great number.
DISAPPOINTED HOPES.
A great multitude, too, are the prisoners of dis- appointed hopes.
That hymn of Mrs. Steele's was born out of pain. Such perfect lines could only come forth from the fiery furnace. The authoress met with an accident in childhood which made of her a life-long invalid. Engaged to be married to a gentleman whom she dearly loved, and awaiting his arrival on the eve of her bridal mom, a messenger came with the sad news that he had been drowned. Prostrated, she retired to her prison-chamber, and penned the lines:
" Father, whate'er of earthly bliss Thy sovereign will denies, Accepted at Thy throne of grace Let this petition rise:
6o HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
Give me a calm, a thankful heart
From every murmur free ; The blessings of Thy grace impart,
And let me live to Thee.
Let the sweet hope that Thou art mine
My path of life attend; Thy presence through my journey sliine,
And bless its happy end."
Some are hedged in by circumstances; others are grappling with their evil star; while many lose heart for want of breathing room. How pitiable to witness anything over-large for its place! Goethe says: "If you put an oak tree in a jardiniere, either the jardi- niere will break or the oak must die." In his dun- geon in London tower, Sir Walter Raleigh could pace but twice his length, and thousands there are to whom their environment says : ' ' You shall not live your best ; you have no room to swing your arms, no room to swing your heart. " Like ships are they aground and helpless for lack of water depth.
One of Maupassant's short stories is called "The Necklace. " It treats of a young wife who suffered keenly, feeling herself born for luxury and high life. The poverty of her home hurt her — the worn-out chairs, the faded curtains, the bare walls. When she sat down with her husband to their modest fare, she dreamed of silverware and tapestry, delicious dishes, the pink flesh of trout and wing of quail. She felt herself a caged prisoner. Alas, how many such there are in life — prisoners of unf^dfilled ambitions.
Here is an old college friend. Many a happy hour we spent together. We graduated together. His an intellect as keen and clear and bracing as a frosty,
ENVIRONMENT. 6i
moonlight sleigh-ride in a northern winter. His, too, a tall, stately figure with the face of an Apollo — lofty in thought, noble in spirit, spotless in character. Splendid are the visions of which he dreams, but the seeds of death are in his lungs, and he is poor. His truly is a soul in fetters — "looking before and after, and pining for what is not. "
And time would fail to tell of the prisoners of pros- perity, for they, too, are a great multitude. Strange that prosperity should tend so to incage the soul, but the facts are unmistakable. Prosperity is a test that few can stand. Some men cannot succeed because they lack capacity for leadership. As long as they are fighting in the ranks they do unselfish, heroic service; but placed in command they lose brain- steadiness, and grow dizzy. Benedict Arnold was for many years a patriot above reproach. No better soldier through those long Ontario marches than he. But when British gold glittered before his eyes, he lost his poise and fell. Verily, to climb high up the ladder of distinction without losing balance, that is the task for all that man hath of strength and fortitude.
Strange that prosperity can so easily belittle; strange that it can so readily enslave! Some things in this world are dangerous to possess, because of their tendency to possess us. " Many a man going up the hill of prosperity meets his soul coming down." A few there are who have sensed the danger and taken warning. Witness the late Samuel Appleton. He was becoming very wealthy. He had a ship at sea, uninsured. She was many days over-due, and he was growing anxious and worried. One night, ner- vous and sleepless, he arose, saying to his soul:
62 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
" Soul, this must not be. "
He took his pen, estimated the value of ship and cargo, wrote out a check for the amount to some benevolence — without knowing whether or not it would ever arrive. Thus did he assert his freedom.
Balzac has a story in three books, called the " Magic Skin. " It opens with a young Paris student, Raphael by name, entering a gambling nest of human vipers one afternoon, throwing down his last gold napoleon with a chink, and losing; then, dazed, walking out as in a vertigo, thinking only of the five-franc piece which the prefect of the Seine would pay to the boat- man as the price of his body. Passing the shop of an old, fleshless antiquary, who had seen the storms of 1 02 winters, he turned in and asked permission to look over the curios ; for he was questioning himself if darkness were not the better time to die, which were in truth an effort to gain courage. There were porce- lain plates, ivory dishes, mummies, jewel cases, ara- besques, miniatures, carved shrines, panoplies, vases of Egyptian porphyry, a vast bazaar of ancient relics, and an ass' skin, very much like that of a fox, on which was written in Arabic :
"Dost thou desire me? Take me. God will grant thee thy wishes. But at every wish of thine I shrink, And with me thy days."
"Take it," said the old man; "you are welcome; only once taken you can never get rid of it. Every wish it will gain for thee, but with the fulfillment of every desire it will shrink, and with it thy days. Any desire thou mayest have, but at the cost of thy life. "
The young man signed the compact, seized the
ENVIRONMENT. 63
leather, rolled it into the pocket of his coat and rushed out.
His first thought was to plunge into some wild orgy. So to the banqueting hall he turned, where the wealth and culture of Paris made midnight tumultuous. The tables were white as snow new-fallen; the cut glass shed prismatic colors in its starry reflection ; the viands served upon golden dishes sharpened curiosity and appetite; claret, burgundy and madeira flowed in regal profusion. By the time the last course was served, all the guests were wallowing in the delights of that limbo "where the lamps of the mind go out, where the fires of the body are kindled, where the passions are delivered over unto the delicious joys of liberty." The ladies, beautiful and bejeweled, stag- gered from the table. Passionate eyes glared like the beads of a reptile.
And now the guests were gathered in the parlors. Groups were formed. Revelry rose like the pande- monium of Milton. The air grew hotter and hotter with wine and wassail, till soon each victim fell over in sickening self-helplessness. Gradually the candela- bras burned low, flickered and went out. Night now wrapt its black crape around the hideous spectacle. Silence reigned — an awful silence. At noon next day the guests began to stir, stiff in limb, sore in body. The women, whose elegantly arranged tresses were dishevelled, and whose dresses were disordered by the tossings of a cramped sleep, presented a picture repulsive to the freshness of dawn. Sobered eyes were dulled by lassitude. Each haggard face read the confusion. Like flowers crushed in the street they seemed, after the passing of the tournament. "It
64 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
was the awakening of Vice, when excess with strong hand has squeezed the wine from the grape of Hfe and left only the peeling and the refuse. "
Raphael leaped up, as if startled by some bullet- wound. He felt for the magic skin, and a cold chill crept over his flesh when he saw that it had shrivelled.
The next book is called "The Woman Without a Heart." Her name is Fedora, and she represents modern society. A young woman of twenty-two, beautiful, fabulously rich, with all Paris at her feet.
Raphael falls in love with Fedora. To win her was life's one ambition. Her heart was the last ticket in his fortune's lottery. Then follow the ins and outs of this strange love episode — a passage, no doubt, from Balzac's own autobiography. A young man was he of marked intellectual gifts, but born to bit- terest poverty, living in a garret, and yet seeking to win the heart of a woman that lived for glitter and dazzle and bubble and affectation and parade and pomp and show — a woman without a heart.
Fedora inoculated Raphael with the leprosy of her vanity. Deeper and deeper into debt he fell; deeper and deeper into despair.
"To the devil with death," he exclaimed, one day, brandishing the magic skin, "I choose to live, to be rich, to win Fedora. Never will she be won till I am rich. I wish for 200,000 francs a year, must have it, 200,000 a year! Then shall I break her heart. "
One night at a feast a notary entered.
" Is there one Raphael de Valentine here? " he asked.
" Your pleasure, Monsieur? "
" I bring you six million francs, sir from the death of yourimcle. "
ENVIRONMENT. 65
A storm of cheers from his boon revelers made the dishes rattle. Raphael took out the magic skin, spread it open upon the table. A dreadful pallor defined every muscle in his haggard face. He took a pair of compasses and measured it. He felt the steel of a knife cutting through his flesh when he saw that the leather was smaller. Three times he looked at the talisman. Three times he flushed and paled. Was it not the image of his being? He could gratify any sensual enjoyment, but at the cost of his life.
In the last book Raphael endeavors to destroy the fatal leather. He who started out with suicide as a goal now desires life with an intense and awful long- ing. He turns to life's wise teachers, but they could not fathom it. The mechanic strove to annihilate it by violence, the chemist by reagents. Into a white- hot furnace they thrust it, but it came out unsinged. They subjected it to the full force of a voltaic battery, but without avail. He knew, for had not the old antiquary told him that whoso signed the compact was thereby committed to the end, and could no more repent and return than could a man repent and return who should throw himself from the pinnacle of some Eiffel tower.
One day he hurled it into the bottom of the well, and plunged that night into some wild orgy. Next morning the gardener brought it in, to show it to his master.
" In drawing a bucket of water, monsieur, I brought up this strange marine plant, and although it lives in the water it is as dry as a fungus."
So saying, the man handed Raphael the inexorable skin, now reduced to six square inches.
66 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
"Great God," he cried, measuring it, "I have but two months to live. All the delights of life are danc- ing like beautiful women around my dying bed. If I call to them I die, for every wish is suicidal."
And now Raphael realizes the inevitable, and des- pairingly returns homeward to face death. He retires from the world, closets himself in seclusion, and strives to live a vegetable life — to strip his soul of every wish and all the glories of desire. But a long career of self-indulgence has weakened his will-power, and the gratification of his lower passions masters him. Ex- cess has enervated and unnerved him. He is a pris- oner to his passions. There hangs the magic talisman upon the wall, fastened to a white cloth on which its dreadful outline was accurately marked.
Four physicians now attended him. and soothed his wasted body with opiates. That dry, sepulchral cough bespoke strange murmurings of disease. He saw it shrink gradually to the dimensions of a vinca leaf; and as the strangling death rattle proclaimed the end, the last morsel of the skin melted into nothing- ness, and was gone.
Beloved, we have given a brief of this awful allegory in much of the novelist's own words. Do you recog- nize the types? The magic skin is the undisciplined desire for worldly success, indulgence in which shortens life by exhausting the nervous energy. Have you not seen men devoting themselves to the posses- sion of some prize, and finding, when the prize was won, that they were no longer capable of deriving pleasure from it ? Have you not seen men grow rich and at the same time losing the power to enjoy their riches? Do you remember, in Greek mythology, the
ENVIRONMENT. 67
story of Tantalus, from which our word "tantalize" is derived? Do you recall the punishment the gods meted out to him in the lower world? He stood up to his neck in water, which fled from him when he tried to drink it, and over his head hung fruits rich and rare, which the wind wafted when he tried to grasp them. Are we not having that scene enacted before our eyes every day? There are men who can adorn the walls of their homes with any number of beautiful pictures, but who cannot appreciate them; men whose library is filled with the choicest books, but do not care to open one, unless it is a cash book. Have you not seen such men?
Some years ago George William Curtis published a volume called " Prue and I." There is a chapter in it entitled Mr. Tidbottom's spectacles. The magical quality of these glasses was that when their owner looked at any one through them he saw the real man. He looked at one man and saw a ledger, at another and saw a champagne bottle.
There is an old proverb which says: "It is not worth while to kill yourself to keep yourself." How many are doing just that ! How many are losing the higher life in grasping the endeavor to gain the lower life! King James, learning of the poverty of Ben Jonson, sent him five shillings. Jonson said to the messenger:
"The king sends me five shillings because I live in an alley; tell him his soul lives in an alley."
We do not admire the ingratitude of Jonson or his unkind reply, but the lesson is plain : it is possible for the life to enlarge and at the same time for the real man to shrink ; it is possible to augment a fortune and
68 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
to diminish a man. Prosperity should be a life pre- server; alas, full oft it is a life destroyer!
PRISONERS OF JESUS CHRIST.
But if the prisoners of adversity are ever with us, and the prisoners of prosperity are a large and increas- ing number, let us hasten, in conclusion, to take note of that considerable and growing circle who are the slaves of the higher life. These are that choice company of select children who pride themselves in being called the prisoners of Jesus Christ.
Such was the great apostle to the Gentiles. His favorite introduction of himself is: "I, the prisoner of Jesus Christ " ; his favorite title, " doulos." He was a slave, and he gloried in it. " For from henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus."
I have a friend with whom I spent many happy years in college, and at the time of his graduation he offered himself for missionary work in Africa. His was a tall, handsome, personable physique, turning the scale at 230 pounds. He would enter the football field as captain of our college eleven, and not a man but looked up to him as far and away, in every line, the first athlete on the gridiron. For three years he was pitcher on the 'varsity nine. He would enter the examination hall, and when the marks were announced he was at the top of his class, not in one subject alone, but in all. At the time of his graduation, he received the gold medal, and the honor of being the only man in the history of the institution that ever came out first in every depart- ment of study. But he "sacrificed" a brilliant intel-
ENVIRONMANT. 69
lect and a great muscle for Christ. He went to Africa.
Pray, dear reader, what sent him thither.? Was it gold? Indeed to some of us who knew him best it seemed as if all the wealth of Pierpont Morgan would not avail to keep him home, so determined was he. Was fame the enticement? Never will he be known. What power, then, could it have been that drew him from a lovely home and a lovely mother and two lovely sisters to a place so uninviting? Ah, it was the power of the cross, the slavery of Jesus — the same slavery that sent Livingstone to Africa, and Duff to India, and MacKay to Formosa, and Patteson to Melanesia.
" Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small; Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all."
To all of life's captive children come the glad news that the truth can make us free. " Is not this the fast that I have chosen," saith the Lord, "to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free?" Christ is the fountain of all freedom. He is a door to those in custody; wings is He to the cast-down in soul, hope to the disquieted. He is health to the broken-hearted, deliverance to the captives, liberty to the bruised. He unshackles fetters. He emancipates serfs. Come into His service, dear reader. Come voluntarily, cheerfully, gladly. Disobedience and resistance are bondage. The willing slavery of the best is liberty. "In tune with the infinite" is liberty. "Life," says Dr. Vandyke, "is self-change to meet environment."
70 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
Is thine a weak body? Consecrate it to Him, and thy very weakness will be made strength. Art thou hampered by circumstance, and cast down by adversity and ingratitude? Know that to those who love God, who are the called according to His purpose, all things work together for good. Is prosperity at thy disposal? Watch and pray, lest it enthrall thee. Surrender thine all to Him, a living sacrifice — body, soul, spirit, time, talent, wealth, business cares, influ- ence, duty, labor, home, wife, child. Be transformed by the renewing of thy mind. Thus wilt thou find that perfect slavery which is perfect freedom, as thou dost prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.
CHAPTER V.
HARMONY THROUGH EXPERIENCE. "Come and see." John 1:46.
These words are wholesome. They are frank, open and above board. The Gospel courts inspection. Take your sledge and sound every stone in the build- ing. No room in the temple is locked. Knock, and it shall be opened. Free is the holy of holies to all. Personal experience is the vital note.
The Christian religion has everything to gain from thorough probing. It has no favors to ask; all its favors are gifts. It submits itself to the test of science. It asks men to think and prove. It places us on the hills ; yonder is the north and the south, the east and the west. It wishes nothing secreted. It is for the daylight and the uplands. Let there be no political wire-pulling, or slating or doctoring in the dark. Let nothing be done in a corner. Let the examination be merciless and thorough. Let the whole truth be told. Search, sift, satisfy, question, cross-question. Neglect not hammer and scalpel and retort and reagent and electric coil and vernier. If the investigation be open, and accurate, and honest, and healthy, and keen, there is no doubt of the verdict.
Never was there such heart-hunger for truth as to-day; never did the world ask such questions, and so many; never was age so interrogative, never such a cry for evidence. Is it a healthy sign? Surely. Inquiry must not be crushed, but courted rather.
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"If my faith is false, " said Bishop Berkeley, " I want to know it; I want to know it now." The hope immortal must not rest on what is perishable. The Bible is a book that welcomes the strongest light that lens can focus. There is nothing close or stifling in the temple of revealed truth — no bad ventilation. Its windows are open. The air is pure. Walking through it one feels as if he were inhaling a breeze from the mountain, a whiff from the ocean.
Jesus trusts His message to a world of thinking men. Here it is in the open. There is no cloud, no concealment. It has no mysterious esoteric pass- word. It learns every language, sets its foot on every silver shore; "its wings were made to flap in the firmament." Such faith has our Lord in the inde- structibility of what He came to teach, that He charged His followers to proclaim it from the house- top.
With this thought uppermost, let us hasten to the text before us. '' Philip saith unto Nathaniel, Come and see"; and for memory-support let us move along two lines :
I. Come and see.
II. Come and see Jesus.
I. COME AND SEE.
Nathaniel could not believe that the Messiah had come from Nazareth; but a little out-of-the-way hamlet up in the highlands was Nazareth.
" Very well, " Philip says, " come with me. Do not make up your mind until you see. Do not criticise first, and then come. Come first, and then criticise. "
Surely that is fair ; verily that would be accepted by
EXPERIENCE. 73
any American jury. Christianity is the most reason- able proposal that was ever presented to a thinking world. Never does it drive, but draw; never does it compel assent, but rather coax inquiry; it can be tested. For certainty can be had on religious matters as on scientific matters. Not all experimenting is monopolized by the chemist. The soul, too, can handle his tools with advantage. "O taste and see that the Lord is good. " Nothing is more convincing than the sense of taste. If a babe has once tasted honey, all the nurses in town cannot persuade its little tongue that it is not sweet. If you take a piece of gold to the jeweller he applies the test of acid; should the acid leave a stain, the claim of pure gold is falsified.
Some years ago there was a discussion in the press as to the benefits of vaccination; it is not a question for argument, but for statistics. A few years ago a Frenchman, Mesmer by name, discovered what he called mesmerism. It was scoffed at by the wise as deception; but a committee of investigation was appointed, and they reported favorably. Thus, and in many ways, it may be seen that a large percentage of questions in this world is experimental.
One may be a greater chemist than Faraday and a greater reasoner than William Pitt, but he cannot tell by mere reasoning whether a precipitate will be formed by adding ammonia to mercuric chloride ; it is a question, not of reasoning but of seeing. Dr. Lardner, an eminent mathematician in the university of Oxford, wrote an article for Blackwood's Magazine, proving that no steamship could ever cross the Atlantic; but the steamer "Sirius, " only a few months later brought that article to America. He
74 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
also staked his repute as a man of science before the House of Commons that no railway train could ever go faster than ten miles an hour. Again it was a ques- tion, not of reasoning but of seeing. We have not yet forgotten that eminent engineer who once declared that no bridge could ever be built across the Missis- sippi; and we remember, too, that Babinet, the French calculator, asserted that the idea of trans- mitting a telegram from Queenstown to New York was childish. Is it not recorded in the life of Comte, that the great philosopher advised his followers to cease attempting to find out anything about the filled stars, because such knowledge was forever beyond the reach of man? And does not the same historian tell us that before he had been dead ten years the spectro- scope was discovered ? And now our knowledge of the fixed stars is respectably considerable. The dark valleys and mountain peaks on Mars cannot be rea- soned out; they must be seen. The monks of four hundred years ago might have beheld Jupiter's moons, had they only been willing to condescend and look through Galileo's telescope. Ours is a universe where stars crowd into the sky-ceiling in proportion as the eye is assisted and made far-sighted.
There is what is called the "cushion of the sea.'' Down beneath the agitated surface there is a part that is never stirred, peaceful as a vault. Formerly it was believed there was no life down there. Learnedly and conclusively did each, Thompson and Tyndall, prove that the tremendous pressure and absence of light made life at certain depths impossible. In the year 1880 the ship "Challenger" dropped Brooke's sound- ing weight five miles deep in the Indian Ocean. The
EXPERIENCE. 75
valve of the weight was opened and closed, and some of the dredgings brought to the surface. When Prof. Bailey examined it, little marine insects were uncovered. Diatoms he named them, and assigned them to the vegetable world. Once more it was a question, not of reasoning, but of seeing.
It is personal experience and sensuous perception that carries with it the logic unanswerable. What cared the man born blind that the Pharisees rejected Jesus? He knew He had made him to see. What cared Galileo for deductions against the motions of the earth when he pointed his newly constructed glass to those million jewels that blaze on the brow of night? What cared Fulton for the laughs and jeers of his cynical countrymen when he proposed to take a party up the Hudson on the " Clermont " ? " The thing will burst," says one; "it'll burn up," another cries; "they'll all be drowned," exclaimed a third; "put Fulton and his folly in the asylum," shouted the multitudes that lined the banks. The great inventor simply smiled and said: "Wait and see." Then the paddle wheels began to turn.
THE BEST PROOF.
Suppose you deny the saving power of Christ's blood to a man who is a living witness of that power; what then? Is not the best proof that which needs no proof? Self-evidence cannot be proved; it is its own proof. When Mozart walked out into the fresh- ness of the morning air and listened to the lark, he did not feel like dissecting it to find the music.
"Sing on, sweet messenger," the great composer said; "sing on, sing on.".
76 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
When Rosetti once plucked a rose he did not shake its petals in the dust to find the beauty.
" Let the little diamond blow and blush," the poet- painter thought; *'by this I know the rose is beautiful, and that there is better beauty in the heart of God."
I do not wish to analyze my mother's love; I would rather feel it. It were difficult to prove in syllogism convincing that a parent loves its child, but what no syllogism can state the heart knows. I do not under- stand the exact relationship of Christ to the everlast- ing Father; I have not mastered the metaphysical analysis of His matchless character; I would much rather just see Christ ; and as Lord Byron had himself shut up all night in a dungeon in Venice that he might have a truer appreciation of the life of the prisoners and the joy of his own life of freedom, so I would shut myself up in the quiet of my own closet and on bended knee come face to face with my personal Saviour, that I might have a truer conception of the slavery and hideousness and enormity of my sins, and the glorious liberty of the life to which He calls me.
But ever mindful let us be that the tests of truth are multiform and various. Corn calls for a Fair- banks, timber for a foot rule. We approach harmony with the eye, and melody with the ear, beauty with the taste, and duty with the conscience. The star requires a telescope; the bacillus a microscope; but the "heart is the window through which we see heavenly things." No Gladstone would take a tape measure to see how far aloft Homer's thought ran, nor a steel-yard to weigh the heavy syllogisms of Bishop Butler. You cannot sweep up sunshine with a broom, nor raise doubts with a derrick. A great
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cartoonist makes us smile by sketching some hod- carrier as he examines a Turner masterpiece with his penknife. It is as absurd to go to physical science for the proof of Scripture as to consult solid geometry for information on Bright's disease. Natural things are naturally discerned; supernatural things, super- naturally.
Just here let us pause to add, in passing, that patient lovers of truth have been imposed on by the unreasonableness of men who imagine that scientific eminence entitles them to weigh Christianity; and because they are experts with the electric coil and scalpel, that they are, therefore, necessarily experts in everything else. When John Locke's famous blind man was once asked what scarlet was like, he an- swered, "Like the sound of a trumpet"; when asked what blue was like he answered, "Like the tones of a flute." Not much more considerable was Sir Robert Peel's estimate of Tennyson's poetry when he offered the laureate a pension, confessing at the time that he had never read a line of his writings.
Within his own province we admit the right of every man to speak with note commanding. Here, for in- stance, is some Audubon who has devoted all his life to the study of birds. On that subject let us hasten to kneel to his authority ; let us accept with becoming modesty the deep results of his research. But herein lies the danger of specialism. Our expert ornithol- ogist becomes ambitious to dogmatize in some field where he is not an authority, not even a fair judge. Think of some Beecher writing a treatise on juris- prudence, crossing swords with Blackstone! Think of Mr. Darwin writing a commentary on Shakspere!
78 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
Does not the story go on to tell us that one evening, picking up Hamlet, the great naturalist found it so dull as to drop into slumber? Think of Sir Isaac Newton writing an introduction to "Paradise Lost"! Once upon a time did he not read it and ask contempt- uously at the close: "What does it all prove?" A beautiful concept meant nothing to Sir Isaac, unless it proved something; surely he forgot that his mother's love was beyond the carnal grip of proof. Think of Mr. Huxley publishing a volume of lay sermons on the Gospel of John! Now, Mr, Huxley was a prince among scientists, and Mr. Beecher was a king among preachers; but the legal brotherhood respectfully de- cline to take Mr. Beecher as their authority on juris- prudence, and surely the church cannot be accused of any extreme narrowness if she declines Mr. Huxley as her prophet on religion.
II. COME AND SEE JESUS.
But the third little monosyllable of our text is a transitive verb. Philip's invitation to Nathaniel was to come and see Jesus. This must be our "gospel for an age of doubt."
Today honest inquiry does not reject Christ; what it does reject is misconception and caricature. It rejects creed, but Christ's magnificence can be crushed into no creed, it matters not how pliant and plastic. A man climbing the flanks of Pike's peak cannot form a final estimate of the survey; he is getting higher every moment; the horizon is retreating, the vision widening. There are traditional interpretations of the Nazarene's teachings, just as there are traditional photographs of His profile; but the world owns no
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portraiture of the man, and the distortions of the one are sometimes as pronounced as those of the other. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so high is character above creed and deed above doctrine. Mis- sionaries tell us that there are Mohammedans, who when they see a man intoxicated, exclaim: "He has left Mohammed and gone over to Jesus." Such scan- dal have we brought upon the sacred Name! Paul says that if the men around the cross had only known the true Christ, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. If a doubting world would but come and see the real Saviour as He is, they would no longer antagonize and reject Him.
In the ancient myth, Orion, while sleeping on the seashore, had his eyes put out; he recovered sight by looking to the rising sun. If the inner eye be dark- ened, let us turn our blinded hearts to the Sun of Righteousness. Jesus is the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Thus will our spiritual vision be recovered and made clear. For no person was ever so open and accessible as Jesus.
Religion has nothing to fear from criticism. Ours is an evangel, let us repeat once more, that thrives best where the sunlight is strongest. It is for the rostrum and the market-place. It brooks no monop- oly. It is the friend of the daylight. It works best in the fresh air and on the naked hills. It lives for the commonwealth.
There is a famous passage in the opening bars of Mendelssohn's "Elijah," in which the musician tries to represent the despair of a nation perishing from thirst. There are sullen, restless murmurings; there are cries of heart-rending agony. The world has tried
8o HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
to slake its thirst at the dry wells of agnosticism, and positivism, and a Christless Christianity; but to-day the wail comes back, "Give us back the Christ we have lost." The cry of the world to-day is, ''Sirs, we would see Jesus"; not through a glass darkly, not distorted by human prejudice or clouded by faulty conception, but Jesus as He is, the real Jesus.
It is not Calvinism the world wants, nor Armenian- ism; not the thirty nine-articles; nor is it creed and confessional. Nothing but the living Christ Himself will satisfy. There is a hungering and a yearning at the world's heart for the living Bread which came down from Heaven. Men have grown tired of a lifeless verbiage. A Christianity without Christ is a husk. What the world wants, what the world must have, is the personal Jesus — Son of Man, Son of Mary, Son of God. Personal experience of the Lord Jesus Christ is the only harmonizer of the world's noisy discordant, doubting voices.
If a student refuse to believe that a circle is round, then it were folly for him to enter on the study of the higher geometry. A physician cannot persuade his patient that the medicine is not distasteful if he shuts his mouth and clenches his teeth. "Come," the Scriptures say, and they say it six hundred and forty-two times. "Come, come, come!"
Come and see this meek and lowly Man for thyself. Some things are plain till you commence to explain; the noon-day star is lost in the brightness. Some things are lustrous till you begin to illustrate. The good Christian lady said that the commentary on "Pilgrim's Progress," which her pastor had sent to her, was not as clear as the text. No sermon about
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Jesus was ever so simple and understandable as Jesus. He hides Himself to irreverent approach, but there is a beautiful simplicity about Him to the child-spirit. The way-faring man, though a fool, need not go astray. "Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good." No doctrine do we propound; simply an acquaintance with the real Jesus. Will you not give me the honor, dear hearer, to introduce you to the King? Come and see for yourself. Be satisfied with no creed, no confessional. Let no priest or pastor come 'twixt you and your Lord. Christ is Christianity; come and see Christ.
A dreadful battle that was between Caesar and Pompey, when 80,000 brave soldiers lost their lives. Caesar tells us that he did not want to fight, but Pompey pressed him. After the battle he stood upon the field and exclaimed :
*' Alas, he would have it so! "
Dear sinner, if you are lost, it is because you will have it so. Jesus invites you. He wants you. He pleads with you. He yearns for you. He died for you, and rose again. "Come and try me," He says. "Give Me a chance. See whether or not I will deceive you. If after a fair trial you find Me false, you can return to your old companionships. "
Could any proposition be simpler, fairer ? You will lose nothing. You may gain everything.
There are two lives possible for us. There is the life of trust and the life of insurrection. The life of trust is the life of surrender, which is the life of obedi- ence, which is the life of harmony, which is the life of happiness, which is the life of peace. The life of insurrection is the life of self-will, which is the life of
82 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
rebellion, which is the life of estrangement, which is the life of discord, which is the life of unrest.
Dearly beloved, are you in trouble? Won't you come and see Jesus? Are you in temptation? Why not come to Jesus? Are you in doubt? Are you groping for the light ? Are you concerned about your sins? Are you interested in pardon and peace of conscience? Are you honestly anxious to find the way? Do you feel the skepticism of the age eating into the groundwork of your early faith? Let me plead with you to come and make the acquaintance of this man Jesus. I believe He will show you the light. He will make things plain. He will make the way clear. He will remove doubts. He will make your confidence steadfast. He will give you assurance. He will make you strong, and clean, and happy, and brave. If I did not believe that with all my heart and soul and strength and mind, I'd never preach again.
" 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 traveling days are done."
CHAPTER VI.
HARMONY WITH THE CHRIST-LIFE.
" That in all things He might have the pre-emmence." Col. 1 :18.
The heroes of history are in danger of being lost. After death a great man is ofttimes idealized. The popular fancy plays around him with a glamor. Stories pass current that have no factual ground. Memory weaves myth. The pathway of the past loses its roughness, for "'tis always twilight in the land of Memory. "
Memory is the mother of mythology. Plato for long was thought to have been bom of a virgin. Alexander was believed to have been the son of a god. All the Caesars were deified as soon as they were dead. The early Greeks placed the Golden Age in the begin- ning. Then Saturn lived in person on the earth. He was the father of gods and men. There was no pain, no sorrow, no disease. Sin was as yet unborn. This was succeeded by the age of Bronze, when the gods left the earth, and life and government declined. Then followed the age of Brass, and finally the age of Iron. And so the closer we approach the living picture of the present, the coarser its coloring. It seems a smear, a smudge, a melancholy daub. Verily, indeed, a prophet hath no honor in his own country, for '' distance lends enchantment. "
Attention has been drawn to our own George Washington, who, alas! has been buried in aprocrypha and haze. The real Washington has given way to the
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ideal. One genealogist has traced his ancestry back to Odin. The Washington that had his weaknesses is gone, and we have instead canonized a Washington — Washington the saint, Washington the savior.
What has history done with Jesus? Let us hasten to confess the strange anomaly that history has both loved and hated Him. Criticism has attempted to destroy Him. Scholars have labored to resolve Him into Greek myth and Hebrew legend, but unavailingly. At one time His humanity, at another His divinity has been obscured. Socinus gave way to Strauss ; Strauss to Renan. Stesichorus says that Helena, the heroine of Grecian story, was never carried to Troy at all, and that the Greeks and Trojans fought for a figure of the far-famed beauty; so, it is claimed, did the evangelist historians. "They wove the wondrous texture from the tangled threads of fond remembrance ; the Sun of Righteousness is a torch of human kindling. " But the final verdict, and calm, is that He is historical. His story is not a cunningly concocted tale. He is not fabric, but fact. His personality remains imperish- able. He is substantial and abiding. Men could not have created Him if they would. That were unthink- able. The creator is more than the creature. Did Matthew create Jesus ? Then, truly has it been noted, Matthew is greater than Jesus, and Matthew was a tax-collector and a Jew. You cannot evolve a Christ from a Matthew. . "It takes a Newton to forge a Newton," said Theodore Parker. A real historical Christ appeared. No other alternative fulfills the facts. This is what Vandyke calls the "Gospel of a Person. "
Of late years there has been a searching study of
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the real Christ. The Christ of the gospels is better known. The literature of His age has been examined with such method and minuteness that we have a truer setting. Heretofore we have known the Christ of theological systems, the Christ of Chalcedon and Constance and Trent and Westminster. To-day we are studying as never before the Christ of Nazareth and Jerusalem. And what is the reuslt? By consent unanimous the world thrones Him to-day supreme in the realm of Mentality, Morality, Ministry.
JESUS CHRIST AN INTELLECTUAL FORCE.
I. — Mentality. Jesus Christ is to-day an intellec- tual force in the world. There is no school or court or forum where His influence is not felt. There is no speech or language where His voice is not heard. His sound has gone out through all the earth, and His words to the end of the world; they are ever ger- minating, ever fruiting.
The test of greatness is its creativeness, and the forces it sets astir. The Jews were an inartistic race fenced around by the artist nations of earth — Assyria,' Babylonia, Egypt and Greece. The apostles, who never referred to the subject at all, have yet been made the subject of more painting and statuary and architectural memorial than the pagan gods of Greece and Rome. St. Paul, who stood on Mar's Hill seemingly oblivious to the friezes of Phidias, has yet figured in the great cartoons of Raphael and the oratorios of the masters. This is the commanding and perpetual surprise of history, how twelve illiterate fishermen have become the centre of all culture. Jesus said: "I am the hght of the world," and cer-
86 HEAVENLY HARMONIES;
tainly He has "focused on Himself the light of the world's learning." Haydn and Handel in music; Raphael and Reynolds in painting; Angelo and Canova in sculpture ; Grotius and Gladstone in states- manship ; Blackstone and Burke in law. His teaching has lent melody to Mozart's music, grace to Dona- tello's marble, loveliness to Fiessole's faces. How much does each Rembrandt owe to Jesus ! It was the Madonna that made Murillo.
No one can see the whole Christ at once, just as no one can see the whole mountain at once. He is the gigantic figure of history. To take in His full propor- tions, one must fall back. Some things are best seen a little way off, as stars become visible when you look a little away from them. Clamber up the flanks of Mount Blanc and you are disappointed; but come down into the vale of Chamounix and see the mighty monarch tower!
His speech is not big in bulk. St. Augustine asks for thirty volumes to systematize his theology; John Calvin is even more ambitious, calling for forty folios. But Jesus Christ can be read in half an hour. He never tried to preserve it Himself, and He never asked another to preserve it. But there is no speech like it. It is so simple in phrase that a child need stumble not ; it stands alone. Goldsmith says of Dr. Johnson, "You make your little fishes talk like whales." There is a foolish fondness in many literatteurs for swollen language ; yet He spoke of heavenly things in homely garb and humble fashion. Nothing could be simpler or freer from sign of effort than the mountain- talk. Without firstlies, secondlies, or thirdlies, it is so informal as to baffle analysis. It does not suggest
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Aristotle's Organons or Calvin's dialectics. " It is the art that conceals art." It is not a mosaic; it is a living unit. There are few quotations from learned names. There is no long list of citations from any Hillel or Shammai. He is not an expositor; He is a revealer. His teaching is not commentary ; it is text. It is not apologetic ; it is dogmatic. It does not have to be changed to suit each changing age. It fits every century — the nineteenth as well as the first, the first as well as the nineteenth. It carries the same attrac- tion to the west as to the east, to the east as to the west. Gibbon sneered at the idea of our Lord's sayings being original. He said he had read some of them in a work written four hundred years before the Nazarene ever saw the light of Palestine. But what of that? The rising orb of day mocks not the paling Venus. By its own superior glory it throws it into shade, even as the glow worm keeps its enemies at bay by the blinding brightness of its own flash. Venus only caught her brilliant disk by reflection, just as the mountain peaks are all ablaze long ere sunrise, and flash to the valleys long after setting, the glories that bathe their commanding crests. Music, so the poet tells us, does not exist until you come to man. Nature is a jangle of sounds — the roll of the river, the plaint of the pine, the scream of the storm, the liberty of the lark. Music means emotion. There are a number of beautiful sounds echoing adown the corridors of time, but only when Jesus came was sound turned into music.
The intellect of Jesus was a puzzle to the scholars of His day. It had a depth and a catholicity they could not explain ; it had a passion and a poise they could
88 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
not account for; it had a positiveness and a con- structiveness they could not interpret. This note of authority was the more strange as He had not been in their schools. He dwelt in realm apart. He came not asking questions, but answering. Therefore, in bewilderment, they said: "Whence hath this man these things?" Emerging from the narrowest of nations, provincial in thought and texture. He stepped out on the arena of life to preach the widest of faiths. Nine and forty times in the evangelists do we read: ** But I say unto you. " " Here we have the amazing picture of a simple Hebrew peasant placing Himself, in words presumptuous, above His own traditions, and asserting authority over human con- duct. " He was a Jew at a time when Judaism was clannishest. Judea was then the margin of the civilized world.
Surely neither time nor place account for Him ; nor does family. He came not of royal blood nor priestly line. ** Is not this the carpenter, the son of Joseph? " Hannibal is the incarnation of the wild Punic spirit. The glory of a nation in the science of war calls forth a Caesar or a Charlemagne. The poetry and polity and philosophy of Athens explain a Plato. The culture of the Renaissance accounts for Shakspere and Bacon. The decadence of the church for Luther and Wesley. But no law of heredity or environment embraces Christ. ** There are no antecedents large enough for His coming, no parentage lofty enough for such a Son. " He stands in solitude.
Christianity has an ethical side, and much has been made of it; but it has also an intellectual side, and not sufficiently has it been stressed. It has a
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message for the realm of truth as well as for the realm of intellect. Christ is made unto us wisdom. Among His disciples have been strong, heroic, ven- turesome, clean-cut thinkers. Jesus places in the fore of His teaching His comprehensive command: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind." Our faith thrives not in the atmosphere of fear, but of a sound mind. It does not serve roots and dry, prickly shrubs to our mind-hunger. The Christian who starves his mind starves it not for scarcity of strong meat. "Christ reigns today as no god in Rome, as no deity in Greece, as no divinity in Egypt ever reigned — over civilized, free, progressive men." He is so built into our being that no history can be written without Him. His voice is on the rolling wind. The light of His presence is flashed across the mighty deep. The thoughts of His intellect are woven into the web of the world's wisdom. Knowl- edge of Him has created the richest culture, and faith in Him has wielded the mightiest power.
THE REALM OF MORALS.
2. Morality. Jesus is supreme, secondly, in the realm of morals.
In describing any great man, some one or two terms are used. He is wise, or benevolent, or brave. But otherwise is it with Jesus. In terming Him intellectual, we do not mean that He is more intel- lectual than moral or spiritual. His nature is cubic. "The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal." No one trait describes Him, because all others are equally bold. His is not a mountainous nature whose every peak has its corresponding valley,
90 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
Switzerland-like. He is all mountain, and hence all plain. His perfection shuts Him off from definition, as a sphere cannot be grasped for roundness. Many- years before Plato had expressed the hope that the moral law might become incarnate. Law alone was cold and colorless. Fulfilling this heart-hunger, "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."
Now, some of our brainiest thinkers have been sadly defective in character and conduct. You are to see the glowing genius, the daring achievement, the immortal lyric, the literary charm. Byron and Paul Verlaine soar with eye sunward and heart on carrion; so, many of our sons of genius have had depraved appetites and affections. Bums could sing like the lark, and fly where foulness lay, like the condor. How brilliant Aaron Burr the lawyer, how like a beast the man! Oft in our biographical rev- ellings the eye greets Bacchus dancing to the strains of some Mozart or Mendelssohn. The abattoir is hidden in honeysuckle. Looseness and license are gilded with lustre, as a mud puddle might be fringed with golden border.
Not thus Jesus. His character supports His intel- lect even as the column supports the capital. In the Houses of Parliament at London there is a standard linear measurement built into the walls; it is avail- able to all, and infallible. Jesus Christ is the infallible standard of perfect manhood, built into the temple of our humanity. In vain we search for lapse or flaw. The strongest glass does not expose a blemish. Enemies have searched His career with lamp and candle, but no profane tongue has ever whispered a suggestion against His blameless name. His char-
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acter is blotless; His life spotless. His was piety without penitence. His perfection has no parallel, no approach.
Proof needed? Witness Channing, the Unitarian: "His character is wholly removed from human com- prehension." Witness Theodore Parker: *'His is the mightiest heart that ever beat in human breast." Witness Jean Paul, the freethinker: "Jesus is the purest among the mighty, the mightiest among the pure." Witness Strauss, the skeptic: "He is the highest model of religion within the reach of human thought." Witness Renan: "Whatever the sur- prises of history, Jesus will never be surpassed." We will add no more. He needs no certificate of recommendation signed by any of earth's Rousseaus or Voltaires. It helps not, nor does it hinder, what John Stuart Mill thought of Jesus. Full oft we grieve Him with patronage, but the verdict is interesting.
Now, character has this remarkable distinction: you can place it. Given a certain character, and you can tell when it lived and where. If a man is an expert archaeologist and you give him a mummy, he can tell exactly where the body was embalmed and when. Denuding the dead of its wrappings, and studying swathe and texture, he can fix precisely place and period — anywhere between 3,800 b. c. and 700 A. D., the two extremes between which the art was practiced. So with a code of laws. The political economist can trace it to its indigenous clime and soil and habitat.
But Christ cannot be localized. He belongs to the nineteenth century as much as to the first, nay more, for just as Handel must needs wait for our age with
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its improved instrumentation and superior skill to have a worthier rendering and a fitter embodiment for his oratorios, even so the nineteenth century is nearer Christ than the second, the second is at a greater remove from Him than the nineteenth. Verily He is the "man without a country," because the man of every country. All national lines are lost in Him. He belongs to all territory, all time. He belongs to no class; He is beyond class.
Does the age explain Him? Great men some- times are the incarnation of the spirit of the age. It is not strange that Socrates should preach sobriety, as when he philosophized the Spartans were a sober people. Think, then, of the times in which Jesus lived. Virgil and Horace had just died; Livy was yet living, and at the apex of his fame. What say they? The jury is unanimous; it was the corruptest age that the world had ever seen. On Mount Olym- pus were gods and goddesses representing every human passion. Mars was the god of war. Mercury of theft, Bacchus of drink. You could not offer a greater insult to a Roman gentleman than to tell him he was like his god. When Herod the Great gave the order from his death-bed that his own child should be strangled, he did nothing shocking to the sentiment of his time. Froude tells us that few statesmen died a natural death. Plato grouped slaves and wives together in his "Ideal Republic." Juvenal says: "Many are divorced ere their nuptial flowers are faded." Seneca tells us that "many women counted their years by the number of their husbands." What saith Tacitus? That the Roman Empire was so corrupt that he preferred not to detail.
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"We can," he says, "but stand at the cavern's mouth and glance into its dark depths; were we to enter, our lamp would be quenched by the foul air." And what saith our Matthew Arnold? If he has any prejudices, they certainly lean not our way.
"On that hard pagan world, disgust And sated loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell."
Surely no honest man will claim that the age ex- plains Jesus. " He was a root out of a dry ground." Heaven's brightest glory and earth's blackest guilt seem here to meet. In the mire a lily blooms.
Material bodies throw off emanations. The violets breathe their aroma modestly. The mignonette throws itself out farther and fills a wider circle. The orange grove flings its fragrance far afield, flavoring whole leagues with its welcome. So likewise men; some have good atmosphere, some a bad. Some seem born in the spring, some in the autumn. Some breathe balm, some brimstone. Margaret informs Faust that the very sight of Mephistopheles made her blood curdle. She knew him not. He might have been a holy hermit for aught she could tell. His mouth was bubbling o'er with pious platitude. Yet, in some way mysterious, she felt his approach freezing to lofty impulse. She could not pray when he was near.
How differently Jesus! In His presence faith revived and blushed into bloom and color. Hypoc- risy was quieted, and prayer found vent and voice. There was a certain atmosphere around Him that made it easier for His followers to believe in goodness.
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Men were at their best in His company. They were conscious of an uphft.
Not many Gladstones, a certain historian notes, but there are a few that share with him the wreaths of the rostrum. Not many Napoleons, but there are some who dispute his empire in the art of war. Not many Schuberts; some, however. Poets are plen- tiful as stars in the evening, and perhaps Shakspere approaches loneliness the nearest; but the gap be- tween Shakspere and Milton is finite, while 'twixt Jesus and His nearest rival the sweep is infinite. Of Jesus alone can it be said that He had absolutely no competitor. He is the peerless Christ. This is the unique glory of the Virgin's Son — His aloneness. There have been other sacred singers — Seneca, Con- fucius, Zoroaster; but they are twittering sparrows to the lark. Here is Socrates and Buddha and Marcus Aurelius, but how they dwindle in the measurement! "What prepossession," said Rousseau, ''to compare the son of Sophroniscus with the Son of Mary ! What an infinite disproportion!" Scripture has a gallery of worthies — Enoch, Abraham, David, Paul — what a roll call of immortals ! Yet one thing is common to them all. They are all concluded under sin, and all are penitent for sin. Jesus alone is sinless. In Him all graces meet, as all colors melt into the white solar ray. We do not see the several colors because they are so blended. His is the full action of a perfect nattire.
THE MINISTERING CHRIST.
3. Ministry. Whether we measure Christ by the shadow He has cast upon each century or by the light
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He has thrown across it, He is equally great. He called Himself the light of the world. It takes light to create shadow, and the greatest shadow is the shadow of Himself — the Cross.
Certainly more hearts have been touched by the shadow than the brightness. The death of Jesus is the divine center of Christianity, the culmination of His ministry, and the controlling chapter of the Gospel story. Of Tissot's 365 paintings, 310 are on the ministry and passion. "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me." "His suffer- ings," says Renan, "will melt the noblest hearts until the end of time." A theory is only powerful when a heart stands behind it and fills it with its life, as the reseiVoir lives behind the faucet, as the Rocky Moun- tains live behind the Mississippi.
If He was the model preacher, He was also the model pastor. Da Vinci paints Him a man burdened with sorrow, but when the true artist arises he will figure a ministering Christ. " He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister." It is claimed that Tintoret approaches nearest to that ideal. Im- possible to discover a single selfish action in His whole unparalleled career; so self- forgetful was He. His love was mingled with pity. When He saw the mul- titude He was moved with passion and compassion. He went about doing good. He was brother to the beggar. He never gave a thought to His own phys- ical ease. He never performed a miracle for His own comfort. He could have turned stones into bread, and yet He hungered. His ministry was so manifold that there was no phase of life it did not reach. He went to the homes of the poor and the haunts of the
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outcast, helping and healing. He never cloistered Himself. He lived in the open. He ministered to human tear by human touch. Truly man never spake like this man, nor did Man ever live like Him. His parables He first spoke, then acted. "He came to seek and to save the lost."
The greatest are those who serve. Ever since, this has become the foundation of all true chivalry. Here is Antigone dying rather than desert the body of her dead brother. Here is George Atley, a young Englishman in the Central African Mission, with the instincts and heart of a hero. The story came to us last year of his being attacked by a party of natives. He had with him a Winchester repeating rifle with ten chambers loaded ; he had the party completely at his mercy. Calmly and coolly he summed up the situation, and finally concluded that if he killed them he would do more harm to the mission than were he to let them take his own life. So as a lamb to the slaughter he was led, and when his dead body was found in the stream, his rifle was also found, its ten chambers untouched.
Here is a young doctor dying recently in one of our hospitals. In a case of malignant diphtheria it became necessary to clear the throat of the sufferer by suction. He knew the outcome of the experiment ; yet in the interest of science and suffering he volun- teered, and saved a life by the sacrifice of his own.
And what shall we more say? Time would fail us to tell of the Patons and Pattesons, the Allan Gard- ners and Wilberforces, the Goughs and Willards. Long the scroll of the self-sacrificing engineers and captains and heroes unlettered, who did their duty in
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the "scorn of consequences." Who are the true Garibaldis and Garrisons and Grace Darlings of earth ? Sons and daughters of ministry are they all. Rubens never painted a picture like the career of Florence Nightingale. No Handel ever composed an oratorio like the career of John Howard. The Napoleons and Caesars of earth have been murderers, not ministers. They soaked the soil with the blood of their brothers, but they never shed their own blood. Joseph Mazzini was a true hero. He shed his own blood. Father Damien was a true hero. He shed his own blood. Abraham Lincoln was a true hero. He shed his own blood. But if the greatness of these worthies is only reflected greatness, their love is only reflected love.
Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Criticism and culture throne the Christ pre- eminent. Now abide His mind, His morals and His ministry — these three. He is supreme in all, but the greatest of these is His ministry. He is the great theme of the pulpit. He remains the " chief est among ten thousand and the altogether lovely." "If Shakspere were to enter this room," said Charles Lamb, "I would rise up to do him honor; but if Jesus Christ w^ere to enter, I would fall down in wor- ship and adore. " The old legend tells of the god imprisoned in the tree. Whoever cut the tree wounded the god. Ofttimes in our preaching we feel we have been mutilating His glory. But take no thought. That were impossible. The subject is too lovely to be marred, too rich to be impoverished. No man can rob the Matterhom of its majesty. Eighteen hundred years of infidel distortion have not served to fade the immortal features. They are lovelier than
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ever; Voltaire said that he would pass through the forest of Scripture and girdle all the trees, so that in one hundred years not a limb would be left to fence the sacred enclosure from profanity. But the one hundred years are gone, and not a leaf hath withered, and still the trunks are full of sap. We know Him no more after the flesh, and yet His glory lingers on the mountain tops and loathes to leave.
But there are some in whose eyes He hath no beauty. He is despised and rejected of men. Think it not strange. There are some in whose eyes the sunset hath no beauty. But He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied. Not in vain was He wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities. With His stripes we have been healed and reconciled to God. " For He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He might have the pre-eminence. "
CHAPTER VII.
HARMONY WITH THE CHRIST-PITY.
" When He saw the multitude He was moved with pity." Matt. 9:36.
"Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, a heart full of pity." Col. 3:12.
" Like as a father pitieth his children. Psalm 103 :13.
Turning over the pages of the Christ-teaching, how wonderful, how summery, is the picture of God! He is our Father, waiting on bird and beast; caring for lily and sparrow; with tears for the under-man; not breaking the bruised reed ; not quenching the smoking flax; covering us with His feathers; with a great, big, bursting human heart of pity for life's unfortunate children.
How partial any paraphrase of ours must be of the great world-Shepherd! Photographers tell us that these mountains round about are too large for their camera-plates. Compelled are they to take Baldy and Greyback and San- Jacinto in sections. Thus, God is too big for definition, too far away for perfect imprint.
So we turn to something tender; turn our kodak on the foot hills, as it were, with their warmth and greenery.
"When He saw the multitude He was moved with pity." "Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, a heart full of pity."
"Like as a father pitieth his children."
" Pity, " says J. F. Clarke, " lies at the core of all the great religions. " The chapters of the Koran, all of
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them, begin with these words: "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. " The vast reHgion of Buddha numbers fivehundredmillion votaries, and pity is the key-note to it all.
KINDNESS TO ANIMALS.
Let us first speak a word on behalf of the brute world.
That was rather a startling charge brought against us Christians at the Parliament of Religions, some years ago, by the Brahmins and Buddhists present, when they said :
** You Christians are cruel to animals. "
Such sport as we witnessed once in a little Western village cannot soon be lost to memory, when twelve poor, helpless rabbits were let loose and hounded — their limbs dismembered and torn apart, their flesh hacked into pieces and tossed hither and thither by the dogs, while cowardly oaths and cheers filled the air with blasphemy.
Some one says there were no wild beasts until there were wild men. Fallen man becomes a savage, and asks for a gun. He would civilize with shot and powder. He would be cruel to his own horse; his own dog he would starve. Even the little feathered songsters of the forest flee with trembling when man comes near. The poet sings of man's inhumanity to man. Alas, too, for man's inhumanity to brutes and birds !
There is a bird called the white heron, that has its habitat along the coast of Florida. There birds have beautiful white feathers, known in milliners' shops as aigrette plumes. Artistic and admirable are they,
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did we not know how they are obtained ; for at breed- ing time the parent-birds are shot down in their nests, and while the body of the mother is left to rot in the sun, the little brood of young herons is left to starve in the nest. It is not many months ago that we read of a New York merchant boasting that in one season his men had killed 150,000 birds for millinery purposes along the coast of Florida, the result being that the white heron is now almost exterminated.
Passing strange and wonderful, how the hand and heart of man seem to delight in the inflicting of pain! Our wonder grows apace when we remember that man likes to tease and torture himself so little. Boys pin insects to the floor, pull wings from flies, and mutilate fowls and fishes. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father's notice, but for sport older boys — grey-headed ones — will wound and lacer- ate these innocent little chirpers. For the sake of science, thousands of animals are yearly taken into each laboratory, laid on a table of torment, and slowly poisoned by some inoculating virus. For the lust of land, nations will revel in the sickening cruelties of war, and look with complacency on their brother man in pain. Yet all the while the voice divine keeps whispering to each ruthless persecutor, **Be ye kind one to another, tender hearted, " pointing anon to that glad time when the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, the leopard with the kid; when the calf and fatling and young lion shall walk together, and a little child shall lead them; there being nothing to hurt or destroy in all God's holy mountain.
" If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" It
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does not stir our wonder over-much that those who are pitiless and without feehng toward God's innocent creatures of the field and forest, should be hard and unrelenting likewise toward their fellow-toilers on the street and in the home.
When a statesman was once asked how the poor people were to live through a famine, he replied :
" To with the people ; let them eat grass. "
When Marie Antoinette was riding to her betrothal in Notre Dame, she ordered all beggars, cripples, and paupers from the line of march. She would not have even a glimpse of misery's children. Even a man as great as Edmund Burke, referring to the manner in which this selfish woman was afterwards treated, speaks of the ** swinish multitude." When Prince Mettemich, the Austrian diplomat, once told Napo- leon that his scheme would cost the lives of 100,000 men. Napoleon laughed :
" 100,000 men! what are 100,000 men tome?"
Robert Louis Stevenson once crossed the Atlantic in the steerage of an ocean liner. Although the most considerable passenger aboard, he went in the steerage from choice, not necessity. In his story, "The Amateur Emigrant, " he describes for us what he saw. He saw a supercilious parade of wealth that grieved him, an insolence that enraged him.
Recently it was my privilege to converse with a manufacturer of note. Standing at the window of his office, he watched his workingmen coming out of the mill and hastening to their noon-day meal.
"A lot of animals, " he gruffly remarked; "only by holding the whip over them can I get anything out of them. I treat them like animals. "
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Contrariwise, here is John Brown, his body pierced with bullets, stooping to kiss the little colored lad on his way to the gallows.
Here is Livingstone found dead on his knees in prayer in the heart of Africa, with that great craggy head tipped over resting on his open Bible, and his finger pointing to the last words he ever penned in his diary :
"Oh, God, when will the open sore of the world be healed?"
Here is Mrs. Booth. When first she went to Shef- field, it seemed as though the angry mob hurled every foul epithet at her. They cursed her, egged her, howled at her like drunken demons, silenced her in the middle of her story. She stood before them on the platform and burst into tears, and just said:
" My dear friends, I love you. "
Here is Lord Shaftesbury. A little before his death, Miss Cobb wrote him a letter, asking what it could have been that ever tempted him from the society of royalty to be the knight-errant of the poor. The answer he gave was never published till after his death. He said that when a lad of ten or twelve, he was sored to see that nearly all the aristocratic boys with whom he played looked down on the poorer children and taunted them.
Here is John Ruskin, heir to a million dollars and with his pen earning a million more — the first prose writer of the century, world-famous as an author at twenty-one. Court and college strove to banquet and do him reverence. No door of privilege but swung wide open to his gentlest knock. Walking through Whitechapel one day, he saw sights that
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made his heart sick. He saw every brick discharging matter. He saw anarchy rampant, and hell let loose. No blade of grass, no park, no herb, no shrub, no flower, no marble, no book, no picture. When he saw the degradation he was moved.
In that hour East London seemed to him like some earthly inferno whose smothered Macedonian sob was crying out: ''Won't you come and help us?" To this place John Ruskin felt he must go. He founded museums, clubs, schools, charities. He gave them his paintings, curios, books, art- treasures. Weekly he went thither to give them himself.
One day on his weekly visits there was a beggar on the comer who asked of him daily an alms, and who never had been refused. This day the grateful beg- gar suddenly caught the outstretched hand and kissed it. Mr. Ruskin, with a sudden impulse, bent forward and kissed the beggar's cheek. Next morn- ing the poor fellow came to his lodgings with tears in his eyes, bringing a gift.
"Just a piece of brown cloth," said the beggar, "from the robe of St. Francis."
This relic Ruskin cherished through life, thinking it more beautiful than anything Turner ever drew.
A story of Henry Ward Beecher at his last service in Plymouth Church is vouched for by the choir. It was the last sermon he ever preached. Coming down from his pulpit after the great congregation had scattered, he felt tired and weary. He saw two little ragged street waifs far back in the rear. Passing the door, they had heard the choir rehearsing, and tim- orously wandered in. The piece they were singing was: "I heard the voice of Jesus say.*! The great
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man walked down the aisle, put his arm round each little waif, stooped down and kissed them tenderly, then walked out into the street, leaving that great arena of his triumphs forever. How beautiful! The great, big-hearted genius loving the little beggars.
And what shall we say more? Here lastly is Jesus. When He saw the multitude He was moved. He chose for His earthly home the place where were the multitudes. Wherever He went He saw that sea of swelling, surging life, that ceaseless pour, that noisy, restless flow of faces. It appealed to Him. He saw the crowd, and the depth of His being was stirred. Dr. Morton, a Boston dentist, discovered anaesthesia in 1846. The other day, in London, the jubilee of this blessed boon to mankind was signalized. It seemed to be the conviction of the great company of medical experts present that the human body is becoming increasingly sensitive to pain. How ex- quisitively sensitive our Master was! How keenly He could feel! How easily shrink! How alive in every nerve of His nature! His surely was the most impressive spirit that ever felt life's pathos.
Strauss was so touched by our Lord's tenderness that George Elliot said she could not do justice to translating the pages of the great German critic without having the crucifix before her.
Ah, beloved, we may call ourselves disciples of the Master; but if we are insolent toward the lowly, high-minded toward the humble ones, we are not His disciples. He will not, cannot own us.
Ours is an age that worships intellect. Many of you have seen Delaroche's immortal oil painting in the French Academy. He grouped around a marble
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chair of state the master minds of all ages — artists, architects, sculptors, thinkers, inventors, statesmen, scientists. He puts intellect on the throne. The great hearts of the world are crowded out. Shaks- pere is there, Homer is there, Newton is there. La Place is there; but the John Howards and David Livingstones and Florence Nightingales of earth are not there. For in Delaroche's estimate heart had no right to a niche in the Temple of Fame.
How different that scene in the Gospel gallery, where the Lord of glory is seen washing the disciples' feet, and teaching that the greatest are they who serve.
Not that our faith belittles brain. It refuses to assign to it the first place ; that is all. It champions a truthful perspective. Its assault is on the heart. Salvation means salvation of the heart; any other kind of salvation were mythological. Let the head rule the heart, and you have the Spanish inquisition. Let the heart rule the head, and you have the Refor- mation. Head without heart is cold, conventional — a picture without color. No man will die for a truth till that truth twines itself around the tendril of his heart. Erasmus was keener-witted than Luther, but Luther was bigger-hearted, and Luther, not Erasmus, did the work. Daniel Webster had a mightier brain than Harriet Beecher Stowe, but Daniel Webster stood for slavery. It has been said that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" did more to sweep the slave curse from our beloved land than all the intel- lects in Congress. The seal of Whitfield had for its device a winged heart soaring above the stars. Jenny Lind captivated the multitudes because her heart
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was sweeter than her voice. Once Ruskin and Carlyle were discussing the literature of their day.
"Why is it," said Carlyle, *'that Emerson and yourself scarcely pay for the cost of publishing, while trashy novels run up into the hundred thou- sands?"
Ruskin thought for a little, then answered:
"Because the novel has love in it."
Surely it is so. Man is not complete until some great love possesses him. Love lifts the tired feet forward and lends wings. Love levels the hills, tunnels the mountains, shortens the journey along which duty calls, cuts a foot-path through the forest. No man can be great who is not tender-hearted. He may be a great fighter like Alexander, or a great bear like Carlyle, but not a great man. A great man is a man easily touched. He is not the best general who has a thirst for blood. He is the best general who is the most humane.
Many there are to-day who steel themselves against the tender in religion. They love to hear an intel- lectual discourse, they tell us. But the appeal that moves and melts they stifle and suppress. They regard it as a synonym for weakness. If men feel thus, not so God. His message is nothing if not tender; the old, old story of the Gospel is full of tears. Woe to the man who never weeps! Unworthy the man who glories in it. Heroes have always wept, from the giants that stride through Homer's lines down to Grant and Farragut and Abraham Lincoln. The man who thinks it weak to sob in the presence of sorrow is not the child of strength or greatness. We pity people born deformed in body, the man with a
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club foot, him of the withered arm. Shall we have no sympathy for the man with withered morals, for the pathos of life, its sadness, its anguish, its sins?
Sin it was that necessitated Calvary. In Geth- semane I see my Saviour sweating blood-drops for the sin of the world. On Calvary I see Him wrestling with the enemy, and pouring out His life. Has that no appeal for my heart ? When He looked down upon the multitude, He wept. He saw them as sheep not having a shepherd. He wept over their hardness, their unbelief, their turning a deaf ear to their own eternal welfare. He wept when He thought of what they were missing. Never did He weep for Himself. No nails driven in His hands or feet ever started a sigh. When man denied Him, betrayed Him, mocked Him, spat upon Him, crucified Him, He did not weep; but when He came nigh unto Jerusalem, that wicked city. He burst out into tears :
"Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but ye would not ! "
He weeps over you, this morning, sinner. He weeps over your hard, cold indifference. He weeps because you reject His overtures of love. " You will not come unto Me, that you might have life ! "
Let us note, lastly, that love is never at its highest till it is mingled with pity.
Balzac has driven home this truth with a story. He brings us back to an old Flemish mansion in the year 1812, where a woman, Josephine by name, was sitting in a deep arm chair one evening, looking out
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upon the garden. She was hard-featured ; she was plain. Her thick, black hair fell in heavy curls upon her shoulders. Her forehead, very prominent and narrow at the temples, was yellow in tint. Her face, Spanish in type, was dark-skinned, and pitted with the small-pox. Hot tears were rolling from her eyes. The nose, aquiline as the beak of an eagle, gave the impression of some interior malformation. The lip was large and curved, yet betraying the pride of noble birth. Yes, she was ordinary, that was clear; and still the worst is not told, for she was both lame and deformed. She belonged to one of the illustrious fam- ilies of Belgium, but she had renounced her share of her father's property to enable her brother to make a marriage worthy of the name, for she never expected to marry herself, being weighted down by a sense of physical disfigurement.
And now the rich nobleman, Balthazar, appears and wishes to wed her; but her poverty and his wealth, her deformity and his handsome physique, make her distrustful. The sense of her admitted imperfections made her difficult to win as the most beautiful of women. The fear of some day displeasing the eye of her lover roused her pride. She asked herself if Balthazar were not playing with her; were not seeking a domestic slave ; whether he had himself no secret defect to be satisfied with a poor, ill-favored girl who had nothing to offer him. It would need a volume, the novelist goes on to say, to paint the love of a young girl humbly submissive to the verdict of a world that calls her plain. It involves fierce jealousy of happiness, freaks of cruel vengeance against some fancied rival, that exaltation of heart which the face
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must not betray, the fear that we may not be under- stood, and the boundless joy of being so; for ugliness hath no charm. A beautiful woman can be her natural self, the world overlooks her little foibles ; but a single glance can check the noblest expression on the lips of a homely creature, give timidity to the eye and awkwardness to her carriage.
Often, to test his love, she refused to wear the draperies that partially concealed her deformities, and her Spanish eyes fairly danced when she saw that Balthazar thought her beautiful as before. The glory of our humanity is to be adored for an imperfection. Not to observe a woman's deformity may be human, but to love her because she is deformed, that surely is divine. What is that beautiful thought of Beaumont and Fletcher? ** Of all the paths that lead to woman's heart, pity is the strongest." There are those who are loved for their beauty, as there are those who are married for their money. But love bestowed upon life's disinherited children, verily that must be the mysterious passion, the perfect flower of heaven.
And this is the sermon that Balzac's story preaches with such splendid effect, that love is only perfect when mingled with pity. This is our Heavenly Father's love. "He saw us ruined in the fall, yet loved us notwithstanding all." "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. For He knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust. "
Oh, mother, dear, why do you waste such love on that poor child? Do you not see that he is a cripple, has curvature of the spine, always will be a cripple? See the little fellow creeping on his hands and knees!
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The doctor says he can never be strong; always will be a source of anxiety to you; most likely never will be able to walk. Why worry so over him? What good will he ever be ?
Ah, if you spoke thus, she would give you a look that would shrivel you.
" My silent boy, I hold thee to my breast.
Just as I did when thou wast newly bom. It may be sinful, but I love thee best,
And kiss thy lips the longest night and mom. Oh, thou art dear to me beyond all others,
And when I breathe my trust and bend my knee For blessing on thy sisters and thy brothers,
God seems the nighest when I pray for thee."
Such, dear reader, is God's love for us — His poor sin-crippled children.
CHAPTER VIII.
HARMONY AND COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP.
" Why is the house of God forsaken? Neh. 13 :11. "Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is." Heb. 10 25.
Two voices from long-ago!
Back, far away in the twilight of History, the prophet seeth the forlorn condition of his people now returning from exile, and moumeth the fact that the temple of worship was being deserted; while many centuries later the writer to the Hebrews takes up a like lament, wameth his readers against a similar neglect, provoking them conjointly to love and good works and the duty of public assembling.
Herein is surely found a danger-lesson for us. For it were so patent on the very face as to seem scarcely needing of proof, that the sanctuary to-day is being abandoned, that church attendance is on the wane, that it is no longer *' not respectable " to live aloof, but rather that some of the most honored, upright and reputable of our citizens are stone deaf to the call of church chime and steeple, that in our large cities at least three-fourths of our voters never darken the doorway of any meeting place for prayer or praise, and that from one end of our beloved land to the other the same cry is heard: "Why is the house of God for- saken ? " The church to-day has lost its foregone hold upon men. Altogether is that statement beyond a doubt. So noticeable is the lapse as scarcely to be entitled to serious debate.
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What may some of the reasons be that are forth- coming in answer to the question the prophet asks with such heaviness of heart?
Many there be who find explanation within the church itself — charging her, as at present organized, with being behind the times, with slavery to tradition, with intellectual iron-rule, with having a shivering dread of thinking, with emphasizing doctrine to the discount of deed, with sermon weakness and over- stress of the emotional.
These are not uneducated men. Ofttimes they are educated men, men of sight and insight, and this is the result of their honest review. On the other side they pass by. In truth, hardly could they do otherwise. Carrying out their convictions to the letter, they will not ask her ministrations, even in sorrow. Having ignored it in life, to be consistent they should ignore it also in death; and compared with the man who lives indifferently and apart, and yet wishes a Christian burial, men of that type the church rather admires.
A large company there is who have forsaken the church because they claim they need the Sabbath for rest and outdoor diversion.
"I labor all the week," the clerk says, "in an atmosphere of dust and impurity. I feel the need when Sunday comes, for fresher vision, for purer light ; a breath of the ocean will lift me higher unto things unseen. What need for a building made with hands, when out yonder is the greater building not made with hands? Can I not find God in the wide temple of nature on the mountain top, under the oak tree, by the sea shore, where the mighty Maker is the organist,
114 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
where the heaving billows are the bellows, where the sea birds are the choir? "
And time would fail us to detail the varied lesser reasons that have estranged so many from the sanc- tuary; that the poor are excluded from its worship; that the clergy are the servants of the moneyed class ; that the pew rental system grades the people and robs the service of its spiritual brotherhood and equality; that the pulpit rings not with a genuine note. Many and multiform are the reasons given why the temple of worship is being forsaken.
Excuses, alas, not reasons! For it doth seem that the real reason is rarely confessed. Ours is an age in which, in religious matters, men hasten to shift the real issue ; and the clear, concurrent testimony of our students and seers to-day sweeps all pretence aside, leads direct to the inner life, and points to the skepti- cism of a materialistic and mammon- worshipping age, which has changed the emphasis from Eternity back to Time, as the root-cause of all our spiritual unrest.
It is the purpose, then, of this chapter to introduce the Gospel message by hastening to note that for which the temple of prayer forever stands — immova- ble, impregnable.
I.-^GOD.
God is the one answer of every human want. No age, no nation, no people, but has some time uttered the cry: ** Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! " Tribes there are without written speech, without mar- riage, without government-code ; but no tribe without its deity. Perhaps it is a deity of wood or stone or tree or star or reptile; a deity, may-be, of dead
COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 115
ancestors; but some deity. The soul of humanity looks Godward as easily, as naturally, as the eagle- wing soars cloud ward. To say that such a universal instinct means nothing were as unreasonable as to say that the lifting of the vapor from the river-depths means nothing.
The belief is all the more remarkable when we remember that it runs athwart the grain of life's natural temper. It lays a tax upon the time, the talent, the opportunity, the possession, the outfit. It asks for tithes, temples, pagodas, sacrifices, priests, idols, graven images, golden calves. It imposes obli- gations men do not care to meet. Why does not sober reason rise and overturn a faith that is distasteful? Because the faith is rooted in human life. To tear it out would tear out man's humanity.
In the early years of the past century there arose in France a most remarkable man. Poor was he, inordinately ambitious, trained to hardship, clothed with exceptional brain-power, and yet withal a man of toil, indefatigable, unceasing — Augustus Comte. He was an authority on astronomy, political economy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. He died in 1857, and to this day the anniversary of his death is celebrated by his French and English followers, by such men as John Morley, Frederic Harrison, and, in her day, George Elliot. For sheer intellectual grasp and vigor, Comte ranks with Leibnitz and Descartes. Humboldt was one of his admirers, and John Stuart Mill called him the "most wonderful deep sea thinker since the age of Aristotle. " His character was stern, inflexible, but pure, high-minded, and with an iron
ii6 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
devotion to what he considered the service of man- kind.
He was the founder of a system of thought called the Positivist School; that is, nothing is to be accepted which cannot be proven by the positive agreement of the senses. The truths of religion, like the facts of science, were made to rest on certainty. Thus God was swept aside. " He led Him to the confines of the universe and bowed Him out." Religion was done away with. Bibles were knocked down with ruthless and fearful iconoclasm. Hard it is to believe, and yet the fact abides, that before Augustus Comte died he established a church of his own, with its calendar of saints, its sacred days, its catechism, its Sabbath, its Bible, its God. The cathedral mind of this great man had bowed the Deity out, but the heart insurrected and rebelled.
Surely it were difficult to conceive a more convinc- ing proof that God is grounded in human life. That is the witness of every temple. No steeple throughout the land but points the heart to the Unseen One whose throne is heaven, whose footstool is earth. Day unto day the church spire speaks, and night unto night it showeth knowledge. With steel point and in starry letter it writes its creed across the breast of night, "I believe in God the Father, Almighty Maker of heaven and earth. "
II. — WORSHIP.
The Greeks called man "anthropos," meaning the upward-looking one. "Man is the creature of religious instincts, and must worship something," is the pronoimcement of Kant. If dogmatism be suf-
COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 117
ferable anywhere, surely it is here, for man, wherever found, is a worshipful creature, capable of appreciating capable of admiring, capable of extolling. That outburst of the soul, that rapture and rush of the emotions, that exclamation in the presence of the picturesque, that is the natural sentiment of worship. Education and study exalt it into a culture; revela- tion into a duty.
This power of appreciation it is that elevates man and places him on the heights. That which lifts us above the savage is the capacity to admire, and the wider the range of one's admirations the higher the type of his manhood. He who can enthuse over a sweet song, a beautiful landscape, a perfect poem, a noble painting, a faultless statue, a clever mechanism, any perfect piece of art, he, we say, is an all rounded character. Turner, standing on the foothills watch- ing the sunset tinting the Matterhorn, bared his head, bended his knee. He spake not, for voice were dumb, speech irreverent. He who can discover nothing in the gallery of beauty to kneel before, he who can find in the temple of wisdom nothing more to learn, he surely asks claim on our long suffering and pity.
When Rubenstein was in this country some years ago, a friend took him to hear his pastor preach. Asked the following Sabbath if he cared to go again, Rubenstein replied:
"Yes, but you must take me to hear a man who will tempt me to the impossible."
Rubenstein felt the need of some excellence unat- tainable to tone up his jaded nature. Ideals we call them. Ideals each true life must have. If there were no God, the human heart must make One, for
ii8 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
where there is no vision of the Infinite, the people perish. Worship is a true soul-view of God; rather is it a soul-view of the true God. It is the highest admiration, because the admiration of the highest. Worship is worthship — a confession of worth. It is a reverential upward-look. It is the attitude of the penitent rising and turning his face skyward. Most truly does some one say that the evil of atheism is not its open avowal that there is no God, but rather its silent implication that nowhere in all this universe lives one greater, wiser, holier than itself. The evil of atheism is its monumental self- deification.
During the past century Renan has been the acknowledged leader of the critical school in France. Perhaps he had as little innate reverence as any scholar of his time. His teaching at bottom is atheistic. In the preface to his "Recollections" he pens these words:
"One of the most popular legends in Brittany is that relating to an imaginary town called Is, which is supposed to have been swallowed up by the sea at some unknown time. There are several places along the cost which are pointed out as the site of this imaginary city, and the fishermen have many strange tales to tell of it. According to them, the tips of the spires of the churches may be seen in the hollows of the waves when the sea is rough, while during a calm the music of the bells rises above the waters. I often fancy in my calmer moments that I have at the bottom of my heart a city of Is, with its bells calling me to devotion. At times I stop to listen to these gentle murmurings, which seem to come from hidden depths, like voices from another world."
COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 119
Truly a wondrous confession for the great French skeptic! Underneath the cynical thinking and prof- ligate life of this wonderful man, the voice of God was clamoring for homage. For praise and honor are claimed by Him who fiUeth all in all.
Surely there is deep need in our land to-day for some embankment to stem the tide of our growing irreverence. In these days when veneration, like meditation, is becoming a lost art, what hope is there for America's rising youth if the tabernacle of prayer becomes empty of its penitent children? When humbling before the Most High is set at naught, when the awful holiness of Him we worship, when the voice of hosanna and the principles of eternal truth are no longer heard in prayer of song or sermon, whither then shall we be found tending? Is it pos- sible for a nation to become godless? That is, is it possible for a nation to lose its conception of the divine hohness? For a surety this is not a little matter. It is vital. Bound is it to tell in society's forward march. The church is the shrine of God- reverence. It asks the youth whose garments have been soiled, to fall forward into the dust and cry: "Unworthy, unclean!" Thus, by the grace and power of Christ, will he be Hfted and rise up a worthier, a better man; "for he that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humble th himself shall be ex- alted."
III. HOLINESS.
And holiness is the only pledge and hope of the future life, for the church is the perpetual memorial to that life. Godliness is to be the church's pole-star
120 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
till time shall be no more. One calls it the "human life of God," as that life was faultlessly enfleshed in Jesus. Righteousness, holiness. Godliness — this is to be our never-ageing message. The church stands for the most vital thing in life — the art of teaching men how to live. On creeds and articles the minds of men have always differed, and there is no sure evi- dence forthcoming that the future will not repeat the past; but right and wrong are as old as Orion and its nebula. Right will never lose its lustre ; never wrong its shame. Full oft and repeatedly we hear the criticism made that the church is narrow; but how otherwise could she be? Is she not the only organi- zation in the world to-day that stands for unflinching antagonism to wrong? Her battle cry must ever be hostility, not victory. Victory is sure, but victory belongeth unto Him for whom are all things and by whom are all things. To us pertains the warfare, and "unconditional surrender" are the terms. "If the church were not," means that the supremacy of evil would be unchallenged, the field abandoned, and Satan have his own wicked swing.
Thus far we have not entered on the disputable. So many are the immortal verities on which all minds agree, that life were over-brief to exhaust even these, and the world is slowly learning that, as the certain- ties are more than sufficient to fill Hfe's hurrying hours, fighting and quarreling over things debatable is time- waste, sheer and simple. God and worship and right living are not problems controvertible. So how honest-hearted, fair-minded business men can remain stone-deaf to the Macedonian cry the church is uttering to-day, were passing strange and puzzling.
COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 121
Recently it was my fortune to spend a day with a great manufacturer of national note. Two thousand five hundred men has he in his employ. Relating the story of his strict, early training, he told me how he had been brought up on porridge and the shorter catechism. Dropping into a familiar mood, he said:
"I haven't been to church for eleven years."
Emboldened by his freedom, I ventured to inquire how he spent his Sabbaths.
"Well," he answered, "I generally play a game of golf on Sabbath morning, sleep on Sabbath after- noon, glance over a magazine Sabbath evening, retir- ing not later than nine, and awaken to my work Monday morning, fresh as an athlete."
Meanwhile this wealthy magnate, with his abound- ing influence, with two thousand five hundred work- ingmen watching his every movement, with five thousand children of these workingmen growing up around him to repeat his example, has deserted the faith of his fathers, left the village preacher and a few good women to teach these children in the Sab- bath school the commandments of safe and holy living, not dreaming that some day a strike may be forthcoming, when these very boys will rise up in their envy to burn his buildings, tear down his prop- erty, and threaten his life. For the church to-day is the only peace-pleading tribune between the rich and poor. Her mission is to heal wounds, to pour oil upon troubled waters, to proclaim the gospel of brotherhood and good will. When we see in our literature the widening spread of a revolutionary socialism ; when we mark how money is growing year by year to be the universal monarch of men; when
122 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
we see how ease, which usually means disease, is eating into the body politic; when we watch realism wedging its way into the realm of fiction; when we note the slavery of social arrogance and the lustful heartlessness of corporate wealth; when we see the yawning gulf between the privileged and the lowly deepening each year, aye, and widening; when we study the drink curse, the gambling, the lust, the sins of a violent and vulgar nature, those of a soft and sinuous type; and then, when we remember that the church is confessedly the only intermediary, the only hope of our American society, the only healing ointment for her sores and bruises, the only antidote to her sins — the burden is laid heavily upon our hearts to ask how it is that patriotic, country-loving men can so easily emancipate themselves from the great Christian brotherhood and shirk its duties, its toil, its labor, its support.
Some years ago Prof. Henry Rogers wrote a book which he called *' The Eclipse of Faith." He dreamed that on a certain morning the world awoke to find that the Bible had been absolutely banished from it. Every copy of every Bible in every tongue had dis- appeared, and even the quotations from the Script- ures had become extinct. The very name and memory were lost. A striking conception it was, and leading to some startling conclusions.
In fancy let us picture a like lament over the passing of the church. Every cathedral, church, chapel and cloister in this great land of ours razed level with the ground; 30,000 pulpits from Maine to Mexico hushed; the voice of the preacher no longer heard in the land; the words of Jesus forgotten; no
COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 123
longer a handful of men to lift up a little wooden cross between heaven and earth; no more any refuge for the weary and heavy-laden, the man bankrupt in hope, the woman bankrupt in love; no longer any listening to what the unchangeable God has to say concerning sin and pain and want and woe and pardon and peace. The world has lost its faith.
Tennyson has drawn for us this picture in its startling outline. They are husband and wife. At length they make up their minds to drown them- selves, and you fancy you see them wading into the water as he says:
" Lightly step over the sands ! The waters — you hear them call ! Life with its anguish, and horrors, and errors — away with it all !' And she laid her hand in my own — she was always loyal and
sweet — Till the points of the foam in the dusk came playing about our
feet. There was a strong sea-current would sweep us out to the
main. Ah, God, though I felt as I spoke, I was taking the name in
vain — Ah, God, and we turned to each other, we kissed, we em- braced, she and I, Knowing the love we were used to believe everlasting, would
die: "We had read their know-nothing books, and we lean'd to the
darker side — Ah, God, should we find Him, perhaps, perhaps, if we died, if
we died ! "We never had found Him on earth, this earth is a fatherless hell — Dear love, forever and ever, for ever and ever farewell ! Never a cry so desolate, not since the world began, Never a kiss so sad, no, not since the coming of man."
The church has now entered upon a struggle for life. The coming revival is to be one of righteous-
t^4 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.
ness. Every consideration to-day that makes for the permanence of our institutions asks for the pros- perity and welfare of the church, and the refusal of men to come out boldly and lend it their support — to say the least — is ungenerous, and savors of selfish- ness "The rich and the poor meet together, the Lord is the Maker of them all." That is Christian socialism. No man can genuinely love his brother man imtil they have clasped hands and hearts around the Father's hearthstone. Europe is a standing wit- ness to that fact to-day; where the sanctuary of prayer is empty, there class hatred is found ferment- ing.
Once it was my fortune to sail up New York harbor on a peaceful Sabbath morning. Far away the bells were tolling, and hard by old Trinity, with its slender spire shooting above the smoke, was calling the people to forget the noise and din and clatter of the counter and come apart into a quiet place to rest awhile. New York was summoning her tired chil- dren to the feet of that Father in whom we live and move and have our being. The great metropolis was calling her weary ones to worship, her erring ones to pardon, her fainting ones to rest and peace.
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