NYPL RESEARCH LIBRARIES

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The Reasonableness of Faith

The Reasonableness of Faith

and Other Addresses

By

•Vv

W: Sr RAINSFORD, D. D,

NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. 1902

9

h

THE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX ANO TILDE N rc>*.'>'DATIoe^«.

R 1 902 ^

Copyright, tgo2, by

DouBi-EDAY, Page & Co.

Published May, 1902

CONTENTS

The Reasonableness of Faith

Courage

There Wrestled a Man

The Gospel of Genesis

Harvard Baccalaureate

Love Not the World

The Eyes of the Heart

The Rest Day

Phillips Brooks

Our Duty to Civilization

Leanness of Soul .

Sacrifice to Their Net

Claims and Duties of Our Time

Creation and the Fall

Whosoever Shall Seek to Save

Life Shall Lose It God's Lmage in Man Christ Sent Me not to Baptize What Manner of Man is This?

Hi

Page I

45 6i

77 91 115 125 139 157 171

193 205 219 ^33

251 261

279

297

THE REASONABLENESS OF FAITH

"If thou canst do anything, have compassion on us and help us.

"Jesus said unto him, if thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. "

Mark ix. : 22-23

Here is the old, old subject — Christ's changeless demand for faith. Is it a reasonable demand? Can ordinary men comply with it ?

Of all questions the thoughtful man is called on to face, there can, I think, be none more important than this. There are those — not a few — who tell us faith is waning. On the other hand, there are many at least as competent to form a judgment who confidently assert that our age is pre-emi- nently one of faith. Goethe says the ages of belief are the only fruitful ages, and history backs his opinion. If, then, faith is slowly waning from the earth, and the most progressive peoples are learning to live without it, the fact is one of gravest I

2 The Reasonableness of Faith

significance. If, on the other hand, it is only the antiquated and infirm forms of faith (her cast-off garments) that are passing, cast aside as things no longer usable, while the real body and life of faith are quick and vital — then the time is ripe for new and simpler definitions of what our honoured forbears called ' ' saving faith. ' *

With this last view I am very heartily in accord, and to-day, when you have called me, gentlemen of Columbia University, to the very high honour of addressing you, I know of no more timely subject for which to claim your indulgent attention.

I wish to try and point out that faith as demanded by Jesus Christ and His apostles never was meant to be adhesion to any credal statement, but a vital obedience to, and trust in, a living man. Who in His Person and teaching revealed two things as they never had been revealed before — the nature of man and the nature of God. My subject, then, I shall call the reason- ableness OF faith.

First of all, I ask you to consider that Jesus wins the response of faith that He desires from all sorts of people. The most un-

The Reasonableness of Faith 3

promising win their way to Him and gain His approval. He expects to find good in men, to find something worth helping and saving in them, and to find this worthiness in the most unlikely places.

In order tO' understand what Jesus meant and what He taught about faith, we must refuse to separate His acts and His words. We must put acts and words together, and then what He does will illustrate what He says. Here, I venture to think. Christian men have very often failed, and are failing to-day.

We take a word of His — this word faith, belief; we find that to those who have it and exercise it He constantly makes such promises as these: ''All things are possible to him that believeth"; "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life"; *'He that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." No words seem too strong when He seeks to express His fear for those who have it and exercise it not: *'He that believeth not shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him," and a multitude of similar passages. We remember these passages, but we forget

4 The Reasonableness of Faith

the circumstances in which they were spoken. Did we remember them, the circumstances would illuminate and make their meaning plain. These, however, we ignore, and the unfortunate result arises that, before we are aware of it, faith seems to become an unreal, impossible thing, a demand with which we cannot comply, a possession which but few have. Thus it fades, and the Christianity of which it is the root and spirit fades too.

Notice, then, that from all sorts of people — the learned and the unlearned, the stranger of a day and the life-long friend, the dis- ciple who clings to Him and the casual visitor who comes to Him only for some one thing, and, having got it, goes away — from all alike Jesus demands faith and belief. He will have no dealings with men with- out it.

In word or act of Jesus we can find no precedent for the state of things which we have brought about to-day. We have made faith seem difficult; so difficult that multi- tudes of our very best men and women turn from the Church, because in their souls they believe it is impossible for them

The Reasonableness of Faith 5

to yield to the demand which the Church makes on them for faith. They are just as good as the Church people from whose company they turn, as kind to their children, as faithful in their loves and friendships, as scrupulously honest in their lives, as fervent in their patrotism, as ready to serve and suffer for their fellowmen. Their aims are the aims of all good men and women, and yet they are turning away sadly or indifferently from the Church and from Christ. And why are they doing it? Because we have made His claims on them appear to be claims with which they cannot in their conscience feel it is right for them to comply.

This is nothing less than a perverting of the known character of Jesus, an unlaw- ful reversal of His method, an unfaithful presentation of His message. So far as we have achieved this result we have not been faithful witnesses to God for our own time and generation. I claim not only a word or a text here and there in the inspired records, but the whole life-long conduct of Jesus in proof of the truth of what I have said — that when He demanded faith and

6 The Reasonableness of Faith

belief from men, He demanded something which He thought the every-day man was able to give.

Let us notice, then, that our Lord came not to create barriers between God and men, to thrust man farther from God, to call the few to their Father. His yoke was easy. His burden was light, the door of His feast stood wide open, the wanderers in way- sides and hedges were welcome within. When He sowed the seed of the kingdom, the rocky road, the choking thorn, the barren hillside as well as the fruitful earth liberally received the golden grain. He sought no rare possession, like genius, in man. No ! He fastened on some common gift, the most universal, when He appealed to faith and belief. This was Jesus' fixed conviction. Every little child. He said, had faith naturally within, and could sub- stantially exercise it. In Christ's view to demand faith is to make no unfairly diffi- cult demand.

Nor can belief be confused with credulity. This Jesus rebukes again and again. Cre- dulity turns the soul into an ash-heap on which are cast together all sorts of things

The Reasonableness of Faith 7

good and bad, and all alike are wasted. Credulity is not clear-eyed but blear-eyed. Credulity abases judgment. Credulity is a traveller without a guide, or one with a hundred guides who is trying to follow them all by turn. He blunders round in a circle, makes no progress, and wins no goal either of character or attainment.

Nor can faith, as Jesus demands it, be the development of ourselves at the cost of some one part of ourselves (though this fallacy has been taught again and again, and is believed sometimes in the present), at the cost of that part of us by which we know and judge of all other things— our reason. Faith cannot be created, called out, developed, at the cost of reason; for to play off our faith against our reason is to raise a civil war in man, destructive, fratricidal and unnatural.

I would like in passing to recal what Lord Bacon says about this: ''It were better," he says, ''to have no opinion at all of God than such an opinion as is un- worthy of Him; for the one is unbelief, the other contumely." He then goes on to illustrate: ''Plutarch said well, 1 would

8 The Reasonableness of Faith

rather a great deal men said there was no such man as Plutarch at all, than that they should say there was one Plutarch who would eat his own children as soon as bom. ' " For this was what the priests of Saturn taught, that Saturn did.

In the light, then, of the plain practice of Jesus as told to us in the Evangelists, I think it is evident that there were three things faith was not: not difficult or rare, not credulous, and in no way opposed to reason.

Now see how this wonderful story of the transfigured Christ coming down from the moimtain to relieve His sorely confused and beset disciples, and help the father in his misery, and the son in his epilepsy, illustrates what Jesus would have us believe that faith is. Notice first that here Christ confronts all that is most hopeless in life. He is face to face with life's tragedy ; for here we see a father's misery, a son's insanity, a disciple's stupidity, while round the spec- tacle gathers the heedless, gaping crowd.

A father is crying for help, such help as love needs for its loved ones. The cry is the cry of need, of need for another, for

The Reasonableness of Faith 9

another's pain. Most of us have felt it — pain so much deeper, sharper, more unbearably- bitter, than any pain of our own. It is the cry of him who has tried all known methods, tested all panaceas, and won no relief. His long course of disappointment has robbed him of all faith. Expectation even is almost dead. Hear him speak for himself. *'If thou canst do anything, have pity upon us and help us." But this is not the only misery that confronts the Lord. Here is a son's insanity, the very quintessence of earthly failure. How weary we sometimes grow of failure, weary of bearing the burden of failure which is the result of our own miscalculation or sin ! But harder still is it to confront hopefully that heavy burden of failure which seems to weigh on the world from no immediate fault of its own — failure the result of some hidden deed, some for- gotten sin of long ago, an hereditary taint handed down, bringing forth at last its bitter Dead Sea fruit.

But another failure confronts Jesus here, a failure more near and intimate. His chosen disciples, whose great task lies be- fore them as yet unattempted, they who

10 The Reasonableness of Faith

must minister to pain, they who, inspired by Him, must go forth to heal earth's failures, seeking to uplift and inspire those multitudes of men whom it is so hard permanently to touch ; these men have failed in their efforts to help the boy. What promise is this for the work before them? For these men must be not only soldiers, sharing the dangers of the field, but while they fight they must bring succour. They must be in- vincible veterans fighting with one hand, and bearing the wounded to shelter with the other. They must learn to tread out evil, learn to smite and hate it, to steady the poor soul caught in its toil, and, freeing his feet from the entangling snare, set him on the path of life again.

So we behold our Lord confronted by the human need of the father's misery, the son's insanity, and the sad incapacity of earthly ministry. What does Christ do? It is all-important that we should know.

Something in all these men. He says, is put there by God, a quality which lies within them, buried and almost lost, per- haps, but still resident, responsive to meet just such occasions as these. The most

The Reasonableness of Faith ii

real of all human need carries, Christ teaches us, the cure for its want in its own bosom. Belief lies almost dead there among those men because unused for so long. But father and disciple alike, even in the face of such difficulties, can exercise a trust so vital, so warm, so strong, that not only can they stand up in it and conquer for them- selves, but the influence of their own faith can work the deliverance from what seems to be a hopeless failure, and break the ties that have botind this boy in darkness from his cradle.

And what is this belief which Jesus de- mands and calls into exercise, which He challenges, and which immediately comes forth in obedience to His challenge? He does not enter into disquisition or definition of it. He does not even say, ''Believe in Me." It is just belief in God, belief that He is good, not bad ; that He is near, not far ; that He is loving, not indifferent ; that He is all-powerful, not powerless; belief that He is the sort of God, in short, that the dis- tracted father, the imbecile son and the despairing disciple really want, if they will but have it so.

12 The Reasonableness of Faith

Jesus tells them that they do believe in God, that they have always believed in God, that it is human instinct to have faith in God. "Arise and exercise what is your own, and all things are possible to him that belie veth." To convince them of the truth of the great power, of the possibilities of the exercise of this power within them, Jesus will give them a display of divine power. He cannot repeat such displays forever: by doing so He would make them meaning- less. He will not break in on His Father's laws — which are the best laws possible for men — but He will more fully reveal those laws; and, therefore. He works what people call a miracle. That does not mean that He will do a supernatural deed — there can be no such thing as a supernatural deed — but He will more fully explain the natural. He will not alter by one degree any divine order, but He will give in His own person an illustration of the beauty of the order. He will show that it is God's will that misery, insanity, stupidity, should cease to be, and that when men are at one with God as He is, these old oppressions of earth are powerless to resist their faithful, God-trusting will.

The Reasonableness of Faith 13

To them, then, is entrusted a power before which the long entrenched evils of earth shrivel up and disappear.

We know that as long as this Jesus stood before men, living the life that inspired them, doing the deeds that thrilled them, using the old word faith, belief, and breath- ing into it absolutely new meaning — so long did faith to the Apostles mean the exercise of that spiritual faculty within them that lived by the life of Jesus. They were not believing things about Him. Day by day they were drawing vigour, vision, and virtue from Him. And the reason why the Gospels are so invaluable to us, and no criticisms can ever rob them of their value, lies just here — they give to us in its simple beauty, its compelling reasonableness and its utter comprehensiveness, this imperishable pic- ture of the Son of Mary.

At the bidding of faith man stands forth transfigured and transfiguring in his power; for faith is a vast unused capacity inside all men. This is the emphasis Christ lays upon it: ''All things are possible to him that believeth." ''Look not," He says, *'even to Me for immediate deliverance,

14 The Reasonableness of Faith

call not on some new power, seek not to ally yourself with some awe-inspiring thing. Can you believe? Believe with only a little belief, come with Me and I will show you. All things are possible to him that belie veth."

When Jesus stands beside us and calls on us to believe, we sometimes feel that we, too, can face all the pathos and tragedy of life as He speaks. Why, then, have we done so little with this divine endowment? What are we doing with it? Casting it into the lumber-room of unused things, or putting it in some pitiful way into evi- dence, as in some homes they put the family Bible on a table by itself, where, if they did not dust the room day by day, you could write with your finger on the cover. This, we are told, is a day in which faith is wan- ing, and yet we believe in many things, believe quite as much as any generation before believed, and feverishly follow the things we believe. But the faith of which Christ spoke, misdirected and misused, shrinks within us. Crowded out by mean ambition, debased, it loses its hold. Starved and untended, it seems to fail us at the

The Reasonableness of Faith 15

supreme hour of need. We do not take time to believe in God. Perhaps we know that once we did believe in Him, and we think that our belief is with us still; but some night the winds begin to rise, and we hear the voice of the coming storm. We must go out alone on the water, and the ship has, plank by plank, been builded of things we have been and done.

Ah ! some of us have lived in havens land-locked. Safely anchored we have been by stem and stern, and no storm test of life has been possible. We have come to believe that our portion in existence must be everlasting serenity. But no; we too must front the stress of wind and weather, and all we have been and done must be tested by the winds that blow, the floods that flow, and the rains that beat upon the houses of our lives. Friendships only built on favours accepted; deeds that look won- derful outside, but are hollow within; popu- lar descrpitions of us with which men flatter us, or tickle our vanity while we know them to be more than half deceits — what are all of these worth? They are only wreckage before the first rockings of that storm.

1 6 The Reasonableness of Faith

Yet God for every soul of man hath pre- pared that which, doth he but use it, will bear him to haven and safety.

I have seen an old boat lie on the shore. Well built it had been and well-shaped. Its lines are fair and strong. There is its rud- der; oars and sails lie wrapped beneath its thwarts. Launch into the wild sea and trust yourself to it, and quickly it sinks with you into the salt water. Any child can tell you why. For years it has lain unused. The suns have smitten it and the frosts have cracked it. Its seams gape, its timbers part. It is fairly shaped ; it was strongly built. It could once carry fifty. Now it is only a cofhn for one. It has never been put to sea. It is no more help than a boat painted on canvas. In the hour of trial it fails, as all unused, unexercised things must fail. So it is with faith. Care- fully, wisely, firmly within us, the quality and capacity of faith has been builded. It was meant to bear us through all storms and temptations to a fairer, further shore; but laid away, forgotten, unused, it moulders, shrinks and dries up beyond recovery.

But let us turn and look more deeply into

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the nature of faith, see how it comes to be, and why its exercise is so vital to us. You judge of a tree by its fruits, not by its leaf, or even by its flower. You judge of any course of events by its results; a theory too, a doctrine, a philosophy — nay, more, any government or institution. They must all submit to the same test. By that they stand or fall. Not only is there no fairer test, nor any better all-round test, but there is no other test. This, you say, is sound theory. Nay, you say it is more than theory — it is well-ascertained fact; for though we may often deny and forget it, the nature of things around us never forgets it.

Nature has been working on this line for ages untold. She only accepts and pre- serves as her instruments things that suc- cessfully endure this final test. She has a vast work to do, carries on innumerable manufactories under inconceivably numer- ous conditions. She tries all sorts of tools in her vast workshop, and ever and always casts aside all tools that break or fail. In the process she piles up heaps of failures, but the things she finally arrives at — the good things, the useful things, beautiful and

1 8 The Reasonableness of Faith

fitted things — these all have stood the test successively. They are not only good but they keep on improving. In this consists their vital goodness. They are all the time being tested by competition.

How we hated, as boys, our first com- petitive examinations ! How well we re- member the long breath we drew when we were through the last of them. And yet, when we left the examination room, as we thought forever, we were only entering the larger examination hall of life. When we left the competition of the book, study and paper, we were entering on a fiercer test of competition still. For competition rules everywhere, in the air and sky — yes, far aloft in the ether, in the dark earth beneath our feet, in the sunless gulfs of the sea. Every blade of grass, every ear of corn holds its own by competition. The multitudinous things that crawl, that live, that walk, that swim, that fly — they are all of them, little as we notice it, holding their own painfully, in circumstances of fierce struggle. And so it is that from her vast competition halls nature brings forth not only the good but the best. Only the best survive, because

The Reasonableness op Faith 19

she admits no favouritism in her vast house- hold. Her system is absolutely fair. She scorns all suggestion of *'pull. " She loves the strong, the fair, the good, and these at their strongest, fairest, and best. All lesser goods and fairs and strongs are ever making way, under her order, for her best, her fairest and her strongest.

When we denounce competition we de- nounce a divinely ordained process for weeding out the imperfect. Nay, further, we denounce the only conceivable process by which sorrow, pain, imperfection and at last death itself, can be done away. Let us gird up the loins of our minds, face facts, and cease crying for the moon. By competition we are what we are. By competition our children shall be, please God, better than we. God's great competitive examination board is ever in session, and through it our nation has been lately passing, as you well know; for what after all is war, but the competitive examinations of nations?

The point I want to make is this: This faith which Jesus demands of us is a common possession. This religious instinct which even a child possesses is acquired by us all as

20 The Reasonableness of Faith

all other valuable qualities are, as the result of a system of competition. The knowledge of these later times has bidden us hold what is old with new reverence. The very fact that it is old carries to the thoughtful mind proof of its vitality. Its age is the medal on its breast, telling of the many victories it has won, the struggles in which it has conquered things of lesser good than itself. So we value what is old, and we call it beautiful, for we know it is the result of actual worth, that no favouritism of nature has saved it for us. And this truth teaches- us a new respect for the good things around us and within us. They are not only ancient ; they are costly, they are approved, they have won their right to use and a hearing. And the greatest, the most lasting, the most universal of these is faith.

But there is a further reason for valuing faith, another proof of its importance. It is not sufficient in God's economy that things should be old ; they must also be adaptable, for no quality or possession, however vener- able, that lacks this capacity for adaption can live on; or, to go back to what I have said, can keep improving, can keep on hold-

The Reasonableness of Faith 21

ing its own in the competitive examinations of God. And therefore the proof of the vitality of faith is the measure and magni- tude of its adaptabiHty. AdaptabiHty, in this sense, comes to be a greater sign of vitaHty than age. And this adaptabiHty is the pre-eminent quahty of faith. When man's condition was low, his faith was base born. It clothed itself in base forms. When his moral ideas were undeveloped he clothed his ideas of God with his own im- perfections. When he was cruel, so was his God; lustful, so was his God; jealous and full of hatred to his enemies, his God was a God of battles and a jealous God. The reason thoughtless people to-day find fault with the Bible is because many of the pre- sentations of God which its pages bring to us do not agree with our present conceptions of God. If the Bible were not full of mis- conceptions, or old and imperfect concep- tions, it could not in any sense be the Bible at all. It could not be a true history of man's reaching out in earlier times toward God. In centuries much later than those whose record we have in the Bible you can note the same process. From pagan to

2 2 The Reasonableness of Faith

puritan you follow the idea of God, and God is chiefly a law-giver, His chief seat the judgment seat. His title the Lord of Hosts.

But our faith calls, yearns for something higher, for a God higher than the law-giving God and the ruling God. Yes, for One in whom infinite tenderness and mercy can, as the old hymn puts it,

"Make the dying bed Feel soft as downy pillows are."

So in the Bible and, since the Bible was written, still on in human history, faith gathers up all the broken lights that have come from God, all the thoughts which men have in their best hours worthily formed of Him ; gathers them from the artist yearn- ing for His beauty; from the poet, divining His meaning; from the philosopher thirsting for His truth; yes, from misunderstood re- former and martyr. From all religions and all histories faith gathers them up, and sees in the teachings of Jesus the explana- tion and vindication of them all. Old and new, changing because it lives, who can fix for it a birth date, and who can set any boundary to its advancing tide? Man's hunger for and appreciation of God ! So

The Reasonableness of Faith 23

the Son of Man explains to us the universal instinct. We are not inventing an explana- tion of faith. We are face to face with its actuality. This faith of ours is as much an evolution as our eye is, as our hands are; and to-day with us it is not the rudimentary thing it once was, just as our eyes are not the rudimentary things they were once, or our hands the rudimentary things the monkeys once had. Eyes and hands and faith have all been developed by ages of painful use.

But I hear some one object, and the ob- jection at first seems both reasonable and weighty: What proof have you that this faith — the result of evolution, possessing wonderful powers of adaption — has not, hke many other old things, fulfilled its pur- pose and is now no longer useful? Let us consider this a moment. There are things within us that are old, and have no doubt been in the past adaptable, but, so far as we can see, are useful no longer. What distinguishes them? They are like links connecting us to the brutishness of the past. They are marks of a lower order. The scientists call them vestigia, for they are

24 The Reasonableness of Faith

carried around by the living body, but are not fulfilling a living function ; are not vitally important to any part of our lives. The proof that we can do without them is that we do not use them at all, or use them less and less.

Now faith I hold is probably not one of these. What is best and highest and most seemly in our lives is ever dependent on the exercise of the religious instinct. It would not be hard to prove that in every depart- ment of progress man fortifies and inspires himself by the use of this part of himself — the inspirational impulse toward the best of which he is cognizant. I have no claim to scientific learning, but I can quote the words of one who had the greatest mind probably that Germany ever produced and I remember again that it is Goethe who says: ''Only the believing ages are the fruitful ages. " Scientific progress and scien- tific men are commonly supposed to have little to do with faith (a supposition which, by the way, I think is false), but to-day faith has modified the whole aspect of science. Contrast the greatest scientists the past has produced with the attitude of the present

The Reasonableness of Faith 25

scientific men. Consider the wisdom of Egypt confronting the baffling mysteries of the universe ! Hear the spirit of the past speak in the motto of the Temple of Isis : "I am whatever hath been, is, or ever will be, and my veil hath no man yet lifted. " Now hear the later voice: ''Veil after veil have we lifted, and her face grows more beautiful, august and wonderful with every barrier withdrawn. "

But let us contrast religion where faith dwells and religion where mere resignation takes the place of the hope and inspiration that rightly belongs to faith. For let us not forget this: Faith is never mere ac- ceptance; it is the appreciation of God that yearns and strives and grows from good to better, and from pure to purer. It is the religious instinct in exercise.

On reading an interesting book lately, the tale of a strange life lived in the Far East — ''Colonel Gardiner's Memoirs" — I came on this story. Gardiner was staying with a mountain chieftain who held sway over a lonely valley on the borders of Thibet. This valley and all its inhabitants were threatened by the ruthless incursion of a

26 The Reasonableness of Faith

more powerful chieftain, of whom all the people lived in dread. Gardiner's host set himself to procure a present which, when presented to the tyrant, would save his people from rapine. An old fakir lived in a cave at the mouth of the valley. For years the old man had lived only to pray and to share his scanty provision with travellers poorer than himself. He possessed, however, an extraordinary ruby, which had come to him by direct descent, a family heirloom from the time of the great Timour. Gardiner describes their visit to the old man. They found him immersed in contemplation, and the chief told the cause of their visit, the threatened invasion, the certain ruin to all his people, and begged that, in the hope of propitiating the tyrant, the old man would give to him his one treasure. He listened, said Gardiner, and then he arose, went to a comer of the hut and unwound the jewel (which, by the way, was as safe in his keep- ing as though it had been in the Bank of England, for no one in that country would touch the dwelling of the fakir), unwound the jewel from a bit of rag and put it in his visitor's hands, saying: "I hope the gift

The Reasonableness of Faith 27

may have the result you expect." Large money was offered, but this the old man would not take. " But you may, if you will, " he said, "give me a larger allowance of corn, for many hungry people pass this way." Then he asked to be left alone, and com- posed himself to prayer again. Here in this lonely, distant, unknown land, where no Anglo-Saxon had ever come before, was holiness of a pure type, unworldliness complete in its renunciation, charity as unselfish as that of the Son of Mary Himself. Yet numberless such men have for long centuries sat in their caves or huts, looking on the fair plains of the valleys of those cruel lands. Alas ! their holiness has not availed in those regions to advance by an inch, so far as we can see, the cause of life, humanity and truth. Lust and cruelty reign supreme. Regions once prosperous and happy are desert and soaked in blood. Man still remains as he has been for cen- turies, a ravening wild beast. And why? Because the progressive power of religion lives in faith alone, and not in mere un- worldliness. No renunciation, no unselfish charity, no piety, nor all these combined.

28 The Reasonableness of Faith

however splendid they are, can, when faith has fled from them, permanently uplift mankind.

There is such a thing as heredity in good- ness. Men are like tops often. The top spins a long time after the string that spun it is withdrawn, but in time it totters to a fall. So hereditary goodness stored up will uphold individuals, will for a time even sustain society; but take faith away, and though courage still upholds the brave, and fortitude still supports the strong of heart, the skies have become gray over the pilgrim masses of men, their marching lines have become broken, and no sweet singing cheers the march, no heavenly allies help them on their way. Such pilgrims will not keep on marching forever, such soldiers will soon cease to fight ; for even Mr. Greatheart is himself a pilgrim, without hope of a celestial city; and Galahad a knight-errant, who dares no longer hope for a glimpse of the white light of the Holy Grail.

But let us see how the Church has dealt with faith. First, let us remember it is not the policy of the Lord himself to utterly destroy old conceptions that are part of

The Reasonableness of Faith 29

man's very growing. He replaces them slowly with better ones. And so His new gospel, as it clashed with time-honoured beliefs, must merge and mingle with them. Mankind's whole previous conception of God was as unlike Jesus Christ as it well could be. When the bodily vision of Him passed, the great doctors and saints of the time soon began to create from His teach- ings, as they understood them, systems of religion crude in form and profession, differ- ing radically from Christ's gospel. It could not be otherwise. Man's dominating idea of God had been the God of force. Sheer almightiness was exalted — man bidden to bow — but sheer almightiness has no sweet reasonableness. It may command and threaten, but it ever remains a sort of militant rule of life, a martial law for conscience ; the rigorous control during a crisis, not the normal condition of a peaceful and pro- gressive life. But since the mere almighty idea of God of necessity died slowly, ere it passed there grew from it a whole series of conceptions of a punishing and damning God. Men bowed to religious laws as they bowed to national laws. The world owed

30 The Reasonableness of Faith

much to the iron-law-clutch of rule, and in the Church, in lesser scale, came naturally to be reproduced a similar condition. It seemed reasonable for men to demand, in the name of God, obedience, acceptance of certain definite things. They made pic- tures of Jesus that were often veriest cari- catures. They baked their truths into hard and fast shape. Things that appeared to be true about Jesus, men were told they must believe; and faith came to be a de- mand, and not the exercise of an instinct.

The movement was inevitable. It was the highest sort of religious movement that the time was capable of, but none the less it replaced Christ's idea of faith with a lesser one. It practically said that faith was not merely the exercise of the religious instinct addressed to its Lord, but the en- forced belief in a complex system of things. I have dwelt on this devolution of Chris- tianity just to show that it was a growth in the opposite direction to Christ's teaching. As I have said, it had to be. The world was not capable of evolving or accepting any- thing higher. But truth put in hard and fast shape, or in a word, dogmas, cannot

The Reasonableness of Faith 31

produce the highest form of Christ's like- ness. Dogmas are poor food for the soul. The Great Physician knew best, and seeing far into the future as He did, and knowing what must be the deepest needs of the present, as well as of future times, He never once made a demand on any soul for this lower sort of faith. Well He knew that belief in the mere almightiness of God only tends to make strong natures diabolic; that repression incites rebellion. And so, in not one single, authentic incident did He so represent His Father or make claim for Himself. Recal one instant, if you can, where faith, as Jesus demanded it, meant believing in things. Always and ever, rather, did faith with Him mean belief in the sort of God that "I reveal to you;" ''He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. "

So much for Christ's demand. How about the Apostles' demand for faith? What did they mean, for example, by faith as a pre-requisite to baptism? What was baptism? Was it more than a common rite to which was given a new significance, an open confession in the sight of men of obedience to Jesus, a declaration that He

32 The Reasonableness of Faith

was the Son of God ; that His cause was the one to fight for; His society the divine and final society? Those who would be His followers must be baptized. What was the form of baptism? We know that baptism at first was not administered in any other form but the name of Jesus. The very early Christians were not even baptized in the name of the Trinity. This was a later form. Belief in Jesus was the one thing demanded, and that without any disquisition on the nature of God at all.

There is not one single line in all St. Paul's Thirteen Letters to lead us to suppose that he laid any stress, with the multitude of his converts, on mysterious questions of religious truth; whether, for instance, Jesus was the Son of Mary alone, or the Son of Mary and Joseph. The subject does not come up with St. Paul. Nor is there one line to lead us to suppose he formulated for his converts any doctrine of the Trinity. Rather, Paul said, as his Master had said before him, "Jesus stands before you — do you admire Him, can you love Him, can you find it in your hearts to obey Him? I speak to you as the Apostle, the messenger to a despairing

The Reasonableness of Faith 33

world of the visible God in humanity. Here at last is rest, pardon and hope for men. "

But this is not what men are asked to do to-day. They are confronted with, or think they are confronted with, certain churchly demands. They must stand up to say a creed, and they are told that that creed is not simply a symbol of their faith, but an accurate definition of things which they consider to be often utterly beyond human knowing, or at least human defining. Or, second, they must submit to the rite of baptism. But baptism does not seem to them to be quite what the old rite was. Once it meant danger braved, and now, too often, they see it degraded till it is merely a fashionable function. And the third de- mand is, that they should kneel at the com- munion table, where again " believing things" confronts them. They have some dim idea of what it means to kneel with the Lord of long ago, when the multitude clamoured for Him and were plotting His death, to kneel around the altars of the early Church when heathen Rome thundered and the Arena reeked of blood. But what does this kneeling mean to-day? They are told it

34 The Reasonableness of Faith

expresses a sorrow for sin which they cannot always honestly call forth.

I might go farther, but time forbids me. Here these three simple acts, these demands of the Church, are each and all of them made to rest on a false idea of faith. They are not made the expression of personal obedi- ence and reverence for Jesus. They have been perverted from that. And can we not see that the natural man, the inferior man, often likes this system of perver- sion, that he will readily comply with these things? Cannot any one see that he does this because he is a lesser man ? The more scrupulous men, however — the men built to a higher order, whose re- ligion does not mean a bargaining with God, but an effort to follow God in honesty of soul — these greater, larger men cannot ac- cept such conditions, but ever draw back from them. They do so, not captiously, but in order that they may safeguard the very eye of the soul, the religious instinct itself. A faith in things suits the natural man, alas, too well. He is ever its de- fender. But it leaves uncomforted and unblest men of larger mould.

The Reasonableness of Faith 35

So, based on this misapprehension of the meaning of faith, there has grown up a false idea of the Church. From the Church men turn away, for she seems to come to them with intolerable demands. She makes them suspect God, not love Him. She seems an exacting Church, not a giving and freeing Church, as of old she came in beauty and might to men. The best and most scrupu- lous men hold back from her too often, doubtful of that to which they are asked to commit themselves. Could they but realize that religious faith is but a striving after obedience to Jesus, the simple, great Jesus Christ of the gospels; to seek to do what He would have us do to make earth more fit for His divine rule, to slowly lift life's laws into harmony with love's law ! Let the Church demand these things of men, and again will men listen to her, and again will she lead them on in the path of a high resolve. And though they stagger, painfully at times, yet will they follow her, for following her will then be following Him.

Faith, then, as Jesus and also His Apostles demanded its exercise, was not believing things that were hard to believe. It was

36 The Reasonableness of Faith

using a divinely implanted instinct, a power and a faculty within us that answers to the presentation of the living, loving God made visible in Jesus Christ. When this faith has failed to fasten its grasp on Him, again and again it has created for itself distorted images, again and again it has found itself disastrously following wandering fires; but still it ever contains within itself power to turn to the true vision, and bow before the supreme beauty, perceiving the beautiful to be beautiful, and the good to be good, and, therefore, sent from God. From this the Christian Church started, and to this the Christian Church must return. This is the real Church. This is the real Christian- ity. This is the Christianity that shook the whole world and lifted it out of its despair. This is the Christianity that can breathe peace into the deep unrestfulness of our times. It shows no defect of nature to refuse to believe in old things just because they are old. Tradition, however vener- able and weighty, may be rooted in utter error. It has often been proved to be so rooted. To find one's self, therefore, incapable of accepting truths accredited by most

The Reasonableness of Faith 37

venerable tradition shows no defect of nature. I repeat ; to refuse to believe things is no sin; but to refuse Jesus the faith He demands — ah, what shall we say of that ?

We are told men take masses of precious stuff, and, subjecting it to intolerable heat, expect at last to see glowing in its centre one tiny, blood-red drop — the ruby. So in Jesus there is for man the declaration of his own preciousness. The ages of human struggle have not been in vain. The chaos that often seemed to engulf man's life was only the prelude to God's cosmos. All the pains, and all the struggles, and all the hopes of the mothers and fathers of the world were justified when at last, as the result of all the intolerable heat and pain of living, there came forth One utterly beauti- ful, completely good, and men bowed before Him and cried : " Behold the Son of God ! "

More than once before on earth had burst forth that ecstatic cry. But when at last His own lips speak, we hear Him say : '' The Son of Man!" To fail to see in Him a present beauty, a visible loveliness, to fail to hear and own the sway and inspiration of His heavenly music — this indeed is to argue

38 The Reasonableness of Faith

defect and limitation ; for such failure means, in part at least, a moral death.

Press faith on men. Emphasize it as believing things, and you have but erected thorny hedges around the cross of the Christ through which men must peep, over which, wounded, they may strain, and after all only see partial views and catch distorted outlines of Him Whom you would place within. This has been done again and again; done with the best intention, done by those possessed of a passionate love for Him Whom they would protect. But the human hedges, whether erected by friends or foes, with spiny barrier forbid the child- faith He so loved to come near Him.

I would not be misunderstood. Creeds are necessary, dogmas in their place essen- tial. I have said nothing to decry them. Many dogmas and doctrines have been slowly evolved, and are the result of much pain, of long and reverent study, and show a profoimd insight as to human needs and divine revelation. Thus thoughtfully, rever- ently let us receive these partial statements of eternal truth, till the Master open our minds for better and higher things still.

The Reasonableness of Faith 39

Thoughtful men will readily admit that we must have creed in every active relation of life. The merchant has a creed in his office ; the scientist one in his laboratory; the brick-layer and builder one at his finger's ends; and the soldier who charges and dies at San Juan Hill, or amid the kopjes of Natal does so because he accepts and obeys the soldier's creed. The creed is a certain accepted thing on which I, as a man, base my action. The creed is a working neces- sity at all times. In every department of life, as much as in the religious department, *'no creed" means paralysis.

And still further I must hold my creed with other men, and make it a basis of working with other men. The individualist simply argues himself a fool when he says: "I must unite with other men to make money, unite to get learning, unite to pro- duce any valuable earthwork, or unite to defend anything that is worth defending. But when it comes to a question of doing good and developing my own character, let me alone. Here I will be my own guide. Here no man shall dictate to me, aid me, or judge me." He may be perfectly in-

40 The Reasonableness of Faith

telligent, and have thought intelligently along other lines, but along the spiritual line he is not a thinker. He is talking foolishly. All this is true and timely.

But what to-day is most important to emphasize surely is this : all these doctrines, dogmas, and creeds, however necessary they may be, are but crutches and walking-sticks, not hands and feet. They are but a tempor- ary expression of the eternal verity, and, as they change and pass, by their very change are evidencing the might of the living truth which, because it is the everlasting seed, can ever, must ever, reclothe itself in a series of new and beautiful bodies, thus proving its life.

Shortly before he died Tennyson said: ''My most passionate desire is to obtain a clearer and fuller view of God." So spoke and still speak the great of the earth. For man cannot live by bread alone. And if we have learned in our heart of hearts to want Jesus, then some glorious day He will surely open our eyes to see the things we cannot see now. The way shall be open for us, and the lame man shall leap as the hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.

The Reasonableness of Faith 41

The little lame boy needs his crutch as he limps beside his father; but when they both of them come to the stream-side, his father takes him in his arms, and he needs his crutches no more.

Let me beg, then, my friends, your care- ful consideration for the meaning of faith. I insist on it as of vital importance to-day. Oh ! let us search our hearts so that we may keep alive and in health this divinely ap- preciative part of us. We are making pro- vision for this part of our life itself. It is ever the eye of the soul ; and all the spicery of all the Indies, all the glut of all the seas, all the flattery of all the myriad sycophants of our time, cannot take its place, nay, cannot satisfy the soul from which faith is departing.

Be you inside the Church or outside the Church, I charge you, then, make provision for this faith that is in you, this religious faculty God has given you, which you hold by virtue of the painful struggles of the past, and for the handing down of which to your children you will be held accountable by God. Keep the religious instinct alight. Keep single this divine part. For in each

42 The Reasonableness of Faith

soul of man it is the little window opening to the Everlasting Day.

It is because this wonderful religious in- stinct and aspiration within us links us to God, that faith, and faith only, can trans- form. By faith's use it is absolutely true we are transformed men. Faith softens us, widens us, deepens our sympathy. It breathes a peace over all our life. Why, take it in the lower sphere. You trust a friend of great resources — you who are poor and friendless and burdened with a load you cannot carry. You go to your friend, you lay your case before him. He meets you with kindly hand and eye, and before you know it your burden is rolling from your shoulders, and you go away from his house or his office with lighter tread and hope re- bom. Or you trust in some one you love — your friend, your child — and in the strength of that trust, no matter how fierce the sun or how cruel the cold and frost, you find warmth and shelter. What accomplishes the wonder? It is just faith. Faith in what is highest and best in those you know down here. And so you go forth to life's inevitable struggles with a gentler heart.

The Reasonableness of Faith 43

Faith justifies all it does and sees here by what it believes in beyond. Faith is in- tuition triumphing over appearances, ''the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." Put trust in God, the Good over all, the Worker in all, the Power behind all, and at last the Judge of all — not the outside and distant God, but the immi- nent and inside God, moving through all men. When we reach this point, my friends, we hear an echo of divine harmony, and we know the beginnings of a holy peace.

"We know in part — how, then, can we Make plain each heavenly mystery ? Yet still the Almighty understands Our human hearts, our human hands, And, overarching all our creeds, Gives His wide presence to our needs. "

And now as I close I turn specially to you young men and women who to-day go forth from this great university into the larger life beyond. Oh, still it is true, true to-day as it was eighteen hundred years ago — ''all things are possible to him that believeth.'' Believe in your friends, believe in your country, in your institutions, in yourself, in your God. Believe in your dreams, your best and highest and holiest dreams. Many

44 The Reasonableness of Faith

things you may have to give up, but never surrender these. Use the BeHef you have, and it will surely grow to more. For

"So nigh is glory to our dust So close is God to man, When duty whispers low, 'Thou must,* The youth replies, 'I can.'"

COURAGE

"Add to your faith courage."

// Peter, i: 5

Why does the display of courage always move us, even when that courage belongs to what we would call the lower order? We love a brave dog above a cowardly one. Why is it we resent, as a personal insult, any hint of the want of courage in our- selves? I believe, my friends, we have here an unconscious tribute to a divine law. We accept the presence of courage as neces- sary, we resent the absence of it, are filled with shame at the thought of the absence of it, because courage is a divine necessity. No race can flourish or ever has flourished, without courage. In the long ago, brute courage was necessary in brute struggle; and through those ages of strife life had to pass. As life moves upward toward its farther goal, the nature of courage, of course, changes, but the necessity for it 45

46 The Reasonableness of Faith

remains the same. Environment will do much for a people, craft and finesse for a time may save a nation's life; but, sooner or later, however favoured that race may be, without courage it passes from the regard and admiration of mankind. Some thoughtlessly, I know, instance the Jews as a people who have held their own mar- vellously and yet were lacking in courage. Yet but a slight study of that nation's history makes it evident that nothing but sheer valour saved the chosen people again and again.

To pass, however, more immediately to the sort of courage which the writer pleads for — ''Add," he says, "to your faith cour- age. " Courage, without faith, as I have tried to point out briefly, is a powerful thing. The courage of Rome was pitiless and unmoral. The courage of Greece co-existed with con- tempt for all mankind except the Greek. But it is not the unmoral courage of Rome, nor the hypercritical courage of the Greek, that can stand us in stead to-day. These, in no sense, could be said to have added courage to their faith. Nor will every union of faith and courage avail to make and keep

Courage 47

man great. The Barbary pirates have faith as well as courage. The Soudanese have an enthusiastic faith and matchless courage. Perhaps they are physically the bravest race that tread the earth to-day; yet, in their combination of faith and courage, there is no moral quality, and they are thrust out beyond the bounds of civiliza- tion, and by the cruel law of civilization must inevitably perish.

And so we come, my friends, to the con- clusion that valour necessary to the develop- ment of Christian character, the valour we need to add to our faith, must be a valour of no obsolete type, no mere physical bravery, no mere wilhngness to contend against long odds, to risk everything in the contention. It must go forward to its work, the ally and support of an intelligent faith, a growing faith, faith that grasps the truth of new ideas; valour which, at any cost to self- interest and self-pleasing, determines to achieve them. Faith will vitalize and ap- propriate new forms, courage fit itself to new conditions, and thus only can the cause of God and man be won. Such character may indeed be hard to mould, such task

48 The Reasonableness of Faith

hard to achieve. But let me remind you, this Sunday morning, that if the path be- fore us is steep and thorny, and the enemies against us are many and strong, they will be not few that are on our side. Ours is in truth a high calling. If ever a people should be called on to exercise a high degree of courage, we are that people. The herit- age we have received is rich in both faith and courage. Those peoples whose blood mingled in our veins were faithful among the faithful, were bravest among the brave. English, German, Huguenot, Scandinavian, Celt — where has bravery dwelt, where has faith purified and inspired mankind, if not in these families of men? Their courage, their faith, are our heritage to-day. It is for us to be worthy of that heritage.

Why do I press on you, my people in St. George's, the need of courage? I do so because I see all around us things which, it seems to me, tend to make us ignore and forget its imperative need. First of all, our easy position among the nations, the happy fortune of our lot, our immense un- earned estate, rich beyond precedent in all that goes to make the resources on which

Courage 49

a people can build prosperity; the un- exampled suddenness of our riches; an unassailable position, hedged off from trou- ble by three thousand miles of sea; set, as it were, alone in the midst of the earth, the strifes, the turmoils, the vast destruc- tions of other races and continents not for us or for our people. Waxing fat, we begin to dream that life owes us comfort, plenty, power, ease. This is the devil's lie. Life owes such things to no one — to no people. Remember it once for all, no nation ever has cheaply obtained these things which make it stable and great. Comfort, plenty, power, ease, self-control — these ever, always, are only the reward of long toil, persistent endeavour and victorious conquest urged against odds that seemed overwhelming. Two brief struggles we have had, neither comparable to those struggles through which other peoples have passed. Be sure that longer and more protracted ones await us. If we are to be truly great, if the dross is to be purified from the pure gold of our life, oh, be very sure of this, the plans and laws of God cannot know reversal in our favour. No favouring clause can be inserted in the

50 The Reasonableness of Faith

divine statutes on our behalf. We must know chastisement, we must know trial, and through these we must win our way, before, in any sense, we can be truly stable and great.

Again, I think, there is much in the so- caUed orthodox religion of the present day that makes little of courage. There is a tendency to discount masculine virtues, the hardihood, perseverance, honest pride and love of work that belonged to the gener- ations preceding us. These are not dwelt on as they should be ; these are not sought as they deserve to be sought. Religion is too often taught as a thing apart. These masculine virtues are in danger of being neglected in our religious conceptions, be- cause in secular life they are in danger of being neglected. Prosperity and wealth are sought by cunning, craft, clever com- bination, lying advertising of self, unscrupu- lous manipulation of fellow man; above all, by tricky laws favourable to individuals or groups of individuals. Such methods are lauded as necessary to success. And this is done not alone by those without character or without position. The most

Courage 51

successful men are known to employ these methods, confess that they employ these methods very often; and orthodox religion, sometimes, at least, receives their con- science money and holds its tongue; stands by again while the seamless coat of God is torn into parts, and while men who even think themselves to be Christians venture to teach and to practise an utter atheism, real and sadly effective in its denial of God, however unconscious that denial may be; a denial which asserts that religion is one thing, patriotism another thing, and busi- ness yet another thing.

Ah ! there is no room for courage there, or for much faith either. Religion becomes flabby, washy, full of humbug, and valour gives way to craft. Men don't stand up straight before their fellow men, any more than they stand up straight before their God. Life's balances are false, life's weights tricky. Better open warfare than such damnable deceit. When men divorce from their religion or subordinate in their religious thinking such simple, straightforward ideals which we call masculine — hardihood, per- severance, honest pride, love of work and

52 The Reasonableness of Faith

fairness of dealing between man and man — religion will be found to take refuge in the hysterical, and then men and women read without condemnation such gross carica- tures on religion and mankind, on both faith and courage, as you find in the popu- lar Hall Caine's '' Christian," which is mere rant and hysteria from one cover to the other. Its faith is delusion, its courage that of a Don Quixote; and in a time when knight errantry for Christ is needed as much as it ever was, the simple, manly Christianity which has won, and ever will command the admiration and respect of sentient beings, gradually passes from the field.

Shall we be discouraged on account of these things? Far from it. The purposes of God are sure. Those that do not add valour to their faith will fail of their high calling. Others will listen to the calling they refused, will take up 'the tasks they were false to, win the victories they shrunk from, and at last stand on fairer shores and bathe in the sunshine of a clear day. This must come, for the nature of things is on the side of faith and courage. Think with me, for a moment, how certain this is.

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God's kindly stern old nurse, Nature, man- ages to harden her children somehow. She wears a stem look about the eyes, but in her bosom is a kindly heart. Omniscience has set her to her task. She will see to it that no race succeeds, no children brought up at her knee win in the fight, but those who are capable of sustained conflict. Nature has set us among stormy seas and under gray skies, given us to till a weedy earth, a long, exhausting struggle to wage, — this she sets us to, and all for a divine purpose. Now and then her children forget it; but rudely she stirs them up. Pain is here, sore sorrow and disease, separation comes, the thwarting of holiest desire, the denial of loftiest ambi- tion, the inexplicable things of life are ever present with us, the highest and truest prayers of the soul often remain unanswered. All these are, as it were, the hands of Nature fastening iron armour on us, whether we will or not, making us stand when we want to crawl, making us mount when we fain would rest, holding us in life's battle line when we would fain shrink back.

But look away from Nature for a moment. See man himself. He has a second fight on

54 The Reasonableness of Faith

his hands, a fight for his very soul, a fight to which the first fight is a mere skirmish. The moral nature of him wrestles for its very life with the dormant beast within. He comes into the world with leaden weights to his feet, with anchor chains that hold him to the mud and slime of things; and weighted and tied by these, he is bidden swim, — swim in a salt tide that brims to his very lip, swim and swim against wave and current, keep swimming when he is wearied to death, — if he would ever land on a far, fair shore. The battle within is a battle indeed to which the outward strug- gle is but a skirmish. He cannot evade responsibility, he cannot drift, because choice, all momentous, is thrust on him, whether he will or will not. Opportunity bows before him, but he must grasp her, grasp her quick and hold her firm — dally with her, she is gone. Emotions move him tenderly, sing to him like spring birds till he hears their song echoing in his blood ; but he must transform motions into action if they would stay with him. Action must be repeated and repeated, and then at last emotions remain and crystallize into charac-

Courage 55

ter. But deal with them only occasionally, and as the morning cloud they vanish, and as the evening dew they pass away. And behind them they leave an exhausted life, a cold, barren, burnt-out life, where once dwelt the green, odorous possibilities of fruitfulness.

Therefore let us take courage. But let us never forget that the nature of things around us and the nature of life within us, both insist, with an insistence of divine pre- vision, that if we would live and prosper, we must, somehow, add to our faith courage.

And lastly, my people, what sort of courage shall we. have ? Oh ! to-day, if ever, we see the need of a courage that recks not of odds; a courage that is deter- mined to win against odds, be they what they may, (I don't say, mark you, does not tremble at odds — the very highest class of courage often trembles) . I suppose some of you remember the story of the Peninsula officer, a man of undoubted courage, who happened to command a regiment before he had ever seen service. He had to lead his regiment to the attack of a heavy line of battle and against a superior artillery. As

56 The Reasonableness of Faith

he stood in front of the long Hne of his men in which gaps were being blown, moment by moment, by the enemy's guns, the men in the front line could see that their Colonel's knees were fairly knocking together, and some said mockingly, "See, he is afraid!" But there were those who knew the Colonel, and, standing near him, heard him talking to himself, and this is what he said as he regarded his trembling extremities, "Oh, shake away, but if you knew where I was going to take you, you would give way altogether/'

Yes, the courage that will make us worthy of our opportunity and of our time has to be a courage of the soul as well as of the limbs — the courage that Bunyan has so splen- didly described in the doings of Mr. Great Heart. Great Hearts for a great time — yes, they never have been lacking. No need to speak of the past — God has not left Himself without record in the present. It was the great heart of Gordon that held for so long Khartoum. It was a great heart that bore Bishop Hannington into the centre of blood-stained Africa and there sustained him, till he fell under the

Courage 57

spears of those he came to save. It was a great heart that kept Bishop Patteson ever cheerful and brave in his lonely mission to the far Pacific Islands, till on their sands he gave up his life. It was a great heart that spoke in F. W. Robertson of Brighton, till, worn out, he died at thirty-five, the greatest preacher that the English Church has produced in the nineteenth century, yet the worst abused man in England. It was a great heart that enabled Mazzini to endure his self-appointed exile and the calumny and scorn of those who should be his friends and allies.

And so with a high courage fell only yesterday a man that all who knew loved and delighted to honour — a true servant, a true lover of his fellow men — Henry George.

True prophets, knight errants without sbame or smutch — they and hundreds of thousands unknown to fame, whose work, known and unknown, has kept the world for God ! These all counted odds as nothing, never stopped to think of mere reward or human favour, for they knew that life could not be gauged by these. Mighty for

58 The Reasonableness of Faith

good were they, because courage in them went with faith.

What we need, to-day, is a courage that springs from trust, trust in God and trust in man. If you trust God, you must trust man. Just as if you really loved God, you cannot help loving men; for men are the crowning result of creation, of redemption, of salvation. All the world exists, Christ and all the martyrs lived and died, for men. And so your faith in God is a sham unless it leads you to faith in men, as your love for God is a fraud unless it makes you love men. And love and faith in men, and love and faith in God, must ever go hand in hand. There can be no real progress where this mutual trust does not control things. And so I say to you, this morning, be brave to trust men. Look for faith in men and you will find it. Look for courage in man, look for honesty and patriot- ism in men and you will find and inspire them. You will always find what you look for — never forget that ! Look for the mean and the small, and they will crawl out before your eyes. Look for the great and the fair, and they will stimulate you and cheer you

Courage 59

on. Oh ! let us trust men more, for Jesus trusted men ; and if the men He trusted first crucified Him, never forget that at last they crowned Him.

Let us be brave, then, let us pray to be J3j.ave,— brave for our great land, brave for our splendid heritage of institution, brave for our race's sake. Let us pray to be brave against odds, brave whether the battle seems to go ill or well. Victory is the General's business— to carry ourselves like men is ours. We have nothing to do with odds— our simple duty is to hold the ground where we stand. Oh pray, then, to be brave. Look around the world and you will see there are plenty to be wise, plenty to be prudent, tactful, cautious,— let us pray to be valiant for His truth upon the earth. And may God who loves a brave heart help us to remember that at the last —

'• Only the Master shall praise us, And only the Master shall blame, And no man shall work for money, And no man shall work for fame; But each for the joy of workmg, Each in his separate star, Shall draw the thing as he sees it ^^ For the God of things as they are.

November, 1897.

THERE WRESTLED A MAN WITH HIM

UNTIL THE BREAKING OF

THE DAY

*' There wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

"Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. " — Genesis, xxxii: 24, 28.

We misjudge Jacob, because we insist on looking at him as though he were a man of our times, as though his standards were our standards. As a fact, he was a man of one thing. One determination ruled his whole life — to win for his posterity the blessing of the first-bom. In order to do so, he did things that now would be un- allowable; but we must not forget to look at these things as the good men of his own time would have looked at them. Un- doubtedly, he aimed for the highest he saw, he strove for the holiest he knew, and God asks no man to do more. We are judged most truly by our own people, by men of our own race ; and Jacob's own people finally concluded to give him the place of a prince. 61

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He was one of those few whom not fate itself availed to turn from his purpose. Even seemingly divine interposition itself could not swerve him. Do not forget that this is the main point of Jacob's story. It is this quality in Jacob's character that gives him a rightful place among the immortals of the earth. That this instinct of absolute devotion to what a man feels to be his highest call is ever the voice of God, we know from the teachings of Jesus Christ Himself. These specially hardy sons of His, God loves, and, loving them, sends severest trial, allots the fiercest struggles; and this because they are His chosen ones. It was Christ Himself who tried, with what seems a cruel persistency, the faith of one weak woman. ''It is not meet," said He, "to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs." Her unconquerable faith endures even such a rebuke, and then from the lips of love there bursts forth an appreciation, the like of which no one else during His earthly pilgrimage seemed to win from Him : *' O woman, great is thy faith ; be it unto thee even as thou wilt." When you come to think of it, there was nothing strange in

There Wrestled a Man 63

the Lord's so dealing with that faithful woman; for when a great task has to be achieved, a great duty done, whom do we choose? We wisely choose our bravest and our best; on them we lay the burden, and to them, having borne it, we give the praise.

This discipline of struggle is true also of nations and of periods as well as of indi- viduals. This will be apparent to you, if you think about it. The great ages were not the easy ages, but ages in which the face of nature seemed dark and forbidding, times in which men went forth to struggle and discovery. The permanently good things that come to mankind are not those easily won. The things that make for deepest peace, abiding happiness in us all — these are not the result of plenty merely, do not always come with physical comfort: we only win them by persistent strenuous- ness. And great men are not those whose path has been easy, whose burden has been light. The men who won empire, or wrestled with nature for her deeply hidden secret, who lived to produce the beautiful and the true in art or in literature, who saw fair and

64 The Reasonableness of Faith

clear visions of a higher and holier society — • I ask you, what sort of lives such men have lived ? Surely, it is only the stupid and dull- eyed who persuade themselves that the really great, good and far-seeing men of each age are the men who naturally suc- ceed. It is only the degenerate church that thoughtlessly cries Amen to such a proposi- tion. The Master never taught so. Ye shall be betrayed. He says, by parent and kinsfolk and friends, and some of you shall they cause to be put to death. Ye shall be hated of all men, but there shall not a hair of your head perish. Mark it — loss of every- thing, but the real self, the real power; nothing retained beyond that. The power from the living God to reveal to their times a ''life'' — and that is everything; for that is the most beautiful, harmonious, abundant, divine gift that men can hold in trust for their fellows.

Why have I thus briefly developed for you, my people, the part struggle plays in the building up of the kingdom of God? Because I believe God has called us to new effort and new trial to-day. New ways and tasks, and wrestlings lie before us.

There Wrestled a Man 65

The prospect of them has dismayed many. Many true and good men are cast down, and their depression has found frequent voice most prominently, I am sorry to say, in some of our time-honoured pulpits. The cry of discouragement and fear arises not from the poor and the ignorant men, but from the educated and intelligent among us, from men to whom we are ac- customed to look for words of soberness. They tell us the country is in danger, that a new policy of expansion is the beginning of the end of her story of greatness. We are proposing to ourselves to hold colonies, have dependencies, rule subject peoples. Look first at home, they cry. See how we have failed there. Listen to the story of race riot in the South, see the pitiful condi- tion of the Indian in the West. Note the failure of municipal government every- where. Mark the shame and corruption in State legislation. And, remembering all this, what madness is it, they cry, to accept new responsibilities and place on our shoul- ders new burdens ! I do not wish to be uncharitable, but it is my firm conviction that such an attitude of mind proves these

66 The Reasonableness of Faith

doleful prophets to be out of sympathy with much that is most vitally alive in our time.

I think these pessimists have failed to note the great advance that has been made by our people. They expect a highly developed civilization too soon. They have not carefully marked the great advance already made. When I turn to the men who know, — each in his own field, — what they are talking about, when I visit the leaders in such movements as are repre- sented by Hampton and Tuskegee — there I find hopefulness, not despair. If I want to note the progress made by our plain people, I give up a month to study those extraordinaiy concourses met in Chicago a few years ago, and compare the hundreds of thousands there assembled with similar great gatherings in England or France. If I would give consideration to the best philo- sophical thought of the time on the ques- tion, I listen to a really great man like Herbert Spencer, and from the study there sounds a voice as emphatically hopeful as from the schools where the common people meet. The great synthetic philosopher is

There Wrestled a Man 67

as far from despair as the coloured genius of Tuskegee.

But, these doleful prophets of to-day not only make a grave mistake in their judgment of the movements around them, but it seems to me they are forgetful of the ascertained laws of Cod. What do I mean by the ascertained laws of God ? Let me go back for a moment to make my mean- ing plain. For sake of argument, admit those correct who say that we cannot govern ourselves, cannot clean our streets, cannot command honesty of government in our legislatures, have not as yet produced a thoroughly united people. Admit it all — what are we going to do about it? Leave theorizing about the people, and look at the people for a moment. Does any man in his heart of hearts really believe that the masses of the people in this country are more ignorant, dishonest, impure, less patriotic, less manly — worse men, in short, than are the people composing other nations ? Few intelligent men, I take it, will be found ready to say this. Then on your own showing, all you have to do is to arouse the good, organize the good, give expression to

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the better element, and then we will com- pare not unfavourably with other people. How are we to arouse, organize and educate this waiting good — suppress virtue of the nation, as it were? I say. the ascertained way of God is plain.

Let me illustrate. Men are not by nature cleanly. Cleanliness is won by painfully slow degrees. The everlasting laws of life make for cleanliness, and so, slowly, the conviction that cleanliness is necessary, produced a habit of cleanliness. But men do not grow cleanly suddenly, only ac- quiring these habits of cleanliness through the persistent punishments which, in a thousand ways, uncleanliness visits upon them. Now I challenge you to show me one single virtue that has not been won in the same way that we have won a measure of cleanliness. And yet, though won slowly, the fight with uncleanliness has been so actu- ally won, that few would think, to-day, of cleanliness being a virtue at all, since it is gradually being esteemed as a necessity.

Now for my application. How are we go- ing to convince the inhabitants of our great land that all forms of corruption which I

There Wrestled a Man 69

have alluded to, and which I deplore as much as can any man, — how are we to convince them that these things are evil, not only in themselves, but that they are ruinous to all that we love most, and threaten our very freedom itself? How convince them that in dealing with these evils,

"They enslave their children's children, Who make compromise with sin."

I say again, my friends, the ascertained laws of God only point to one way. Bring these deeds to the light, hold them up to the day, name them for what they are, trusting ever and always that God lives in the hearts of men, and that in the end when they see and know, men will choose the good and the fair, rather than the evil and the foul. That is to say, the bulk of men will; for, in the last resort, this was the teaching of Jesus ever, and His hopefulness for His enemies lay in this — that they did not really know what they did. Ah, bring the deeds to the light and have no fear; for the inexorable law of God working in the atom or in the planet, compelling the crawling of the worm or the thinking of the philosopher,

70 The Reasonableness of Faith

lighting the glow-worm's tiny lamp, or flashing in the planet's fiery glory — this inexorable might of God is on the side of purity, liberty and truth.

Now perhaps some will ask, Why is it that I rejoice in the expansion of our land, even though that expansion comes to us with added burdens and most unexpected duties. I admit we are unprepared. I deplore our lack of Civil Service. I resent the ignorance and conceit that makes many who should be strong for a high order of Civil Service languid or opposed to it. And yet, gauging, I think, our weaknesses, I rejoice in this expansive movement; because it will hale us to the light, because we can no longer hide from ourselves or from the world the facts, because it will help to cast down in us that ignorant, pharisaical cry: "Lord God, we thank Thee we are not as other men are." That spirit has obtained too long. Now, sirs, our works are to be mani- fested as never before. The world is to see far more clearly than it has yet seen, what we are. Our institutions are to be tested as the institutions of other nations have been tested and tried. The real inward-

There Wrestled a Man 71

ness of our civilization is to be made abund- antly plain to all men, as they watch our deal- ings with our dependencies. We have pro- claimed in the face of the whole world, that one nation's method of dealing with subject peoples seems to us so utterly barbarous that we, as a neighbourly nation, could tolerate it no longer. The declaration was honestly made. Now the world is to see our improvement on that barbarous method. Can any man dream that it would have been a neighbourly act to drive Spain out, and then, in our splendid vessels sailing away, leave defenceless peoples to anarchy? I remind you again, as I did months ago, of the teachings of Jesus. To do so, I say, would have been accurately to copy the example of those who left the wounded man on the highroad and passed by on the other side. It would have been to earn the curse of God and the contempt of man- kind.

No, we are in for it, — and I thank God — in for a work, in for the discharge of a long and difficult duty, in which we are sure to make mistakes; but in the persistent prose- cution of which we shall learn to^know, as

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never before, our weak spots, our strong spots, and our real selves. For a time, I say, we shall make mistakes. I fear all our appointments will not be like those of Colonel Wood in Santiago ; though plenty such men could be found, when our nation calls for them. There may be a tendency at first to treat these rich islands, these un- happy and ignorant peoples, as a further field for money-making, but if, through negligence or ignorance or greed, we are so unfaithful to our trust, the sign of our shame will be pinned round our neck, and we stand pilloried before the nations. There will not only be irritation abroad and scorn- ful mocking, but I tell you that our people at home will be brought face to face with the intolerable usurpation that the love of money engenders. They will see our na- tional vice publicly shame us in the eyes of all the world.

Oh, my friends, what does the Christian believe in? He is bound to believe in the cleansing power of light. Light reveals, light discloses, washes, restores, revives and cheers. So taught Christ, and so, mark me, to a new and glorious extent,

There Wrestled a Man 73

the light of truth has shone for the healing of the nations. In the criticism of mankind to-day, there is a new assurance of safety and of health. Yes, there is renewed hope in it for the weak, new admonition for the strong. The elder nations decayed and failed utterly — why? Because they were shut in, as it were, to their own atmosphere. In them was no free breath of international criticism. They breathed their own vitiated air, like a sick man sealed up with his sick- ness in an un ventilated room. No outside succour, no healing medicine, could come to the sick bed of the nations of old time. But, to-day, all is changed. Who can over- estimate the good that comes to a people from other peoples? The sickness of one is discussed by all, and touching, even as we do in a thousand ways, we bring to each other vitality, life and health. Aloofness, separateness, are not a gain, but a great danger, and this I assert in spite of the pulpits and press.

There was a gnat once, its life was limited to one summer evening, and it took its airy flight just as the summer thunderstorm was about to burst. In despair, the tiny

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insect cried to its fellow: ''Here is the end of the worid; alas for all its beauty and its bloom ! " But the flowers, though they were only flowers, knew better, and the gardener knew best — that this storm was what he had long waited for through days of parching heat and drought, for the health of his garden and the good of the land. Dark times come. What of that ? The sun reigns and the skies shall grow serene again. If we fail for a time under new duties, it is because we are cherishing and hugging to ourselves old sins; and new duties are but God's fair, strenuous messengers to show us the foulness of old sins. The sin of our nation, of all parts of our nation, is as plain as plain can be. It is slavish obedience to what we know to be sin, and slavish obedience alone, that can make us seriously fail. And that national sin is the one Jesus warned us of. He and His apostles told us it was to be the danger of a later time. It was the overmastering love of money, and what money will bring. Let good men teach that, and good preachers preach that. Let each of us try and show our independence of that (and mark me, if we do this, we have

There Wrestled a Man 7^

our work cut out for us,) and in the end God will accept us, and men shall say we saw truly, and strove well.

December 5, 1898.

THE GOSPEL OF GENESIS

LABOUR AND REST

"God said." — Genesis i: j. "God rested." — Genesis, ii: 2.

The value of Genesis lies not in its scien- tific accuracy. It is God's sketch in char- coal of the beginnings of things, at least the beginnings of things in our small cor- ner of His great field of spheres. To suppose that here in Genesis we have a scientifically accurate cosmogony is not only unnecessary — it is absurd as it would be to suppose the teacher in a kindergarten school commenced the mathematical in- struction of the infants by propounding the binomial theorem. We have all that is important for us to know suggested, and more than that assured to us when we read, "God said."

The gospel of Genesis is, that the creation is God's word. Now what are words? 77

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Words are effort after self-expression. The child is not conscious of itself until it speaks. Dawning self-consciousness and dawning speech go together. And here we surely have more than a hint of the everlasting word — the word of God — if we may so say, the eternal, creative property of God — His everlasting effort after self-expression. When before the inspired vision of that prophet to whom we owe the first chapters of Genesis, there rose this marvellous vision of the creative plan and purpose of God, he gave to his own and after times then these splendid charcoal outlines — not the final picture, not the completed work (for this men were not ready then) — of understanding this men are incapable now. But here we have, with splendid distinctness, the divinely inspired sketch of that great panorama picture which each succeeding age of thinking, studying, believing men are to do something to enlarge and fill up. Creation, in a real sense, then, is God's word — His word, because it is His deed. It expresses Him, as the fleshly body expresses the soul within it.

And thus, here on the opening page of

The Gospel of Genesis. 79

inspiration is clearly seen the ground-work and foundation of all human hope. All that is is God's, and despair is impossible as long as this is believed. Here in the very opening page of inspiration is found the warrant of those strange, quenchless hopes and yearnings toward the infinite life that no sin in man, no stress of circumstances, no physical or moral disaster can totally de- stroy in him, or rob him of. Here we have in sharp and unmistakable outline, that splendid truth that lurks dimly seen and mixed with much error in all forms of so- called heathen religious thinking, the myth of Antaeus repeated again — that man is the son of God and the son of earth, the good brown earth herself, the very dust He made. And so let human falls be crushing as they may, overthrown manhood rises from the bosom of his mother, with strength miraculously renewed, to continue the wrest- ling of life. Yes, that is the gospel of Genesis. There is divine purpose in the very dust. This is the good news of creation. Creation is His word. And all its creeping things, as well as its angels, its serpents, its trees of knowledge both of good and evil

8o The Reasonableness of Faith

and its mystic trees of life, its closing para- dise doors and its flaming swords — all, all, all, very good, for all are of God. Divinity itself inspires its dust.

But here someone will say to me, " How about the Fall?" Let me frankly reply, I do not know that I can explain it. I am prepared to accept the language of our Ninth Article, that man is very far gone from ''original righteousness," but that that original righteousness from which he is very far gone is the righteousness of his Original, I am very sure. There is nothing in the Bible, nor, I hold it, in our Book of Common Prayer that, thoroughly interpreted, obliges us to say we believe there ever was a time when men were better than they are now, ever was a state in which they were possessed of a righteous- ness superior in quality to that they are to-day possessed of. Did the Bible or Prayer Book say this, we should be obliged to reply that, in so far as such a doctrine was taught our times had out- grown it, for that in successive ages we had learned to apprehend more truly man's essential relationship to God, and imder-

The Gospel of Genesis 8i

standing this we found it impossible any longer to believe that in the heart of the race divine life had ebbed, not increased. Certainly we know more of man's relation- ship to God than our forefathers did. Cer- tainly the all-inspiring Spirit has enlight- ened us on this and on other points, and man's relationship to his fellow man has become a completer relationship. It is only necessary to instance the change of all human thought in relationship to such questions as slavery, the punishment of prisoners, the relationship of the sexes and war, to make this evident to any thinking man. But let me emphasize the fact, that though it might be right so to argue, it is not necessary. For as we look carefully at our Bibles, certain things, I think, are plain. First, whatever the meaning of his fall may be, it is evident that the inspired writer of Genesis held that man was abso- lutely one with nature — made of the dust of the earth. His is not an alien lordship. He is the head and crown of things, but he is one with the world he is called upon to rule. Her cares are his cares, her pains his pains. Among her thorns, as among her fruits, he

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must toil. There is no trace of absentee land- lordism in Genesis. Her last, fairest product he is. He is her flower as much as her master king. To lock man up in any Garden Elysian and there make him superior to natural law, which from beginning to end of the Bible we see is divine order, would be indeed to establish a vast dualism, would be to introduce dissonance in the universe — one set of laws for all nature and another set for man, — and hopelessly separate nature and humanity.

Again, once outside the state of rest, outside pa.radise, with perpetual toil before him, here it is he gets his first promise of dominion — the long strife will be crowned with victory. He goes forth to the exercise of his highest faculty — the faculty of choice. All nature that has produced him has known successive births and known them only through strife. Every point she has gained has been gained by pain; every beautiful thing she has produced has come through travail. This law is divine and unchange- able, and so a true humanity must be bom by striving, and not in heaven, earth or hell, can there be escape from an unchang-

The Gospel of Genesis St,

ing law. We talk of primal innocence. Is innocence righteousness? Were inno- cence possible, a fall would be a necessary moral incident in the development of the soul through innocence to righteousness. The metal in the mine is good and pure, and we might, in one sense, speak of it as innocent; but the metal in the crucible has a purity and a use that it never had in the vein. Men and women must eat of the tree of good and evil, for in no other way can they learn to love the good and hate the evil. And, however, to-day, we may recognize the fact that truths such as these have not yet found their best and com- pletest expression in human thinking, that we have not yet been able to correlate them to others equally precious to us, we feel and know them to be true. Our hope and belief that we shall yet stand unabashed before the vision of God in a universe of light rests absolutely on this certainty, that God by virtue of His own nature of truth and love can never seek to bring out of man what He did not first put into man^ that our ultimate evolution towards fitted- ness for glory shall be uninterrupted and

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certain, because we believe in our divine involution. By creation He placed in us the properties of the divine, and through His infinite mercy and wisdom He will draw those properties forth to the day. But how will He do it? Not by leaving us basking in seductive Capuas, or clothed in primal innocence ; but only by the recurring discipline of age-long struggle towards the light.

But yet again, friends, is not the best ex- planation, after all, of this falling, this early catastrophe that overtook our par- ents—to be sought in life itself? Has not every man and woman before me, again and again, known what it was to be conscious of this falling only when it was too late to go back and retrieve it? The doors of opportunity lay open to us, but by some fatal mesmerism our eyes were holden that we did not see them until just before they closed. A chance to succeed, the value of a friend, the opportuntiy to do some good — these and such like things lay like unused treasure under our hands for weeks, for months, for years, and just the one instant before they were snatched away

The Gospel of Genesis 85

we realized what might have been. And then the gates closed behind us and the flaming sword forever barred the way. Those mythical doors that closed on the primal pair have kept closing on all of us, age after age, since then.

Don't many of you remember how the doors of the old homestead that had sheltered so kindly your follies and witnessed so many of your joys — one cold day, closed on you and you looked your last on them, and looking, could scarcely keep down an unmanly tear? And a few, full years pass over, and before you realize it those dear, historic doors of the college closed behind you, and you looked your last on the windows you knew so well, every one of which seemed to frame a kindly face; and beyond the college campus the world looked cold and hard and un- inviting. Then you were ushered into the big, hungry, selfish, multitudinous life of utter competition which men call the world, and when you got your breath from the cold plunge and began to know the first delight of feeling that you could breast its current and keep your head above it with

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the rest, you felt that you knew, in some sort, another paradise, and so you did. But the sense of victory in life did not last — ideals, perhaps, fell away; and the sordid- ness of much of it and the meanness was borne home on you; and the spectacle of the failure of others, often necessary to your own success, bore hardly on you; and contest became difficult and blows rude; and there were stumblings in the mire, mire that would cling and foul and would not off — and then glimpses of open doors and Edens of possible happiness; and look- ings backward and yearnings forward; and dead sea-fruits that grit the teeth and fall to ashes; and sometimes a draught of living water, too.

Yes, here too, doors are closing and swords still bar the way on many a path which you would fain enter. In your own intimate life the same law held good. Sweet friendships were offered to you, some bright hopes arose, some clear vision of service grew, and love was given and in- spiration and help. But still it was not as it might have been. And the friend was never quite what the friend might be, and

The Gospel of Genesis 87

the home never quite what the home should be, and the service never all that service should be, and so much was unexplained, and such mistakes were made, such cruel mis- takes, such purblindness — taking true for false and false for true. Yes, that, and far more than that, is life. And yet in our best and clearest hours we know it must be so, that it ought to be so, and that if all the barred doors were thrown open to us again, and the opportunities lost and mourned over recurred, we would not be bettered thereby. For in some mysterious way, it is only through the closing of our paradise gates, only through the sending of us forth to toil and often to failure, we can hope to do anything worthy or at last attain our rest. Surely, I am right in saying, that the best explanation of the old Genesis story of man's moral disaster is to be found in the pages of each man's life. The ultimate meaning of sin and evil may, as yet, elude us, but we feel, and our feelings, our institutions, are our best guides, that there must at last be

"Greater good because of evil, Wider mercy through the fall;"

that as through the disobedience of one

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the many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One shall the many be made righteous. Or again, to quote St. Paul,

"O, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out !

"He hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. "

Surely, He is teaching us to walk as a mother teaches her baby. See her — there she puts it against the steadiest chair or sofa in the room and stretches a long arm on either side, and by language all of her own devising she wooes it, she bids it come to herself, and she calls that walking. Its little toes are turned in, it staggers from side to side, and tumbles first against one arm and then against the other, — hear her de- lightedly say, "It walks!" Such are our walkings, such are our fallings, and on either side lean towards us the everlasting arms.

So it seems to me, I see creation — God putting His creatures a little way away from Him that they may come to Him — it is not a long distance nor yet a long time, if we measure by the ages, — and then com- manding us to come to His breast. On the

The Gospel of Genesis 89

way there He has promised to teach us how to walk, and surely He will not have done with us, till, with steady stride, we shall march by our Father's side up glorious paths of being, which to-day eye hath not seen nor ear heard tell of.

This, so far as I can see it, is the gospel of creation, as in charcoal outlines we (lave it in this vision of the seer. It is creation's story, a story of a past lost in the being of God, of a present full of the presence of God, and a future glorious beyond all powers of human thought in which we shall know the joy of God. To believe and accept it is already to taste the beginnings of a rest, that in its nature is akin to the divine rest we read of in this creation. God looked over His work and from its lowest to its highest saw it was good and rested therein. In this assurance only can we know rest. Do you remember what Goethe sang about rest?

" Rest is not quitting the busy career, Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere. "

Other races and times have sought this rest by quitting rather than by fitting, and so it was the deserts were dotted with

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monasteries and thousands of recluses peo- pled the Thebaid. To our race and to our time is revealed a wiser and a truer rest — something, as I have tried to say, akin to God's rest in creation. A rest that may lie at the ''heart of boundless agitation," as Wordsworth well knew. A rest that is based on the knowledge that God is before all things, and by Him all things are held together, that He is the all in all.

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

"Nay, in all these things we are more than con- querors through him that loved us.

" For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

"Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. "

God before it all, God in it all, God above it all, God beyond it all.

March, 1891.

HARVARD BACCALAUREATE

JUNE, 1893.

"Not looking each of you to his own things, but each of you also to the things of others. Have this mind in you, which was also in Chnst Jesus: who, being in the form of God, covmted it not a prize to be on an equaUty with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made m the likeness ot men- and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death yea, the death of the cross. Wherefore also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above everv name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."— Phtltpptans, u: 4-1 1.

In these verses, St. Paul's meaning is unmistakable. They sum up too, it seems, much of his maturer teaching. The ques- tion which some of us are in doubt about to-day is. Is it possible to accept a rule of life so difficult, so simple? Sur- rounded as we are by temptations, con- scious as we are of a pitiful mixture of motive, is it possible for us in any real sense to yield practical obedience to these most searching 91

92 The Reasonableness of Faith

and comprehensive commands ? Look stead- ily, says the apostle, with purposefulness, with honest intention, not on your own affairs only, but on the things of others. Look as you would look when pursuing your own interests, wisely, bravely; not merely as you study a problem, but as you plan an enterprise. Look on the things of others, and, as you look, let Christ's very mind be yours; look as He looked. The prize of life He could have grasped; He sought it not for Himself. All the powers of an extraordinary manhood were His; He stripped Himself of them and voluntarily forewent His own legitimate advantage. He stooped to weakness when He need not have stooped. He was willing to die and met death in its most awful shape; turning to death, agony and defeat, choosing these deliberately as His portion sooner than give up His high purpose of saving His fellow men. This deliberate mode of action ruling all His life and finally consummated by His death, Paul declares the infinite God accepts and crowns, and, so accepting and crowning it, declares it to be the one supreme, final, permanent, victorious form of life forever.

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This indisputably is St. Paul's meaning. This is Christianity, and the mind of Christ as He understood it, preached it, and died for it. Is this mind of Christ possible to us to-day ? There is very much in the every-day life of us all which seems, at a superficial glance, to deny the practicability of living after this high standard. We need the stimulus of competition. This is not lacking even in our college days. You are feeling what you believe to be its legitimate influence now. You are gathering the results, in these last, few, crowded, exciting weeks of your Uni- versity life, of a series of competitions, in which you have engaged during all the course of it; and you feel that in the stimulus of reasonable competition there is real good. Yet if you look at this college life of yours at all searchingly, you are soon aware that competition forms a very small part of its life. Its main value lies far away from mere advantages of competition. Its chief gains are not to be won in any game of grab. Rather it is in coming to understand your own life, winning invaluable opportunities to study men of like purposes and yet dif- ferent capacities from your own, and in the

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leisurely associating with so much that is best and stimulating in American life and scholarship, that the main good of it all Hes. And as from the college walls, in an occa- sional thoughtful hour, you look towards the future, you have felt again that com- petition as a rule of life with one's fellow is, after all, a semi-barbarous law and that, when needful, it bears to the generous spirit pretty much the same relation that the stinging spur does to the thoroughbred's flank. By itself, it never won a great race yet. The best blood scarcely acknowledges it.

Thus, brothers, as we look within and then without, we are gradually aware that in a strange and wonderful way the mind of Christ is growing on men. Though some- times disheartened and downcast, we seem to see in life just the same sordidness and cruelty that used to rule it long agO; we are aware that such a state of mind is more or less coloured by passing mood or feeling and is not borne out by fact. The studies of these past years ought to have done something to convince you that there is a tide in the affairs of men, a tide of pity, an earnest, self-sacrificing interest, that flows

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and ebbs not. More thoughtfully, more considerately, man looks on the life of his fellow. Our forefathers played the game of grab so remorselessly, we ourselves are so often keenly set at it, that a life without strife, an existence in which competition in a thousand forms and shapes does not play a prominent part, is hard, nay, almost im- possible for us to conceive. We are so wedded to ideas of contention and competi- tion that any other conditions than those springing from these are well-nigh incon- ceivable to us.

And yet his life is poor and narrow indeed, who has not been blest by some vision of an existence in which love casts out strife; some limited sphere of life, at least, in which competition and strife are not. It is pos- sible for the poorest of us, possible for a very imperfect character to love some one with such a love, that into his relations with that person competition and strife cannot enter. For this loved one we forego our own advantage with delight. For the sake of such to suffer is as natural a thing as to breathe. Further than this, if we look around us thoughtfully, we must be aware

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that man's sphere of love is ever widening; that widening interests bring men more and more together. Warmer ties are gaining strength surely, if slowly. Man is no longer cut off from man as he used to be. Life overlaps life. The hard, high walls of prejudice and caste, of difference in fortune, and even in nation, no longer serve to sepa- rate men altogether from each other as they used to do.

Look backward for the space of a few generations only, and you see the best men, the wisest, the most cultivated, incompre- hensibly callous to the wants and woes of those near them, untouched by the feeling of their infirmity, unmoved by their bitterest cry. Some two years ago, I happened to spend two weeks of Spring weather in the ancient City of Nuremberg. There, almost untouched of our modern life, stands that wonderful city. In its courts and palaces, in its narrow streets and splendid churches, the very spirit of mediasvalism seems to have found its last retreat. There is scarcely a finer hall in Europe than that splendid council chamber in which Nuremberg's great citizens, successful merchants and valiant

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captains, took counsel for peace and for war. Around that banqueting hall, bla- zoned on its walls, is the tale of Nurem- berg's greatness. There the great fresco speaks of her past life and glory, her wealth, her power, her independence, her artistic genius. And, in the most natural way, mingled with this record is the story of her unconscious cruelty, too. The tale of tor- tured criminal stands written on the wall as plainly as the glory of the lordly mer- chant. With equal truth they are drawn side by side. As you stand in the hall, the golden light falling through wide win- dows, rich in glass, it is easy to think your- self back to the time when what was richest, wisest, fairest, bravest and best in that central city of Europe, met and feasted where now you stand. But what another story is hidden beneath the great stone floor! Go down a few feet, and there for your inspection open up whole rows of cells. Oh, such cells ! Noisome, dank, un- penetrated by a single sun-ray. There in darkness, utter and profound, men, and women too, were imprisoned, tortured, put to death; while a foot above their heads,

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the solid stone shutting out all sound of revelry from above or of wail from below, the great citizens feasted and drank, planned wars and discussed commerce.

Could such things be to-day? We smile at the idea; it is an insult to imagine it possible. And yet those men and women that feasted were not specially bad men and women; nor did those poor wretches who suffered beneath own often to any sin worse than misfortune. Why has the former state of things passed away? I tell you, brothers, there is but one reason — 'tis the advance of the tide of the mind of Christ. Year by year, it seemed to those who watched it to ebb as often as to flow. Slowly, very slowly, it rose on the sands, and as each watcher failed at his post, his testimony as to its rising was all too un- certain to assure him who took his place. But there was no ebb for all that.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

' And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light; In front, the sun climbs slow, — how slowly ! But westward, look, the land is bright. '.'

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But, brothers, it is rising still. I tell you the time will come — I believe it is near at hand — when it will be as impossible for men and women to live as at present the^'' are living in the broad and beautiful houses of our great cities, surrounding themselves there by all the rich gifts and bounty of life, while close to them hundreds of thou- sands of their fellow citizens are shut down within the pestiferous narrowness of the tenement house. It will be as impossible for things which exist to-day to con- tinue to exist side by side in our cities and land, as it would be to fill Nurem- berg's broad hall at this close of the nine- teenth century with feasting citizens, while her dungeons beneath were choked with the victims of her torture. Yes, love is casting out strife, is taking the bitterness out of competition. Love recognizes to-day, as she never did before, misfortune as es- tablishing a claim on fortune, and sorrow and suffering as pleas from which an hon- ourable man must never turn away, if he would hope for the favour not only of a merciful God for himself, but of his own justifying conscience ^F-r-^ t r-

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And again, I ask, Why is this ? It is be- cause the mind of Christ is increasingly becoming a power among men. But as I seek to set before you, this day, the reason- ableness and certainty and coming preva- lence of this mind of Christ, I shall be ac- cused of sentimentalism. The plea I make, you say, is sentimental. Is it so ? Brothers, I would have you remember that it is not the voice of religion alone that calls you to-day to make the mind of Christ a power in your own lives and in the world. What science to-day, in the interest she excites and in the splendid triumphs she has won, takes more prominent place than does physiology in all her branches? We might call her the regnant science to-day. It requires little more than a knowledge of first principles of physiology to assure ourselves that this youngest of all the sciences calls on those who follow her deliberately to accept self-sacrifice as their law. Some- what heady with her own intoxicating success, she stands before the world to-day. ''Listen to me," she seems to say, "let me speak. I may be the youngest in the class, but I have something most important to

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say." And when she does tell of her own things, with a captivating vigour of youth and enthusiasm cast around her, what is the burden of her testimony? Invol- untary sacrifice in the lowest orders of life — voluntary sacrifice in the highest forms of life. This her testimony, her message, her gospel. In these highest she calls it altruism. 'Tis really the mind of Christ, without as yet its assurance of exaltation and ultimate triumph. "You," she cries to those who listen to her — "you are the result of age-long processes of sacrifice; fall in with the law that made you what you are. Let this mind be in you: forego your own advantage and, doing so, win your highest life."

Or, listen with me for a moment to another voice of weight, that in no sense claims to be religious. This teacher, too, has the confidence of youth, of youth renewed at least. She tells us that we are only begin- ning to understand how to place together in their proper order and sequence the lessons of history. "In physics," she cries, "you have fixed laws, laws by which you can judge certainly of nature's sequences.

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By these the tides rise and fall, the winds come and go, light follows darkness, and the glory of the Spring, the rigour of the Winter. To the aid of these and the con- duct of them the will of man is not necessary. Seed-time and harvest, day and night, snow and heat, Summer and Winter, shall not fail. But in the conduct of his own affairs, it is vitally necessary that he take into his consideration the property and responsibility of his own will. Nature mates herself to that will. She aids man so long as he struggles. She is to him a sturdy helpmeet. But she will not live with him as a sloven. She will marry him, but not slave for him. If he neglect her, she with- draws her forces, her vital warmth, from him. Whether it is an individual or a generation of individuals, this is true of man's relations to her. She will give man no assurance of faithfulness on her part, and permanent support springing from that faithfulness, if he continue faithless to her. She will help her mate, man, to prepare for each generation a more favourable en- vironment in some respects than the pre- vious generation had. Intellectually, mor-

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ally, the atmosphere, the environment, may be more favourable. But let that generation, thus kindly greeted and pro- vided for by nature, fail of its duty, cease to do its part, be lacking in some essential requirement, and the higher platform to which it has been lifted serves but to pre- pare the way for a more disastrous and irremediable fall. The comparative study of history makes it abundantly evident to the student to-day that each generation can do no more for its successor than pro- vide it with a stout platform on which to battle out its own destiny, wrestle for its life, prove its own worthiness to exist, save its own soul from the death.

At first sight, there seems little that favours the Christ mind in the conclusions of historic science. Look a little closer and you will see that this is not so. The very essence of that mind is willingness for the good of others to forego its own legitimate advantage. When first a few, ignorant and weak men, dared to proclaim such mind as the final type of human mind, what state of things were they confronted with? There was spread all over the known world

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a civilization marvellous in its success. Seemingly, it was established forever. It had founded itself on the ruin of all previous civilizations. It had borrowed from their experiences; it had been warned by their failures. Its rule seemed as eternal as the hills of its own city. And why? Men great and small, old men and children, had ^ lived, planned, toiled, fought, and been willing to die for Rome. And cemented with the blood of her children, Rome stood forth steadily and strong beyond compare. She rose, flourished and blessed mankind. But Rome grew rich and wanton; both rich and poor alike sunk into selfishness. The poor cried only for bread and pleasure, and the rich for pleasure and power; and so the crash of it all soon came. For Rome was but the husk of herself. She had turned to her muck-heap, and forgotten the glory of her early crown. The fair became foul, the wife a wanton, justice was sold, honour fled, the mind of Christ openly scoffed at. She fell and her fall was great. Innocent and guilty fell together, for the hope of mankind had been betrayed by Rome. On her wreck and ruin, after a

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time of doubt and dismay, larger founda- tions of liberty and hope for mankind arose. For in Frank, Goth and Visigoth, and in all the so-called wave of barbarism which had swept over her, possibilities of higher life were existent which were no longer possible to her. On these Christianity took hold. These were the stock of the Christian graft. Nations cannot live who refuse and contemn the law revealed in the mind of Christ. This is the verdict of history as it is of physiology.

And now turn very briefly with me to the definitely reHgious side of this question; and be patient for a few moments while I try to point out to you what the best life in the Christian Church to-day is doing to try and commend to men the mind of Christ. The Church's conservatism seems to many of you blind, unreasonable and intolerant. Yet this is not altogether a fair attitude for any intelligent man, even though he be an unbeliever, to take to organized Christianity to-day. Whether she knows it or not, the Church stands for the whole of humanity, and must shape her formulas and teaching for the whole, and

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not for part. That which stands for the culture and thought of our people, as Har- vard University pre-eminently does, is surely apt to forget this, in so far as we demand too great or too sudden an amount of change in the forms of speech which have enshrined, more or less effectually, so much that has been vital in the past. Men are conserva- tive on the religious side of their nature, because it is of supreme value to them. If, on some sides of us, we are of necessity radical in changes we call for and advocate; on other sides, we are sure to be concomi- tantly conservative.

And so, to-day, Christianity is labouring to express the law and mind of Christ in terms that are too often uncouth and un- satisfactory. It is not because men have ceased to believe in sacrifice, but because Christian men too often seek to describe it in terms that are grotesquely out of date, that the whole Christian system of sacrifice seems so unreal to those who stand outside, and sometimes to those who hesitatingly stand inside the Church. Our terminology belongs to a time when men's highest idea of sacrifice manifested itself in the shambles,

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when lowing herds and bloody altar-steps were men's highest conceptions of the wor- ship of God. Terms that fitted those times will not convey the sacrificial ideas of the present. Yet men in those days thought of sacrifice as an occasional necessity. Now we know it as a vital and changeless law. When we speak of the dying of Jesus, link- ing it with such terms as justification, ex- piation, atonement, imputed righteousness, transferred sin, etc., we are using terms once full of blessed meaning, because they conveyed fittingly the highest thought of which the religious mind of that time was capable ; but now they veil from the minds of multitudes the real significance of that dying.

As St. Paul, in the passage I have read to you, brings it before us, it is as fresh and full of meaning for us to-day as it ever was. The Saviour, whom St. Paul speaks of as crowned with everlasting glory and before whose august feet all things in heaven and earth do bow and obey, sits on the throne of His universe not by favour but by right. He is exalted, because He alone has ex- plained and vindicated the universal law.

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The whole universe, animate and inanimate, bends in homage to Him, because He has made glorious its own supreme law — the law of sacrifice and of service. Through all the dark and vaporous gray ages of the past, that law has slowly worked out its painful processes. It has been sobbed in the universe, ages before it was revealed on the cross of Christ. This is the force of St. Paul's "Wherefore." Who shall justify to the universe her sorrow, toil, pain, dying. Who shall stand and explain her long, long travail pang? Man and only man. Only a Man-Child glorious can pay the poor earth back for her long, drawn-out travail pang. Without man, nature is inexplicable. And man stands confused before himself, un- certain of whence he came and whither he goes, incapable of explaining and justifying what he is and what he wants to be to him- self, till the highest Man stands before him and says: ''I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by me. See in me the explanation of all that you see and feel and hope for in yourself. "

** Therefore God hath highly exalted him. "

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The life of Christ is the final type, and therefore no other life can be exalted. There can be no two victorious types. The final life must be the fitted life. The un- fitted must cease to be. The life that lives in its true relations — to permit any other life than this to survive would be to undo what the ages have been doing; would be to reverse the law by which the lower die that the higher may flourish. God Himself cannot make a world in which the saurian exists side by side with man. Saurians are best possible forms of life at one stage, yet impossible at the next. The conditions of the saurian are the conditions of the car- boniferous age; these would but choke and strangle the man. To persist in conditions is the meaning of sin. A universe favourable to the highest must of necessity be less favourable to that which is not so high. The mind of Christ and the selfish spirit of self-seeking cannot finally co-exist. Which is it to be in us, brothers? After which mind shall we live ?

So let me conclude as I began. All that this old University life stands for, these friendships made, these halycon days in

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which are so delightfully mingled the spring and zest of boyhood, with the growing sense of power that belongs to early manhood — all can avail you but little, if the chief value of them you let slip, if the abiding result of them is not found with you. That result should be a deeper knowledge than is possi- ble to others who have not had your ad- vantages— a knowledge of what goes to make manhood worthy, and true living possible. Your outlook on life should surely be not less sympathetic than that of other men, because of these splendid opporttmi- ties that you have enjoyed. It is men the hour calls for, men who know themselves to have a mission, and who can and will turn away from all other prizes to win that one life prize; from all other siren voices, to listen to that " one clear call for me. "

Oh, my brothers, you come not here to complete your life studies; but to fit your- selves to pursue them. The study you have known here has, if it be worth anything, cost you something. The study that awaits you in the great world will surely cost you more. "Look not on your own things" — not to your own aggrandizement, nor the

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building of your fortune — but look on men, and you will learn to know them a little, and, as you know, to love them more. Pursue pleasure and it will pall on you. Give your soul up to toil, and work will be- come some day unendurable. But the man who gives out his best to his fellow is never utterly cast down or disheartened. No numbering cares can quite paralyze the reverent student of men. Falls and fail- ures he may make; but from them all, like the fabled Antaeus of old, he will rise re- freshed, for he has touched his fellow. *'Look not on your own things," and you will learn to love, love with a discriminating hopefulness that rises above all disappoint- ments, and year by year discovers promise of a life that is worth living.

I have visited all the cities and all the states in this great land of ours; but from out them all, to my mind, one building stands pre-eminently beautiful and eloquent. 'Tis that Memorial Hall yonder. It tells the story of a college generation, that earnestly looked on the things of others. It tells the story of brave deeds following that persistent looking. They had their

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hour, those men of thirty years ago, and they heard their call. A golden haze of distance already hangs on that past time to us. It seems to us very glorious, but also very simple, very easy. They could not have done other than they did. Ah, that is how problems of one age always look to the next. It did not seem so to them. Partings had to be made, preju- dices met, and deep questionings answered ; yet out of them all they passed triumph- ant. They did their duty, suffered and died many of them before they knew they had won. How? What mind was theirs in that momentous hour, in those desperate years of civil strife? It was the law of sacrifice, it was the mind of Christ. The cause was man's, the end his salvation; and the means, the only means, sacrifice. Man never could be, never can be, saved by any other. If you would save him, you must die for him.

Have not many of you often looked on those monuments, and wished with all your hearts that a duty as simple and direct was yours to-day; that you, too, could hear a voice that called, and know it to be divine.

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But uncertainty surrounds you, checks you, benumbs you. 'Tis hard to find the truth, hard to know what to do. On sociological questions we are at sea; on theological, we are divided; on political, we sometimes fiercely differ. We often feel deeply with Matthew Arnold:

"But now the old is out of date, The new is not yet born."

Brothers, as your chosen preacher, feel- ing the solemnity of this occasion, one that cannot recur in my life or yours again, I call on you, by all that is highest and holiest, all that in your own nature answers and echoes God — I call on you to put before you as an end and object in your life the knowledge of men. Do this now, do it faith- fully. More light and a clearer call shall be yours by and by. Look earnestly not on your own things, but on the things of others. Look on man, God's last and high- est work, and in that work you will learn to see and reverence divine purpose. Give men your mind, give them your hand, and you cannot in time withhold your heart. Know the ignorant to teach them. Know

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the weak to help them. Those who are out of the way, to lead them back. Oh, get to know the boys in the great cities and share with them some of those priceless advantages that have enlarged your life. Know the wounded to heal them, the sorrow- ing to comfort them. Know the sinful to for- give and save them. Only set yourselves by the help of God — as a life-long purpose set it before you, cost what it may ; sacrifice time, self-interest, ambition and fortune to it — set yourselves, I say, to know men; and you have laid the foundation for a life that cannot fail and a hope that shall not be disappointed. Know men, and I have the authority of the Highest for saying, that if in this reverent spirit you seek to know men, you shall at last stand unrebuked, accepted by the Son of Man.

LOVE NOT THE WORLD

"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. r ^ n -l, a

"For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

"And the world passeth away, and the lust thereot.— / John, it, 15, 16, 17.

Friends, we need Lent. Sick with its hurry, its divided aims, we need to take such opportunities as are given us for self- explanation, for quiet searching into the root of the needs and purposes of our lives. If we neglect such opportunities, we siifEer from the absence in our lives of the habit of thought, of self-search, which is essential to proper conduct. If any age falls from such habit, then pain, friction, loss, incapac- ity are soon seen; and the issues are not doubtful. If the gentle and slow processes by which we were intended to grow are not sufficient, then, just as in nature, the Divine Order provides for us shock and storm. 115

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If the persuasive heat does not bring out the Hfe of the chick, a rude blow from out- side must crack the shell that no longer is its wise guard, but henceforth is its un- necessary prison-house. And just so with the affairs of men — for this is what the apostle is speaking of here. When we fall into the way of living without consideration, and acting without self-concentration (which alone must lead to fruitful action) , then the result is that we are bound by circumstances, we are blind to duty, we are confined — to use the words of the text — by a present order, and oblivious to the need of change of order.

For, after all, that is the meaning of this idea of the world, as the text distinctly in- dicates. The world is the present order, an order that changes and whose every change is purposeful; but an order that exists, not for itself, but for what comes after it. An order like the strata — line upon line, each necessary to what will follow ; but each not only useless, but positively hurtful, if it be an end and finality in itself. " Love not the world " — when the apostle uses the term he means: Do not get bound up

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in a present order whatever that order may be, for the order changes and can only fulfil itself in changing.

Indeed, there can be no possible doubt about the effect on character of loving the present order — for what is loving? Loving is a world within a world. Loving is a prop- erty and a quality which, if on one side it touches what belongs to this order, on the other side it opens its windows towards heaven and the everlasting day. Loving is the highest bliss, the sorest agony, the supremest responsibility of mankind. Now, friends — and I ask you as wise men to judge what I say — there is no doubt to-day that mere propinquity with a thing influences life ; that mere juxtaposition with a thing creates a likeness to the thing; that life contains w4thin it a property of imitation so strong, so pervasive, that the very animals take the colouring of their surrounding — in the white North, bird and beast are white; in the gorgeous colouring of the tropics bird and beast put on the striped and glistening raiment of forest and jungle.

So in the higher life, we have to do with a force that is not expressed in mere touch,

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propinquity of environment; but when we call into exercise, O men and women, that supremest power of all that belongs to our- selves alone — the power of loving — then we are not only subject to the ordinary force which makes us like the thing we touch and with which we mingle; but just so soon as you let that strange and divine power of loving within you go forth, you capture what you love and it captures you ; you feed on what you love and it feeds on you ; you assimilate what you love and it assimilates you, until at last, my brother, you produce and reproduce what you love, and it again reproduces itself good or bad in you. Modern man is accurately, scientifically, what he loves. His love limits him, his love ex- presses him, his love saves him, his love damns him, his love is his salvation, his love is his judgment eternal, and his love is his perdition eternal. To love is to be abso- lutely part and parcel of and to yield one's self ultimately to what we love.

We must truly confess to each other that if we love the present order, are satisfied with the present order, give up the whole strength and virility of our manhood to

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maintain the present order — the simple philosophy of it is not to be mistaken, friends, — then you might as well expect a fish to turn into a lap-dog, as for us to be- come beings who successfully express the wondrous idealism which Jesus Christ re- veals to man as man's possibility, as his divine high-calling. I ask you to test yourselves by these unmistakable and in- controvertible truths, and ask yourselves if this be not so.

Love not the world, then, neither the things that are in the world ; for if any man love the present order in this sense, he is absolutely putting himself out of count with the order that is to be. Still further. If there is no doubt about the effect of lov- ing this order, there is also no doubt what- ever about the doom of this order. When Jesus spoke these words through His Spirit, everything seemed firm and certain on earth. The Roman Empire was superb in its legis- lation, magnificent in its civilization. Here were fools and blind calling out against this order and declaring that it was passing away, that the worm was already eating its way into the tap-root of the gourd, and all the beauty

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and strength of Rome was crumbling to its irrevocable fall. How impossible it seemed 1 How true it was ! Ah ! that is the law of the world. You cannot convince any generation that the thing it holds to is departing. It is only the man that lives near the heart of God that sees it. And I do not care whether he be a scientist and thinks he does not believe the creed, or a Christian — if he is in touch with the heart of things he knows that the whole order is passing away, and only lives as it gives birth to the babies of the order that is to be. There are things we love in it because they have satisfied us; there are things we almost worship in it because they have expressed us; things in it very precious to us on account of these associations. But remember how wonderfully true it is — the very things in one generation for which men have gladly poured out their life- blood are accepted almost thoughtlessly as the axioms of the next. The inspiring dreams and visions of the one time are regarded as commonplace by the times suc- ceeding them. The achievements of one age are like the toys of children, cast into

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some musty corner, broken and played out. You may make museums of men's aims, and men wonder, to-day, that they ever could be satisfied with things they sought at the cost of life itself.

Rich with the storied experiences of the eighteen hundred years that have passed since then, the words come to us to-day — "Love not the world, neither the things of the world, for the world passeth away.'* The word of God endureth forever. Faith says, *'No doubt," and what does it mean? It means that beyond the changing, beyond the imperfect, beyond the temporary, there is the changeless, the perfect, the eternal. What do you mean by the changeless ? Not stagnation — God forbid ! Not mere rest — God forefend ! But beyond the present and temporal there faith hopes and believes doth spread a life in which these awful breaks, these overwhelming experiences, shall have performed their function and shall have been buried among the things that are no more — death and pain, and sorrow and crying, having fulfilled their educational work, are no more. He that doeth the word of God, abideth forever. Why do we say it ?

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Because we long for it, because we feel it. The slow worm with a rudimentary eye looks round it. It sees what it needs, it feeds on what it sees, and its eye is satisfied with the seeing. The eagle with an eye miraculously developed, when compared with the worm, looks around him and sees what he needs and feeds on what he sees, and his eye is satisfied with the seeing. Do you remember the sublime line in Job : —

"There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen. "

And this strange and wonderful spiral is the path of man. Man sees what he needs and feeds on what he sees, but the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing — for within him is the spark of the everlasting order that refuses to be satisfied with the shards of time.

Therefore again sounding through all the ages comes the entreaty of God — oh, my child, give thyself not — bom for eternity — to the order of the temporal. Live in it you must, and love it you should, but not in the sense of your yielding yourself up to it in whole-hearted surrender. For, oh ! let this fasten itself in your mind — nothing can

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change the law of God. What you love, you are. You assimilate it, you are like it. We go into the far country, and though the infinite love of God again and again brings life from that country of death, beloved, there may come a time when in the far country there sounds no echo of the Father's voice, for the very sonship of the son is dead therein; he has loved the swine, and like the swine he has become. He has loved the citizens of that land, and one of them he has become. The food, the husks, the company, the environment of the low have sucked him down and lowered him, and its vampires have drained his life blood. And all that infinite mercy itself can do for him is to apportion him a sleep that knows no awaken- ing, for the far country with its lusts and its husks and its swine and its citizens has passed, and left nothing behind. For the world is only the bed where God grew His flowers, and when it could grow flowers no more its doom and its glory alike are sounded forth in the decree — " Behold ! I make all things new. "

March 18, 1894.

THE EYES OF THE HEART.

"The eyes of the heart being enlightened."

Eph., i: i8.

It is Palm Sunday to-day. We celebrate the King coming to His own. On the Sun- days lately past, I have tried with you to take a glance at the nature of His kingdom. Last Sunday we studied its method — the method of the leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened, the yeast of His truth permeating all deeds and thoughts of men till life is occupied and blessed with good. Can such vast hopes be ever realized? Are they anything but iridescent dreams ?

There is a way. And here in this beauti- ful line I have read to you, St. Paul points it out; only one way to know about it all, only one way to judge of it at all. That is by the use of the eyes of the heart, the eyes of your heart being enlightened. It is given to men, sinful men though they be, to see 125

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at times visions of coming good, to catch glimpses of the celestial city, and know the tabernacle of God is at last to be with men. Such hope and vision, yes, more than this, was given to him. The most holy men, the most lonely men, yea, the Lord Himself, had such times. *'We would like to have been with Him then. "

I think it is well to remember that Jesus was not always sad. All the great pictures of Him are pictures done in tones of sadness, and the reason of course is plain. For the age when great religious art flourished was an age of pre-eminent sadness. Those times were very ill. Lust, vile ambition, deeds of cruel violence reigned on all hands, and men turned from what was bestial in the times to the visions of Him; and His face would seem to them to be a face more marred than any man's. He was the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief. Such a Lord they needed. Therefore it was such a Lord they saw. But Jesus could not have been ever so. At the marriage feast, in the corn- field, when He drew the little children to His knee, He surely could not have been the Man of Sorrows ; a great joy must have been

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His then. More than that, we read that He rejoiced in spirit. And I beheve some coming day, when men's thought shall have risen beyond the shadows that oppress them, when the vast perplexities that now weigh us so heavily down shall have passed away, some great artist of some coming time may paint, perhaps for another generation, a different sort of Christ face — a face suffused with a transforming joy. We are right so to think of Him, to-day when we watch Him approaching the greatest tragedy of our race, as resolutely He moved for- ward to be the central figure in the darkest crime of history, the supremest misunderstanding of man by his fellowman — the greatest murder of all time. The end is clearly seen. The shadows grow to utter blackness. Full well He knows it all. But it is as He approaches them He celebrates His solitary triumph, and lets His disciples at last shout to their heart's content His praises as He enters the city on Palm Sunday. We want to see the whole of Him, look at all His life, catch its full meaning, and understand His joy as well as His passion, so we may more fully obey.

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How shall we do it? Here is the only- way . The greatest witness He ever had, His greatest apostle and lieutenant, the man whose inspired genius gave Christ the Gentile world — it is St. Paul speaks. " If you would understand Him, if you would follow Him, if you would adore Him, you must do it as the faithful few in the multi- tudes did that day, by using the eyes of your heart; look at Jesus with the eyes of your heart." That is St. Paul's plea — the logical Paul, clear-thinker he. This man who sees as no other man sees the evil and good of his day. He pleads for the use of the eyes of the heart. What are they? We glory in the use of the eyes of the head. We are apt, thoughtlessly, to depreciate the use of those other eyes, especially so to-day. For men are using the eyes of the head as never before they did. They have won, as it were, telescopic power. By their aid we peer into the remotest past, and dig out its hidden secrets. We correct its ac- cepted verdicts. We are re-arranging all our heroes. We insist on re-examining them. Are they true? Are they worthy heroes? We bring before our eyes those

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on whom the verdict of condemnation has been passed. Were they in reaHty un- worthy, or have we been hasty, ignorant, prejudiced in our judgment ?

The eyes of the mind are wonderful eyes to read the present, too ; and they yield such knowledge as men never before dreamed of, such as was never entrusted to men before. We are masters of such resources as our fathers never dreamed of possessing. We curb death itself. We almost defy dis- ease. Ah, these eyes of the intellect are starry eyes.

But there are other eyes, too. And still more we owe to the eyes of the heart, for they are the first eyes we use; and when, after long years, we have gained a little wisdom, we learn to trust them above all other eyes. We find they read more deeply and see more truly far than the eyes of the mind. It was with these eyes that the great of the earth, the great of all ages and times, the great of all races and religions, saw further then their fellowmen; with them the great painters painted; the great musicians caught those views which moved them to write down for men their works of

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immortal music; with them great poets see before they sing; great lovers and all lovers with them at all times loved ; yes, and great inventors and discoverers to see with the eyes of the heart the distant continents and islands, the distant secrets of nature so closely hidden from the eyes of the mind. The visions of men's hearts have always initiated the great enterprises of all times. By the use of the eyes of the heart all has been best done on our poor earth, all that will stand forever has been most chiefly achieved.

Ah, friends, and let us never forget it ! The eyes of the head will accomplish much. They can put together great skeletons of life, erect its cities, rear its institutions, and pile up its vast wealth by the sweating of the race and the ransacking of continents, build a large and lordly pleasure house for man. But when all is said and done, the blood of it, the flesh of it, the nerve and soul of it are all the result of the eyes of the heart. The eyes of the head can plan, and have in the past planned and achieved vast civilizations. Let men stop there, and what are they all ? Nothing but one vast pent-house wherein men toil;

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one great prison-house where bHnd men grind, and hate each other as they grind, till at last some blind and tortured giant lays, Sampson-like, his mighty arms on the supporting pillars of that civilization and tumbles it, and all it doth contain with himself into a suicide grave. 'Tis no fancy thus to speak. 'Tis for this civiHzation builded when she used the eyes of the mind, the neglecting the eyes of the heart.

The eyes of the old Greeks long ago were wonderful eyes. They delighted in beauty, they kindled at patriotism, but in them was no welcome to the stranger, no mercy for the slave, no pity for the cripple, no considera- tion for the unfortunate and unhappy.

The eyes of the Roman were wonderful eyes. They were like eagles'. They could gaze at the sun; saw law in its majesty. Steadfast were they too and brave. But they glowed with lust and they glittered with greed, and they could be cruel as the eyes of a wild beast. And so they grew to be selfish eyes, and learned to look only on those who flattered their ambition, and ministered to their pleasure. Neither Greece nor Rome cared much or thought much

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about the eyes of the heart, and so they fell. And great was the fall of them.

As Paul wrote this wonderful line, he could hear the grinding in the prison-house. He could not fail to note the signs of coming doom, but no social disaster could dismay him. It was not with these eyes he had found his Master, nor with them was he content to follow Him, judge of His future, or see His kingdom. The eyes of his heart can never miss his Saviour, and, let change and destruction come, nothing can separate mankind from Him.

(i) Why are the eyes of the heart to be opened and kept open? Because they see further and see more truly than any other eyes. Let's frankly own it. Jesus appeals to the passions of men, to their feelings, to their emotions. He appeals to these as the highest part of us. He knoweth what is in man, and He is right. For these are to human-kind what instinct is to the beasts and the birds. In their wise cultivation, ex- pression, and ' obedience to their dictates, lie the safety and development of man.

I am uttering no vague and truthless statement when I say these things are the

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highest things about us. So high, so bind- ing, so tremendously necessary are they, that life without them would be an un- endurable struggle, a savage conflict of dogs for a bone, not the growing unity of self-respecting men. Competition has played a great part in man's development in the past, and for long ages we shall need con- stant touches of the spurs of competition. But sheer competition, competition by itself alone as a law governing life, would mean return to savagedom and the beast. Nay, it would be the conflict of beasts armed as were never beasts before armed, with all the engines of modern science. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole progress of mankind absolutely depends on the triumph of the eyes of the heart. Tenderly they have been shielded, and slowly, like the orbs of the new-born baby they are growing accustomed to the light of day, getting their range little by little. They always see the higher things.

The eyes of the mind cry "Keep." The eyes of the heart cry "Give." The eyes of the mind cry "Love yourself." The eyes of the heart cry "Love your neighbour

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as yourself. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death." The eyes of the mind cry "Life is good and pleasure is sweet. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. " The eyes of the heart tell of a greater beauty, a fairer and holier life, see beyond the seen the unseen, beyond the temporal the things eternal. Ah, are we not foolish? We veil our true eyes, we shut out the light. We do not look at the things we do not like to look at; we read the things we fancy, not those that are true; we surround ourselves by such as buttress and strengthen our prejudices, or comfort our ignorances, we live in our prepossessions, so apt are we to give all our energy to one narrow line in life, to the eyes of the heart grown dim and almost blind through non-use. Life's cus- toms close in on us with slowly shrinking wall, as did the old torture chambers on the condemned criminal within.

The divine Man, supreme in beauty and holiness, the great Saviour and leader stands and pleads with us this Palm Sunday just as He did long ago. He pleads with us by living before us. He leads us by going in front of us. He would woo us to use the

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eyes of the heart by showing us how He used the eyes of the heart.

(2.) How shall we use these eyes? We shall use them by acknowledging Jesus. Let us look backward for a moment at the acknowledgment which this day we cele- brate. Such a simple way as they had that Palm Sunday so long ago, those disciples of the Master whose pent-up joy found this simple expression. He had been holding them back, restraining their impetuosity. Now they may come forward and shout and sing as they will. Ah, His coming is no longer a secret. It is made in the light of day. It is inade to His own city. But Jerusalem does not want Him. The kings mocked Him, her religious teachers hated Him. Her poor did not understand Him and were so fickle. But what happened that morning has passed into the world's most sacred history, is guarded and cherished among its precious possessions. Some poor, blundering men came forward that day, and laid their garments down on the ground before His sacred feet, and He walked on them. They rejoiced to do it, for it was with the eyes of their heart they saw that

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morning His coming triumph. They did not know much about the bigotry of priestly possession, or the ruthlessness of Roman power. The eyes of their head served them poorly, but the eyes of their heart were drawn to Jesus, and fastened themselves there. They could not make Jerusalem accept the kingly Man, they could not make the re- ligious teachers see that He was the heart of all religion, they could not make the governing men see that in His truth lay the eternal basis of all law, the rich men see that only by Him could they hold their riches, or the poor men know that only by Him could they endure their poverty and wrong. These things they could not do. But one thing they could and they did do. They could lay their garments in the way. I think I see those garments, poor, most of them, and travel-stained, not rich garments or spotless. Far from that. But they were all they had, and they laid them before the feet of Jesus.

Ah, beloved, we too can lay our garments down — what each man has, what each man is, — ^before His blessed feet. Not do it in a comer, not do it in the indulgence of some

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secret intention, not hastily try to do it when some shrinking fear, some terror of danger and loss impending makes shiver our soul, but here in the open day and morning of our life, when the sun is high, and life with us is still strong, here and now lay such garments as we have, not many of them rich perhaps, none of them spotless, yet lay them before His feet.

I like to think that after many years had passed, and the ruin and misery of Jerusa- lem was over, some of the disciples who paid that one brief tribute of praise to Him, lingered long enough to gain some vision of what His triumph meant for men. Perhaps it was told them that in lands they had never visited and among the first cities of the earth His name and kingdom were beginning at last to spread. Then, perhaps, before they passed, some of them would tell to their children, as a thing ever precious and long to be remembered, that they were allowed on that long-past morning to lay the garments of their lives where His feet would tread.

THE REST DAY

" Call the Sabbath a delight, honourable, and I will

cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth. "

— Isaiah Ivii: 13-14 {part).

The original form in which the ten words were given was in all probability much briefer than that in which at present we have them, The first four commandments in all probability were in some such form as this:

1. Thou shalt have no gods but me.

2. Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image.

3. Thou shalt not take my name in vain.

4. Thou shalt preserve the rest day.

The remainder of this commandment — Remember, that thou keep holy the Sabbath day. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger 139

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that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sab- bath day, and hallowed it — is evident amplification. Some poet of long ago con- ceived of God as working six days and rest- ing on the seventh, and by way of divine illustration added this sanction to the original brief commandment. Surely he was an inspired poet, and surely he spoke a great truth. His teaching will abide though his theory of the creation is hopelessly discredited.

The rest day is here to stay. Have no fear about it, my friends. Set your minds at rest on this point. The hue and cry raised to-day as to the danger of a Continental Sunday in our land is a huge mistake. A large proportion of the labouring people on the Continent of Europe know it not, and great is their loss; but for us on this conti- nent it is an assured possession. The rest day is here to stay, not because the Church advocates it, nor even because the people enforce it, nor yet because it is rooted in legal observance. These are cogent reasons,

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but there is a stronger. It meets the needs of mankind. Americans who, alas, often may not even darken a church door, feel they require it, and the American working- man has made up his mind that he is not going to work seven days in the week. He feels it hard enough to endure the toil of six. The masses of the people who win their bread by the sweat of their brow are quite clear on this matter. I am constantly in receipt of letters from all over this country from the working people, and where work is done occasionally on the seventh day — as in the iron fields — it is done as piece work and under protest, and only because it is necessary to meet some temporary exigency. Let me again assure you, nothing seriously threatens the integrity of the rest day.

The Church cannot be contented with the acceptance of Sunday as a rest day merely. And she is right, not only from a religious point of view, but from a social point of view. This must be plain to all thoughtful people. Man can only be truly man by educating and developing and keeping alive all of himself. If he toils six

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days and simply lies off the seventh, he sinks, and he sinks rapidly. Certain precious things are his only at the cost of others' long struggle, and as the condition of their attainment was that struggle, he can, if he chooses, readily idle them away. By struggle they came to us. By cultiva- tion and by struggle alone can they be re- tained by us. They are vitally important things that call for food and exercise quite as truly as our mere muscles do.

First, there is the family. The man who toils sees very little of his family during the week. Whether his toil be for millions or for a small weekly wage, long hours and fierce competition in multitudes of instances prevent his giving the attention and thought that the poorest or the richest home alike requires. Here let me pause. Here let me give you the experience of years of minis- terial life. The men and women who fail in their families are the men and women who do not give them time. Husbands are lost because their wives do not give them time, and wives and children are lost be- cause their husbands and fathers do not give them time.

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His higher tastes die. All those finer things that make life worth living perish with non-use. And never forget that most of these things are only to be enjoyed in company with others. Do not think me narrow when I tell you that I am learning to be skeptical of the man who goes to the country to worship God. Such worship may in rare instances be possible, but for the far greater part of us it is in going to the *'kirk" in close association, in the stimulus of fellow worship with our neighbours, that man was made to gain and uplift all common worship.

Then the hopes and beliefs that alone can support us in the hours of pain and trial that sooner or later must come to us all — the circumstances of the toilful life do not make for the sustenance and development of these. We who are ap- pointed to know sorrow and pain and at last meet death, only as we have built up and developed our hopes and beliefs shall we be helped to acquit us like men in the inevitable hour of trial.

Knowledge of the old Book — all it teaches, all it stands for — are individuals

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or a society yet fitted to do without it ? My friends, I tell you the questions that come to me week by week, year by year, display an astounding ignorance of the Bible. Parents who do not know, who seem alto- gether careless that their children should grow up without knowing — how are they or their children to get knowledge; knowl- edge by which our forebears grew strong and kept strong? A mere rest day will yield none of these things. From time immemorial men have seen and felt the wisdom of gathering together on the rest day for the maintenance of such good things, the education of such sweet hopes and inspiring beliefs, the highest and best things they had; and the usages approved long ago, believe me, cannot ruthlessly be thrust aside if society or individuals are not to suffer or degenerate. > How, then, are we to commend to all men such a necessary and healthful use of the rest day as the Bible commands and experience has approved? Here two distinct problems confront us. First I name the problem of the well-to-do or the rich, and I name it first for, in my judgment, it

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is much the more complex, much the more difficult of the two. Nor is this surprising, for plainly in the Gospels, yes, and plainly in all history since the Gospels were written, the main sins of non-observance have lain at the door of the well-to-do and the rich. Jesus said long ago that these were the peo- ple He could not reach and of whom He had lost hope. You will remember He could not induce one of that class to join His chosen band, though we have a record of two efforts He made, and no doubt many of His efforts were not recorded. Believe me, I am not harsh here. I am simply quoting the expressions of the Master. The rich had so much, their barns were so full, their tables so bountifully spread, that they patronized Him occasionally but refused to follow Him. Even His awful pronouncements of woe moved them not, or moved them but temporarily. By ap- peal direct, by open denunciation, by pa- thetic parable He approached them; He entreated them, but in vain. Two only of their number gave him a halting obedience, and that after He was dead — Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. So, if we claim

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the name of Jesus as Master, Saviour, and Director, we are bound to remember His experience. And it is most significant.

So much for the past. But turn your eyes about you to-day and see. Try and imder- stand what is passing around you, and you will agree with me as to the danger and duty of the hour. There are in this audi- ence before me very few perhaps who can be truthfully arraigned as belonging to this class to which I have referred, and I shall not be guilty of the foolish mistake of criti- cising the present for the absent. But many of you have influence, and here in God's house this morning, with all earnest- ness of which I am capable, I call upon you to use it. Whenever you can, by means direct or indirect, induce the rich and fash- ionable people of the city to observe the rest day and to Christianize it for Christ's sake and for His Church's sake, don't fail to do it. There is a deliberate, persistent, inexcusable desecration of the rest day by a certain number of our citizens. These people figure largely in the public eye. They so figure because they have invited notoriety. What they do is printed in the

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daily papers because they take pains in many instances that it should be so printed. Or, if they do not do this to-day, they took pains in times past to win for themselves this miserable and notorious position. Once that position was assured, they blamed the public prints for a notoriety which, with considerable pains and even money they had won. The doings of such people, heralded all over the United States, is so much poison in the land. Their names are on our church rolls, they often hold pews, though they seldom come to worship. Oh, why are they tired on Sunday morn- ing? Why take its early hours for rest? Why well-nigh imitate the custom of the old Roman world and place themselves in the hands of highly-trained servitors who can restore by scientific means or clever manipulation their overstrained bodies? Why ? Not because they are working harder for the country, or for fortune even, than other men and women, but because they are doing night work for themselves as well as day work; because year after year finds them in a round of excitement, empty, aimless, selfish, utterly unintellectual, and

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in the fierce struggle for social pre-eminence, a pre-eminence yielded to mere show. And so, slowly, sweetness, unselfishness, yes, the mind itself are dried up, shrivelled and lost in the unnatural and unhealthful processes. Do what you can, my people, to make yourselves felt on this question. If you would be Christians in more than name, do something to Christianize the rest day, for these chief sinners against the law of God and man are brutalizing it. The term is not too strong. Do not go to the country house where Sunday is desecrated. Do not join in Sunday games. Do not give Sunday receptions. Forego even Christian liberty, if necessary, that the Christian rest day may be retained. Ah, try and know yourselves. Know your children. And know your God on that day. This is the true Lord's day indeed.

Then there is the problem of those who are not well-to-do or rich. These, too, are desecrating the Lord's day. What can we do for them? How reach them? To this problem I have given much time and thought, and I may claim some special knowledge. The first thing I think we

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ought to do is to face the fact that by the most of such people we are largely misunder- stood. Multitudes of plain people in our cities dislike Christianity, and I am very sure one of the chief reasons, if not the chief reason, for this dislike is that we have not gone to them in the name of Christ, but have used methods of law. Nothing can be more unchristian, nothing more fatal. Practically we have said to them: We will shut you up to church-going by law. If you won't go to church, you shall not do other things. It is the old Puritan position over again. It never did work, it never could work, not even under the tremendous rule of the great Cromwell. We have practically said: You shall not play, you shall not read, you shall not learn, you shall not go to the country. My friends, some of you think I am exaggerating — I wish I were — but it is not so. Who, may I ask, opposed the opening of the museums kept up by taxes drawn from the people's money? Who for years but the churches were the forefront of opposition? Who opposed the opening of libraries? The churches. Who opposed the running of

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street cars and Sunday trains, the only possible means by which the multitude can reach the country? The churches. Who fiercely advocated the forbidding of Sunday games to the young ? Insensate folly ! The churches. If a boy, forbidden by New York law to play on the public streets, gets half a dozen lads to join him in a surrepti- tious game of ball on some vacant lot, when the pickets placed all around the neighbour- hood give warning of the approaching policeman — who sets the enginery of the law against him, until all his boyish wit is en- gaged to avoid that law or defy it? The churches. That lad pockets his ball and hides his bat, but takes a mental resolution that churches, Sunday-school teachers and parsons are his natural enemies.

Twelve years ago you, my people, know I stood alone in New York in advocating what appeared to me simple justice, namely, the opening of the saloon on certain hours on Sunday. Since then I have not changed my mind; all the more so, that since then many of the men I know, and whose judg- ment I respect, have taken substantially the same ground. Once again let me try

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and make my position plain. I am not ap- proving the present saloon. Any one who asserts I ever have approved or do approve the present saloon perverts what I said. God forbid ! I would to God that every saloon in New York could be closed, and kept closed seven days in the week, but it is just as certain as that I stand to preach to you this morning that the present saloon, bad as it is, is the only means of supplying a great social need in this city. If you would win people from it you must give them something better. Educate the people to want something better, give them a sub- stitute (and mark me, this can be done and one of these days will be done), and then you can oppose the saloon. But until you do, to close it up on Sunday is doing all you can to make hundreds of thousands of people in the community resent your interference and protest against it, and also doing all you can to fasten corruption and blackmail on the city of New York. To attempt to close the saloons when hundreds of thousands want to use them, and think they have a right to use them, is simply to repeat the old fatal mistake of seeking to make people

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good by legislation. Supply their wants in a better way, teach them that they are wrong in wishing to use them, and then you have accomplished your object and not before.

Be patient with me. Let me make my position plain beyond any possibility of misunderstanding. I believe in local option, but I think a great city is not like a country district. If you vote local option in a country district by a substantial majority the law can be enforced. I do not believe it can be so enforced in a city. If New York voted to-morrow by fifty thousand majority to close the saloons in New York on Sunday, those saloons could not be kept closed so long as a great minority believed they had the right, and still retained the desire, to use them. I really think that almost any- body who will give careful thought to the question will agree with me here. Let me illustrate.

There is not one man in ten in New York who wants to bet. Yet so long as that one in ten is allowed, without any loss of charac- ter, to bet $10,000 on a horse at Morris Park, so long as the odds on the races are

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published in all the respectable papers, and the coming and going of the folks who keep up these establishments are a matter of public notoriety, it would be altogether beyond the power of the police or any municipal government, however reformed and good, permanently to stop the news- boy from betting his ten cents in the policy shop. Why? Because, though nine-tenths of the population do not bet, they cannot force their judgment on the one-tenth that want to. Now, on the other hand, not one man in a thousand in New York has a desire to steal. Therefore the nine hundred and ninety-nine can enforce the law against larceny. Therefore I say to you this Sun- day morning (and in days to come will you please remember what I have said?) that so long as a substantial minority in the city of New York want to use the saloons on Sunday, our efforts to close the saloons will result only in secret debauchery and law-breaking. The evils of drunkenness are bad enough — so bad that there is no need to exaggerate them — but it will not do to make the sin of the drunkard the con- venient scapegoat on which to pile all evil

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things. This nation is in no danger of becoming a nation of drunkards, in spite of all that is said to the contrary. Our con- sumption of alcohol per capita is one- quarter that of France, and one-half that of England; and it is decreasing. But there is a worse sin. Drunkenness may threaten our nation, but there is another and a graver threat. There is a sin that lays its poison to the very root of democratic institutions, and of it I am far more afraid than of the sin of intemperance. It is the sin of a light regard for law, a law which we have estab- lished. Let this sin prevail and Freedom herself dies. Freedom is only possible where men highly regard law.

One of the most brilliant bishops who ever sat on the English bench more than, twenty years ago cried in the House of Lords : "I would rather see England free than sober. " Thoughtless people and many- good reformers howled. But the great bishop was right. Sobriety to be lasting and uplifting must be the free and deliberate choice of free and intelligent men. The only true temperance reformer is the man who stands for freedom. You may imagine a

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nation of sober slaves, but you cannot imagine a nation of drunken free-men. To disregard law is to undermine and plot against Freedom herself.

Ah, my friends and neighbours, the people of this city are turning away from the Church of God. The man who cannot see this is blind. Tens of thousands of men in this city who went to church regularly years ago scarcely ever go now. Ten of thousands of children are growing up with no interest in the Church and no knowledge of the Bible. These are not to be won back by legal enactments. They think the Christian people and the Christian ministers do not know them or care for them. They think the Christian churches are a mere luxury of the rich. (I except the Roman CathoHc Church. She is not leaving working people or putting them in mission chapels, as we have sought to do.) We cannot convince them of our care for them by going to Albany, there to pass laws to make them good.

Oh, look round you and see what the city is. See what the lives of the people are. And then kneel to God for wisdom

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and for courage to use your best endeavour, your persistent example, so that the rest day may be the real Lord's day to all the people of the community. Ah, God bless New York ! The destinies of a great people are largely in her keeping. As she pushes forward to the great unexplored future, she needs — if any city of the earth needs — a rest day. But it must be baptized and Christianized afresh, a day of repose, a day to re-knit tender ties, a day to serve men and worship God, the day of the Lord Jesus.

PHILLIPS BROOKS

"Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?" — // Samuel, Hi, j8.

If we can gauge a man's greatness by our sorrow at his loss, then in PhilHps Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, the Christian Church and the nation have lost one of the greatest. The death of the great financier moves the market. Men speculate on what he made, and how he made it. The death of the great politician makes men talk more. It arouses the widest range of interest. The death of the great teacher and preacher makes sad hearts. And this should be so, for he is by far the rarest of the three.

Phillips Brooks was a preacher. Let me briefly glance at some of the elements of his power. Many have spoken some- what slightingly of his power and gifts as a theologian; and if the chopped straw that often passes for theological learning, and the only sort of theological learning worth 157

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the name — if acquaintance with this and successful handling of it be necessary in the theologian, there was much in the criticism that was just. But to-day, surely, we test things by results, and so tested, the great man who is gone was far from lacking as a theologian. It seems to be beyond argu- ment, that the main value of theology lies in the attainment of one aim and end, that is, the bringing near and making real of God to man. If it is a science dealing with the past, it must so deal with it that it record and arrange human thought con- cerning God, so as to bring the record of man's thinking in the past to the knowledge of man in the present in such a way that one generation in some sort inherits the prayers, heavenward strivings, and holiest and highest speculation of all the generations preceding it.

If this be the scope and meaning of the- ology, then surely one who moved so con- tinuously and permanently what was best in the religious and intellectual thought of New England, helping vast numbers toward a living belief in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ — he surely shall not be

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denied a place among the theologians of his time. To the stiff churchman, de- manding before all things clear-cut defini- tions of doctrinal belief, Phillips Brooks naturally seemed hazy as a thinker, and sometimes loosely heterodox. To the scien- tific spirit, demanding impossible assurances in the physical realm of spiritual realities, he also naturally seemed a visionary dreamer, eloquent, but fanciful. Neither of these positions could he understand; to those holding them he was not perhaps sufficiently sympathetic. Each in its own way seemed to him inexcusably irreverent, since it was the effort to define the Infinite in terms of the finite. With neither could he be in- duced to discuss or to argue. Definitions and discussions he abhorred. But his convic- tion was contagious. With his whole soul he believed in the infinite God, and in his case it was proved once again, that the victory that overcometh the world is our faith. His faith was sublimely simple.

And so to the hesitating mind of New England, somewhat given to over definition, he came as a divinely empowered messenger. He brought to much that was best in that

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mind what it most needed — the warmth and fire of an ennobled and ennobHng Christian emotion; for emotional in the best sense Phillips Brooks was. Beyond doubt, he was Massachusetts' truest, great- est pastor and teacher. Born from Puritan stock, living among the descendants of the Puritan, he seems fit successor to that noble man, John Robinson, who, in his own day, with spiritual instinct rising above all narrowness of the time, to that little band embarking at Delftshaven more than two hundred years ago for these shores, delivered as a final and solemn in- junction the words: ''Beloved brethren, I charge you to believe that God has yet more light to break forth from His Word. " To Phillips Brooks that Word was no mere book, but the Man, the everlasting Son of the Father, ever revealing Himself as His brethren are able to bear His light, in all great books, true histories, good men — God once for all revealed in Jesus, ever and always immanent in His world.

More light to break forth. Here he based his message. With girded loins he was looking for his Lord, seeing Him ever

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coming, clothed in His new Messiahship, to each new age, in each new year, in each new duty. Here lay his power. He be- lieved, and he made men believe in the Living God, divinely immanent; as he preached he knew God was to be found of us, and no man failed in finding Him who honestly looked within. "Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven ? (That is, to bring Christ down from above) or, Who shall descend into the deep? (That is, to bring up Christ again from the dead.) The word is nigh thee, even in thy heart: the word of faith which we preach."

Let me repeat it. This was the beginning and end of his theology : the God and Father of Jesus Christ upholding all things by the word of His power, Whose nature is love, Whose home is the heart of man. He based his thought squarely and fairly on the immanence of God. Because there is divine immanence, there must be ever divine evolution. Men are looking in vain for Him without, because they have for- gotten Him within. God revealing in Jesus those laws, that life, by which ever and always, whether in the darkest past or

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remotest future, He must mould and woo mankind to Himself.

Yes, he was a preacher, easily our first. Nor, to my mind, since Frederick Robertson died in Brighton, England, thirty-six years ago, has there been his equal across the water.

Three elements of power were his. Genius of insight, wonderful gifts of expression, and soul-compelling love. Cried Matthew Arnold :

•' We cannot kindle when we will The fire that in the soul resides."

Ah, true, so true. And just because it is so, we reverence the genius, that, like the fabled demagogue of old, brings heavenly fire to the cold ashes of our poor human hearths. Those who listened to the rich tones of his voice, carried beyond them- selves, lost to all outer things, the man himself forgotten by them, were wont to say, as were said by the men in the company of the Greatest one evening long ago: "Did not our hearts bum within us as He talked with us by the way and opened to us the Scriptures?" He lived for men and loved them and knew them; and he lived

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with God. And so the worship of God was after all beautiful and possible, and His service was perfect freedom. So much he made you feel. You felt that he spoke, not as one standing on an impossible height (he never made that most common and fatal clerical mistake of talking down to his people) ; but what he knew he did, what he said he was.

His power was rare. It was the power -of moving men. I shall never forget an instance of it, which, in a poor way, I must try to recal to you. It was at the Church Congress at Providence, if I remember rightly. He was pleading for the larger use of extemporary prayer in the fixed services of the Church; and as his speech drew to a close, he clinched all that had gone before with the following illustration: "The General Convention of our church was in session in 187 1, when the news was flashed — 'Chicago burning.' It was moved at once that the order of business be sus- pended, and that both houses proceed to prayer. What form, as led by their pre- siding bishop, should the supplications of that representative body take? All knelt

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and joined in the Litany, a noble prayer, comprehensive beyond all others, hallowed to us by undying memories of ages past; yet perhaps the only woe it does not deal with is the woe of a burning city. " I shall never forget the closing moments of that speech, or the thrill that took us all, as his words seemed to have real, stinging points to them, making themselves felt in the bodies as well as the souls of men. The dusk of the evening was coming on, and a^ spell was on the assembly as he sat down.

His was not only the power of a very pure eloquence, but of an utter simplicity. When I heard that he had been elected Bishop of Massachusetts, feeling how much that election meant for the whole Church in this land, I could not but telegraph: " Praise God from whom all blessings flow. " And back came his simple answer: " Thank you. I will be as good a Bishop as I can. " How he dreaded that in some way the ec- clesiastical traditions of the Episcopate might hedge him off somewhat from his companions and friends. Alas ! too often they do. On the day of his consecration, some of us were sitting in his study in the

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evening. When we rose to go I shall never forget the pressure of his great, big hand, and the look in his eye as he said: " Please God, I will be just the same, just the same. "

I know no words that bring him back to me, bring back all he strove for, more clearly than those spoken shortly before his death: ''We must come back to our Lord again, and everything becomes clearer in that very clearest life, which is our per- petual inspiration and study. Christ was cultivating Jesus of Nazareth, and yet was remembering His fellow men who were around him in Jerusalem and Galilee; but all this was subject to and governed by His entire consecration to God. And so, my friends, the secret and solution of it lies here. You are to cultivate yourselves for the sake of your fellow-men, and you are to serve your fellow-men for the sake of your own self -culture ; but you are to save both these efforts from the self-conscious- ness which is the taint and poison of them both, by forgetting both of them and by lifting both of them into the very life of God."

Shortly before his election as Bishop of

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Massachusetts, I spent a day and night with him. Even to his intimate friends he never readily and with ease spoke of himself. When, therefore, late into the night (it was Sunday, and he loved to sit up chatting with a friend or two, after Sunday work was over), we were left alone, I was deeply moved when he himself let our talk take a personal drift. I had known him since 1876 when, a very green and imaccustomed English stranger, he had taken me in and made me preach at Trinity. In a hundred ways since then he had helped me to larger views of the truth of God. I had many times tried to speak about my own personal wants and fears, and had found that such confidences seemed to be rather unwelcome and difficult to him. But this evening I felt near the great, good heart of the man, as he passed from dis- cussion of the work we were given to that of his own experience and life. He spoke frankly of the possibility of his leaving Trinity. I said something about the deep pain such a move would cause. "Yes," said he, "but I have said all I know. I have delivered what was given me to say,

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and now nothing remains for me but to amplify it."

Wisely and accurately he summed up his life, so it seemed to me that night; so it seems to me now. Bitterly as we mourn him, greatly as we need him, much as w^e expected from him, within our House of Bishops and without, no man could doubt of all those who loved him and learned from him, that his own view of his ministry was true. You might say it had one text. Indeed, for seven consecutive days he preached on it, but a year ago, in Boston. " I am come that ye may have life, and that ye may have it more abundantly." To all the mean, engrossing, atrophying, narrowing influences of modern life, he brought the gospel of largeness of life in Christ. He knew the struggle for men to-day was pretty much as Bunyan depicted it long ago — the struggle in the choice between the muck-heap and the muck-rake, while the unseen angel offered the unnoticed crown. Brooks saw, as was given to few to see, the utter worthlessness of the muck- heap and the glistening glory of the crown; but well he knew that the man who would

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save his fellows from the one, and win them to choice of the other, must spend his time, not in denouncing the lowest, but in offering the highest; not in dwelling on the worth- lessness of the muck-heap, but the glisten- ing glory of the crown. This he did with splendid persistency again and again.

Let no man then say that the days of preacher and of preaching are over; that amid the hurry and stress of our time the opportunities of the preacher are passed or are passing away. To a man who under- stands his age and believes in his God, men will, as they did to him, reverently listen. They will hail him as leader, they will trust him and love him as friend, and among the very chiefest of their benefactors they will delight to count him.

He died as he would have liked to die. To some of His great ones God does even here give the desire of their hearts; and he had his desire. There was a dread on him of dying slowly, a dread of outliving his full vigour. With manhood at full tide, a manhood that had never known the touch of soilure, he has gone from us. His strength was firm, his natural force un-

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abated, when the post from the celestial city sounded his horn at his chamber door. From his splendid personality, there shall down here no more ring forth that jubilee challenge of his to all things mean, un- worthy and unmanly; but the memory of him abides with us and will abide. Tens of thousands who have never seen or heard him will in years to come think of Phillips Brooks as perhaps the best evidence of what our nineteenth century manhood at its highest was capable. And all over this broad land the multitude of those who knew and loved him and were helped by him will talk of Phillips Brooks as of one, who, like Great Heart in the Immortal Progress, was specially chosen of his king to guide pilgrims to that celestial city which, with inspired eye, he so clearly saw.

I stood in his study on Thursday mxorning, the room he lived and worked in, where many of us had listened to his genial, hope- ful, inspiring talk, in times gone by, and looked across the open space to Trinity Church. It was thronged. Silently, in the cold Winter sunlight, the people stood there. Down the long street to the Common the

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lines of those who wished to see his face for the last time patiently stood waiting. Flags were at half-mast, shops and exchanges closed or closing. Boston was indeed mourn- ing her great dead. And as I stood and looked, the triumphant lines closing Tenny- son's splendid poem of ''Arthur" came to me. I shall never again probably see them so illustrated. It was:

"As though a mighty city were one voice Around a king returning from his wars. '

January, 30, 1893.

OUR DUTY TO CIVILIZATION, OR WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?

" But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour ?

"And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves.which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

"And by chance there came down a certain priest that way; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

"And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

"But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him, he had com- passion on him.

"And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

"And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him: and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

"Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves ?

"And he said. He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him. Go, and do thou likewise. "

— Luke x: zg-^'j.

The Jewish sense of obligation to his fel- low man was tribal only : to their own people, to their own fellow religionists they owed something ; to the rest of the world, nothing. 171

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Little as we yet understand and acknowl- edge it, Christ's teaching of neighbourly obligation is nothing less than world wide. At first, man's conception of what he owes to his fellow-man is a very inadequate and limited conception. He is prepared to serve those who are dependent on him, or, per- haps, I had better say, those on whose well- being he is dependent, whose happiness or misery affects himself. Now, in the provi- dence of God, every advantage in civiliza- tion means a widening of this circle of in- fluence, means a constant increasing of the number of people whose well-being or ill-being intimately affects us. Human law lags a long way behind human conscience; and yet law, to-day, in a thousand ways enforces neighbourly obligations on us, be- cause those obligations are recognized by all which, a few generations ago, would scarcely be recognized at all, or by the very few whose sense of responsibility to their fellow-man was specially high, peculiarly Christian. To-day, a religion that ignores duty to our neighbour contents us not, is no longer true to us. Whatever charges may be brought against our generation this

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much, at least, is true of it, that it sees, far more clearly than other generations saw, the absolute truth of what Jesus Christ said, that "he who would save his life shall lose it," and that they who would enjoy life, whole, sound, and abundant, are men, or are peoples, most ready to discharge their obligations to others.

But in spite of this growing sense of neighbourly obligation, the responsibilities of nationhood many good men still ignore and deny. It is scarcely too much to say that these obHgations are abhorrent to them. Their minds have been so much occupied with the pursuit of their own immediate well-being, so taken up in the excessive activity of their routine duties, that they have formed no clear or adequate conception of any obHgations Jesus Christ has imposed on them to others than those who form their immediate circle. To them- selves it seems a very plain case, to them- selves the argument is unanswerable. "What have we to do with other peoples? See our own evils, our own shortcomings, see the evidence of corruption and failure in our own land, in our own institutions.

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Having failed, or only partially succeeded here, what have we to do with others?" And when, in the providence of God, the obligations of our nation to other people have gradually drifted us into the position in which we find ourselves to-day, and war is an accomplished fact, these people wake up with a start of horror. They forget that what is taking place is the inevitable consequence of a long course of previous events, and instead of going to the root of the matter and protesting against those sins of self-seeking which have made war inevitable, they cry out against war itself. It would be just as sane to cry out against the surgeon, or to protest against the opera- tion which alone can save life. There was a time when it might have been prevented, but, that time having passed, to the knife alone we must look for what medicine might once have done.

Let us sanely look at the situation as it really is and ask ourselves what duty we have to perform.

What is war? War is not only con- flict carried on with rifles and warships. It is a state of things in which, unduly and un-

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fairly, a man urges his claims against an- other man. War is not confined to nations. Unfortunately, it is resident in what is called civilized society. There is consider- able war going on in the world all the time. The generations to come will speak of the nineteenth century as a century of constant war. War is taking more than is right, withholding what is due, pushing the weak to the wall. Under this larger idea of war, much that passes as legitimate competition in commerce is war. To push business as many push it is war. To prosecute the fortunes of monopoly as these are commonly prosecuted to-day is war. To acquire vast wealth by pitiless competition is war. Stealing franchises by bribery, or obtaining them by lobbying, or the illegitimate use of money, is war. This being so, therefore, say some, open, declared war, according to your own showing, between peoples, is not such a bad thing after all. War is stimulat- ing, is good for the nation, means manliness, etc., etc. A silly, ignorant lie, all this. War at best is but the survival of a state of being out of which man must emerge and is emerging. Moreover, war brings all sorts

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of evil in its train. On these I cannot en- large this morning; but think of the terrible suffering to the innocent, as those innocent now suffer in Cuba. Think sanely, I say, of war and you can be no defender of it. As I have already said, war at best is a surgeon's knife and a knife used without anaesthetics, too. To follow my idea further. Operations may not be good things in themselves, but they may be absolutely necessary. There are worse things than cutting out a cancer or removing a diseased limb. Compliance with evil is worse than war. Shutting our eyes to manifest duty is worse than war. Don't suffer any con- fusion in your mind about this. These things are worse than war, they are the very poisonous breath of the disease which ultimately makes war necessary. They are the microbe which rots the soul. These are the treacherous, secret war, war at its very vilest; war, the villain that stabs in the dark or poisons the cup.

More than a hundred years ago, in this land, some one fell among thieves — it is the old parable of Jesus over again. His skin was black and he had few friends;

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and stealing, robbing him of his man- hood and of his right to Hberty and life and happiness, the thieves held him fast. It is none of our business, said the Northern and Western States, and they kept repeating it for long years. "The question of slavery may be all wrong, we admit it is brutal, we admit it is immoral, we admit it is cruel; but to interfere with it is to interfere with property." Now the one fundamental idea of Anglo-Saxon law is that it safeguards property, and Anglo-Saxon law is the bul- wark of Anglo-Saxon civilization, and Anglo- Saxon civilization is the hope of the world. Therefore, we are justified, said they, in non-interference, and the Church cried '*Amen. " And so things went on, and men were gradually being blinded to an awful sin. It was the sin of confusing two things that can never be confused — what was pleasant and seemed proper, and what was right. Property and its safe- guards might seem for a time to be the bulwark of civilization; but if Jesus Christ was sent from God to men, if He had any real message for us, the burden of it was this: That the safeguards of society were

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not to be found in safeguarding property merely but in making men. The law of Anglo-Saxon conscience is one thing, but the law of the Lord Jesus Christ towards which Anglo-Saxon conscience is slowly moving, is a higher, holier, and more lasting thing. The first safeguards property; this is a good and necessary thing enough. The second creates men. There is little fear that property will not be protected; there is great fear that our manhood may not be developed. Law made property safe enough in Rome, long ago ; but Rome fell, and great was the fall of it, when Roman citizens learned to put their propert}^ and their luxury in the first place, and the claims of their State in the second.

Some men, mere enthusiasts the public called them, tried to say these things, or better things than these, generations ago. They said that to sit down tamely, con- doning a wrong, was to be untrue both to themselves and to their nation. They said that man was more than property, that property was accidental; that the main question was not how much a man or nation had, but how the man or nation got it.

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And these enthusiasts kept repeating these things, in spite of the contempt of the great and the stones of the small. The clubs would not have them, their friends made excuses for them; but to their aid in a little time there came a small group of poets that some people fancied were quite the best poets the country had. These few voices would be heard, would not down. They had their song to sing and they sung it — men like Whittier, Lowell and Longfellow, just to name a few — and they, in their own way told the same story of individual and national obligation. And some politicians there were, too, who said the very worth of the American people and the stability of their institutions, depended on casting out the thieves, and succouring the black men that hacj fallen among them. But great as was the combined protest of all these three parties, individualism reigned. Puri- tanism survived and Puritanism had noth- ing to say against slavery. The masses of the people, belonging to a young and undeveloped nation, were too busy with their own affairs to interfere with the affairs of others. The one aim they had was to

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get on. The golden flood of money was pouring in. The West remained to be won. And so America's priest and Levite came and looked at the man fallen among thieves, and passed by on the other side. It was the old story, the story not that I tell but which Jesus told — the wounded man had to wait, and costly was the waiting. If we leave God's wounded, be sure we shall have to pay God's doctor's bill. Disease breeds disease and then comes death. Slavery was moral typhus, and typhus spreads. It seemed but one small, dark pimple on the fair young cheek of a maiden nation; but the pimple carried in it the seeds of death. For an evil thing allowed is not content to hold its own; it spreads.

The policy of slavery and the policy of freedom could not combine any more than oil and water can combine, or alkali and acid. And so in time another cry was heard in the land; that cry was separation. And then, indeed, things began to look serious. Separation meant a divided people, a weakened nation, a thwarted civilization. Slavery was a dull pain, separation was a sharp pain, and at last the sting of it roused

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the land, and the country was awake. And then there came war, the bloodiest of all modem wars, because between brother and brother. Father against son, neighbour against neighbour. South against North ! Then were terrible and protracted battles, for each was brave and each was strong. And even more awful than these battles were the evils following in their train — hideous prison pens, where, under the blight of famine and disease, life faded away. ]\Ian's heart was hardened against his fellow man. A man's foes became those of his own household. And following still in the foot- steps of that war came the blight of evil principles that ever accompany war — cor- ruption, private and public, cowardice and selfishness. Men who should have gone themselves, buying exemption — the rich taking advantage of their riches. Then the standard of business morality fell — the scheming man, the dishonest man taking advantage of his country's woes to steal from his country — dishonest contracts — those who meanly stayed at home, fattening on those who went to battle. Then, too, owing to the stringency of money, evil and

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foolish ideas became prevalent as to what money was. Men said it was in the power of the Government to make money. And thus were laid deeply in the minds of millions of people the germs of an impossible and immoral conception of our public obliga- tions. A man must pay his debts honestly, but a great country need not.

Now paus3 with me. From what cause did all these evil things arise ? Look straight, I pray you. Don't confuse secondary causes with primary causes. Don't confuse the leaves of a thing with the root. All these evils came not from war but from the de- liberate condoning of an evil that made, at last, war necessary. They came from yield- ing to a wrong, yielding to a wrong for comfort's sake, giving in to unrighteousness so that people might be saved the trouble and loss of driving it forth. This was the sin against God and man. This, and not war, was the real cause of all the train of woes which any man who knows anything whatever of the history of these United States is well aware follows and followed in the history of our war. I sum it up in these words of Jesus. The whole, horrid,

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spreading, blasting evil of it was rooted in one thing, and one thing alone — and this, standing in a Christian pulpit, I defy an}^ man to deny — it was the denial of our duty to our neighbour, it was the deliberate breaking of the second commandment.

But now I hear someone say, ''Admitted all this, there is no parallel between the condition of things to which you refer, and the obligations of our people in the past, and this Cuban question. The Cuban business is none of ours." Is it not? I ask myself. What would the Master say to that? I turn back, I ask you to turn back to what He did say. How does He lay down the law of neighbourly obHgation? You own Him as your teacher — don't mind my conclusions — what are His ? Who was neigh- bour to him that fell among thieves? The priest was, the Levite was; but they had so successfully cultivated individualism, so blinded their eyes, so hardened their hearts, so killed their consciences, that their own mean interests were paramount, and they passed by on the other side. But a Samari- tan, that is to say, one whom the wounded man had learned to abhor, one whom, in

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his religious service he was in the habit of daily cursing, one whom he counted a worse enemy than even the Romans themselves — he came where he was, and he saw not an enemy, but a poor, forsaken, crushed, out- raged, dying stranger, and he had pity on him. He forgot his journey, his own safety even, and certainly his convenience. He took him on his own beast, he took him to his own inn, he spent his money on him, he gave him his time. He cast aside the traditions and prejudices of his people to succour his fellow man. He had mercy on him. And down all the ages rolls the command of Jesus — Wouldst thou please Me, wouldst thou really be a man, go and do thou likewise. We may differ as to the means used. We may approve or disap- prove of some of the actions of the Presi- dent and Congress. One thing, as Christian men, I hold, we cannot do. We cannot, as Christian men, tolerate the statement that the unendurable woes of Cuba are no busi- ness of these United States. Are we blind to what God is doing in the world every- where? Do we utterly fail to see those sympathetic relations between people and

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people, which are binding men together all over the world? Have we forgotten that geographically these people are our neigh- bours ? More than that, politically we have declared ourselves to be in some sort their Suzerains, accepted them as our wards.

As I have said before, I am far from advo- cating unnecessary war. War is an evil and brings great evils in its train. But again I repeat there is one thing far worse than war, for it is the fruitful womb from which all wars are born: it is the spirit which selfishly, supinely, sits at home in comfort and national plenty, when the divinely given rights of freedom and justice are denied to our next-door neighbour; it is the growing, sluggish indifference to torture and wrong. This in the eyes of God is far worse than war; for it inevitably leads to wholesale death, death of the soul, and the blasting and decay of all that is worthy in civilization.

It is not so long since Armenia cried aloud to God and men, and Europe heard her wailing; but jealousy and mingled fear, then, too, made the priest and Levite leave the dying Armenian to the Turk that still

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robs and still tortures. European powers were afraid of each other and afraid of the thieves. I ask you this morning how did you feel about it ? You felt that the Anglo- Saxon race was shamed. You felt that if Turkey had seized one small colony of England, in that case the thieves would have had short shrift.

On this I need not dwell. In our case there is no such excuse. We are told that in this immediate case, this special poor man may fall among thieves again, and Cuba become a second Hayti. We are told that we will have to look after her, prop her up, spend money for her, take care of her; in all likelihood we will indeed; that is just what Jesus said He commended the stranger Samaritan for doing. Our business is to do right, and leave the consequence to Al- mighty God.

I feel full well this morning that some of you may not agree with the general princi- ples I have laid down; but do not be mis- taken about this: they are the principles of Jesus Christ. You are not quarrelling with my conclusions, but with His commands. The men who are crying out, *'It is no

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business of ours, this Cuban trouble ! ' ' are mistaken men. They may think themselves to be, but they really are not, patriotic men. They are not the men most willing to undergo hardship for God's cause or man's cause. They are men who have fallen into the habit of thinking that civilization and wealth are one and the same thing ; and that is a foolish, un-Christian, unhistoric, immoral lie. They are not fitted to lead or represent a progres- sive people. Yet I thank God that through the length and breadth of this land there is a marvellous unanimity of feeling about the righteousness of the issue before us. We had a war scare three years ago. An evil and wicked spirit was stirred up in the land. Unthinking and designing men, and some ignorant, self-seeking politicians were willing to fan it, too often, I fear, for the sake of personal ambition. If I remember rightly it was on a Friday that President Cleveland's message startled the world. On Sunday almost all the leading Christian ministers and almost all those who direct the universities of learning in our country, without any opportunity for mutual con- sultation, protested in the name of God

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and civilization both against the message and the spirit in which it was received. Where are those protesting voices now? I say that, almost without exception, they are agreed that the cause of freedom in Cuba is the cause of God and man. Almost without exception, these lovers of peace, these men whose lives and work are their record that they abhor all spirit of blood and strife — these men are agreed. To them and to me it appears that this cry of the weak and the weary (a cry so feeble from long-continued torture, that it is almost inarticulate) — this cry for man's sake and for Christ's sake we must answer and bind ourselves by solemn covenant that we will suffer the evil thing that causes it no more.

And lastly, what is the duty of the hour ?

(/). It is to see plainly, and to try and make other men see the issue before us. It is only the other day that Signor Crispi, while he openly avowed that his natural sympathies were with the sister Latin nation of his own people, the Spaniard, said : ** Spain has committed monstrous sins, and she must pay the price of sin." The dis- appearance of her last greatness has come,

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the end of an awful rule has come. She has slaughtered God's saints, she has per- sistently stood in the path of man's progress, and from that path she must be swept aside. To remove her from it is our duty. Our cause is as plain as day. The issue will appear as clear to our children as the issue of '61 appears to us. Good men hesitated then, some good men hesitate to-day; but we are not playing for our own hand or forcing a war of conquest. This trouble that has come to us has not been cunningly devised by anybody. It is the outcome of an old evil, it is the breaking forth of an ancient and intolerable wrong. We are being pushed on to do the work of God by elemental forces which no politician, how- ever shrewd, could create, control or gain- say.

(2). Steps taken by our Executive we may criticise. Let us, however, not be too hasty with our criticism until we know all the facts, and these we do not know yet. We must stand by those in authority, and we ought all to stand together and stand as one man. Our President has surely proved himself patient, wise and strong, and far

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from lacking in that rare ability to with- stand pressure. Let us support him.

( j) . We must protest against this wicked, unchristian, barbarous spirit of vengeance. We must denounce and oppose all such unworthy cries as, "Remember the Maine!'' These Spaniards whom we are called to sweep aside are scarcely less pitiable in their ignorance, their suffering or their destitu- tion, than the poor Cubans they have blighted. Oh, think of those poor Spanish boys, torn from their homes in their teens, carried away from their sunny valleys and plains to wage a war in which they are not interested, and to die by tens of thousands in a pestilential climate ! Think of the bereaved homes of Spain, and who shall dare to speak of vengeance !

(4). Let us put away all this mere hysteria — it is unworthy of a great people — all this silly shouting over the capture of un- armed vessels which an honest Government will promptly restore to their lawful owners. I say it is entirely unworthy of a great people engaged in a great cause — and the cause is great. So let the best men go where they are needed, and let them go quietly. For if,

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in these last days, a great and rich people, lapped in luxury, sheltered from evil by the wide sea, proved callous to such a pitiful call, such a plea for succour at their door, then, indeed, it would seem to me that the first sign had been given that free Govern- men of the people, by the people, and for the people, deserved to perish from the earth.

May 2, 1898.

LEANNESS OF SOUL

"He gave them their re(juest; but sent leanness into their souls." — Psalm, cvi: i§.

Some nations have no robustness about them. They are of the nature of the na- tional fungi, quickly sprung and quickly passed. Others have just this quality of robustness — a certain constitutional strength by which they refuse to succumb to the evils, the forces of disintegration, that visit and test all peoples. These are the nations who make history. The histories of such are peculiarly valuable to us. We see in them the interplay of forces which we find still active in our own time. These nations are our real teachers. And when in addition to this they produce, as usually they do, great teachers, artists, poets, prophets, then they supply us with the very best guides that we poor, doubtful men, living in the tortuous and difficult pathways of our own time, can know of.

No race, except perhaps our own Anglo-

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Saxon race, has so distinctly manifested so much of this robustness, this national strength, this peculiar fittedness for living, as has the Jewish nation. They have national bone and sinew enough, as it were, to last out other races and yet the quality of their life is fine enough to leaven this robust fieshliness with spiritual fire, purpose and aspiration. History with them, there- fore, is not a mere repository of fact, but fact ever viewed in spiritual light. They are worldly, but religious, too — practical and also ideal.

This old wilderness legend to which my text refers is an instance of this. For our purpose, it is altogether unimportant whether those quails were miraculously sent, or whether in process of natural migration they reached the Jews in an hour of need, or whether after the visit of the quails came a miraculous or altogether natural sickness. This old preacher, ascending the pulpit of perhaps three thousand years ago, with true spiritual insight at once lays hold of the main point of the story. The wilderness tradition serves to point a great moral; serves in his mind to illustrate a tremendous

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fact. It is this: "Thou gavest them their request, and sent leanness into their souls." There was nothing unreasonable or wrong in this request of Israel for flesh. It was the natural craving of hungry men fed for too long a time on farinaceous food ex- clusively. But after excessive indulgence came satiety, and quickly passing from the physical realm to the spiritual which it indicated, with true instinct the Psalmist sees before him, in the old wilderness story of human longing and human loathing, a picture of the unsatisfied yearning that fills all his life. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing. Man can- not live by bread alone. No, not though it be the very bread he cried and craved for. This following of gratified desire by intense sense of new-begotten desire, which is summed up in the old word and compre- hensive— leanness — is true of life. In the highest gifts God gives, in answer to the most natural cravings man knows, there springs up as resultant this leanness. This property of leanness accompanies the grant- ing of longings that are not only not hurtful in themselves, but are most reasonable and

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should be entertained. It is in the satis- faction of the legitimate hunger for legitimate food that we feel this growing leanness at- tacking us — and what is the meaning of it? Look a little closer and see how true the statement is, that this leanness follows longings higher than those for quail. Take for instance one of the highest forms of it. It is the very property of all processes of education known to us to give us our re- quest and send leanness into our souls. The property of all education is to make the educated want more; and surely it is a divine property; whether it is the education of man in the mastery over the physical; whether there falls on him the fascination of that splendid spirit of searching, which God authorized to man when He said: "Have thou dominion;" or whether man pushes his exhaustless search for knowledge among other spheres than those which physical science offers — in all cases the more absolute, the more signal his mastery is, the more really the wings of his aspiration seem to strike against bars that more cruelly draw themselves close. As in the process of man's development he gathers

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the forces of dominion in his right hand, there is a new-born hunger in his heart, there is a deeper emptiness in his soul, there is a further-off yearning in his eye. And he knows and feels, as he mounts from step to step, as request after request is satis- fied, as height after height is measured and ascended — it is still true — leanness in his soul. Each attainment of mastery means for him the strife for a deeper sight, the craving for a newer and larger dominion. Truth is his mistress, and if wholly he could hold and possess her she would lose for him half her charm. And therefore, if you offer him truth in the one hand and the search for truth in the other, reverently he will bow and take the search rather than the possession.

We are told by some who have not girded up the loins of their mind and braced them- selves to pursue on lofty and sometimes dangerous paths the beauty of truth — we are told by these that they do not rise and follow her, "Because," say they, "this unsatisfied and unsatisfiable property in life is evidence that we are only here to be thwarted. Why encourage a yearning which

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must be followed by sharper hunger?" I answer, our requests are not thwartings merely : they are incitements. The very ele- ments of dissatisfaction and incompleteness which mingle with them and which forbid the sluggard to strive, supply the necessary spur and stimulus to further effort which the normal human mind requires. Men whose environment is for the time being a wilderness environment would lose the best properties of their manhood, if they could be wafted from a quail feast to a Capua.

Let our conquests be won in the school- room or in Wall Street, at Washington or in the laboratory — the conquests of politics or of science, in winning of priceless treas- ures from some mountain mine, or wringing a new secret from the half visible flickerings of a star — we feel as we achieve them all that it is well that they should afford us but a temporary platform for our feet, and not a meadow on whose soft breast we may lay us down to rest the whole length of a Summer day. We are like climbers who, for a moment on a dangerous ascent, find their feet at last based on some firm though narrow jut of crag, and so wipe the sweat

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from their brow, fill their lungs with in- spiring mountain air and once again look up. Let me take a modem instance, somewhat hackneyed it may be, though it seems to me peculiarly valuable and useful to-day, because his life was so really a part of what we hold as best. Darwin confesses this sense of leanness with a pathetic frankness that few are great and true enough to be capable of. In his autobiography, he notes down the result on his own disposition of the tremendous intensity of his devotion to one realm of research. Physics and physical research had robbed him, so he believed, of some of his finest perceptions — music, colour, poetry. He was naturally but needlessly severe in his self-judgment. He could not have been the great man he was if he had not accurately recorded his sensations. But if he had drunk into the source and fount of the inspiration of Jesus Christ, as God grant he is drinking now, he would have known — what, alas ! the wisest of us forget again and again — that not even sen- sations are verbally inspired . There is no such thing on God's earth as verbal inspiration, either in your sensations or in your Bibles.

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Darwin forgot — no doubt he knows it now, and knows it with a new delight — that a man has lost nothing that he mourns for, any more than he can cease to love while he mourns. The tear that drops from the eye of memory is the evidence that memory clasps in her soul arms the things she mourns. This is not fancy; it is deepest truth. A man can not mourn lovelessly. It is love that makes mourning real. Those powers are doubtless only laid aside for awhile, overlaid perhaps a little, but the steel of our souls does not decay because the scab- bard in which we hide it is rusted a little.

The more we study, I think, the great facts of life, the more we shall be assured that many of our worthiest longings, long- ings by which we rise toward the attain- ment of desires beneficial to ourselves and to our kin — the more fully they are granted to us the more we know a deepening hunger Why should it not be so? 'Tis but the foretaste of our immortality. 'Tis the proof that we, even we, are a spark of God. Can that spark go out? Can it utterly die? Even in the presence of One, all-present, of whom it is said, *'a bruised reed will He

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not break and smoking flax will He not quench," He himself seemed to fear that it could. And hence, in loving warning, the estate of man is burdened with an un- rest meant to fan the flame.

There is another leanness, a leanness that fails to recognize itself as lean, a hunger that kills its own craving, a cold so mortal that he stricken by it believes himself to be warm, while life is dying at the touch of frost. The dying soul ceases to aspire. The aspirations and ideals of youth are laid aside. Those early aims that came to us in life's morningtide are quite forgotten. That splendid and inspiring vision of life's possibilities that once was ours has passed and left not a wrack behind. And what was it after all given up for? Some poor quail feast, indeed ! Birds of passage for a passing lust ! Some position to be won, some for- tune gained, some social ambition claimed, some prize, tinsel or golden, snatched ! And for these, high gifts, persistent purpose, self-denial that would have been noble were its end a noble one, and all the resources of life used up. Ah, prayer itself prayed out — for, "Thou gavest them their request."

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Where life is fattest and fullest, there is it most dangerous. Oh, it is where life is fattest that the hot wrath of God comes ! No pause between His lightning flash and His thunderbolt ! It is not a jaundiced view of life to say that if there is one fair spot on God's fair earth to-day where the quail-feast is being urged — aye, even by our strongest and best — it is in our metropoli- tan city. Until the sense of hunger itself is gone, the sense of distance from God is gone, and all that was most precious, most buoyant in them years ago, is gone.

Yes, it is tremendously true, by virtue of our own immortal nature, we must get what we want, we must go where we will, we must be what we aim — for this is to be man.

'A thread of law runs through our prayers Stronger than iron cables are, And love and longing towards the goal Are pilots strong to steer the soul."

Man chooses his mistress and at last she is given him to wife. He has his request. She is his very own to have and to hold, to test and to know thoroughly. Well for him, if there still remains some sense of leanness in his soul. Alas ! the hunger, the sense

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of leanness which is itself the evidence of the Divine presence, which is itself the proof that God who led us into the wilderness will, by means of loving and all-wise plaguing, purge us and lead us at last out, does not always, so far as we can see, survive the marriage with its lust. So far as we can tell, there can then in such a case be no Canaan for that soul. No distant gleam of Eden can rouse a longing in that eye. It already hath the fulfilment complete and sufficient of its desire. Life for it is

"A life of aspiration furled,

Of self in petty self deep curled; Amid the struggles of a world

A narrow life, a dreamless eye That hath no glance on earth or sky

Save for the pleasures passing by."

God in His infinite mercy grant that we may ever know the incitement of a hunger that bids us strive and live and pray and hope and serve, and not in the loss of it all, taste the beginning of a dead — twice dead soul.

February 21, 1892.

SACRIFICE TO THEIR NET

"They sacrificed to their net, burned incense to their drag. " — H.abakkuk i: i6.

The simile, you will see, is a fisherman's. He sweeps the sea with wide net. This he uses for the upper waters, and having caught what fish he can in these, he drags his trawl along the bottom. With open mouth and long purse it catches everything small and great. His haul is enormous, and stupid, idolatrous that he is, the prophet warns him of his danger, tells him he is so intent on his own success that his net and his trawl have become to him a god, as really a false god as though on the sea sand he built an altar and burned incense before the tools of his craft.

You will agree with me, friends in St. George's, that these closing days of the year shall be thoughtful days, and surely many things have conspired to make us specially thoughtful at the close of 1895, whether we will or no. Now what I am 205

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afraid of is, that we are not as thoughtful a people as we suppose we are, that, on the contrary, we are more mercurial and less intelligently sober-minded than we ourselves would admit. We are apt to take life too much by fits and starts. And so I think we will do well this morning to take to heart the words that the great apostle spoke long ago when he said: "I say, through the grace given to me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly." Sober thinking is timely and necessary, and in it the Church must lead the world. And it seems that, to-day, outside the Church as well as inside it there is a concensus of thought among all those men who, without difference of opinion, we should judge to be sober minded, that we in these great United States have a very special danger, have a strong tendency to fall into a disastrous sin — a danger which, I think, is distinctly pointed out, a sin which is strikingly illustrated in the text I have read to you.

Our idol is our own success. This danger which I venture to point out exists not alone

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in the enthusiastic mind of a few religionists; but go to men who think as well as to men who pray and you find them agreed. Go to the greatest living philosopher, Herbert Spencer, the great poets of our century on both sides the iVtlantic— Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Lowell and Whittier— the great literary men, or to artists, and in art, poetry, literature and philosophy the warning is repeated : we are in danger of worshipping our trawl.

This worship of success sometimes assumes a grotesque and ridiculous phase, as when (not to go further back than last week to find an instance) a Senator of the United States by way of allaying the war panic gravely rose in the chamber of that delibera- tive body and moved that we, the people of the United States, should, without any fur- ther regard to any other people or peoples of any other land, proceed to the unlimited coin- age of silver at the ratio of sixteen to one. I claim, of course, no special knowledge in financial matters; but that such a move- ment would be a display of folly is evident to every intelHgent public school boy. Here the worship of success is seen in vain

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and vulgar boastfulness, an utter failure to recognize the simplest truths of life; a for- getfulness that it is not possible for nations any more than individuals to stand alone and be a law to themselves. God has not set us alone in the earth to go our own way, regardless of the history or experience of the nations of the earth. We cannot live by different laws. No happy divinity spe- cially superintends our destiny. It is not true that we are quite unlike any other people, much less that we may safely pre- sume on that unlikeness.

Yet the spirit of so-called Americanism which finds an expression so grotesque in the motion of the Senator, is a spirit which, if I mistake not, is widespread in our land. It is an unclean and evil spirit and if it is not driven forth by a cleaner, wiser, and in the best sense holier spirit, it will yet work us or our children great harm. It does not always take a form so palpably dangerous or grotesque as that which I have quoted, yet I believe it pervades our 75,000,000 of people. It lowers our standard of national responsi- bility; it makes us careless and indifferent often as to our own obedience to the calls of

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public duty. It is a sin of overconfidence in ourselves, our resources, our manner of life, our methods of government. "There never was a net like ours, or a trawl with as big a mouth or so long a sack;" and so we cry ''hurrah," and the incense of a false worship rises. The whole land bows to the great trawl, loses its head when confronted with some gigantic success, and forgets how the success was won; marvels at some vast fortune, never asks how it was made, does not indeed care so much how it was made, and if a little of it goes to the public at the death of the maker, why, then, the end is certain, that vast fortune must be a good thing for the people, and the man who made it could not have been a bad man or a bad citizen.

And the natural result of such mushy and sentimental thinking is this: that we are treated every now and then to a display of vulgarity on a large scale. We laugh, sneeringly at other nations for their enjoy- ment of display; but let me ask where on earth would such a wearisome and vulgar noise have been made — not by one class, but by all classes — over the wedding of two young

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people, as we with disgust and weariness en- dured this late Fall. I hold it proven that the worship of the net is a vulgar worship.

Furthermore, the adoption of a false standard means the abandonment of a true standard. Let success once be a national aim, and then every consideration but suc- cess is laid aside. It makes the business man unscrupulous. It makes the working man reckless and destructive. In obedience to it, solemn contracts binding capitalist and labourer are torn up as the interests of either party dictate. In politics, national honour and even national well-being are for- gotten, in order to push private ambition. And in the field of sport where gentlemen meet or ought to meet (will the young men in the church bear with me, this morning, will they believe me when I say I speak that which I know and testify to that which I have seen), they do not race or row as they did twenty years ago. The true idea of sport, in its right place a healthy and ennob- ling thing, is too often laid aside in obedience to this inexcusable worship of success. Let us win, no matter what happens, strain rules or alter rules, play with professional-

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ism, hunt over the land to get Hkely athletes for our college, pay men's way through, pile up great sums in our club funds — for win we must. Yes, ''our own company, right or wrong," says the business man. *'My own fortune, right or wrong," says the financier. ' ' My own college, right or wrong, ' ' cries the youth. "My own party, right or wrong, "cries the politician. And "our own country, right or wrong," cry we all.

What are we saying? Do we remember how near for the Christian man this comes to blasphemy? Were you baptized in the name of your company, or your fortune, or your college, or your party, or the United States? I beg and pray you, my brothers and sisters, let no such talk as this any more pass unchallenged. To be a Christian means in some small but real sense to be the follower of Him Who said (and when He said those words He gave us the watchword for all time): "For this cause was I bom, for this cause came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth. ' ' And if, for any sake — company, fortune, college, party, interest, or even country's sake, w^e take sides against the truth, then do we take sides against the

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living Lord God of all righteousness and right, and we undertake a pretty big con- tract.

But yet a moment further. The worship of the trawl blinds us to reality, closes our eyes to great truths, stops our ears to the calls of pressing dut^ which our very in- terests make imperative. In this land of ours are people of good brain and at least average intelligence ; but if brain and intelli- gence be concentrated on ourselves and our own affairs, we shall not have time to think sufficiently over the affairs of those who are our immediate neighbours, and 'in whose success and well-being our own is indissolu- bly connected. We are pursuing, I beg to say, a dangerous course in relation to the labouring class in this country, a class on whose developing prosperity the prosperity of the whole community depends. Bear with me, if you do not agree with me. I am speaking with intense conviction. The labouring people in this country need the help and sympathy of the church. How shall it be given to them, how shall we aid them ? All the charities, public benefactions, art galleries, museums, nay, the churches

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themselves, cannot help the labouring people as they can help themselves. The only possible development of any class in this country must come from within. We must help them to help themselves.

Now what is the note of to-day ? Here you all will agree with me — it is combination. Larger combinations and more combinations are inevitable. No doubt in the end the result to the whole will be good; but times of growth and change are times of pain and danger, and disturbance and unsettle- ment only imply that inevitable change is making way. But how shall the principle of combination — this inevitable principle — how shall it have fair play among all our people? Only by its application to all. Let part combine, let the strong and the wealthy combine, as they are doing, and let opportunities for combination be grudg- ingly afforded or denied altogether to the poorer and the weaker elements in our nation, and the unrighteousness and wrong of this will not fail to produce widespread evil and disaster. I am alluding to no fancied danger, but to a very real danger at our door. I speak with greatest plain-

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ness. I hold it to be the duty of the Christian Church and of Christian bishops and clergy everywhere to help and encourage the poor people of this land to continue in and to develop their labour unions. Only by these will they educate themselves, only through them, or, rather, chiefly through them, will they become truly American. Labour unions will do more to break up multi-nationalism than all the churches can do. Let us have the American flag in all the public schools, let it stand for what it means ; but when the boys and girls leave school let us help them to recognize that they have no chance whatever to assert them- selves and develop their own education and prosperity in the future, but by recognizing the law — and it is God's law — of association. I repeat again, if the rich and the strong find it necessary to combine, it must be evident to all that there is further and more pressing need for the poor and the weak to do so.

Oh, things are not always going as they should in this country of ours, and the time has come when we must turn our attention to other things than the great hauls of our net

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and our trawl and recognize these sad facts. We speak of our liberty, our prosperity, and our greatness ; but we forget the hundreds of thousands of those who are crushed into misery and vice. In our own city there are many whose earnings for fourteen hours' work daily do not amount to more than a dollar and a half a week. England is re- ducing child labour enormously. Here — and I know you will be startled to learn this — child labour has absolutely increased a hundred per cent, in the last fifteen years. There were no tramps to speak of, twenty years ago, in this country. The best esti- mate, perhaps, says there are probably thirty thousand in the State of New York to-day. In England, arrests for drunken- ness have enormously decreased; here they increase. There are more homicides in the State of New York, with its 6,000,000 people, than in the British Isles, with 40,- 000,000. And we cannot delude ourselves into thinking that the foreign populations produce the criminals. The very reverse is true. These few facts — and they are only a few of many thai might be adduced — surely are worth thinking about.

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Yet for the recognition of one more I plead. More thought, more time, more teaching and better for the children. Let us give the children of this great city a chance. I cannot close the sermons of this year without once again pleading for the children — the children that our neglect in this city has grievously wronged — the children whom we have left to the evil chances of politics — the children whom we are leaving in inadequate and often bad schools, with no proper provision and often no provision at all for physical or technical training. Can we not make time to leave the worship of the net and the trawl and give some attention to Christ's lambs? I tell you we cannot do better for the children, till we have intelligent and honest city government. We cannot have that till all join to get it. We shall not do that till the flower of our city's manhood and youth live and work less exclusively to burn incense to their trawl.

It is not pleasant, my friends, to dwell on these things; but God knows I do so, this morning, because I believe in my soul that the man who poses as a teacher of men and

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fails to do so is either, to-day, a fool and does not know, or else a coward and does not dare. And I hold that the worst of all social enemies — and from such may God deliver His Church — is the false prophet; he indeed prophesies deceits.

Yes, we have a war on hand — what sort of a war? We have no time so much as to think on a wicked war that would be a dis- grace everlasting to our nation and a set-back to all mankind.. But there is a righteous war, one in which we may not hire a sub- stitute and for service in which let us, in the name of God, gird up our wills. A war from which, if we shrink back, future ages will proclaim us traitors to the great cause of mankind. War against the rough places — though they be mountain high, they must be laid low. War against the waste wildernesses of evil — war against ignorance, misery, selfishness and sin. To this war we would pledge ourselves, O God. So through Thy grace shall we yet do in this broadest and fairest of Thy lands something great for the human race, and so shall we ourselves be not only the biggest and the richest, but the greatest among the nations

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of the earth. Help us, then, we pray Thee, to cease from the worship of our net and our trawl, and to kneel to the Son of Man.

December 29, 1895.

CLAIMS AND DUTIES OF OUR TIME

"And the men of the city said unto EHsha, Behold, I pray thee, the situation of this city is pleasant, as my lord seeth: but the water is naught, and the ground barren,

" And he said. Bring me a new cruse, and put salt therein. And they brought it to him.

"And he went forth unto the spring of the waters, and cast the salt in there, and said. Thus saith the Lord, I have healed these waters; there shall not be from thence any more death or barren land.

" So the waters were healed unto this day, according to the saying of Elisha which he spake." — // Kings, it: ig-22.

Here we have the claim of the community on the prophet, and the prophet's answer to that claim. Both, it seems to me, sug- gest to us vividly the circumstances, claims and duties of our own time — society's claims on us and our best answer to those claims.

The distinctive feature of our modern life in these United States has been individ- ualism, an individualism perhaps more vig- orous and in many ways more complete than any that the history of our race has yet afforded. All things have combined 219

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to develop the individual. The religion of each nation is part and parcel of its life. Of necessity it fits that life as the glove fits the hand, and each hand must have its own glove. Hence our religious life has also been individualistic.

Geographically, we are individualists. The bigness of our national estate discovered in the fulness of time and offering its rich bosom to the industry of man, when man began to be aware of the limitations of his condition in Europe, beckoned him to an enlargement of individual energy, offered such rich rewards to him who had manli- ness and wisdom to win them as had never been offered man before.

Politically, our institutions predispose us to individualism. The great and wise men who laid the foundations of our free- dom were deeply impressed with the failure of those forms of government in Europe that to them represented repression of the individual rights of mankind.

Thus it comes to pass, that the bigness of our land, the progressiveness of our found- ers, and the timeliness of the discovery of a virgin continent all combined to give a

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hopeful start and large reward to the push, energy and courage of man. It is no exag- geration then to say that what we see around us to-day is chiefly the result of a generous individualism. Our greatness, our wealth, our boundless energy^a national expan- sion that never had or is likely to have a parallel — all witness what the intelligent individual can accomplish.

Instinctively I think most intelligent men feel this and, standing amazed at the wonderful results achieved, they are not prepared to give anything more than a very grudging hearing to the voice of any teacher or any movement that suggests that indi- vidualism itself is not a goal, but only a way of approach ; is not a final end, but one of the means only to a great end. And yet, beyond question, this is all individuahsm is, and to claim more for it than this is to turn the hands of progress backward, or to seek to turn them to read amiss the lessons of the past and the teachings of the present. We Christians believe that the life and teachings of Jesus Christ have for their object the vindication of God's laws and plans to men; and in that life and teaching

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we find, as we would expect to find, fullest provision for individual development, and yet at the same time the clearest possible sort of statement that this is not all. Christ declares the inalienable right of each man to self -fulfilment, to possession of himself, to live at his fullest and best, to eat the fruit of all his own labour under the sun. The right to be, to think my own thoughts unreproved of any, and so to live that at last I may stand before the Son of ^lan. Yes, stand; not cower or crawl, or even in this sense kneel: but in the fulness of the consecrated manhood of w^hich He in His mercy has deemed me worthy — stand be- fore the Son of Man, unrebuked, approved at last by the Lord and King of men.

Let me be explicit here. I do not wish anything I say should be misunderstood as in the least derogating from the importance of individual development, and the right to the very fullest development under the law of Christ. But I do say, beyond question, that is not the whole of His teaching. Any one who runs can read the significant fact that larger ideas pervade it. The social side of His gospel is at least as promi-

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nent as is the individual side. The crown and end of all individuaHstic effort is found in the sanctified and redeemed society. Lib- erty there is, liberty everywhere, but liberty within society. The end and aim of liberty — the creation of the glorious, lasting and pure society, justifying all the agonies and satisfying all the longings of all the past. Salvation itself is not the safety of the individual only or chiefly. It is the creation of a purified and stable social state. This society Christ proclaimed. Its law He il- lustrated and expounded. Its sure and final triumph He predicted. He founded and inspired His Church to be witness to it, and here on earth we His followers are con- secrated and called to make His words and promises good. How shall we then dis- charge our duty to the society and time in which we find ourselves?

First, I think we shall do so by recognizing the imperfect nature of the Christianity which these circumstances and times have specially tended to produce. The vast in- dividual energy of our people moulds and profoundly influences of course the religious life of the people; and this life is at present

224 The Reasonableness of Faith

too individualistic. It could not but be so. It works too much for its own hand, seeks to achieve too much its own fortune, to fill its own mouth, and be its own law. It is hyperprotestant, in short. It stands rooted in such adages as: **The first law of devel- opment is the law of self-preservation." No doubt it is the first law, but rudimentary law, a law that belongs in its fullest applica- tion to barbarous times and incoherent civilizations. It is the law that gives claws and teeth to the tiger; and strong hands and feet to swing it out of danger, to the ape. But surely the slow though almighty tides of divine purpose have lifted us at least to a point where we can see the beginnings of the working of some larger, higher law than this.

Protestant religions had their root idea in conscience. Fidelity to conscience was the motive power of their splendid past. The times were stormy and dark, and in the providence of God the starlight of con- science was the best light of which the bulk of men were capable. But starshine is not sunshine, and it is wont to be obscured by dark clouds. Conscience unassisted, un-

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inspired by love, may become a baleful fire. Strength, often pitiless, characterizes its rule. It is God's chosen instrument to dash in pieces and lay low the evil growths of time. It carries the blast of destruction with it often, and that blast is indiscrimina- ting. Every scholar knows that England endured the enormities and follies of Charles the Second, and for a time James the Second, rather than risk the return to the too -iron rule of a Puritan conscience. Conscience ends in laws of prescription and proscrip- tion, and in a law that cannot tie man to man. Conscience is negative and delights in the 'Thou shalt not." It lacks balance, discrimi- nation, proportion. It is magnificently brave in the hour of trial and never shrinks before calamity; but is almost as pitiless to the cry of the child as it is to the cursing of the blasphemer. It launches its Mayflower; but it also burns its great and good Servetus with green wood: and the poor, foolish crones of Salem are not too small'or despicable to escape its vindictiveness.

Conscience is the very mainspring of the religion of individualism and marks and stamps that religion always and every-

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where, both with its splendid powers and its great incompleteness. It cares little for the law of love and repudiates its watch- word of fellowship.

Now the simple fact to-day is, that much of the popular and orthodox religion preva- lent in our modern Protestant bodies is only- Puritanism more or less watered down. It lacks its rugged strength and it suffers grievously from a want of adaptiveness. Not all the preaching or writing or persecu- ting or heresy trials of those who oppose it make it fit comfortably or reasonably on the limbs of the present.

Of course the chief reason for this is plain enough. Men's thoughts, instincts and aims are more and more consciously drawing them into more involved and complex social relations. The aim of every good man is to help his fellow. There is more pity for the weak, more comfort for the sorrowing, more offers of aid to the over- burdened, than ever before. Men no longer willingly pass by the unfortunate who has fallen among thieves. They are anxious to help him and even bring him to their own inn and put him on their own beast, if

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they only knew how. And instinctively they feel that this is the best thing, the most religious instinct within them. They turn naturally to leaders and thinkers in religious matters for vindication and direction: and too often they are met by these mere expounders of a more or less dead Protestantism, who add to their con- fusion by trying to direct the influences of one age in language that altogether belongs and has shaped itself to the impulses of another.

The thing to do is to get back to Christ, to study afresh His idea of what the Church should be. And as I tried to say when I began, as we do this, we find that the well- being of the individual is subordinate to, and exists for, the well-being of the body. The idea of the Church is the idea of the body; and this idea Protestantism has almost lost. It has given us a bundle of contending sects, each staking its existence and its reason for being on some doc- trinal statement of truth; some partial statement of a partially apprehended truth. There is no platform for permanent unity to be made out of such thin, rotten boards

2 28 The Reasonableness of Faith

of perishable statement, and the moth and the rust of time find among them congenial food. We have surely to get back to the simple idea that so splendidly mastered the earliest age — a body having many members, illustrating one Christian law, and standing for that law against all the world, because the world can only be saved and advanced by accepting that divine law.

My friends, believe me, I do not seek to detract from the glory of the past, from the splendid results achieved by all that Protes- tant struggle stands for, when I speak thus. I know something of the costliness of the effort which has given us this land,

"Where girt with friends or foes A man may speak the thing he will."

God's spirit gave that struggle birth and guided it to its triumphant conclusion. Liberty is ours, and without cost to us we reap that on which we bestow no labour. But every age must have its own purgatory, and know its own searching, purifying power. What we have to achieve is not liberty, but unity; and the struggle to win

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unity, lasting and precious, will search and purify us, as the struggle to achieve liberty purged the dross from our fathers.

This, I conceive, is the claim that the community has a right to make on us; nay, the claim that often unconsciously the com- munity has made and is making on Christian thought. The salt and saving power of the religion of Jesus Christ must be put by us in the fountain head of life, even as long ago the prophet put it.

Briefly, three things, it seems to me, we must do. They are the spring head of all our life. The Church must educate and the meaning of education must widen and deepen for us all. If I believe in my con- science that the purpose of God for me is to spend my life in making men see that they can only live perfectly with each other in obeying Christ's law, this will profoundly change my ideas as to the way I should bring up my boys and girls. It will no longer be a desirable thing to me to bring up a son, if I have one, with the idea that the first end and purpose of his life is to make a fortune or to keep intact the fortune I give him. To bring him up with an idea so

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partial and imperfect as that, is to do what I can to make him a moral cripple, who must limp behind and not lead the thought of his time. The education that God in- trusts me to impart to that life of his, must be one that seeks to bring out and lead up all that is best and most helpful in his nature, all that can serve his generation best, be- cause it understands and is ready to obey its divinely ordained law of growth.

Again, to accept Christ's law as the law for all life, means to be separate, means to be vowed to a holy separateness from evil of which the most consecrated Puritan scarcely dreamed. The separateness proscribed by Protestantism no longer satisfies us. It is not something merely done or left undone, some religious observance kept, some gift rendered, some creed repeated or profession made; but we stand amazed and inspired before the certainty and unalterableness of the divine law. The law of God is the law of the universe. The world was made to order, the very atoms march to tune, and I am called intelligently to place my atom life within the splendid obedience of that law. I came from God and to God I must

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come — not part of me, not a seventh of me, not come to Him in my Church, in my family prayers, or even at His holy table; but come to Him with all my life, from the first cry of babyhood to the last weary sob with which the tired man puts off his body. With all between these I must come to God with the tale of all I have done or left undone and His law must search me and try me, even as silver is tried in the fire, and to the judgment of Infinite Wisdom, Mercy and Love, I must yield myself up. I cannot escape. I cannot palter — I dare not if I could.

Tell me, is this not separateness ? As I realize it, I get a holy contempt for the pett}^ laws and maxims by which men live; for I know myself to be a sharer in the vast law of God revealed in Jesus Christ His Son. So, too, as I realize the forces that are be- hind me and how truly I am a fellow-worker with God, weak and sinful though I be, I can know myself brave — brave to speak that which I hear from Him, bravely in- dependent of self-interest or worldly policy; careless of whether few men or many, great men or poor men, are my associates in

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tasks that are divinely set and shall surely be divinely crowned. I may only see a few yards before my face; but I know that the forces of the universe itself are obeying the wish and will of the King. That though life seems often a purposeless struggle, yet amid all its confusion and murk man must at last, since He is the one child of God, born of one Father and heir of one home — must be aware of his brotherhood. And that knowl- edge must profoundly alter and save, purify and inspire every relation with his fellow.

All life is God's life, and all law divine law. Love, not hate, is at the heart of things ; and unity, not division; fellowship, not conflict, shall be the result of things. All of self-seeking and self-seekers must at last die. They who love their own souls only must perish; but they who wait on the Lord of all love and law shall renew their strength, till at last they shall dare to stand crowned with a radiant and immortal man- hood before the Son of Man.

March, 1892.

CREATION AND THE FALL

I AM to try, this evening, my friends and fellow- workers, to say some things to you about the Creation and Fall. I think we might sum up what we know about the first of these in this sentence: Matter is the cradle of spirit. There was a time, as you know, when it was supposed to be necessary to divide all creation, so far as its history is concerned, into definite and clearly traced epochs. Well, one thing at least we know, that the conclusions as to the process and method of creation which obtained among best informed people but a few generations ago are now provably wrong. It is not the business of the Christian Church — and therefore it is not our business on Ash Wednesday after- noon— to bother our heads about various theories of how things came to be. What we want to do is only to deal with these things so far as in the dealing with them we will gain light and help for the conduct of 233

234 The Reasonableness of Faith

our own lives, for the building up and the deepening of our own faith, for the prosecu- tion of the difficult work which confessedly lies before us. I might recommend to you some books that are interesting and in- spiring on the questions suggested by Cre- ation and the Fall, and you might read them with profit; but when you have read them all through, and boiled them down, it just comes to this: the advan- tage to you — not intellectually, but spirit- ually— will be an advantage that can be measured just by the amount in which your own spiritual life is made to you reasonable, useful, purposeful. There are one or two things we may be clear about.

First, God did not in the past work in a different way, on the whole, from the way He works in the present. There is one thing that we are slowly coming to the conclusion about with certitude. It is this: God's work is continuous. He works by certain methods. We gather our experiences to- gether— those experiences stretching over perhaps thirty centuries with which his- tory deals, scarcely perhaps quite so many as thirty — and having compared and tab-

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ulated our experiences, we call the record of them laws, and we say God works by law. We merely mean by this, that we have no other record of the way God works than the records which our experiences for a few centuries have enabled us to gather. As we study these records, we see an in variable- ness in God's way of working. We see a continuity — one thing leads to another. We see that God does not work by jerks and fits and starts; but in the true sense of the word His work is orderly. We do not mean by this that God does not employ the sudden forces any more than He em- ploys His slow forces; He employs both. To illustrate. A storm is a sudden force. An earthquake which strikes us as some- thing absolutely instantaneous is instantane- ous only from our standpoint. Ages and ages have been preparing it. And so the fact that we see sometimes a suddenness in God's (I am speaking now of the physical uni- verse) revelations of Himself in the phys- ical universe does not a bit mean — ex- cept we see in a very childish way — that God's power is broken up, but simply that the processes of what we speak of as in-

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finite slowness have at last made them- selves evident to us.

When we come to think of our relation- ship to created things, we have got to recog- nize the fact that the very same laws or record of experiences which obtain in cre- ated things obtain among ourselves. We cannot expect to live in a world which took millions and millions of ages to bring it to a certain point, and then by any crying and praying on our part to suddenly change it. There are lots of people who seem half the time at feud with the work God has given them to do. They want those forces, that, in the infinite wisdom of God, made them what they are, to suddenly change things for them. It is specially the peculiarity of an active age. There is no God or hope or eternity for us anywhere, except we see God working always and every day. And if that is so, how silly for us, instead of remembering that we are but fellow-workers with God, to start out to work after our own idea. Ah ! friends, that may sound to some of you a far away theory; but it is a working theory. It is all very well, so long as the trend of daily life happens to suit our

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emotions for the time being, but when it strikes athwart the current of our wishes and suddenly the sun goes in and the flowers bloom no more, and the sweetness dies out of life's breeze, then we want a change, and cry and wail because we cannot have things the way we want them.

If we do not see that God is as truly in the wind that blows and whistles around our life's tree as in the breeze that spreads its boughs to the Spring air, we have not got a working faith to carry us through life. It is all very well when life is at high tide and youth at the helm and each little wave seems a reflected smile of God — ^but we cannot live always that way, because life must put on its dark and dull face for us and must put its heavy hand on us, and the sorrows of others, as dear Long- fellow said — "Do more than cast a pitying shadow over us;" — for we are part of the world, its sorrow and joy, its passion and pain, part of its great throbbing life. Woe to us, if we cannot see it, that that life is ruled by God. Peace to us, if we know, that neither things present nor things to come can make it anything else but ruled

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by God. God won't work in jerks spiritu- ally with us any more than He will work so physically. The things that we do are part of His purpose, the things that we suffer are part of His will, the tasks on which He sends us are chosen tasks. And yet, there exists in us, just by virtue of the position we hold in creation, that wonderful likeness to God which means the independence of each, that we are not bound down to any tasks, not tied by fetters to any duty.

Take a simple illustration. It helped me. Columbus four centuries ago sailed across the deep, and since then ten thousand times ten thousand keels have followed in his wake; and every keel drove its own furrow, every helmsman had to hold his own rudder true. Millions of hands spread the sails, sometimes in the cold and bitter blasts. A thousand times ten thousand men with ex- pectant eyes looked across the sea to catch the first sight of land. They were all fol- lowers of the first great discoverer. That is one way.

There is another. That is man's way of doing things. He sets to work with spade and blasting powder and riven rock re-

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spends to his blow. A broad pathway is opened in the land, and on a narrow space iron rails are laid down and on them men put narrow cars, and the cars are put on wheels, and each wheel has got its flange, and each flange clasps its steel rail, and each car is linked with its coupling to the potency of the engine and that, obedient to a lever, rushes impetuously on, and, without wreck and ruin, the car cannot leave the rail or the flange slip from its steel grip. Impetuously and irresistibly, beyond all choice of its own, the iron horse does its work and drags across the face of earth the will, the purpose, the toil of man. That is the way in which man works for his end — • useful and necessary in itself.

But it cannot be the way he directs his life. It is the way he is called on to exer- cise his will, the way he conquers nature, the way in which God whispers to him of his likeness to Himself. But in his higher law of being, in the working out of the destiny of his own immortality, he has got to be the discoverer, who, with trembling, cold hand, with questioning eye, with aching frame, with peering glance tries to follow other great

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discoverers, and not simply the pounding carriage back of the irresistible power bound by an iron chain to a dull track.

Follow out the simile and you get some- thing, it seems to me, of the idea in which we stand, brothers and sisters, to the things around us. We are not bound as cars to engines. We are laid as keels in the stormy sea by the men who discover the continent to which they go, each making its own voy- age, each steering its own ship, each trying to get to its own goal, each guided by its own star, with this difference, that for those who bravely follow — as the hymn puts it —

*' All journeys end in welcome to the weary."

We have clearly to recognize the fact that while God allows us to possess these instinctive, directing powers, they never mas- ter us in the blind way in which the engine drags the truck. They do serve as guides and general directors of life. That is the relation, it seems to me, in which we stand to created things. All creation obeys, first of all, without hesitation and without sin. It has no power to do aught else but trundle after the fiat of God drawn by ir-

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resistible force to a goal of which it is in- sensible but which may be very good.

Such cannot be our work. There comes from the tremendous and mystic likeness which we have got to God that which links us to Him in purpose, or allows us to divorce ourselves from Him — the possibility of un- righteousness in order to the possibility of righteousness.

We do not want to ignore the fact that everything in God's universe — His very dust — exists for a purpose, exists as the result of God's act. There are a great many people to-day who have a sort of hopeless idea that the universe somehow came to be, long ago, by the will of God, and every now and then, like a meddling friend, He puts His fingers down to see that the old ball rolls in even groove. That simply leads to atheism. The wise and reverent long ago felt it could not be so. As Emer- son says: —

"God of the granite and the rose, Soul of the sparrow and the bee, The ceaseless tide of being flows Through countless channels, Lord, from Thee, It leaps to life in grass and flowers, Through every stage of being runs; While from creation's radiant towers Its glory shines in stars and suns. "

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Some people turn away from that sort of idea and say that it is Pantheism. That is all wrong. It is extraordinary how people fail to see that Pantheism does not mean that God is in everything. On the contrary, Pantheism says that everything is God. To use a simple illustation, Pan- theism says: *'I and my clothes are one. My coat is I." Paulinism says, Christian- ity says: ''God clothes Himself with light like a garment; but the light is not God.'* Do not be afraid to hold on, in these days, when the immensity of creation is opening up to us the blessed thought that God's clothing is what you see. He is in it. Every outline of it speaks of the majesty of His proportions. To use again a physical illustration, every beam of it speaks of the Divine Soul within. Every beauty of it hides and veils a greater beauty.

You remember the old legend. How true it is of truth here. They say truth first of all appears as only a shadow to those who seek it, a shadowy form that brings with her some suggestion of purity, of aspiration, of infinite desire. And then, after years, the man seeks her with single

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eye and more self-sacrificing purpose, and the shadow becomes more substantial — to the ancients that was the outline of the gods. And then still from his hands there drop things that have grown insignificant and unimportant to him, and he lays still aside every weight and gives himself up still more to the pursuit of truth, and at last he sees a glorious woman before him. And as years go on, from time to time she lifts her veil and gives him a glance from her starry eyes. And he still pursues her, for he knows, in the far beyond, that he shall possess her, and have her for his very own.

How exquisitely true of what God is ! First a shadow, then a veil partially drawn, then a glowing face, and then a possessed life. That is not Pantheism; it is only the veil. We have got to hold it fast. There is nothing else to bring us face to face with truth to-day. All that is, is of God. Noth- ing exists but by His permission. Nothing is held together but by His holy will, He is in all, or the all could not be. He must be in pain and death as He is in life. And, therefore, as David said long ago, God to

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him was as much in hell as He was in heaven.

One more thought about this, one sug- gested by creation. This being so, why is it that all nature seems to be given up to expression? Everything expresses itself. The flower is the expression of the root. The grass, the expression of the earth. The blue sky, the expression of the sun- light. So the sea and so on. But when I look into myself, there seems to be another law. Why is it that I cannot get this ex- pression? Why is it that again and again I am under constant and ceaseless repres- sion that is my daily duty? Why must I get up in the morning and feel I cannot ex- press what I have got to express? My whole hope to do and be good is to keep the cork in life and repress myself. Here is the lesson creation teaches. How many ages the world we see took before it found its expression ! They said long ago, that it took seven days; we know better now. Later, they said it took seven ages; we know better now. Later, they said per- haps it took seven millions of years. We know now that we have no arithmetic by

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which the ages could be traced. The world went on before the birds sang or the flowers bloomed — ages and ages were laid in pain before the completion of nature which you look on with delight could be yours to teach you. Oh, what infinitude of years had each to make its own deposit and live its own life ! What time it took before the grass of earth grew to the glory of man !

Can we foolishly think, that if it took ages and ages and ages to make this bulb of creation, we are going to get the flower of man in a week ? That he is going to blossom out here into all God intended him to know and do? Science is going to come as the voice of God and say, ''Thus saith the Lord." You people who want the full expression of your life before you are thirty, thirty millions of years may pass before you get the full expression of your life — the life that came from, and goes to God.

"All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you." Jesus Christ Himself says that every single thing which the Creator Father had was His.

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The simile, you know, is the first-born son. The first-born son got the inheritance. The end and object of creation — what is it? It is to give to the Son. He is speaking of creation as it affected Christ. Here is a whole world, perhaps a whole bunch of races — all that the Father hath given to His Son. The end of creation, the purpose and meaning of it, that He should enter into it and possess it. O friends, when we grasp what that means ! That God has given over everything to Christ, that through all His members, through all His weak children, through all the different co-operative parts that go to make His body, the possession of God may come. Thus we find Him spoken of again and again as the First-born among many brethren — leading out these brethren, show- ing what the purpose of their life is, ex- plaining what their future is to be. The brethren existed to produce Him — that is what it amounts to. If we could grasp the meaning of that ! Man existed to produce Christ — the First-born among many breth- ren. The family idea existed to produce Christ. We go back a little bit and we say,

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just in the same way, matter existed to produce mind. Then, it seems to me, you get some idea of the co-partnership of things. All God's vast world-matter existing at last to produce a thought — something that was able to enter into the secret of the Divine and share His rule. All God's vast world of men existed, that there should rise at last a flower from the midst of them capable of explaining to them all the purpose of the existence of all of them.

Just as you see a boy bring home a round, ugly root and put it in a glass jar, and through the hole in the bottom the long trailing roots depend into the water, and it looks like a thing without life or beauty. But as weeks and months pass there springs from it the waxy greenness of a stem and a pyramid of buds, and at last it bursts into a bouquet of sweetness. Jesus exists in His sweetness, in His life, in His power, in His beauty, in His divinity, to explain to the bulbs of men their purpose, their value — their God.

Again, there was a round bulb of earth which seemed impossible of life — rough, torn, rent with internal convulsion. Ages

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pass — will it ever be anything but a lifeless ball ? At last there came a shoot, and there shot forth a strange thing called life. And again it shot forth a strange thing called beauty. And still again it shot forth, and there was a stranger thing called man. All those ages the bulb existed that man might come, and for untold ages man existed that Christ might come. And everything lifts itself up w^hen it looks at that last flower of creation, and says — ''Why, life is worth living that Christ may come!" — and that is the meaning of Creation.

And what is the meaning of that strange struggle of life called in Genesis the Fall? In the moral sphere there must be a parallel to the physical. That is all I understand about it. Physical excellence is only achieved by struggle. Moral excellence is only achieved by struggle. There is no other way. You have got to have the possibility of sin that you may have the power of righteousness. Yon have got to forego in- nocence, that you may have character. There is nothing in the Bible, as I understand it, nothing in the teaching of Christ to the Apostles, which makes it necessary for me

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to believe that men were ever better than they are now. Men never fell consciously from a higher state into a lower. Their fall was only a change of experience. There is no other way in which men could be men but by sharing the law that went to make the bulb blossom. The very principles under which the bulb must blossom effected all blossom, effected the blossom of the planet, the blossom of the race, the blossom of the man, the blossom of the God-Man. Jesus would not live a different life from us. How did He get His holiness, His perfection ? By pain and death. He had to die as He had to be bom. He learned obedience — how ? Only by one way — suffering, the law of the bulb to the lily, the law of the planet to man, of man to God.

Created us that we should be conformed to the image of His Son through all the falls, through all the cataclysms, physical or moral. We ourselves know the rising of the bulb life into the lily.

WHOSOEVER SHALL SEEK TO SAVE HIS LIFE SHALL LOSE IT

"Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it."

— St. Luke, xvii: jj.

At least eight times, with sHghtly vary- ing emphasis, Jesus Christ gave this thought to His disciples. It was difficult, it seemed contradictory; they did not understand it. I do not think we understand it to-day. The Church has failed not so much for want of zeal or charity, or even from com- prehensiveness; but more largely, I believe, from want of adaptability than anything else — the faith of adaptability, the faith that believes in the truth given her — and so confidently assured of that truth that she goes forth under the direction of the Spirit of God to adapt herself, age by age — adapt her teaching, her worship, her methods her formularies of doctrine, to the growing, and so to the changing needs of mankind. That is the faith that the Church has lacked, which I believe we lack to-day. 251

252 The Reasonableness of Faith

I do not think any of us can do much good in the world except we find out what that one good thing is that God wants us to do. It is not given to many men to do many things. It is given to all men and women to do some things; and the one thing I think we want to try to do is to find out the thing that God has given us to do. Let each man speak for and judge himself. The one thing I believe God has given me to speak about, to work for persistently, with such strength as I have got, is this gospel of adaptation — is to tell men, as I believe it to be a message from the living God, that faith in God has no fear of the changes which God himself must work under His law of life, which is a law^ of ever changing adaptation. A man may work till he dies, yet if he does not adapt his tools to his toil he will achieve little. He does not take a rake to open a coal mine, nor does he set about tending a violet-bed with pick and dynamite. And just so in the work which God has given His Church to do. She may not lack faithful men, nor learned. Money may be at her disposal, prestige behind her efforts; but if she have not faith

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enough to adapt herself to the times in which she lives, she will fail to witness as the voice of the living God to those times.

We are trying — we have tried — to adapt to our little comer of the great world near our church, our teaching and methods and service. We believe that the public salva- tion— I use the word in its widest sense — the well-being of city, of state and of the union itself, depends on the acceptance of our gospel by the people at large. If we do not succeed in commending the truth for which we are professors to the age in which we live, it does not matter, to my mind, in what we do succeed. In home, in school, in city and in state, in business and commercial life, in law or in the Senate, there can be no steady advance, there can be no permanent prosperity, unless all of these institutions are builded on, supported by, the princi- ples of Jesus Christ. Do you realize this is revolutionary doctrine? I do not think you do; none of us do. At most, we have at times but an inkling of how revo- lutionary it is. Individual salvation was not Christ's aim on earth, must not be the Church's aim now. I have said noth-

254 The Reasonableness of Faith

ing tending to make little of individual salvation. It is the beginning of God, not His end. The saved man is saved that he may strive for the saved society. A mere truism, you say. Yes, but a truism which, if accepted, revolutionizes our prac- tice.

One of the deadliest of the weapons of evil, one of the most successful in opposing the kingdom of God, is to make men believe in a salvation that, though true in letter, is lying in spirit, which so uses the word of the gospel as to deny the spirit of its Christ. As Shakespeare long ago put it,

**Be those juggling fiends no more believed Who palter to us in a double sense, Who keep the word of promise to our ear And break it to our hope. "

We call on Christ to save our souls, and under our breaths pray that He may let our lives alone. We have praised a Christ and prayed to a Saviour who long ago did all things for us, while we half inwardly hope that Pie v/ill not demand too much of us in personal self-denial or action. And so a scheme of salvation, as it is called, dubbed with His ever blessed name, has too often

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become a thing to sneer at. And not merely sneerers, but many honest, God-loving souls — feeling how utterly alien it is to the mission and purpose of Jesus, and yet deeply dis- trustful of their own ability to state the things which others state falsely in terms that are more true and more forceful — sadly turn away from a church they feel no longer represents the ideals and purpose of the Saviour. I do not scruple to say that much that passes under the name of re- ligion to-day is a hollow and blasphemous sham.

What is the evident cause of failure in our life to-day? We are a people where each man works for himself, each for his own hand chiefly or only. The surpassing temp- tation of our land, our institutions, our new, undeveloped country, with its freedom of egress and ingress, and its vast capacities, is to lure each man on to work for his own hand. Amazed at our own temporary suc- cess, drunken with the prospects of growing fortune, we forget that a people and a society where each man works for himself alone cannot be made to hold together. Egotism is the sin of the hour — self-seeking

256 The Reasonableness of Faith

the infidelity of to-day. And so long as religion does not interfere with these our plans and purposes, we welcome it, and, welcoming it, make it a blasphemous per- version of the religion of Jesus Christ. However it keeps the word that is promised to our ear, it breaks it to the world's hope; and holy God and honest man will have nothing to do with it.

The God of nations has called aloud to us to cease mocking Him, to cease our worship of gain. We are in danger of be- coming a nation of money-makers, a nation which honours money-makers because they are money-makers, and for no other reason. I say it advisedly — men honour the man who makes money badly and makes lots of it, more than they honour the man who makes money honestly, makes money so as to help his fellow-man, but makes little of it. We depend on money for every- thing. We are prepared to put so-called Christian money to almost any use — willing to put it even to a bad use, in order to win great ends — good ends they would call them. And so under conditions like these, life must become one long contest, business nothing

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more than an effort to outwit each man his fellow. It has become, in short, as most of you know, too often little better than a great gamble where successful players are successful because they throw with loaded dice.

Briefly let me repeat. I say nothing against those blessed old doctrines which we learned at our mother's knee. A reason- able, humble hope in individual salvation each of us may, nay, should entertain. Those teachings of Jesus which convey to us this priceless blessing are fraught with larger, not lesser meanings as the times roll on. We pray to Him that in His mercy we may be saved, counted worthy of sharing His everlasting life; we pray for the re- mission of our sins. But let us not blind ourselves. We cannot commend our Lord to others by any mere acceptance of these precious truths. We cannot escape our duty in this existence by solacing ourselves with comforting visions of what may await us in the next. We dare not seek simply to safeguard our life in this world, while we let all that Jesus proclaimed to be His Father's legacy to men be denied and

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trampled under foot by the greedy crowd which is striving at any cost for money. His promises are not empty promises, His laws not visionary laws.

"Whosoever shall save his life shall lose it: whosoever shall lose his life shall pre- serve it. " Such words cannot be mis- taken. Go not away, this morning, my friends, saying, "Ah! it is beautiful, but a dream; a vision that gleams as the rainbow gleams, and then vanishes away." No, it is the very truth of the immutable God. He whispers it to you in your conscience; He presses it on you by all the teachings of experience. And by a louder voice even than these God is calling on us to-day — the voice of events present and pressing. Deaf, blind and sodden indeed of soul must the man be who does not hear these voices. Let us go on seeking chiefly each man his own pleasure, power, wealth, and we are a people undone. Yes, and for all our profes- sions, however loudly we chant our creeds or beautifully celebrate our worship, we are a people that know not Christ and obey not His law. He will be with us. He will strengthen us. He will lead us forward; but

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only if we follow Him: and following Him through all the confusions and doubts of the present, duty will grow fairer and plainer day by day. And through the growing capacities of a great and a growing people, we shall devote ourselves as fellow-workers with the Christ to change the life of this our country until it is more according to His will; to bring not merely prosperity after any mundane conception of it, but the very life of God which is the life of man to the acceptance and realization of mankind.

And so while we have time and energy and voice and strength, let us struggle for a fairer day, a purer state, a nobler manhood, and a firmly united people.

November, 1896.

GOD'S IMAGE IN MAN

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him ; male and female created he them. " — Genesis, i: 26-27.

"Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be Hke him; for we shall see him as he is." — / John, Hi: 2-3.

The same story at the beginning and at the end of the Bible. God could have created a world painless, sinless, pure, with seas of glass and skies of unchanging azure, a world where struggle and death never enter, a world of unruffled calm. He could, too, have called into existence beings fitted for that undisturbed, reposeful land. But one thing He could not do, though He be Almightiness itself — He could not rear men in such a world. For, how- ever our knowledge of ourselves may cause us to distrust ourselves, to deplore what we have been, or to fear what we may be, 261

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we are coming more and more to believe that man is a little God — God in minature, God in embryo — that we are set here as seeds to grow into plants, put into earth's ground as cuttings to grow into fruit trees fair and useful; put here as infants, through storm and stress, to attain the fulness of man- hood; beings, moreover, who carry in their souls the divine instinct of rule; and since they are her rulers, earth must offer them but a rugged breast. She will yield them nourishment, but only on compulsion. The old fable of the Roman she-wolf has got the true secret of manhood's struggle at the root of it — a race born to rule must be reared by an unkindly nurse. Only as they squeeze her cruel breast can they grow strong. And so for the rulers of the future. For them the sea prepares her storms; for only by ruling her can they become lords of the ocean. And when man seeks to woo him a bride more beautiful than sea or land can be — Knowledge, his would-be partner, turns from him her averted face, and he only wins her by toil more arduous, that entails a keener suffering, than to the con- queror of earth or sea. And so the story

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runs far back as we are able to trace it, far into the future as we may imagine it. Life itself is only to be held and enjoyed at the cost of ceaseless care and toil. The school down here is a hard school, and very surely we know that there is no room within nature's great school-room, wide as it is, for the inefficient, the vicious or the lazy.

Yet, friends, let us look clearly at this matter. What matters it? What school can be too hard for those who are destined to share powers that to-day we call divine? What matters it that the struggle be fierce, that wherever we turn, whatever progress we propose to ourselves, our way seems to be walled up; that physically I hold my life as a challenge against death on all sides; that intellectually, painfully, step by step, I rise above my ignorance? Morally, I only overcome the beast within by an unceasing struggle that wrings from me many a groan ; for there are two natures within me, and I am torn first one way and then the other, and this desperate strife rests on me more heavily than the others — the moral strife. Are these three realms of strife not suffi- cient? Can any further struggle await me,

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as I pass on toward fuller development? Yes, assuredly, there is even a fourth. In my advancement as a social being, terrible conditions of conflict lie ahead. My higher, my more finally adjusted relations to my fellow man are only to be won as my physi- cal, intellectual and moral prizes are won — at the cost of perpetual vigilance and self- denial. A social strife awaits us all. Where it shall lead us we do not know. What sacrifices, what travail pangs it may bring forth, God only knows. But, 0 beloved, let us meet the future with faith in God and a big heart. Let us gird up the loins of our minds to face whatever struggle God may send to our race — a struggle not to be avoided, but courted by the sons of God. And now at once arises the question: Is there anything in life that can justify this fourfold struggle? Is the prize that life offers me worth such a contest? How shall we answer this question?

If we are proposing to ourselves the likeli- hood of continuing our self-appointed toil in the future, we naturally ask ourselves how our race has fared in this regard in the past; and, as we search into the subject,

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we are confronted with some extraordinary truths. We see that, beyond question, a mere instinct to Hve has tided our race over the most difficult times. When life, according to our estimate, was most worthless, when it was held by the slightest thread, when awful plagues and pestilence threatened it with obliteration (just as, to-day, a whole part of the Hindoo nation will be swept away by the inter- fering hand of God), and the conditions of living were so hard that man might be said to have fared worse than the beasts — this strange, this all-compelling instinct to live, upheld, like a life-belt, the race. Men could not be persuaded to take their lives. No combination of hunger, or misery, or desperate oppression justified the sin of suicide. Only when their women were shame-stricken, or their warriors conquered, could the barbarian admit that self-sought death was other than a shame. This fact of an instinctive determination to live is among the most wonderful that an in- creasing knowledge of the past yields to us. But to-day there is a certain looseness in the sense of responsibility to life. We

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feel, everywhere, that men do not condemn the suicide quite as strongly as they used to. We are passing from one method of thought to another. We are beginning to see that we must justify our lives to ourselves by other means than that of instinct. We are discovering new thoughts, new truths about our life, and these seem at first to teach us that the prize is not worth the ru.nning. There is no question about it, I think, that this new knowledge coming to men has this effect — it loosens old ties, it has not yet time to knit new ones, and in the interval you have got to face doubt, fear, uncer- tainty and disintegration. Instinct has carried us on to our own age, or almost to it ; but to-day, beyond question, we are aware that instinct alone is not sufficient: it must be reinforced. And the question has got to be answered, where shall we from human experience and human knowledge find sup- port for our desire to live and grow at any cost? Instinct must be justified by the clearing light of reason.

Now here, at first sight, new knowledge seems to contradict this old and most virile impulse of living at any cost. It says,

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with considerable insistence, I must shatter your dream. You have dreamed of a golden age behind you — far behind. Such an age never existed. Aye, says pitiless and remorseless truth, as your golden dream has faded into the dim, you have dared to transform it into one of a golden age before you — I tell you it never can exist. It never can exist, for the world that has seen your rise, has contemplated your painful struggle, the world whose children you are, which has been your cradle and must be your tomb — it is not a young, but an old, gray world already. Its heart beats more slowly, year by year; nay, it is owing to its dying vitality that you can live on it at all. As you point forward towards a golden age, the earth slowly, but steadily, decays beneath your feet. The chill of age is creeping over its bosom already. Its central fires, on the permanence of which your existence depends, must at last die at its heart. And then earth will care not for you, nor even for your race. Noth- ing can remain of all your strivings, aspirings, prayings, but a small, outworn, cold, dead planet, on which grows no green

268 The Reasonableness of Faith

blade of grass, on which ebbs and flows no life-giving sea, a lonely and a dead thing, so far as man is concerned, rolling purpose- lessly through space — the deserted and ruined home of a race that has risen wonder- fully, striven marvellously, stood for a brief time with a hope nothing less than divine in its eyes, and at last sunk to the dust from which it came forth. This is probably all true. And when these facts are held up to instinct, instinct begins to tremble and people begin to commit suicide. The man that loses his money blows out his brains. Even the child that is corrected at home, in some cases in this country, puts an end to its little life. How can mere instinct meet such terrible disclosures ? The old virile strength that held the barbarian to his life is gone, and the new strong strength that makes us feel that life is worth living has not yet fully come. Why, instinct is trembling before the unconscious revela- tions of nature, and the fact that the golden age is doubtful makes man doubtful of himself. He feels the breath of the coming time whispering to him that the world, as the old Bible puts it, and the things that

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are within, must suffer change — even as the dead, dry leaf falls from the tree. There- fore, in view of this new knowledge, the impulse and stimulus of instinct is quite insufficient, and instinct is breaking down.

To the assistance, then, of instinct comes religion, and religion tells us that it is true. The struggle were not worth what it costs, if the hope of our life ended here ; if all that is noble and all that is base ends together with the passing of that brief hour, in the history of a briefly-lived planet which we call earth. Since now are we the sons of God, we can without fear steadfastly behold the dissolution of the cradle of our race, wherein for a little time we have been rocked as babes are rocked. Long ere it falls to pieces we have outgrown it. As well suppose our life is ended with this earth, as suppose our time of strength and vigour is past because we have worn out a suit of clothes. And, moreover, repeating these truths which man has always ventured to believe as of quite vital importance, Christianity appeals to us not in its own name only, but in the name of all relig- ions, wherever hope has risen, wherever

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civilization has advanced, wherever man- hood has revealed itself as pure and brave and holy — there in all ages, in all countries, in all religions, in some sort at least this being has dared to believe he is a son of God. And because related to a force infinitely vaster and more permanent than that limited to a planet life, man may be, man must be, as Tennyson so triumphantly sings : —

"Ancient of the earth, But in the morning of the times. "

Man's life is not pinned or dependent on an}^ planet existence — for he is a son of God, and because he is, his life goes on and on forever.

"Let go the breath!

There is no death To the living soul, nor loss, nor harm.

Not of the clod

Is the Hfe of God: Let it mount, as it will, from form to form."

Yes, religion distinctly confirms what is highest and best in the instinct of man- kind. We are sons not of the universe, but of God, who controls and is author of the universe. Sons in a gray universe, if you like, for as Kingsley says,

" Gray weather makes strong men. "

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But sons with a future dependent not on their cradle, but on their Father God.

"All mine is thine," the sky- soul saith; "The wealth I am, must thou become; Richer and richer, breath by breath, — Immortal gain, immortal room !" And since all his Mine also is, Life's gift outruns my fancies far, And drowns the dream In larger stream. As morning drinks the morning-star."

So instinct and reHgion agree ; but still we have not answered for knowledge. What has this great inflood of new thought and conception and experience to say to these old religious sanctions that man never has been without ? How does knowledge fortify both instinct and religion, or does it fortify them ? That is the question. Yes, I believe it is only the language of moderation, of reasonable certitude to say, to-day, that the main trend of modern knowledge, of scientific acquirement, is to cry amen to the instinct of the future life so deeply im- planted in man's soul; is to encourage and fortify, and not contradict, those mysterious voices that so continuously have sounded within him. It is as though earth, our mother, stooped over and in her cradle song

272 The Reasonableness of Faith

was bent on assuring us, that as her Hfe grows gray and feeble, we must infinitely outlive her.

But I must not speak in metaphors. What lesson of hope for the future can we gain from our increased knowledge of the past ? I want to put this part of my subject in a sentence or two, and then, if I may, briefly amplify it. How did our life come to be at all? How did all the beauty we see, the music we hear, the knowledge we have won, come to be? I tell you, my friends, science speaks on these points with no uncertain voice. She claims authority, and, claiming it, she makes on us a stupendous demand. She expects us to accept, almost without question, the truth of a miracle so great that I do not hesitate to say all the miracles of revelation are trivial by the side of it. Science distinctly teaches us that, as I have said, all the beauty, music, knowledge, that go to make up what we understand of life to-day, has come out of a swirling, formless hurricane of fiery cosmic matter, and noth- ing else — out of a chaos so dark and rude, out of a blast so awful and death-dealing,

God's Image in Man 273

that not even to an educated imagination can its fury be conceivable. In that long ason of chaos death reigned, not life. Chaos ruled, not order. Then were enthroned powers surely utterly diabolic. Any sane, over-looking intelligence, any man even of genius, who, from some distant point of vantage, might conceivably have surveyed that chaotic storm, could have believed nothing less than that he was hearing and seeing, in its awful confusion and roaring turmoil, nature's articulated curse. In vast spaces, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the fiery hurricane, with purposeless fury, prom- ised to rage forever. So ages passed and were followed by other ages, and some sort of order grew, till in the sublime language of the Bible, in the centre of dense vapour earth lifted; but it was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. What has love or wisdom to do with such a gray, lifeless world as this?

Then other ages passed and forth from the ocean depths there came forms of life, grotesque and awful, which lived but to de- stroy. What has love and wisdom to do with such a world ? Then other ages passed,

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and lo ! Man at last stood upon his feet. But what a man ! Is he a man ? Perhaps he can Hft hands of prayer, "but they are red with blood. He is dimly aware of his better self, if he be aware at all. He is surely likest far to the beasts. Cruel and lustful is he, living on earth, far yet from ruling it, barely holding his own against savage beasts and threatening hunger, and without love or faith or much hope — just the blind instinct to live keeping him alive. What has love and wisdom yet to do with such a world, or such a product of the world ?

I have not time, I need not go on to tell the oft-told tale of man's later progress, his defeats, his shames, the far ebbings in the tide of his advance, the fair hopes of men and of nations cast down and betrayed, of civilizations at last built up with much toil and blood, only to crumble into the dust again and forever be lost and forgotten. But, for all these pitiful changes, the most careless student can now conceive a rising in life's scale, a growing towards a fuller self -con- sciousness, a widening of the certainty of

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responsibility, a vast increase of the sense of pity, and a steady determination, even when storms are at their height, to keep Hfe's tiller true. Night is not yet passed, nor are the storms yet over; but who could ever have dreamed, in those ages so far behind us that even man's intellect breaks down in computing their longness, that out of that chaos — out of that imgoverned chaos of steam and cosmic matter that raved so purposelessly ages ago, we should have come forth — we and our wonderful order of law and beauty and hope and increasing power of man? Tell me, friends, where are the miracles of any earthly revelation when placed in comparison with a world- miracle so stupendous as this? When knowledge has said its last word, and reverently or grumblingly cries amen to instinct and religion, day may not yet have dawned; but we see at least a rose of dawn upon the gray sea : and on earth, once with- out form and void, where undisturbed darkness reigned, there is at least a promise of the dawning of a day without clouds. But who could have dared to dream it, ages ago? Ah, who could have dared still

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to hold to the dream, ages and ages after? . I beHeve that the time will soon come when men will see that miracle is not the breaking of God's law, but the expression and fulfil- ment of that law. // we came from chaos — what may not come from us?

Briefly, then, I have tried to point out to you what the results of knowledge are. We are assured soberly to-day that the wildest dreamer could never have con- ceived of transformations so impossible as those which our world cradle hath under- gone in order to make us possible. And so faith dares to hope it shall so be again. Man has a right to hope, man has an au- thority to love. Man looks backward — and, though he knows no golden age lies there; and, looking forward, knows also that on this planet no golden age can ever be — by these very facts he is assured that, as earth's chaos gave way to him, as he more than justifies that chaos, so the struggles and pains which his instinct, his religion and his growing knowledge call upon him bravely to face, shall be justified; that his struggles with death for his living, with ignorance for his knowing, with the beast

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for his moral growing, with the problems of his relations to his fellows for his social growing shall have their fair result at last, for not one particle of his struggle shall be lost or in vain ; and that once again, a yet higher and holier order from our present disorder shall be bom and a kingdom established wherein dwelleth righteousness. By the stupendous miracle of what he is, he is emboldened to believe in the still vaster miracle he is to be.

Yes, knowledge says Amen to man's in- stinct and religion, and faith ventures to believe and to declare, that as out of that swirling chaos an order inconceivably beau- tiful has come, a miracle inconceivably great has been wrought, so once again out of what seems to us much confusion and dis- integration and death, in the advancing evolution of God, is to emerge a new order as much fairer than the present, as the present is more beautiful than the past — and the old Greek myth of Orpheus going even into hell to claim his bride, which stands for an everlasting truth, is to have its fulfilment. None has dared to think why God chose His bride from hell — but

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out of very hell God has called the race, and love can lift them out.

So runs the gospel of Jesus Christ to-day. Since now we are the sons of God, imagina- tion itself is bankrupt in dreaming of what we shall be.

"Prophetic Hope, thy fine discourse Foretold not half life's good to me; Thy painter, Fancy, hath not force To show how sweet it is to be ! Thy witching dream And pictured scheme To match the fact still want the power ; Thy promise brave From birth to grave Life's boon may beggar in an hour. "

For God's life is now in us, and we are little Gods, and over us spread the everlasting and eternal powers, waiting to fill us and inspire us, waiting to fit us for new tasks and soul-satisfied living, as ages fulfil themselves.

CHRIST SENT ME NOT TO BAPTIZE

"Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel." — / Cor., i: ly.

A SHARP distinction is drawn between the highest and most sacred right of the Christian reHgion and the soul and essence of that religion itself. A distinction drawn in the very earliest days of the Church's history; for it is not now seriously disputed that this letter was written by Paul about thirty years after Christ's death. There is a distinction, drawn between the out- ward and necessary formularies of the Christian religion and the spirit of that religion. You must remember that we cannot at all properly estimate now the importance in those early days of that rite of baptism. It was literally the passing from an old into a new state. It was the sign and evidence of the completest change of character, of surrounding, of laws and cus- toms that was possible. It was a rite regarded not only as advisable but abso- 279

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lutely obligatory. It was a rite so uni- versally regarded as obligatory that then and in all succeeding times the Catholic Church has regarded baptism, no matter when or how administered, if administered in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, as valid. Baptism by a lay person is just as valid as baptism by a bishop or pope. I mention this simply to indicate to you the supreme importance in which this rite was held at the time in which these words were written for the guidance of the Corinthian Church.

St. Paul believes in the body, in- sists on its order, enforces its discipline, strives for its unity; and for that unity sacrifices his wishes and subordinates his own opinions, as all must who wish for unity at all. But important as he believes this visible expression of unity to be, high as the place he gives to the Church, to the body of Christ, there can be no possible argument with St. Paul as to which of the two is the more important. He is charged with the very life of the Church itself. "Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel. "

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What then is the gospel? It is all im- portant to know what meaning St. Paul attaches to the word. There may be many gospels — as a matter of fact there have been — for good news has come again and again to man in his extremity, and all messages delivered at all times and by divers manners from the Everlasting Spirit to the growing children of men, have been indeed their true, good news. To say that Christianity is the only gospel is to speak ignorantly. But the Christian gospel is distinctive. It sums up, explains and completes for us the everlasting gospel in which God, from time to time, by various methods and ways, has made plain to man the truth about his own destiny and about his own nature. The Christian gospel is the good news which Jesus brings, and that revelation of His may be fairly described as having for its scope and aim the good news as to the nature of God and the nature of man. It is very evident that on his views of the nature of God and the nature of man de- pend all man's views as to his duty and responsibility, rest all his ideas as to his nature and destiny. These, then, are the

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truths that are taught and revealed by Jesus Christ. Profoundly they changed the life of the world; profoundly they continue to change it.

Jesus Christ presented the truth con- cerning the nature of God and the nature of man in His own person. His teachings were His gospel, for they were the explanation of His person, of His Father, and of man's re- lation both to Him and to His Father. No words that I can use will go beyond the words of Jesus Christ. You remember He says: " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. Why sayest thou then, show us the Father?" In the person of Jesus not only is truth revealed about the nature of God, but there is a visible presentation, so far as human eyes can see it, of the nature of God. And so when I ask myself that question, which all times and races have propounded — how am I to go to God — there comes the old answer: *'I am the way, the truth, the life; no man cometh to the Father but by me." And so the way to God is absolutely revealed to me in a man, whose personality is as distinct as mine own. You may say these things are old and trite, but I tell you

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the thought of man is only beginning to deal with them. As we stand in wonder- ment before the half revelations of our own greatness, we are led back again with new sense of their fulness to these old, inex- haustible truths. The conception of man's approach to God is not in a book, is not to be found in a Church, is not wrapped up in a creed. No definitions, however valuable, are the main guides here. Mark it, no sacraments even, however truly pronounced and authorized and given by Jesus Christ Himself, are main channels here. "Aye, the study of Me, the walking in Me, the obeying Me, the having and possessing Me — I am the way, the truth and the life ; no man cometh to the Father but by Me."

Now, what is Christ's kingdom? The kingdom of Jesus is the presentation in the person of one man, Jesus Christ, of the very law and purpose of the living God. There are no two laws in this world, no two sources of life. Jesus Christ makes it quite plain to us — "A house divided against itself cannot stand." God's kingdom is not divided against itself. Thus beyond possibility of misunderstanding He states

2S4 The Reasonableness of Faith

His message, He declares His aim. This is the truth which He has received from His Father, and has come to declare to His brethren. To accept this truth is to accept His person. To accept His person is to admit His rule, yield to Him obedience of mind and will and heart, own Him king of the soul. And all who so obey, whether they join His outward society or not, are subject to the Son of Man who has become their king. This is the sort of kingdom He comes to set up. These are the simple laws on which it rests. But simple as they seem,, these are the very laws on which the whole universe rests. For the universe is God's house and cannot be divided against itself. " His Father worketh hitherto, and He works."

This work he describes under a simile that perhaps more clearly expresses His views of the Father, of His Church and kingdom than any other — the simile of sown and growing seed. In this universe which is His Father's He sows this seed of His truth ; submitting it to the law and order of that imiverse, as He submits Himself. '' I am the Truth" — and so all He is and all He

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knows is yielded to the order of the world. To quote again His simile — it is a corn seed, and it grows, though you would not think it growing. Mistaken by those who hastily judge or see no further than they see, His truth, His life. His person, in seeming to die, take new hold on being.

Now let us look still a little more fully at this gospel seed. The most confusing thing, the most disheartening, in man's struggle with man's surroundings and with himself is the ever present, seeming defeat of death. The body of truth — to refer to Christ's simile, the casing of the seed embryo — that has become so dear to us because we have toiled for it, and with pain and tears reared it and reaped it — this seed corn must die. " Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone." And so in the person and teaching of Jesus is first clearly revealed to men this light be- yond the darkness of the grave. But His disciples could not endure it; we may not wonder at this. They had walked in His light for a brief season. They had learned to love and to worship. Must anything so beautiful, so broad, so incomparable as

286 The Reasonableness of Faith

Jesus, die — die and leave no follower, none at all like Him? None to fight for them, love them, seek and save them as did He? This be far from Thee, Lord. But Jesus had to die. Death is not the breaking of the law of God; death is the law of God. There is only one law for the Lord and for the servant. His apostles must die; and we can well believe that a sense of strange loneliness and disheartenment lay heavy on the soul of the early Church, when she knew that the last of those whose eyes had seen and whose very hands had handled the Word of Life must pass from her away. They must die and leave no successors for no Pauls or Johns came after them; and we wonder still at the gap they left behind. But the fact remains; for this is the law of the seed's growth. Dying, it is replaced by a poorer thing than itself; or so it seems at first. After the greater there follow the lesser men.

The Master has died, and His apostles. But the gospel is not dead ; '' for the kingdom of heaven is a seed which a man sowed in his field; it groweth he knoweth not how, first the blade, then the ear, then the full

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com in the ear. " But as the Master passed from one phase of Hfe into another, and so departed from our ken; as the apostles went and left none so great to succeed; so the forms under which that gospel which they loved and proclaimed is delivered passes often with the deliverers. For it is not only true of the messengers, but Jesus teaches us true of the truth itself, that "except a com of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. "

As we look back on the ages that have preceded us, again and again that seed seemed to die past all power of resurrection. Darkness, misery, debauchery and crime of those bloody and confused times, seemed to overwhelm it and drag it down. Its enemies are mighty and evil; its champions are often far worse; its bitterest foes those of its own household. But it cannot die, for it carries within it the extraordinary potentiality of the truth itself. You can no more hinder its springing up in new vigour and taking new form, rounding itself into new beauty and completeness, than you could have prevented, millions of years ago, that whirling mist-storm, fiery, wildly lashed

288 The Reasonableness of Faith

to fury — a cyclone of earth-stuff cast forth from some mighty sun crater — orbing itself at last after changes that are bewildering into a new planet, to spin for long ages through realms of space and work out from boyhood to manhood its fateful destiny. Who could foresee in the fierce eruptions of a glowing universe the mystery and beauty of a human world? Who would have dared to say that out of that wild, whirling chaos of earth matter, millions of ages hence a round and beautiful earth would roll, with its greenery, its beauty, its living things, and all the wonders of life ? Yet all you are, all you dream of be- ing, was contained in that whirling vortex of earth-stuff, ages ago — the very seed of God. And all the powers of the universe were bent on at last making the cyclone into a planet, and at last moulding the planet into a garden, and at last leading out of the beds of the garden God's sprouts and seeds of men and women. But all that makes up life lay hidden, awaiting its development, in the fiery spume cast off by some convulsed sun. And what works

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the miracle? The law of life in the atom. Yet every single stage in this extraordinary development has been a death. No one single advance of life without death, any- where, anywhere. My friends, the things that men believe just as truly die as the men that believe them.

So with the gospel truth which the Saviour brought. Each generation brings to it change, each change seems a death, and is indeed a death of the outer part, and death is ever greeted with trepidation; man being so slow to learn that it is the necessary precursor of change. There can be no two laws, one for the church and the gospel, and one for the universe — for the house of the Father is not divided against itself. Again and again, great and good men have taught that there are two sorts of law, but we know them to be wrong. We may wish it, we may mourn for it; but it cannot be. And the dearest truths we hold, as in the simpler seeds we sow — neither one nor the other can grow and be its fullest, best self, except as it submit itself again and again to the seeming defeat of death. Under this im-

2 go The Reasonableness of Faith

press of death it develops and re-develops. In the unscientific language to be understood of all simple folks Jesus taught this when He said: "It is expedient for you that I go away; if I go not away, the Comforter cannot come to you; but if I depart I will send him unto you." The doctrine of the Holy Ghost is the assurance to the Church of the continual presence and changeless energy of the life of Christ.

So again I say, What is the gospel ? Truth about the nature of man and the nature of God, as Jesus revealed both. First the tiny, yellow seed; then the morsel of dark decay with white tendrils growing beneath it; then the upspringing shaft of greenness, weak and uncertain of itself; then the tall, fair stalk waving in the light and air; and, lastly, the ripened and completed grain itself. That is the seed, and it is Jesus' teaching about His kingdom. The seed dies that it may live. This was how He sowed, this was what He saw, this is what we are here to work for and to be. This is His gospel, the gospel of His teaching and His person. Our views of the nature of God

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and the nature of man have passed and are passing, again and again, through every one of these stages, from the single seed com cast into the ground, to the great harvest of all nations and peoples and kindreds and tongues, to gladden at last the heart of God and fill to the full the destiny of man.

But, men and brethren, how shall we proclaim this gospel ? Talk it, build churches or cathedrals, publish Bibles and prayer- books, repeat creeds and join in litanies? Ah ! the French bishop said the truth when he said: ''It is infinitely easy to say our prayers ; it is infinitely hard to do our duty. " We cannot satisfy the hungers of to-day with the corn seeds of the past; we can only satisfy them with the harvests which we have sown and reaped from the per- petual sowing and gardening of those corn seeds. The com of past harvests cannot satisfy present hungers. Duty done, ser- vice given, life surrendered, the carrying into a living confession of the splendid truths Jesus taught us, the high revelation of the nature of man in our own lives, in- spiring belief in the nature of God, justifying

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and rewarding our lives — these are what the world wants. This is the gospel har- vest of Christ's sowing which can feed its hunger and satisfy its soul. It will avail us little to bow before the forms of the past, if we are not ourselves living in the power of its spirit. I may be possessed of the very forms that inspired lips once drew; I may know the very words that once fell from the dear lips of the Christ — yet having the one and knowing the other, what am I the better for these if His loving spirit does not rule my life and move me mightily to achieve His ends and obey His laws?

Life, not venerable death, w^e want — living men for living issues. Men have borne into battle the relics of the great dead; but it was that they might inspire with the spirit of the past the arms of the present. You remember when Douglas and his little band of Scotch crusader knights were beset by the flower of Moorish cavalry, he hurled Robert Bruce's heart which he earned round his neck far into the fight, and then followed it to die. Fine and true, that ! but what cheered him on his last desperate

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charge? It was not the dusty heart of the dead hero of Bannockburn, but the spirit of Bruce that had found a lodgment in his very soul.

And to-day, thank God, we can tell sometimes the same splendid story. It is the spirit of present heroes, not the relics of past heroes that win the battles; out- lining the destinies of nations and move- ments, and making men still proud that they are men. Only a few weeks ago, in the heart of what is called the Dark Continent a little band of thirty-six African troopers found themselves suddenly hemmed in by three thousand of a brave, but pitiless foe ; cut off from all hope of succour, home, love, life ; the only barrier they could present, in their last stand, their dead horses. None sur- vived the short, bitter fight; mothers and friends at home did not know how they died till one of their own foes told the story ; and what was the story? Thank God, again and again, it is the story of man's endurance and of a courage which at least is part of the spirit of complete manhood revealed in Jesus Christ. When the last cartridge is

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spent and their strength spent, too, what do they do? The very wounded and dying struggle to their feet, and while the winning foe for a brief moment gives pause, they raise their shot-riddled hats and try to sing with dying breath — *'God save the Queen." What does it mean ? It means that the spirit that has always risen in darkest hours of storm and trial, conquering diffi- culty, laughing at odds, bidding defiance to death, is not a spirit given to the few great leaders of a great people only; but given to thirty-six unknown African troopers, plain men, dying in an obscure war. It means that God still lives His own supreme life even in these brief lives of ours, closed in for a short day with clay. The spirit of a splendid courage which is at least in part the spirit of the Son of Man, lies hidden, and often forgotten, in hearts and souls of common men — the spirit of goodness and of God; the spirit that endures and hopes and dares, giving its life to do life's duty; far, far removed in its quality from that su- preme goodness and courage combined which spake in Him and lived in Him as never man spake or lived; but still through all

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its changes claimed as akin to His own nature, as witness to, and evidence of, man's relationship to God.

"For the dear Christ dwells not afar, The King of some remoter star, Listening at times with flattered ear To homage drawn from human fear; But here among the weak and blind, The torn and suffering of mankind, In works we do, in words we say, Life of our life, He lives to-day."

April, 1894.

WHAT MANNER OF MAN IS THIS?

" What manner of man is this ! that even the winds and the sea obey him." — Luke, viii: 25.

God Speaking not only to man but in man — this is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A revelation of the divine in man — this is the reason the revelation of Jesus Christ is inexhaustible. From it each generation of men must draw a new light and inspira- tion. Prophecy shall cease, tongues shall fail. The greatest messengers and greatest messages are sometimes forgotten. But if I am sure that God lives in man, then in every unfolding of the wonderful life of our race, in every single department of its activ- ity, I am contemplating the real revelation of the very life of God Himself. This is a profound, a soul-inspiring thought.

In the teachings and person of Jesus, God has given us an assurance that this is true — not only that He did speak to man, but that He does live and will live in man to the end of the ages. And when we come to be with Jesus, to study Him, 297

298 The Reasonableness of Faith

to understand Him a little, we find united in His person these two great verities. He is united to the Father as none other could be. He is one with God, sent by His Father, He knows His Father, does His Father's will, speaks His Father's words. ** He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." And on the other hand. He Himself searches all nature to find similes that should adequately explain the inseparableness of His relation to us. He is the root of our life tree — we its branches. He is the elder brother, and we the younger brethren. Aye, when He chooses deliberately His own name, it is "Son of Man."

It is absolutely essential for us to remember this unity of Jesus with the Father, for from it springs His authority to make the tremendous declarations He does. It is equally necessary for us to remember His unity with us, for by this actual one- ness alone are these vast commands of His revealed as possible, as binding. In other words, the teachings of His person must supplement those of His doctrine. He in- tended them to go together, and we must never separate them.

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The reason for this is very plain if you will consider it a little. The moral height of His moral teachings would discourage us, they are so infinitely beyond our present attainment. They lift us into a region too high for human breathing almost. They would leave us in despondency were it not for the intimacy of His person. He who sees these awful things, who sums up His commands for us in: "Be ye therefore perfect as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect," is the same Who walks beside us in the rough road, shares our thirst, our hunger and our pain, is born of woman, is most truly human of all the sons of men.

Teaching and personality must go hand in hand. Last Sunday we glanced at His teaching. Reverently this morning let us a little regard His person. The note sus- tained and dominant here is that One was born on earth and yet was to be full of God. Here is a human life really human, lacking no single part or passion of manhood — ever mark that — yet purely pervious to God.

Pause with me here a moment. It is not true that the measure of any Hving thing's perviousness is the best possible measure

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of its advance in the scale of being. All life stands veiled before the infinite life. And life may be spoken as of lowly or of high order in proportion to the thickness of the veil that hangs between it and the infinite life.

Here are creatures scarcely alive. Their life is evident only to patient study. They seem closely allied to the vegetable world. They have little use for life and none for air. Why? They are veiled from the sun and from the air by the well-nigh impenetrable veil of twenty thousand feet of sunless sea. The depths of the ocean veil them from the sun.

Rise up ages and ages in the scale of life, and here you find the locust burrowing in the wet, cold covering of the ground till many inches of impervious soil cut it off from the light and the day. Before it has spread its wings, and sung its simimer song, the frost of many a winter and the rains of many a spring, and the persuasive warmth of many a summer day must search for it in the cold dank soil. For its veil, too, is thick and impervious.

Rise a little higher, and you look with me

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on the gauzy veil woven of the filmy thread which the silkworm spins out of the rich greenery of the leaf on which it feeds. And so it is all through Creation. Some veils are thick, and, we have thought, im- penetrable, like the profound gulf of the sea. And some are coarse and impervious like the cold dank soil of earth. And some are gauzy coverings that seem almost to in- vite the warmth and light of the sun. And so looking at life merely in this illustrative way, we think the thickest veiling lies on lower orders, thinner on higher orders, and, thinnest of all, on the order of man. As we rise, there is less and less lethargy and more and more light.

Now, we Christians believe that back of all veiling, penetrating His veils — for He Himself has hung them — God our Father lives — above all, through all, in all, over all from the beginning; that all creation is but the burying away of life. Whether it be in the ravines of the great sea, or the gauzy veiling of the silkworm, or the mysteriously sensitive matter of the brain, all creation is but a veiling of life from God; and that in the past so in the present and in the future,

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whether it be insect life struggling towards the sunlit water, or monkeydom struggling towards manhood, or manhood stretching itself yearningly towards Godhood, all bury- ing of life, as it were, is a burying that may be unburied — a sowing of life that from the sowing life may spring, the veiling of the seed, that there may be the unveiling of the flower, that the God in whom all things live and move and have their being, may, in calling His creatures forth to Himself teach them to win some special quality, gain some certain value known only to Him, the inevitable struggle which life must make to pierce its veil and rise in response to the mysterious voice that calls it forth to the joy of its own individual resurrection. So we sing:

"God of the granite and the rose,

Soul of the sparrow and the bee, The mighty tide of being rolls,

Through countless channels, Lord, from thee. It springs to life in grass and flowers.

Through every grade of being runs, While from Creation's utmost towers,

its glory streams in stars and suns. "

These are more than dreams. They are hopes founded not only on growing knowl- edge and widening experience, but on a

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deeper understanding of the universal long- ings and purposes of mankind. But oh, my soul's athirst for God ! Not merely for the God of theory or even hope, not even as the poet's song seeks to praise Him, nor the grave man's pondering would vision Him forth, but here as the Son of Mary I honour Him. I want Him as a hand, a guide, a man. Yes, a guide more than a teacher. For if He gave me only these teachings of His, they so utterly transcend me that they cast me down. I gasp in His higher air. I must draw near to His person and I must find in His person the equiva- lent for His teaching.

Ah, we are such materialists to-day. Just because we must have a Jesus with a person that no more outrages our faith, that no more outrages our reason than His teachings do, just because so very much depends upon His person, we prepare ourselves before- hand with all sorts of doubts and fears as we approach the contemplation of it. We accept almost thoughtlessly the transcen- dence of His teachings because they are not half real enough to us. But when we come to the transcendence of His person, we

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halt fearfully, and draw back. Men begin to shake their heads. Now they say: *'You are in the unreal land of faith and myth. Beware ! He was so great that all the reverent fancy of the early time has played round His person, misconceived and misdrawn it. "

I am aware of all this. I am perfectly aware that it is impossible to accept without question the conclusions of a tradition however reverent. I am fully aware that a reasonable man cannot to-day be asked to bow before mere authority. I am no believer in such authority myself. Full well I know that on the smallest of founda- tions authority has too often built the vastest of superstructures reversing the pyramid of life. In building, the apex takes the place of the foundation. Full well I know that monstrous superstructures have been reared under the reverent super- intendency of tradition and authority.

By all means let us give full weight to all such considerations. I try to do so. I do not find myself able to believe all the miracles ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels. But I am more than ever convinced that at certain

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periods of His life, Jesus was given to work miracles in order to commend His message and win for His message a reverent atten- tion. And far from believing such miracles to be impossible, I think it more than likely that in the time to come, miracles will not offer any real difficulty to the thoughtful man, but our children or children's children may yet see men on the earth who are good enough and great enough to work them.

For I am sure of this — that miracles as Jesus wrought them were altogether the most beautiful and natural things possible. To think of them as breaks in God's law is illogical and absurd. To think of them as natural operations wrought by higher good- ness and higher power working in com- pletest harmony with God's will, is reason- ableness itself.

When Jesus stood before men, there stood One Whom they knew not — One fully pervious to Hght, knowledge, and power of God, a will at one with His Father's, a hand clasped in His Father's hand. Well might they cry, "What manner of man is this that even the winds and the sea obey Him?" The rude forces of earth shaping

3o6 The Reasonableness of Faith

matter after the eternal will, plastic in the hands of absolute God. For God is above all. His greatness flows around our in- completeness, His goodness round our frail- ties, always seeking opportunities to express itself and flow forth. Once upon a time there were some who believed that the larger and colder volume of the Mediter- ranean Sea was higher than the Red Sea. And travellers who ventured far said that beyond the Mediterranean Sea there lay a vaster and higher sea still. Hence arose the fancy that if an opening were made through the sandy spit of Suez, the waiting Mediterranean would pour down the heated channel of the Red Sea, and the volume of the ocean beyond would fill up all loss.

Now, our poor life channels are tortuous, weed-grown things and choked. Here and there a little divinity trickles through, but in Jesus the channels of life lay open to the divine flood.

God ruled through Him. God filled Him. He did not do His own will, work His own work, or speak His own word. And the miracles of Jesus amounted to just this— that when a man is supremely good,

What Manner of Man Is This? 307

is full of God, matter is plastic to him. He rules, and all things obey, for what is God's whole order of rule but a giving to each range of life a little bit of life to rule, increasing its little kingdom as it has won the capacity to govern it.

Here is a clover plant. It must have its king, and the king lives only an hour or two. It is but an insect; but for that insect's coming and going, the clover-patch would fade and die. The life of the clover-patch and all its beauty and fertility, its wafting odour to the breeze, its ministry to the comfort of man, depends upon the successful reign of the insect of a day.

Go higher with me. It is ever the same story. The bird will rule its bush, and its life in that bush largely determines that bush's growth. And the monkey will rule a grove, and the savage will rule a tribe, and the man will rule himself or a race. And Jesus will cry: ''Could not I now call to my Father and He would give me more than ten legions of angels. But how then could Scripture be fulfilled?"

''Ah, what manner of man is this! For even the winds and the sea obey him."

3o8 The Reasonableness of Faith

We are such materialists, my friends. The mud on our shoes has so bemired the very eyes of our souls, that we halt and pause at anything that seems to promise us con- trol of the material that wraps us in.

If we that merely control could see more clearly, should we not regard with greater reverence, should we not yield a more awe- struck admiration to the power availing somewhat to change and uplift the character of one child, than that magic touch of miracle that proves its control over matter ?

For which is greater — the veiling of the soul, or the soul itself? "What manner of man is this?" A man after God's own heart, a real man, a man who at last possesses that abimdant life which God intends for His children, Jesus the Ruler — for He is fit to rule ! Ah, how great and simple it all is ! How it answers to our deepest and our best longings ! We, striving for our little reign and agonizing to establish our little rule, and moaning over our constant incapacity ! How

"He stands beside us like our youth, transforms for us the real to the dream, clothing the palpable and the familiar with golden exhalations of the dawn" —

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the Man, the Son of Mary, absolutely per- vious to God, the Son to Whom the Father at last can say confidingly: ''Thou art ever with Me, and all that I have is Thine."

So runs human history. At first we are boys getting our ten cents a week. Then we grow a little older and our father makes it fifty. Then we come to the borderland of man's estate, and we have our allowance, helping us to the responsibilities to come. Then years pass, and we are taken into minor partnership, begin to understand the plans, begin to catch something of the pur- poses of the Master, our Father. And yet again years pass, and all those plans and purposes become to us less strange and dim. And we think and hope, yes, and believe, that in His infinite mercy the time shall yet be, when He shall explain to us, even as a father does to his boy, that the treasures of His kingdom, the resources of Creation itself, are ours in their length and their breadth, to know and to spend, just so far as by His grace we have made ourselves fit to be fellow-workers with the Father — the God who made, fills, and sustains all things.

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