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INTO HIS MARVELLOUS LIGHT. Studies in Life
and Belief. Crown Svo, $1.50.
DOES GOD SEND TROUBLE? Crown Svo. $1.00.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
Boston and New York.
?e>oe£ dSot) 0enn CrouMe?
-4./V EARNEST EFFORT TO DISCERN BE-
TWEEN CHRISTIAN TRADITION AND
CHRISTIAN TRUTH
BY
CHARLES CUTHBERT JEALL, D. D.
MINISTER OF THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BROOKLYN, N. Y.
"O 6fb$ ayairrj esrlv
i Epistle of St. John, iv. 16
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
<£be Rtoecsi&e $rcs$, Cambtibge
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THE
Copyright, 1S94,
By CHARLES CUTHBERT HAIX.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cnmbri'itjr, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton and Company.
TO ALL
WHO SORROW OVER
THE SORROWS OF HUMANITY.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
The thoughts which make this little book
are not the outcome of a sudden impulse. They
are now presented with a desire to glorify Him
Who came to bear our griefs and to carry our
sorrows, and in the hope of cheering those
who suffer in this present evil world.
If this book shall appear to some who read
it only a departure from the current teaching,
perhaps also to others it shall seem to suggest
an approach to the better understanding of
God's Love.
Brooklyn, 27 January, 1894.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
The Problem of Consolation 1
CHAPTER II.
The Relation of God to Natural Law, to Chas-
tisement, and to Discipline 21
CHAPTER HI.
The Historic Atonement and the Punishment of
Sin 39
CHAPTER IV.
The Will of God and the Tendency of Nature 55
CHAPTER V.
The Duty, the Comfort, and the Power of
Prayer 75
CHAPTER I.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
Are the consolations of God too small for thee ? Book of Job
(Revised Version).
DOES GOD SEND TROUBLE?
CHAPTER I.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
In the old Book of Job, Eliphaz the Teman-
ite is represented as asking the suffering patri-
arch, who rejects such sympathy as is offered :
" Are the consolations of God too small for
thee ? " That question continues to have a
place and a meaning as long as Humanity con-
tinues to bear its solemn burden of suffering.
All who suffer, whether in mind, in body, or in
estate, instinctively know whether the consola-
tions of God are or are not too small for them ;
whether the thought of God brings to them any
peace and strength in their troubles, or whether
the thought of God is to them an empty, unin-
spiring thought, and the consolations of God
are too small and too inadequate to slake the
thirstings of the afflicted heart. " Are the con-
solations of God too small for thee ? " Oh, won-
4 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
derful question, thrilling, not with reproof, but
with sympathy and with the desire to help !
The cold, hard ring of the voice of Job's mis-
erable comforter has died out of this question
long ago ; and to-day it is spoken in a voice
richly tender as that of Christ Himself, spoken
gently, yea, reverently to all to whom sorrow
seems so great, that God seems too small ;
life's sadness broad, the consolations of God
narrow.
In the Old Testament Scriptures, one in
Genesis, one in Jeremiah, are two word-pic-
tures whose pathos might make an angel weep :
the one is the grief of Jacob ; the other is the
grief of Rachel. " Jacob mourned for his son.
And all his sons and all his daughters rose up
to comfort him ; but he refused to be com-
forted ; and he said : For I will go down into
the grave unto my son, mourning." " A voice
is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter
weeping, Rachel weeping for her children ; she
refuseth to be comforted for her children, be-
cause they are not." " He refused to be com-
forted." " She refuseth to be comforted."
The consolations offered were too small, they
could not meet the vaster need, nor measure
across the chasm of a broken heart. Whoever
goes out among lives to-day, not as a spectator,
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION. 5
a critic, or a cynic, but as a confidant and a
friend, will find many who refuse to be com-
forted ; not because they want to be unhappy,
but because nothing they meet or hear is great
enough to appeal to them, or mighty enough
to lift them. Consolations, alike of man and of
God, are too small to perform their intended
office.
It is perfectly useless and illogical to say to
those who refuse to be comforted that they
ought to be comforted. For comfort, relief in
sorrow (on the part of the afflicted), is not an
act which one puts forth one's hand and does ;
comfort is a state of mind into which one is
brought by the operation of adequate causes.
If you bring to a person a form of consolation
and it fails to comfort, it is folly to say : You
ought to be comforted by this. The fact is
that for some reason or other the consolation
you have brought is too small ; it is inadequate,
or it is inapplicable. To blame persons for
continuing to be sad, for refusing to be com-
forted after you have brought to their atten-
tion what you believe to be an adequate conso-
lation, is absurd. A physician calls upon his
patient at night, carefully looks him over, and
prescribes powders. " Let these be given," he
says, " at intervals of two hours throughout the
6 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
night, and I believe that in the morning I shall
find him better." In the morning the physi-
cian returns, finds that his patient has faithfully
taken the powders, and is much worse. What
will the doctor do ? Will he turn on his pa-
tient and say : " You ought to be better. It
is wrong for you to refuse to get better. I
gave you the right powders, and here you are
worse this morning." If a doctor spoke thus
to his patient, he would be a fool. What pos-
sible obligation exists for the man to be better
if the powders did not make him better ? Nay ;
the physician would say : " This man is worse.
I gave him what I believed was adequate.
Either I gave him the wrong medicine, or con-
ditions have developed in himself to counteract
the influence of the right medicine- I must
study the case until I find what will reach him,
arrest the waste of tissue, and stimulate the
weakened forces of repair and recovery." If
consolations do not comfort, blame not the
heart that weeps on, commit not the folly of
saying that a heart ought to be comforted by
thoughts which do not appeal to it ; that tears
can be dried on demand ; that burdens can be
lifted from the heart, unless there are given
strong consolations, like strong hands, to grap-
ple with those burdens and to lift them.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION. 7
When even the consolations of God seem too
small for one who suffers, seek for the causes
of that strange insufficiency. There was a
reason why the medicine helped not the sick
man. And there are always reasons why God's
consolations fail to console.
Consolation is a problem. Many would-be
consolers work at it in vain ; though working
in God's name, His consolations seem in their
hands ineffective and barren. And many who
sorely need the richest consolations of God
never obtain them.
For years I have pondered these facts in-
tently and continuously. Living so much as
it has been my privilege to live among the sor-
rowing and the distressed, I have been amazed
to find how few, of all who suffer, know the
richness of the consolations of God. There is
much submission to God's will, as it is called ;
though often the term " God's will " is ap-
plied to troubles which are the Devil's will
rather than " God's will." There is much rev-
erent wonder at the reasons why afflictions are
sent by God upon men, when of many of those
afflictions it is certain God did not send them,
but that they were instead the direct result of
human carelessness, or of human extravagance,
or of human hatef ulness, or of human lustful-
8 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
ness. And there is far down in many a heart
that has suffered a deep-set, though surrepti-
tious protest against " the will of God," as it
is called, which sent this sickness, or that loss
of property, or this disappointment, or that be-
reavement ; when not one of those sorrows, the
sickness, the loss of property, the disappoint-
ment, the bereavement, came from God's will,
but from that broken and bruised and halt-
ing and sin-stricken order of the fallen crea-
tion which broke away from God's dear will,
and pierced itself through with many sor-
rows. And so, between all the suffering men
and women who meekly submit to what they
call " the will of God," and those who puzzle
and wonder over what they call " the will of
God," and those who secretly rebel against
what they call "the will of God," it is not
many, I fear, of all the great throng of suffer-
ing hearts, who know in their broad fullness, in
their immense tenderness, in their gladdening
and ineffable sympathy, the meaning of the
words : " The consolations of God"
Human sympathy means much more to many
people than Divine sympathy — and to not
a few who have suffered, the beautiful self-
sacrifice, the generosity, the pitiful love of
blessed earthly friends, the labor and suffering
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION. 9
those friends endure to save life, stand before
their minds (though their tongues utter it
not), as a kind of rebuking contrast to God,
Who says He loves us, yet (as they say) robs
us of our property, sends continual disappoint-
ment on us, and sweeps our helpless little
children into their graves. Oh ! if you could
hear, as I have heard for years, the despairing
groan from suffering hearts, asking those ter-
rible, mistaken questions : " Why — why does
God bring all this trouble on me ? Why has
He made my wife an invalid, or my child an
imbecile? Why has He swept my fortune
away ? Why has He robbed me of the desire
of my eyes ? Why has He smitten me with
this disease, so that my life is a burden to
myself?" you would not wonder that I say:
few, of all the many who suffer, comprehend
the consolations of God ; few know God's
real attitude toward those who suffer ; few
live in such a spirit as permits them to realize
the largeness, the sufficiency, the uplifting
strength of the consolations of God. Through
years of almost continual fellowship with sor-
row, I have pondered this problem of conso-
lation until it has seemed at times my heart
would break with sympathy for those to whom
God's consolations were too small. And in
10 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
this little book I speak out my beliefs on
this subject with a freedom born of no short-
lived impulse, but of the prayer and the study
of years.
I believe that for very many persons in and
out of the Christian Church, the consolations
of God are too small ; that is, they do not
console, they do not substantially alleviate
sorrow, nor substantially assist in providing
hopeful and cheering thoughts for the life that
now is. In this respect the consolations of
man are often more effective, and come nearer
to the bruised spirit than do the consolations
of God ; and the most of men bear their sor-
rows by getting used to them, as the poor cart-
horse bears at last, without flinching, the collar
that galls his neck. Use, time, kind friends,
and hard work do more for the many than
God's consolations, to make the pains of life
endurable. To account for such a state of
things in part, there may doubtless be local
causes, acting upon individuals, such as pecu-
liarities of temperament, or of habit, or of
family training, or of the friend environment.
And all such local causes must be reckoned
with by one who would solve the problem of
consolation for any single life. But far above
and beyond all local causes are two general
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION. 11
causes which seem to have spread their influ-
ence far and wide in the common thought of
the age, to have insinuated themselves into our
ordinary phrases of speech, into our prayers,
into our hymns, into our devotional litera-
ture, and to have brought about a popular
conception of trouble, sorrow, sickness, and
death (as things that come from God, things
that God sends upon us), which has immensely
weakened the power of God's consolations to
console ; which has made them unto many a
troubled heart (to use the startling phrase of
Eliphaz the Temanite) "too small." These
two general causes are : first, a distorted view
of God's relation to our sorrows ; second, a
consequently distorted relation of our life to
God.
Out of a desire, doubtless, to proclaim the
sovereignty of God over His creatures, and to
recognize after some fashion His hand in all
the events of life, a fearful perversion of
God's true relation to human suffering, loss,
sickness, and death has spread like an untimely
frost over the minds of men, whereby all of
these evils that so abound in our time are de-
scribed as the dealings of God's will with the
children of men. From Him, we are told,
come these mysterious visitations, the pestilence
12 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
that walketh in darkness ; the destruction that
wasteth at noonday ; the railway crash that
smites with sudden death the beloved head of
an household and leaves a family in poverty ;
the financial calamity that melts a fortune in an
hour ; the insidious disease that fastens itself
in the lungs of the strong, true-hearted man,
and worries, wastes, and wears him away till he
surrenders to the enemy he does not fear,
going gallantly to his untimely grave ; the
fever that breaks out in the beautiful child,
tortures its sweet life for one hideous week,
then leaves the pure temple an unsightly and
unapproachable ruin.
There is a kind of religious phraseology
prevalent in our time which would seek to per-
suade us that it is God who has done these
atrocities, that it is God who has wrecked this
fortune ; God who has made the strong man a
consumptive, God who has seized that beau-
teous child, whose every motion was grace,
whose every glance was ecstacy, and has tor-
tured it deliberately to death. I have even
heard a Christian friend suggest to a mother,
sitting white as ashes by her dead baby, " Per-
haps God saw you loved the child too much,
and so He took it from you." If I believed
that God spreads scarlet fever among little chil-
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION. 13
dren ; if I believed that God sweeps off into
their graves so many young wives and mo-
thers ; if I believed that God produces idiots,
or drives people mad, or makes men murder
and steal and blast their families, I would
hate Him as other men hate Him. Who that
believes this can sincerely care for the con-
solations of God, or want them? If God is
practically responsible for nine tenths of the
evil and sorrow that come on us, what impulse
have we to desire His consolations, save by an
effort of religious duty ? If you employed
a physician who trifled with your child's life,
and aggravated its disease till it died, would
you go to that physician for comfort in your
bereavement? But I believe none of this. I
believe that God's whole and only intention for
man was from eternity to give him a life as
perfect, as free, as gloriously supreme over
physical forces, as consummate in its joy as the
life of God and of His Christ ; that it was the
eternal ideal of God for us, that we in our
manhood should be conformed to the imaa'e of
His Son. I believe that God, in introducing
man to the earth, set him amidst conditions
altogether fitted to produce perfect and ever-
lasting happiness. There was no sickness, no
disorder, no death. And the Heart of God
rejoiced in His world : —
14 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
" And a Priest's Hand through creation,
Waved calm and consecration."
Then came sin. By man it came as its chan-
nel and its exponent. Sin is the perverted
choice of a free being. And with sin came its
train of consequences ; all sorrow, all perver-
sion of instincts and lusts, all confusion of in-
terests, all strife and warfare, all sickness with
its incredible train of infirmities, all debasement
and derangement of the intellect, all degenera-
tion of vitality, and that supreme, that heroic,
that last catastrophe — Death. And God saw
and sorrowed over the man He loved. God saw
His beautiful creation blackened, and an an-
archy springing up within His order : a Devil-
motive and a Devil-mission penetrating every-
where, till the whole creation, once so happy
and made for happiness, but self-destroyed
through sin, groaned and travailed in pain.
And God, hating Death as a contradiction of
His purpose for man, so loved the world, He
gave His only begotten Son that whosoever be-
lieveth in Him should not perish but have ever-
lasting Life. God took man's part against the
disorder that had broken out in the creation, to
redeem and to rescue man from that disorder ;
to console and to strengthen his heart while
waiting for deliverance. And God is on man's
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION. 15
side to-day, as his best, his kindest Friend,
taking his part against the woes and sorrows
of life, taking his part against Death, and
pledging Himself to us that Death shall not
always have dominion over us. We must
break away from our forms of popular speech
which continually misrepresent and dishonor
God in His relation to Death : we must teach
ourselves to stop saying at the death-beds of
our friends : " God is taking them away from
us." God hates Death. Death is His enemy
as much as ours. Death is a catastrophe and a
blot on creation. God's proclamation against
Death is explicit and oft repeated. Read it
in the magnificent prophecy of Hosea : " I will
ransom them from the power of the grave ;
I will redeem them from Death. 0 Death,
I will be thy plagues. 0 Grave ! I will be thy
destruction." Death is not the outcome of
God's will. Death is the outcome of natural
law, the effect of natural causes, in a created
order perverted and spoiled by sin. " By man
sin entered into the world, and death by sin."
Scarlet fever smites the temple of the dear
child's body and leaves it a ruin. We torture
our hearts to make them say this fearful para-
dox : " God's will has done this, therefore I turn
to God to comfort me." How many hearts have
16 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
bled, blasphemed, and broken in the excruciating
effort to ask comfort from Him Who killed the
child. We try to train ourselves to believe
that this is " kissing the rod." We are wrong.
" What took this child away ? " Shall we say,
the will of God ? No, let us say the truth ;
bad drainage and germ-infection. And God
sorrows with us as much as any earthly friends,
for He no more did it than did they. What
does it mean then : " The Lord gave and the
Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of
the Lord " ? The Hebrew word is clear : " The
Lord gave and the Lord hath received, blessed
be His name." Who could bless the Lord for
taking away our beloved ? But we can bless
Him that since the sad and broken natural
order of disease and death has conquered our
loved one, the Lord has received to His eternal
paradise the sj>irit we loved. Once only in the
Bible, so far as I know, is it said of a human
being : " God took him away," and that man
was Enoch — who did not die. God for some
reason made him an exception to the natural
order. And to those who believe in the Pre-
millennial Coming of our Lord, one of the
bright thoughts about it is, that they who are
living on the earth when He comes, as His dis-
ciples, shall be gathered to Him without death.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION. 17
" Tliey that remain, that are left, unto the
Coming of the Lord shall be caught up to
meet the Lord in the air ; and so shall we ever
be with the Lord." " We shall not all sleep."
God, then, being not the Author of our
troubles, of our sicknesses, of our deaths, but
looking upon all these things rather as sad and
fearful interruptions of His plan for us, has
sought to comfort man by pouring forth con-
solations into his life. And what are these
consolations of God?
The Incarnation is one of God's consolations :
that into the very midst of this broken order
has entered in human form, with human sensi-
bilities and human sympathies, the Lord Jesus
Christ, to be tempted like as we are, to bear our
griefs, to carry our sorrows, to taste death for
every man, to show us in His Resurrection that
there is victory in store for us ; to lift up our
eyes toward that new order, which is but the
original order brought back across the chaos of
sin and made once more the inheritance of re-
deemed Humanity : " I am the Resurrection
and the Life : he that believeth in Me, though
He were dead, yet shall he live ; and whosoever
liveth and believeth in Me shall never die."
The Divine Word is one of God's consola-
tions. " Are the consolations of God too small
18 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
for thee and the Word that dealeth gently with
thee?" Such is the full reading of that
splendid verse in Job. How gently deals the
Word of God with all sorrowing hearts that
hear and understand its truest meaning ! How
it urges us, counsels us, pleads with us, not to
confuse these agonizing catastrophes of sin and
death with the will and the heart of God ! How
it pleads with us not to mistake the Devil's
malignant will for God's blessed will ; not to
load on God the responsibility for sorrows that
are the offspring of sin ! " Th is is the will of
God," it says, " even your sanctification." And
amidst the bitterness of our lot, in sorrow and
death, it ever protests, " God has not done this
— God is Love. Come to me, ye that are
heavy laden, — / will give you rest."
The Holy Spirit is one of the consolations of
God. The Comforter, the Strength-maker, the
Paraclete, the Advocate is He ; the ever pre-
sent Friend ; Revealer of the presence of the
unseen Lord; Creator in our hearts of that
vision of things to come, when the new order
of redemption shall be consummated in the
manifestation of the King, when this corrup-
tible shall put on incorruption and this mortal
shall put on immortality, when sorrow and
sighing shall flee away, when Death shall be
swallowed up in victory.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION. 19
Two words as I close this chapter. What
then is " chastisement," and what then is " dis-
cipline " ? Both are words which undoubtedly
have their immense reality in human experi-
ence. What is chastisement ? Chastisement
means " making chaste." What is the mean-
ing of such a great passage as that in He-
brews, " Whom the Lord loveth He chasten-
eth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiv-
eth " ? I believe that that is spiritual and only
spiritual. It is not a passage relating to bodily
calamities. It is that intense experience of our
spirits with the Father of our spirits, through
which in our inward life we are rebuked and
purified and made meet for the kingdom of
God. Bodily calamities are only the results of
natural laws. Every one of them can be traced
to natural causes. The moment we call them
chastisements, we plunge into confusion. Are
the sufferings of infants chastisements ? When
the Spanish bomb-throwers kill by chance inno-
cent women, are their orphaned children chas-
tised by God? When the mistake of a British
Admiral carries his stately flagship to the bot-
tom of the Mediterranean, shall we tell the
weeping wives, and children, and sisters, and
mothers, and lovers in England that they are
being chastised by the hand of God? God
20 THE PROBLEM OF CONSOLATION.
forbid ! Bodily sin carries its own retribution
to the sinner, under natural law; but chas-
tisement from God, according to the Scrip-
ture, is a process of the spiritual life, not of
the physical order. And what, then, is disci-
pline ? What does the word mean ? It means
" Teaching." God can teach through any-
thing, joy or sorrow, holiness or sin, life or
death. Christ used anything and everything
to serve His teaching purpose in His parables,
— birds and flowers, or drunken servants and
cheating clerks. And God takes everything,
even all the events of this broken order of sin
and sorrow, and through the use of it in the
hand of His Holy Spirit He teaches. Thus out
of sorrow, out of sickness, out of death, evils
of the natural order, what magnificent lessons
have been learned in the school of grace ; what
friendships have been formed beneath the
Cross ; what power for usefulness has sprung
into being from the side of the grave ! And
the end of the whole matter is : God is Love.
God is not the Author of confusion, but of
peace. By man came death ; by Christ have
come life and power and hope ; and to all who
suffer in the flesh, God waits to be gracious,
saying unto them continually, " As one whom
his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you."
CHAPTER II.
THE RELATION OF GOD TO NATURAL LAW,
TO CHASTISEMENT, AND TO DISCIPLINE.
Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. — Epistle
TO THE GALATIANS.
Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. — Epistle to the
Hebrews.
It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Teacher. — Gospel
of St. Matthew. (Revised Version and margin.)
CHAPTER II.
THE RELATION OF GOD TO NATURAL LAW, TO
CHASTISEMENT, AND TO DISCIPLINE.
The proposition laid down in the preceding
chapter suggests questions which lead the mind
forth in many directions. If we permit our-
selves to break away from the traditional lan-
guage which teaches us to regard the troubles
of our present life as sent from God, we find
ourselves in the midst of thoughts full of vital
interest. In an earnest effort to discern be-
tween Christian tradition and Christian truth,
the teachings of the New Testament constitute
the final court of appeal. The Christian Scrip-
tures are authoritative for the definition of
Christian truth. I believe in the perfect unity
of that Divine Revelation which is contained
in tke two Testaments. Nevertheless, the
Bible is used unfairly if used indiscriminately,
i. e., without regard to dispensational distinc-
tions. In the study of every Biblical subject
it is necessary to take into consideration the
differences of view-point, of language, of time,
of racial significance, of dispensational method
24 NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC.
between the Hebrew Scriptures and those
Christian Scriptures which must be the imme-
diate standard of revelation for ourselves.
The relation of God to Natural Law is one
of the first subjects presented to the mind
intent on discerning between tradition and
truth in answering the question : " Does God
send trouble ? " This relation is pointed out
in the inexorable verse from the Epistle to
the Galatians : " Be not deceived, God is not
mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap." I call this " the inexora-
ble verse ; " but " inexorable " does not mean
" cruel/' it means " unchangeable ; " and there
is as much blessing as pain in that thought.
If natural laws were not inexorable, if they
were changeful, erratic, and uncertain in their
action, life would be intolerable, and this world
one frightful chaos. No plans could then be
made ; no undertakings could be securely devel-
oped ; the material and intellectual progress of
the race comes to an end ; society dissolves in
physical anarchy for which it is not respon-
sible ; the sciences explode in ruins ; the arts
topple from their sinking foundations; the in-
dividual cowers before the cruel caprice of his
Creator. The one beautiful remnant of the
original creation which survives, towering like
NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC. 25
a sublime Greek peristyle above the heaping
ruins of man's sinful life, is the inexorable, the
unchangeable character of natural laws. The
original order survives in the sequence of cause
and effect, although the madness of sinning men
has turned that fair order against themselves.
" Natural Law," says Henry Drummond, " is
an ascertained working sequence or constant
order among the phenomena of Nature. Law
is order. The Laws of Nature are simply
statements of the orderly condition of things
in Nature. They are modes of operation.
They are great lines running out through the
world, reducing it like parallels of latitude to
intelligent order." There was a Hand that
drew those lines. It was the same Hand that
brought man to the earth and set him to live
among- those lines of order. The order was
perfectly fit for man. Man was perfectly fit
for the order. There was no place for catas-
trophe ; no occasion for suffering ; no cause
nor intention of death. The God-made man
was in the God-made order ; and his entire life
was adjusted to the circumjacent order as the
eye to light, the ear to sound. The order
stands unchanged. No new laws ; no changed
laws ; no unjust laws. The same order. The
man within the order changed. The order
26 NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC.
stands harmonious with itself ; every law as
beautiful, as beneficent to-day as at the be-
ginning. The man has dropped out of har-
mony with the order. This is sin. Sin is
lawlessness ; wrong adjustment to right laws ;
wrong uses of right things. And this ac-
counts for all the physical and material sorrow,
sickness, misery, poverty, bitterness, violence,
death in the world. " By man sin entered into
the world and death by sin ; and death passed
upon all men, because all have sinned." No-
thing is so easy as to make beautiful laws and
beautiful things deadly by misuse and misman-
agement, and to transmit the effects of our
misuse, by processes of just and rightful law,
to lives not only innocent, but ignorant of
the misuse. Sin is misadjustment to law, and
each new sin extorts one more abnormal conse-
quence from a normal order ; throws one more
handful of dust into the troubled air, which in
the fresh morning of the world was bright as
crystal, revealing everywhere the Presence of
God.
Keeping in the foreground of the mind this
thought, that evil and death are not God's
order, not of God's making, but are the effects
of man's misadjustments of himself to inexora-
ble laws of Nature, consider the two questions
NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC. 27
which are immediately asked : Cannot God
readjust the natural order ? And if He can,
why does He not, and thus prevent suffering ?
To the first of these questions there can be
but one answer for those who believe. That
answer is " Yes." Do I believe in miracles ?
Surely I believe in miracles. Miracles are
results of a character contrary to our experi-
ence, arising from the combining of natural
laws in ways superior to the present order.
From time to time, to secure certain ends, such
as the authorization of a new revelation of
truth, or the certifying of a new teacher
of truth, miracles have occurred. They may
occur again at the pleasure of God. Those
who believe miracles believe that God can
change the natural order if He will. The
other question immediately presses : If He
can change the order, why does He not, and
thus prevent suffering? The answer which
yields itself to reflection is a very solemn one.
God does not change the natural order, be-
cause the natural order is the right order.
Natural laws are the best laws for man as God
made him. Natural laws are the lines of order
drawn through a perfect world. The fault is
not in them, but in the sinning race which has
put itself in wrong relations to those laws.
28 NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC.
The laws of Nature have not broken humanity.
Humanity has broken itself against the laws
of Nature. As far as we are able to attain
conformity to those laws, we find ourselves
happy, well, and free. Every glimpse we have
into the right adjustment of natural laws dis-
closes a heavenly beauty translated to the
earth. Natural laws are God's work, right
and kind, the best for man in his present state
of being. Is not, then, God's way most god-
like ? He cannot break down His glorious
laws to suit the perverted needs of the fallen
race ; but by redemption and by consolation
He would bring up the fallen race to know
that there is hope of recovering, here in part,
hereafter absolutely, the Divine order. If God
suspended natural laws so that sin and misuse
no longer wrought out their consequences to
the bitter end, upon the innocent as well as
upon the guilty, what a blow would thus be
dealt at the moral nature of man ! Even now
he sins, knowing often by the brightest light of
knowledge, that the wages of his sin is death,
and that the sting of death is sin. But what
would man's moral life become, what would the
corruption of society become, if God, ignoring
His own law : " Whatsoever a man soweth,
that shall he also reap ; " a law which operates
NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC. 29
as much for happiness as it does for misery ;
should tempt man, as the Devil tempts him,
with the hope of escape from the natural con-
sequences of sin : " Thou shalt not surely
die."
When our hearts are sorely suffering with
beholding the pains of some loved one ; when
the inexorable laws of Nature are grinding the
life out of some dear form that we would not
touch save with the touch of blessing and the
kiss of peace, although we may not believe that
awful paganism that God is the direct sender
of this suffering, although our minds may be
enlightened so far as to know that sickness and
agony and death occur not because of God's
laws, but because of humanity's sad misadjust-
ment to those laws through the world's long
generations of sin, still comes there not un-
bidden the passionate longing that God would
for our sake suspend those laws, and stop
those inexorable wheels that grind away at the
precious life. And when the wheels go on
still and finish their work, has there not been
in many a heart the embittered doubt of the
love of Him of Whom we dare to say : " He
could have stopped those wheels if He would " ?
Ah ! we wrong Him, we wrong Him by that
thought ; we wrong the love of Him Who put
30 NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC.
Himself under those very wheels, and let Him-
self be ground to death. Have we the right to
believe that He loves our loved one only, and
loves not also every single one of His poor,
suffering- children ? Have we the right to be-
es o
lieve He would wish to help us only and. not
also to help all ? But what would it be to
help all ? What would it mean for God to pre-
vent all suffering, to stay all the forces that are
at work, making misery for Humanity ; what
would it mean for God to keep those effects
from following their legitimate causes, which
bring heaviness to the heart, weariness to the
frame, tears on the cheeks, fever in the blood ?
It would be to overturn the laws of Nature, it
would be to bring anarchy into that system of
order, which, however men may misuse it, and
sin against it, and break themselves to pieces
on its marble solidity, is still the best for the
individual and for the race, still the only vestige
of the divine order remaining in the earth ; it
would be to make life intolerable, to throw all
human plans, efforts, and calculations into chaos,
to upheave the very world, and send the whole
human system of things staggering into hope-
less confusion, as a ship on her beam-ends in
a cyclonic sea. No ! as long as it is necessary
for the present state of being to continue, it is
NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC. 31
necessary for the laws of nature to do their
work, inexorably blessing, inexorably blasting.
Man has undone himself and his children in
God's fair universe, and the heart of God is
sorry for Him, with a divine pity and pain.
And the consolations of God are poured out
upon him through the Christ his Redeemer, and
the Word his Gospel, and the Spirit his Com-
forter. And as the complications under natural
law grow worse and worse, as the innocent reap
what the guilty have sown, and the Nemesis of
physical retribution follows the scent of phy-
sical wrong-doing, as the pathos of creation
intensifies, and the vast procession to the tomb
is augmented by the world's increasing popu-
lations, God Himself tells us that the sorrows
of the race lie upon His heart, and that He is
hastening on the new dispensation. The laws
of the present natural order cannot be unhinged
and set aside at the pleasure of a million con-
tradictory desires. For the good of all, the
order must go on to its consummation. But
He Who died in the earth is risen to the
heavens, whence He shall come to bring in a
new day of hope. And there is meaning in
that prayer : " Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will
be done, in earth as it is in heaven." We do
not look for the suspension of laws and for
32 NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC.
the elimination of pain in the present order.
But we look for "a new heaven and a new
earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness ; when
the tabernacle of God shall be with men, and
He shall dwell with them and they shall be His
peoples ; and God Himself shall be with them
and be their God; when He shall wipe
away every tear from their eyes, and death shall
be no more ; neither shall there be mourning,
nor crying, nor pain any more, for the first
things shall have passed away." Thus is God
related to natural law. He is the Author of
order, of harmony, of beauty ; and the disor-
der, the discord, the disfigurement, the disinte-
gration of the race under natural laws, are the
fruits of man's misuse of laws, not the work of
God nor of His laws.
Concerning God's relation to chastisement,
the New Testament suggests these familiar
words : " Whom the Lord loveth He chasten-
eth." By a great misfortune in the association
of ideas, chastisement is understood by many
to mean " punishment." " To chastise " does
to the modern ear mean bodily punishment.
Hence we hear constantly in our conventional
religious speech of chastisements and punish-
ments coming from the hand of God upon men,
both upon Christians and upon unbelievers ;
NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC. 33
and the world is full of events transpiring in
the private and public walks of life which are
described as chastisements visited by God upon
men for their offenses. A man who has lived
a proud, dissolute, worldly life is smitten with a
disease which makes him a burden to himself
and to his friends ; or a household which has
grown worldly has one of its fair children
snatched away by sudden death. We are told
conventionally that this is God's chastisement
upon these worldly people for their sins. And
out of this mode of speech grows vast self-
righteousness, not to say vast impertinence,
whereby one man presumes to affirm that an-
other has been visited with special punishment
from the Most High. Is there any ground in
the New Testament for affirming that God ever
punishes men with physical or material calami-
ties in the present life? None whatever.
" Punishment " is a word never used in the
New Testament to describe God's dealings with
men in the present life. Christ repudiates the
idea of physical retribution in this life. We
read in St. Luke : " There were some present
which told Him of the Galileans whose blood
Pilate had ming-led with their sacrifices." The
Lord's answer clearly shows that this incident
was pointed out to Him as an example of pun-
34 NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC.
ishment for sin. He answered and said :
" Think ye that these Galileans were sinners
above all the Galileans because they have suf-
fered these things ? I tell you, nay, but except
ye repent ye shall all in like manner perish.
Or those eighteen," He continues, " upon whom
the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them, think
ye that they were offenders above all the men
that dwell in Jerusalem ? I tell you, nay, but
except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish."
The civil law punishes men, or some men, for
their sins in this life. God does not. If a bad
man breaks natural laws, he will suffer ; but
not because he is a bad man. If a good man
breaks natural laws, he will suffer just as much
as if he were bad. If a child is snatched away
from a worldly family by sudden death, it is
not because the family is worldly, but because
the child caught the prevailing fever. Perhaps
it caught it from the little child next door, who
belonged to a most holy and devout family, and
who also caught the fever and died. Side by
side in their beds, side by side in their graves,
lie the dear little children ; two homes in
mourning, yet neither one family nor the other
is being punished for its sin. God is not pun-
ishing now. He is saving, with every possible
effort of His loving heart. Into this world
NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC. 35
Christ has come, not to condemn the world, but
that the world through Him may be saved. The
whole subject of punishment is reserved for the
future dispensations. Now is the accepted time,
now is the day of salvation. Later on, in a
future dispensation, those who refuse the
Love of God, who trample under foot the Son
of God, who despise the Spirit of God, must
reckon with God for what they have chosen to
do. I know not how, I dare not say, nor im-
agine, how they will reckon with Him or He
with them ; but now there is not punishment.
Sickness is not judgment, death is not retribu-
tion ; they are purely natural phenomena issu-
ing from causes more or less traceable. Let
my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth be-
fore I, a sinner, dare to say of other sinners
weeping by their dead, " God is punishing them
for their sins." To-morrow I may be weeping
by my dead — and what then ?
But how shall we adjust with these views the
fact of chastisements of which undoubtedly the
New Testament speaks? Very readily, by
observing that chastisement is not punishment
for sin, but a spiritual process of purification
from sin. Chastisement is " to make chaste,"
and " chaste " is the beautiful, snowy, Latin
" castus," spotless, pure, holy. Study every
36 NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC.
passage in the New Testament referring to
God's chastisements, and yon will not find one
connected with physical calamities and sorrows.
The connection is wholly spiritual. " Chastise-
ment " is the office of the Spirit. Whatever
gracious work of the Spirit quickens within one
the consciousness and conviction of sin, is chas-
tisement. Whatever brings in upon us the self-
humiliations and rebukings that spring from
our wounding of Jesus through our sins, is
chastisement. Whatever pain of our spirit
thrills us in the presence of our suffering Lord,
so that the scourges that fell on Him bite the
very flesh of our souls ; whatever " via cru-
cis " opens at the beckoning of His hand, lead-
ing us on till we have crucified with Him un-
sanctified passions or unfaithful fears, and have
come on, as through the solemn fellowship of
His grave, into the buoyant and blessed com-
munion of His risen life ; whatever holy chalice
of His grace comes to our lips, tasting of which
we spring renewed into loftier living, casting
off the works of darkness, girding on with
brave hands the gleaming armor of light —
that is chastisement, a work of the Spirit,
making the soul chaste, white, and knightly for
the kingdom of God.
What is the relation of God to disc'qyline ?
NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC. 37
No intelligent answer can be given until we
realize that discipline, as well as chastisement,
is not punishment for sin. Discipline is the
education of the disciple — "discere," to learn.
" The disciple," says the Great Head Master of
the School of Grace, " is not above his Teacher.
It is enough for the disciple that he be as his
Teacher." Chastisement is the purifying of
man's spirit. Discipline is the education of
man's spirit. The end in both cases is the same,
the one consummate end for every human life,
the end which the loving Father purposed for
us from the foundation of the world, that we
should be conformed to the image of His Son ;
that we should be like Christ, like Christ in
purity, like Christ in power. Chastisement is
the purifying office of grace, making our spirits
chaste. Discipline is the educating office of
grace, making our spirits calm and strong and
faithful and patient and mighty for useful-
ness. To assist Him in this process of educa-
tion our teacher uses everything good, evil,
bright, dark, joyous, painful, that comes into
our life in the natural order of events. Through
every hardship that develops from the distor-
tions of the natural order, He seeks to throw
into our minds some magnificent suggestion of
patience, valor, and victory ; through every
38 NATURAL LAW, CHASTISEMENT, ETC.
pang of physical suffering", as well as through
every thrill of physical health, He, mightiest
of teachers, works or seeks to work some
broadening influence of grace ; through the
dark mists of death, that last and most awful
catastrophe of our shattered life, He, most
faithful of friends, still reaches us with His
glorious teaching, till again and again, the
disciple, neither seduced by life's pleasure nor
vanquished by life's woe, grows up, through
the discipline of years, toward the measure of
the stature of Christ, and becomes like his
Teacher. Christ is indeed everything to those
who believe this — " Christus Salvator," Sav-
iour of our lives ; " Christus Consolator," God's
great Answer of love to His bruised and suf-
fering creation ; " Christus Doctor," Christ
the Teacher, training the disciple upward to
grander living, lightening all our darkness,
broadening all our narrowness, and flooding
our path with the dear fulfillments of His own
promise : "lam the Light of the World. He
that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness,
but shall have the Light of Life."
CHAPTER III.
THE HISTORIC ATONEMENT AND THE
PUNISHMENT OF SIN.
We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Right-
eous, and He is the Propitiation for our sins, and not for ours
only, but also for the whole world. — 1 Epistle of St. John.
(Revised Version.)
God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not
reckoning unto them their trespasses, and having committed unto
us the ministry of reconciliation. — 2 Epistle to the Corin-
thians. (Revised Version.)
While we were enemies; we were reconciled to God through the
death of His Son. — Epistle to the Romans.
Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation. —
2 Epistle to the Corinthians.
CHAPTER III.
THE HISTORIC ATONEMENT AND THE PUNISH-
MENT OF SIN.
My objective point in this teaching has
from the beginning- been this : To show that
God is Love, although the world be full of sin,
of sorrow, and of death ; to show that the Eter-
nal God is not our tormentor, but our Refuge,
to Whom, in the woes of life and death, we
run to hide ourselves, and in the embrace of
Whose Everlasting Arms we shall be sustained
until these calamities are overpast. In the
process of this teaching we have had occasion
to examine the relation of God to Natural Law,
to Chastisement, and to Discipline. As to
natural laws, those lines of order running out
through the whole creation, we have seen that
they are made for man, and that he was made
in perfect adaptation to them, so that they are
the best for him as God made him. We have
seen that sin is man's misadjustment to law : in
sin man has related himself adversely to law,
thereby causing sorrow and sickness and every
variety of trouble — even death itself — to
42 ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT.
spread like a pall over the earth. We have
seen that although miracles show us that God
has power to interpose in the working of laws,
and so to recombine them as to produce results
the reverse of those for which experience has
taught us to look, yet our reason tells us that,
for the good of all, the reign of law must con-
tinue as long as this present order continues.
If God should intervene, as sometimes we
blindly seem to think He ought to intervene,
for the purpose of putting a stop to human
suffering, it would mean the suspension of
natural laws and the throwing into confusion
of our present system of life, which, in all its
calculations and efforts, depends on the change-
lessness of laws. Our conclusion, therefore,
concerning the manifold sufferings, sorrows,
sicknesses, and deaths which transpire in the
world under natural law, is this : that they are
not punishments from God, sent in retribution
upon man for his sins, but that they are the
natural and inevitable consequences of man's
own sins, working themselves out through the
sequence of cause and effect, perhaps through
generations of persons innocent of all other
connection with the original act of wrong
save that of involuntary inheritance ; they are
the consequences, occurring under processes of
ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT. 43
natural law, of man's innumerable bodily or
mental perversions of law, man's innumerable
wrong uses of right things. From Natural
Law we proceeded to speak of those two ideas
which the New Testament presents as un-
doubted elements of God's dealings with His
children, viz. : Chastisement and Discipline ;
and of those we saw that neither chastisement
nor discipline is punishment, according to the
New Testament; that chastisement and dis-
cipline are offices of the Holy Spirit, — the one
the purifying or making chaste of our spirit,
the other the educating or training of our
spirit ; that the idea of punishment for sin does
not enter into chastisement, but instead the
spiritual work of purifying the inner life from
sin ; and that the idea of punishment for sin
does not enter into discipline, but wholly a
gracious teaching and guiding and elevating
of our spirit by a work of grace which may
make use of any and every incident and ele-
ment of our daily life as an instrument, even
a sacrament, through which to broaden or up-
lift our views of life and of God, that the
disciple may become like His Teacher, These
views, although in no sense original with the
writer, doubtless come to some as new views,
as views which have not hitherto been enter-
44 ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT.
tained among Christians. And certainly these
views of chastisement and discipline, as purely
and entirely works of spiritual purification and
education, differ from other views which hold
that God is now punishing men for their sins
through physical or financial adversities ; that
sickness is often sent to us as a sharp rebuke
for some proud or unfilial attitude toward God,
and that death comes sometimes into a fam-
ily as a punishment for worldliness, or smites
directly an evil-doer in the sinful act, even as
Ananias and Sapphira were miraculously smit-
ten at a time in the history of the Church when
miracles were needed for the accrediting and
enforcement of a new dispensation. Now, if
these teachings which we have expressed con-
cerning the nature of chastisement and disci-
pline, as being absolutely without punishment,
involved no important conclusions, it might not
be worth while to dwell upon them further ; it
might be more expedient to pass them by as
opinions of an individual entitled to no special
consideration. But to those to whom these
teachings are new, they involve such wide de-
partures from the opinions which hold that
God is punishing people now for their sins, and
they suggest conclusions so apparently start-
ling, not to say revolutionary, concerning the
ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT. 45
nature of suffering and death, that it becomes
an all-important duty to state the ground upon
which we maintain our position.
I now proceed to state that ground in three
words : The Historic Atonement. " He is the
propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only,
but also for the whole world." " God was
in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself,
not reckoning unto them their trespasses, and
having committed unto us the word of recon-
ciliation." " While we were enemies, we were
reconciled to God through the death of His
Son."
In speaking now of the meaning of the
death of Christ, I have no desire to state a
"theory of the Atonement." I believe the
Atonement is something far greater than man
ever has or ever can put into words. How
many systems of theology have fought their
battles at the Cross, each system, it may be,
containing some measure of the truth, but not
one containing all the truth ! But we may
escape all these controversies of theology, and
think simply and plainly upon the meaning of
Christ's death.
Let us think of the death of Christ as the
historic Atonement, an event in time. Some-
times the whole thought of the Incarnation
46 ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT.
of the Son of God, of His relation to Human-
ity, opens out before the mind in such enor-
mous expanse, presents to the intellect such
vast problems, and leads to such stupendous
conclusions, it is almost impossible to realize
its successive stages as actual historic events :
the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism,
the Temptation, the Passion, the Death, the
Burial, the Resurrection, the Ascension. Yet
if we hold them at all, we must hold them
as historic events. We must know them as
facts in the order of time ; must admit that if it
were possible for us to walk back through the
long- valley of the receding centuries we would
come at last to " the green hill far away," by
that great city's wall ; we would be swallowed
up in that surging crowd and swept upon its
raging bosom up, up, up, to the foot of the
Cross. Yes, it is real. More and more I am
realizing- the Crucifixion of the Son of God as
an event which I might have been called to
witness with my own eyes had I but been born
earlier in the history of the world.
And let us think of the death of Christ not
only as historic, but as the historic Atonement.
The " theories of the Atonement," as they are
called, are hard to understand, and very often
they fail to satisfy when understood. But the
ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT. 47
fact is as simple as the outline of the Cross.
The dear Lord Jesus is laying down His life
for the life of the world. We may not know,
we cannot tell what pains He had to bear ; we
may not know, we cannot tell what awful
necessity in the holiness of God's life was
fulfilled by the obedient and willing sufferings
of Our Lord ; we may not know, we cannot
tell the answers to many, many thoughts which
arise in our minds around the historic Atone-
ment. But our faith is very simple and very
clear : " We believe it was for us He huno;
and suffered there ; " we believe that on the
shoulders of Our Blessed Jesus rested the pun-
ishment for the sin of the world. " Behold
the Lamb of God which beareth the sin of the
world." " He was wounded for our transgres-
sions ; He was bruised for our iniquities ; the
chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and
by His stripes we are healed. And Jehovah
hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." This
is the relation of the death of Christ to the
sin, not of a few, not of a class, not of a
nation, not of an age, but to the sin of the
world as such, to sin as the great sad fact in
Humanity's life. We have seen, in the earlier
parts of this process of thought, what the na-
ture of sin is, that it is lawlessness, it is man's
48 ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT.
putting himself in wrong relations to God's
laws. We have seen that the natural conse-
quences of these terrible and constant wrong
uses of right laws through all the generations
© © ©
of time have been the accumulated miseries,
sorrows, sicknesses, poverties, and deaths of
earth ; and we have seen that those conse-
quences produced by man's own imprudences
and evil choices cannot be suspended in the
present order ; to suspend them in the present
order would be to upset the order itself, and
therefore the sorrows and tribulations caused
by sin must go on, except as by skill or care
or holy living they are alleviated in individual
cases. But the death of Christ brings into
view another terrible fact about sin altogether
beyond that fact of the sad natural conse-
quences with which experience has made us
familiar. That additional fact, brought into
view by the death of Christ, is the fact that
sin is not only sorrow to man, but wrong to
God, a crime against His holiness which must
be punished. The punishment for sin as a
crime against God is something entirely be-
yond and above what we mean by the natural
consequences of sin. The natural consequences
of sin, under the operation of natural laws, we
see all about us in the thousand sorrows and
ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT. 49
ills of life. But when we talk of punishment,
of retribution for sin, as visited from God
through that necessity of His Holy Being
which compels Him to vindicate His nature
against wrong, do not let us belittle the same
by speaking of earthly events as punishment.
There is but one place on earth where man
obtains a glimpse of what the punishment of
sin is as a crime against God. That place is
the Hill of Calvary, where stands the Cross
of Jesus Christ. When we can look into the
secret anguish of that sacred heart ; when we
can comprehend the horror and misery that
rent His soul ; when we can understand the
hideous sense of alienation from all good which
surged over Him in that frightful darkness,
wringing from His lips the shriek, " For-
saken ; " when we can rise to the point of
grasping that, — then, and not till then, may
we think that we comprehend what the punish-
ment of sin is. The punishment of sin ! God
knows what it is, and to His mind it is some-
thing so awful, His one purpose from the foun-
dation of the world has been to redeem the
world from that doom. And He has redeemed
the world, the whole world, every creature in
the world, from that saddest of fates. God
so loved the world, He gave His Only Begotten
50 ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT.
Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should
not perish, but have everlasting life. Christ
has suffered punishment ; He has been into
that black mystery ; He has gone to the bot-
tom of it. And when I think of the name-
less horror of His punishment, the only unin-
spired language which approaches a description
of it is that clause in the creed (which some
tell us we ought to reject as unscriptural),
"He descended into hell" I cannot reject
these words from the creed. Ah! When that
shriek, " Forsaken" burst from the pallid lips
of Jesus Christ, was He not descending into
hell?
"Yea, once, Immanuel's orphaned cry His universe hath
shaken.
It went up, single, echoless, ' My God ! I am forsaken ! '
It went up from the Holy's Lips amid His lost creation,
That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation."
If this is true, if sin is such a wounding
of God's life that the punishment of sin re-
quired Christ's death ; if the Beloved Son
came forth from the bosom of the Father to
be a Propitiation for our sins, and not for ours
only, but also for the whole world ; if God was
in Christ in that supreme tragedy of the
Cross, reconciling the world unto Himself, and
not reckoning unto them their trespasses, but
ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT. 51
piling them, a crushing weight, on the bleed-
ing heart of Jesus; if that holy sacrifice was
indeed made for all, and once for all, then
three conclusions appear to be established, con-
clusions bearing very closely and forcibly upon
the teachings contained in the foregoing chap-
ters.
The first conclusion relates to God's present
attitude toward the world in the dispensation
of the Gospel. It is an attitude of perfect
love. God has redeemed the world ; but not
from the natural consequences of sin : those
have involved the life of every individual, and
have so comprehensively affected the race that
to suspend them would bring the whole system
of natural laws into instant collapse. Redemp-
tion from these natural consequences is impos-
sible ; the consequences go on, and what is
sown, that must be reaped. From what, then,
has He redeemed the world ? From that which
is too terrible for man to imagine : the punish-
ment which comes, not out of natural law, but
out of God's holy life, upon sin, by the very
necessity of His being. This has been borne
once for all Humanity by the Incarnate Son
of God. We cannot describe it. We do not
know what it is. Christ has been through it,
and that cry of His, " Forsaken," is the only
52 ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT.
clue we have, to tell us what it is. But from
the hour that cry sounded, the world was re-
deemed ; every creature in the world was re-
deemed. The whole relation of the world was
changed : it was reconciled unto Himself. Be-
fore that suffering there was nothing in store
for the world but that nameless horror ; but
by that suffering the horror is lifted from Hu-
manity for all save those who finally and forever
reject Christ. Let us not confuse the revela-
tion of God's love by attempting to pronounce
on the destiny of those who have entered and
have left the world in ignorance of Christ and
of His Sacrifice. We may safely trust Him
with them, and trust them to Him. And what-
ever we may affirm or deny concerning them,
our faith has nailed this inscription on the Cross,
written not in three languages, but in every
language spoken among men : " He is the Pro-
pitiation for our sins, and not for ours only,
but also for the whole world."
The second conclusion which we reach re-
lates to the teaching that chastisement and dis-
cipline are not God's punishments for sins;
that sickness and death and sorrow are not
God's punishments for sin ; that God is not
punishing any one in the world. I believe that
sin has been judged, condemned, and punished
ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT. 53
in this world, once for all, in the awful sacrifice
of Jesus Christ. I believe that that sacrifice
of the Cross is the one divine event toward
which the whole creation moves. Prophecy
looked forward to it with longing expectations.
Faith looks back to it with absolute confidence.
Then and there, in Him, punishment was en-
dured, not for our sins only, but also for the
whole world. And it is only because I believe
this, I can preach the Gospel, can say to every
creature in the world, Jesus Christ has suffered
for you ; Jesus Christ has borne your punish-
ment; you are free. How, then, can we be-
lieve that God is now engaged in punishing us
for our sins? To believe this discredits the
Atonement. To believe that God punishes
any one for sin now is to bring the charge of
insincerity against His Love, and the charge
of insufficiency against the historic Atonement.
Natural laws work out their own retributions on
those who break them, but God's punishment
of sin has been borne for the world on Cal-
vary.
The last conclusion can be stated in a word.
It relates to the fate of those who finally and
forever reject Jesus Christ. If any soul were
finally and forever to put Jesus Christ aside
(and on this side of the grave it is impossible
54 ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT.
for us to understand what that may mean, or
to know what dealings with Christ souls may
have hereafter), hut, if any soul were finally
and forever to put aside Him Who has vicari-
ously borne the punishment of sin, it must
bear its own punishment, for it places itself
under those conditions which brought from
Christ's lips the cry " Forsaken." We have
only one Saviour. His sufferings have re-
deemed the world. If we put Him aside, there
is no other to rise up and take His place. The
alternative is this : to meet the future alone,
because forsaken, or to be saved in Him,
Who was " forsaken " that all men might be
forgiven ; Who descended into hell that all
men might ascend into heaven ; Who was sepa-
rated in darkness from His Father's face that
all men might behold that face in righteous-
ness and peace forever and ever.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WILL OF GOD AND THE TEN-
DENCY OF NATURE.
Thy Will be done. — Gospel of St. Matthew.
Be ye not umvise, but understanding what the will of the Lord
is. — Epistle to the Ephesians.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WILL OP GOD AND THE TENDENCY OF
NATURE.
The common speech of Christians contains
many unconscious perversions of the plain
sense of Scripture. Many phrases of the Word
of God have been broken away from their en-
vironment, and have been handed down through
devotional literature and through pulpit use
in forced association with unscriptural ideas.
These misapplied phrases, sanctioned by com-
mon consent, have given a disastrous force to
opinions and beliefs not in accordance with
New Testament truth. It is not an enviable
task to raise one's voice against these vener-
able perversions of Scripture. Nevertheless,
he who does it may thereby serve the truth.
Hardly any words in the whole vocabulary of
religion are so widely, so continually, so pain-
fully misunderstood and misapplied as the
blessed words : " Thy will be done." Never
were words, meant to comfort, so turned into
an instrument of needless torture as those
58 THE WILL OF GOD, ETC.
words : " Thy will be done." Never were
words, meant to cheer and to nourish faith, so
perverted into the stumbling-block of faith as
those words, " Thy will be done." Never
were words, meant to magnify God's love, so
distorted into a gospel of cruelty as those
words, " Thy will be done." By what pro-
cess of perversion they were first broken away
from their proper environment of thought and
made the basis of what has been to myriads a
doctrine of despair, I cannot here undertake to
say. By what chain of historic and dogmatic
influences they have attained their almost uni-
versal dominion over the Christian conscious-
ness, I may not attempt to tell. But one thing
must not be left unsaid, that when we enumer-
ate the forces which have contributed most
fruitfully to the sorrows of the human heart,
we must name among the more powerful of
those forces the misdirected words, " Thy will
be done."
He who goes much among the suffering sons
and daughters of men, especially among those
who are sick, or whose loved ones are sick,
dying, or dead, will find, ere he has gone far,
two classes of persons whose condition verifies
all that has been said : the silently despondent,
the openly rebellious. Here sits a mother,
THE WILL OF GOD, ETC. 59
empty-handed, broken-hearted. There, on the
little bed, all too smoothly folded, is the ala-
baster face that never more shall flush with
joy, set round with curls that never more shall
toss with play. Still, cold, white — mother
and child alike. All is over, and now for the
child, its suffering done, its paradise regained
— the death of sorrow ; for the mother, her
suffering only begun, and lonely life before her
— the sorrow of death. For now she is trying
to do the thing her reason rejects, while her re-
ligion (as she thinks) commands to say, " Thy
will be done." She is trying to make herself
believe that God's blessed will has broken her
heart, and that it is good and kind in killing
her child. Poor soul ! as if death were not
enough, she must attempt the torture of wor-
shiping Death, the last enemy, as the will of
God. And this also one sees, among the suf-
fering : the heart which, chained by tradition
to that terrible creed that sickness and death
are God's will for His children, takes the only
revenge upon God left within its reach to take
— the revenge of rebellion. Breaking away
from the hand which, as it believes, has dealt the
cruel, shattering blow, it cries out in its pain
words of rejection, words of rebellion, words
of helpless hatred which I have heard too
often ever to forget.
60 THE WILL OF GOD, ETC.
It is the deep-seated, almost the universal be-
lief, — fostered, alas, by the holiest doctrines of
our religion ; taught, alas, with the purest and
best motives ; illustrated, alas, in the lives of
some of the saintliest ones who have ever walked
as Christ's servants on the earth, — that the
physical sufferings of man are the will of God ;
that Christian character requires us to look
upon the pangs of the body in ourselves and in
others, and upon the misery of bereavement,
as the mysterious portion which God wills for
us ; that when our friends succumb to disease,
and pass away under the processes of natural
law, we must, as Christians, adopt for ourselves
that Old Testament saying of Eli (which he
used only in that horrible moment when the
sentence of judgment and retribution was
passed upon his impious sons, for the most vile
profanations of the house of God), " It is the
Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him good."
As though sickness were not of itself sufficiently
repulsive, sufficiently suggestive of a broken-
down order of nature ; as though death, no
matter how with the gentler modes of our ad-
vanced civilization we attempt to idealize it
by covering it with flowers, by concealing its
ghastly accessories, and by clothing our very
speech with beautiful and noble metaphors, — as
THE WILL OF GOD, ETC. 61
though death, I say, were not the same dreadful
and hopeless catastrophe wherever we meet it, —
on the battlefield, in the railway accident, on
the sinking ship, or in the beloved home sur-
rounded by comfort and love, — an almost uni-
versal tradition, appropriating and distorting
the very words of the Saviour, has succeeded
in making most people share in the general at-
tempt of self-delusion, to wit, that these last
terrors of humanity, these cloven rocks from
which have gushed the tears of ages, were
stricken open by God's hand, and are indeed
the very will of Him Whom we are told that
we must love with all our soul and with all our
heart and with all our mind and with all our
strength.
This attempt to persuade ourselves that it is
God's will that we suffer and die, and all the
consequent efforts of religious philosophy to
reconcile a God of love with a will so terrific,
have proceeded from a twofold cause, from a
desire to honor the providence of God, and
from a misuse of Christian Scripture to support
that desire. The desire to honor the provi-
dence of God has led men from a beautiful
truth to a terrible deduction. The beautiful
truth is that not a sparrow falls to the ground
without the notice of Our Father ; that the
62 THE WILL OF GOD, ETC.
very hairs of our head are all numbered ; that
all things work together for good to them that
love God. The terrible deduction for which
God's Word gives us no warrant is that there-
fore every event of our life, not only the great-
est blessing, but the greatest catastrophe, comes
from our Father's hand, and is an expression of
His holy, though often inscrutable will. A
deduction which leads to conclusions more hor-
rible than can be fully understood, except by
those who have either broken their own hearts
or have seen others break their hearts in the
effort to accept a will of God which did vio-
lence to His character, must, in order to stand,
claim the authority of the Divine Word in its
defense. And this it has done to an amazing
extent by perverting the meanings of Scrip-
tures, which, in their perverted form, have be-
come so ingrained in the speech and in the
prose and poetical literature of Christianity, it
is next to impossible to convince many that
these so-called proof-texts upon the will of
God in ordering all physical calamities are
not Scripture proofs, but Scripture perver-
sions. For example, passing by the famous
passage in Hebrews upon the subject of chas-
tisement, or the purifying of the heart striving
against sin, to which I have alluded in a pre-
THE WILL OF GOD, ETC. 63
vious chapter, the words in 1 Peter iv. are
constantly quoted to show that our physical
sufferings are the will of God. " Let them
that suffer according to the will of God com-
mit the keeping of their souls to Him." Read
the context about the fiery trial, and see that
it bears not upon the natural routine of sick-
ness and death, but bears wholly upon the per-
secutions of Christians by unbelievers, being
reproached for the name of Christ. To bear
that reproach fearlessly is to suffer according
to the will of God. Recall that famous pas-
sage in John xvii., " What I do thou knowest
not now, but thou shalt know hereafter." In-
numerable times have those words been spoken
over the coffin of a child, as if to comfort par-
ents with the thought that God had done this,
and that He would interpret His will hereafter.
But in the Bible those words have not the slight-
est relation to suffering of any kind. They are
Christ's words to Peter, when Peter, from a
mistaken impulse, refused to permit Christ to
bathe the Apostle's feet. Take once more
those terrible whispers of grief which fell from
the Saviour's lips in the silent darkness of
Gethsemane : " Oh ! My Father, if it be pos-
sible, let this cup pass from Me ; nevertheless,
not as I will, but as Thou wilt. The cup which
64 THE WILL OF GOD ETC.
My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink
it ? " Words are those so tremendous in their
relation to the sacrifice of which I have already
spoken — that historic Atonement just about
to be offered ; words so intimately associated
with the anguish of Christ's heart on entering
His unique sufferings, — it sometimes seems to
me almost a presumptuous intrusion upon the
grief of Christ to repeat those words aloud,
much less to apply them in any sense to our-
selves. Let us not forget ivhat that cup was
which the Father was offering to the lips of the
Redeemer. Let us not forget that the obedient
Son, once for all, accepted that cup of punish-
ment on behalf of Humanity. Let us not take
language divinely unique, and make it our
commonplace. And especially when we re-
member what we are told of the origin of sick-
ness and death (as for example, in Heb. ii.,
that he who has the power of death is not the
Father, but the devil), let us not seek a per-
verted comfort in bereavement by saying : " The
cup which my Father hath given me, shall
I not drink it ? " And yet once more : " Thy
will be done ! " That petition from the Lord's
Prayer is the classic proof-text of the doctrine
that when our hearts are broken with sorrow ;
when the desire of our eyes has been tortured
THE WILL OF GOD, ETC. 65
and put to death ; when misery has crushed
the brave wife, and she gathers her frightened
little children around her, and tells them they
are orphans and penniless, she must force her-
self to believe, and must force them to believe
that this cruel wreck is the will of Him Who
calls Himself by the name of Love. Yet this
is no proof-text, but a perversion of the plain
sense of Scripture ; it is tradition's clumsy
hand tearing a glorious sentence out of its
environment, and using it for a purpose never
contemplated by its Author. " Thy will be
done." What has that to do with sickness
and death in this world ? Much verily ; but
not that which many have been taught to be-
lieve, that sickness is the will, and death the
will of God, to which we are to submit as
sent from Him. Just the opposite to that is
what Christ taught us to pray : " Thy king-
dom come. Thy will be done in earth, as
it is in heaven.'''' Yes, as it is in heaven,
where the blessed order of peace is not in-
vaded by death and the sting of death, which
is sin ; in heaven, where no such catastrophe
has entered as that which has turned this world
upside down, and has brought to confusion
God's beautiful order of life, perverting kind
laws till they become instruments of ruin to
G6 THE WILL OF GOD, ETC.
the race which perverts them. Christ has
taught us to pray for the hastening of a new
dispensation, for the passing away of this
broken order in which the will of God is not
done, in which sickness and death are constant
protests against His will, and for the coming
in of the new heavens and the new earth, glo-
rious with the kingship of Jesus realized upon
it ; an earth in which there shall be no more
death, nor pain, nor sorrow, nor crying, no
more of anything contrary to our Father's lov-
ing will ; an earth in which His will shall be
done as it is in heaven.
Before venturing on the utterance of these
words concerning the Will of God and the
Tendency of Ncdure, I have laboriously and
freshly examined every single passage in the
New Testament bearing upon the subject of
God's will, and I have also examined freshly
every single passage in the New Testament
bearing upon suffering and affliction. I fail to
find one winch warrants the belief that sickness
and death are the will of God, sent directly by
His hand upon us. And if the New Testament
revelation fails to support that opinion which
has taught us to look on sickness or on death
as the direct sendings from God, does not our
reason rise up with unanswerable arguments to
THE WILL OF GOD, ETC. 67
support the contrary conclusion ? If sickness
and death are God's will, things He sends
upon us for our good, what right have we to
resist death, or to fight those brave fights
against sickness which are going forward to-
day on and around so many a sick-bed? Tra-
dition tells us when our child is stricken down
with deadly disease, we must accept the visi-
tation as God's will, and bow submissively to
it. By what right, then, do we send for the
doctor and the nurse, and implore them to do
all that skill and faithfulness can accomplish
for the recovery of this loved one? What
are we doing ? Are we fighting against God ?
Are we trying to outwit the will of God with
hot-baths and fever powders ? If this is God's
will, we ought to promote it, to fan the fever-
fire, to help the pneumonia, and to pray as we
hurry our darlings to their graves, " Thy will
be done." If sickness and suffering are accord-
ing to the will of God, then every physician
is a law-breaker; every trained nurse is defy-
ing the Almighty ; every hospital is a house of
rebellion instead of a house of mercy, and all
those conditions which increase suffering and
breed sickness are fulfillments of the will of
God, and sanitation is blasphemy. This tradi-
tion quickly reasons itself out into impossibility.
68 THE WILL OF GOD, ETC.
The only absolutely logical holders of it are
those who, accepting sickness as God's will,
refuse to employ medical aid for their sick
children ; and the civil law has now made that
refusal a crime. Why, then, in a vain effort
of reverence and devotion toward God, do we
persist in claiming events to be the will of
God, against the consummation of which events
the most religious do not hesitate to fight with
every resource of wealth and skill ? Why
does a devoutly Christian father, whose daugh-
ter is consumptive, declare with apparent sin-
cerity that that disease is God's will for his
child, when, at the very moment of that dec-
laration he is spending a fortune to take that
child to the Riviera, to Algiers, anywhere on
God's earth, in the hope of conquering the
disease ? Is he trying to outwit God ? No,
he says he is not. What, then, is he doing?
When that saddest of tragedies occurred in
England, and a loving wife, seeking to ease the
sufferings of her husband, lifted by mistake
the wrong vial, and administered with her own
hand a potion that sent into swift unconscious-
ness and death one of the greatest thinkers
of this century, was it her duty to say, " It
is the will of God " ? Had she administered
that fatal dose of chloral intentionally, as a
THE WILL OF GOD, ETC. 69
murderess, I think we would hesitate to say
that she did it by the will of God. Why,
then, should we say so when she does it by
mistake ? When one of the young collegians
who have lately taken part with insane despera-
tion in what was once a noble game, and what
may yet be brought back to be a noble game
(but has now gathered about itself an atmos-
phere of brutality and debauchery against
which it is the duty of all collegians and non-
collegians to protest), when one of these young
men shall in a few years develop, to the grief of
his heartbroken parents, that peculiar form of
tuberculosis which I am told by medical men is
likely to result from these irrational exertions,
shall those parents or shall their helpless son
be taught that they must look to that Father
above, Who will then be their only refuge, and
must believe that He has sent this deadly blow
to all their hopes ? But I have pursued this
subject sufficiently far. And if in so doing
I have said aught which has seemed unjust to
the beliefs of any, I ask forgiveness for those
words. They were not spoken except in ten-
derness of purpose. It seems to me that one
would almost be willing to lay down one's life,
feeling that it could not be more complete,
if one might be the means of lifting from the
70 THE WILL OF GOD, ETC.
heart of man the burden which he has so long
borne in his attempt to see in sickness and in
death, not the perpetual catastrophe of a nat-
ural order perverted through sin, not a state
of things contrary to the divine order, but
a dispensation, a sending, an ordering of the
Heavenly Father — a bitter, revolting cup
pressed to the unwilling lips of man by the
unsparing hand of God.
But I seem to hear the question asked in
doubtful hearts : What, then, becomes of that
thought, so precious to a Christian, of doing
God's will ? Are we no longer to say : " Thy
will be done " ? Must those great words be
laid aside ? God forbid ! How could they be
laid aside when Christ holds them out to us as
the very end and substance of all living? " My
meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and
whosoever doeth the will of My Father that is
in heaven, the same is My brother and sister and
mother." How could they be laid aside in the
face of that mighty outburst of apostolic wit-
ness to the blessedness of doing the will of
God? "That ye may prove," says St. Paul,
" what is that good and acceptable and perfect
will of God." " That ye may be filled with
the knowledge of His will." " That ye may
stand perfect and complete in all the will of
THE WILL OF GOD, ETC. 71
God." "He that doeth the will of God,"
says St. John, " abideth forever." The con-
stant prayer of a Christian cannot be other
than this : " Thy will be done, for me, by me,
in me, through me." This prayer becomes
both more intelligent and more intense as he
realizes that for the present he is placed in an
order where many forces, physical, intellectual,
spiritual, are warring against the will of God.
In the midst of these forces warring against
God's will, forces which attack the body, the
mind, and the spirit, the Christian feels that
he is set, that the true will of God may be
done by him, and may be shown forth to the
world in him. And so, standing between the
blessed love of God on the one hand, and on
the other hand the fierce, discordant elements
of sin and pain and sickness and death which
fill the world, to him, "Thy will be done,"
means three things : it means the fellowship
of Christ's sufferings ; it means the manifesta-
tion of the grace of God ; it means the cour-
age of faith.
" Thy will be done." It means the fellow-
ship of Christ's sufferings. He remembers
that Jesus Christ came down into this world,
and bore the brunt of its warring elements.
Him the Devil tempted ; Him the storm of
72 THE WILL OF GOD, ETC.
sorrow struck shelterless ; Him bodily pain
wrenched and bruised ; Him death had domi-
nion over for a season ; and the motive of it
all was pure and utter love, devotion to the
souls and bodies of men. All this the Chris-
tian remembers ; and then he thinks that he
himself is in the same world where Christ suf-
fered, amidst the same warring elements of
pain and death that swept over the body of
Christ. And because Christ came into the
midst of all these dreadful storms and hard-
ships, so contrary to the Father's will, so ut-
terly the fruits of sin and evil, and met them
grandly, endured them sweetly, inasmuch as
the Father's will was that even in the midst of
these deadly things, He, the Son of God, should
raise up a mighty salvation; the Christian
hopes that he, being set in the midst of the
same deadly evils and sorrows, may bear them
in a spirit so Christly as that the dear Lord in
His glory shall count even the man in his suf-
ferings, the woman in hers, the child in its
early woes, a brother, a sister, in the fellowship
of the Cross.
" Thy will be done?' It means the mani-
festation of the grace of God. The Chris-
tian may without presumption look upon him-
self as a teacher, an interpreter of the grace
THE WILL OF GOD, ETC. 73
of God. The whole world is sharing with him
the sorrows of life; and he that hath the
power of death, that is, the Devil, is doing his
utmost through sickness and a weary chain of
calamities to drive man to despair. But the
Christian has what the world knoweth not : the
benediction of the grace of God. This has
God shown him that he might show it to
others : he can best show its power to others
by showing its power in himself. Therefore,
with holy pride he seeks so to live in the
fellowship of God's will, which is his sanctifica-
tion, that he shall never fail under any temp-
tation, nor sink into despair under any afflic-
tion. And when those fierce temptations of
the Devil press him, bodily anguish in himself,
or the sight of bodily anguish in those he loves
but cannot relieve, then he prays more in-
tensely, " Thy will be done in me ! Yea, Lord,
let the sweet purpose of Thy grace be accom-
plished in my strengthening and sanctifying,
that even in these devilish temptations of pain
and death I may not fail to show to men the
reality of the love and the peace and the
strength of God."
" Thy will be done.'" It means the cour-
age of faith. He is a servant of Christ, and
as such he must go forward, however difficult
74 THE WILL OF GOD, ETC.
or painful the path may be made by natural
fatigues or by those who oppose the truth.
Thus went onward the martyrs of old, meeting
pain and death undaunted, because the one
thought which made their courage infinite was
the ambition that God's glorious will for the
world might be carried, even though it were by
their sufferings and over their martyred bodies,
on toward its triumph. And thus, in humbler
ways, yet perchance in the same spirit, we fol-
low them, we who have undertaken anything
that is hard, anything that brings strain and
toil, and the shortening of our days, for the
love of that blessed will of God Who would
have all men to be saved and to come unto the
knowledge of the truth.
Greatest of all prayers for man on earth, —
Thy Will be done : sickness and sorrow and
death proclaiming everywhere the fierce might
of the kingdom of darkness, and we who know
the meaning of that prayer, praying and seek-
ing to be as " light-givers " 1 in the world,
holding forth the Word of Life !
1 <pw(TTTJpes.
CHAPTER V.
THE DUTY, THE COMFORT, AND THE
POWER OF PRAYER.
He spake unto them that men ought always to pray and not to
faint. — Gospel of St. Luke.
In everything by prayer and supplication, ivith thanksgiving,
let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of
God ichich passeth all understanding shall guard your hearts and
your thoughts in Christ Jesus. — Epistle to the Philippians.
(Revised Version.)
Casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you. —
1 Epistle of St. Peter.
Is any among you afflicted ? Let him pray. — Epistle of
St. James.
CHAPTER V.
THE DUTY, THE COMFORT, AND THE POWER OF
PRAYER.
When one undertakes to speak o£ prayer
(a subject concerning which many conflicting
opinions exist), one should lose no time in de-
fining the standpoint from which he speaks.
The dangers of misunderstanding are, by such
frankness, considerably reduced. I therefore
state, at the outset, that I speak of prayer from
the standpoint of one to whom prayer is (in
the language of Montgomery) the Christian's
vital breath, the very atmosphere of daily liv-
ing. I speak from the standpoint of one
whose belief in the Duty, the Comfort, and the
Power of Prayer is absolute, without mental
reservation, full of delight, thankfulness, and
experimental appreciation. I regard prayer as
a precious and sublime reality, and as one of
the most inestimable blessing's and one of the
most useful endowments which the God of love
has given to His children. I believe the realm
of prayer is commensurate with life itself ; that
every interest, great and small, secret and open,
78 THE DUTY OF PRAYER.
joyful and sorrowful, physical, mental, and spir-
itual, personal, domestic, social, national, uni-
versal, falls within the realm of prayer and
constitutes legitimate occasion for prayer. I
am not aware of language by which to define
more clearly the standpoint from which I un-
dertake to speak of prayer.
Among those who have read the foregoing
chapters on the relation of God to earthly pain,
calamity, and death, there may be some within
whom apprehensions have arisen, that the
logical conclusion from what has been said
would be to disparage the value of prayer and
to undermine the faith of those who pray.
The current sense of New Testament Scripture
upon the subject of prayer is readily ascer-
tained, and what may be said by me upon this
subject is not a case of special pleading, rest-
ing insecurely on the use of a single text, but
is rather, as the preceding argument has been
in all its parts, a broad exposition of the cur-
rent sense of the Christian Scriptures. Four
texts may be cited as illustrating that consensus
of teaching on this blessed theme which runs
through Gospels and Epistles alike, and for
each one of the four a score of confirmatory
texts might easily be given. From the Gospels
we may cite the authority of Christ Himself:
THE DUTY OF PRAYER. 79
" He spake unto them that men ought always
to pray and not to faint." From the Epistles
we take the testimony of St. Paul, in a passage
of singular comprehensiveness and beauty :
" In everything by prayer and supplication,
with thanksgiving, let your requests be made
known unto God ; and the peace of God which
passeth all understanding shall guard your
hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus."
We take also the testimony of St. Peter, in
words sweeter than any music to our ears :
" Casting all your care upon Him, for He
careth for you." And we also take the testi-
mony of St. James, in which prayer is directly
urged as our refuge in the hour of trouble :
" Is any among you afflicted ? Let him pray."
Beyond these testimonies how easily could we
branch through every part of the holy oracles,
showing that prayer is as fundamental a con-
ception in the Bible as the idea of God is fun-
damental.
The thoughts which have occupied our atten-
tion thus far upon the relation of God to earthly
pain, calamity, and death, having possibly ap-
peared to some readers as involving the dis-
paragement of prayer, it becomes important to
inquire upon which portion of these thoughts
this apprehension of danger may be founded.
80 THE DUTY OF PRAYER.
It would probably be founded upon the main
proposition : that pain, calamity, sickness, and
death are not to be attributed to God as caus-
ing them, and as sending them upon us, but
that they and all other evils have entered into
the world as the fruits and consequences of
sin ; that man's perverted choices have related
him adversely to the laws of God's universe ;
laws which were framed for a holy race in a
holy world, and which would forever have
operated blessedly upon a holy race in a holy
world, but which are brought violently into
collision with the happiness and the life of
man through man's own perverted choices. I
have sought to impress upon the reader's mind
the malignity of evil ; to remind him that he
that hath the power of death is the Devil ; that
men born into this disordered world are tempted
to relate themselves more and more adversely
to natural law, which moving onward, as move
it must, through regular processes of cause and
effect, scatters calamity, evil, and death every-
where, upon the innocent and guilty without
discrimination ; the innocent often suffering
for the errors of the guilty, and all, both inno-
cent and guilty, yielding at last to the agencies
of physical decay, and following the genera-
tions of the dead. I have sought to exalt the
THE DUTY OF PRAYER. 81
love of God for man; a love which our sins
and failures have never alienated from us ; a
love which, from the beginning, has held out
to man the hope of redemption and restoration ;
a love which has been historically manifested
in Him Who came to bear our griefs and to
carry our sorrows, sharing not only by sym-
pathy, but by suffering in our unhappy lot ;
and which, in the historic Atonement has borne
the essential punishment for sin as a Propiti-
ation for the whole world. So that the life
which, knowing Christ's love, yet continues in
sin ; knowing the light, chooses the darkness ;
knowing the better, chooses the worse ; alienates
itself from the life of God, and brings at last
upon itself that dark and miserable fate which
cannot be more fearfully depicted than by the
word " Forsaken ! " I have sought to impress
the thought that, because Christ has suffered
once for all in this world the punishment for sin,
we ought not to belittle His Atonement or to
discredit His sufferings by affirming that our
present sufferings and calamities and sicknesses
are God's punishments for our sins, or that
they are sent upon us by the will of God ; but
rather that they are fruits and consequences of
our fallen estate ; that they are all of them
opposed to that blessed will which desired and
82 THE DUTY OF PRAYER.
planned for man an existence of Godlike per-
fection ; and that God sorrows with us in all
our sorrows, and is our sure Refuge in all our
calamities, comforting and purifying us by His
grace, and so guiding and teaching our minds
by His Spirit that splendid qualities of char-
acter may develop in the very midst of ad-
versities, and Christ may be glorified by our
fellowship with His sufferings, and by our
exhibition in ourselves of the power of God's
grace to make us conquerors and more than
conquerors in any and every sorrow.
I will assume that these thoughts are by
some looked upon with apprehension, lest they
disparage prayer. "If it be true," says the
objector, "that sickness, calamity, and death
are not sent us by Our Father's hand, are not
the orderings of His will, but are the outcome
of natural laws operating upon a sinful and
distorted humanity, have we not surrendered
to the cold and pitiless machinery of laws that
most precious thought, that our lives and the
lives of our dear ones are in the hand of God ;
that God's will is constantly exercised in our
behalf ; that the interests Avhich are dear to us
are dear also to Him, and may be brought in
faith to Him ; have we not, in fact, taken the
heart out of prayer, and left only a form of
THE DUTY OF PRAYER. 83
words ? " Now, what answer shall I make to
this objection ? The only answer I can make
is this : So far am I from believing that the
importance and the reality of prayer are dis-
paraged by our denial that sickness, calamity,
and death are God's will for His children, I
believe, on the other hand, that no child of
God can enter into the joy and preciousness of
prayer as fully as he might enter until he does
deny that the devilish evils of this world are
sent upon a groaning Humanity by the God
Whose nature and Whose name is Love. Until
he makes that denial in the fullness of his
faith ; until, with his body racked by pain,
with his property melting before his eyes, with
his loved ones tossing in fevers or maimed by
accidents, with the clods of the hillside drop-
ping on coffins that contain his heart's de-
lights, with the cry of a world in pain and
poverty and animalism sounding in his ears —
until, with these things about him, he can look
straight up into God's face and say : " My
Father, my Saviour, my Comforter, none of
these things are from Thee or of Thee ; Thou
hatest them as I hate them ; they are foreign
to Thee ; they are alien and antagonistic to
Thy Will; they are the fruits of sin, and the
malign deeds of the Devil ; " until he can say
84 THE DUTY OF PRAYER.
that, I do not see bow he can pray without
strange and sad misgivings lurking; in his heart
concerning the very God to Whom he makes
his prayer. It would seem to me that he who
realizes intelligently the horrors of human
calamity and the dreariness of death, who
understands the hideous thing of which he
speaks when he says, " the sorrows of man-
kind," and yet who maintains that these things
are God's will — the will of Him Who has died
for the world — must encounter an embar-
rassment in prayer which would be insuper-
able, were it not for the tendency, common
among us, to rejieat traditional language, with-
out forcing ourselves to inquire into its mean-
ing.
The embarrassment of praying to a God
Who is at one and the same time the fountain
of a boundless love, and the willing sender of
the piteous miseries, the heart-breaking be-
reavements, the loathsome maladies of man-
kind, is a greater embarrassment than many
a heathen encounters when he prostrates him-
self before the monstrous image of cruelty
which he calls his god. In his conception of
that being there are no complications of love.
Wrath, cruelty, and rapacious lust for human
victims are the harmonious attributes of Mo-
THE DUTY OF PRAYER. 85
loch. Moloch's heart, in the estimate of his
shuddering devotee, is a well of unadulterated
ferocity. And when he prays to Moloch, he
pleads for mercy as a man might plead with
a murderer whose knife is poised above him.
There is at least no embarrassment in prayer
under those circumstances. But on the other
hand there is embarrassment, and a secret mis-
giving which has led unnumbered persons to
abandon prayer, in the conception of a God
Who is love ; Who pities His children like a
Father ; Who is more ready to give His Holy
Spirit than parents are to give good gifts unto
their children ; Who knoweth our frame ; Who
remembereth that we are dust ; Who hath borne
our griefs and hath carried our sorrows ; Who is
the Comforter ; Who is the Friend of sinners ;
Who is the Good Shepherd ; Who can have
compassion on the ignorant and on them that
are out of the way — all this, and at the same
time, Who by His will, which we are bound
to accept, is pouring down upon the good and
the evil, the young and the old, the useful
and the useless, the strong man, the beautiful
wife and mother, the loving son, the sweet
daughter, the enchanting and guileless infant,
a ceaseless storm of trouble; so that thousands
of homes echo with the screams of suffering,
86 THE DUTY OF PRAYER.
the hospital wards are lined with pallid faces,
the scenes o£ accidents are red like the bloody
shambles, and men and women are going about
bowed with the misery of their trials and weep-
ing for those who will never come back to
them. Three hundred thousand persons sleep-
ing in Greenwood to-day ! Try to measure
the sorrows issuing from those three hundred
thousand deaths — yet what are they among so
many, or what, even, is death, among the other
sorrows of mankind ?
Now this is the real embarrassment to prayer ;
the true stumbling-block. If all Christians
knew how many persons are abandoning prayer,
having no heart for it, no belief in it, no com-
fort from it, no sense of logical consistency
in it, they would be inclined, as I have been
inclined, to ask the reason why. When this
great Book of God speaks to us of prayer on
almost every page, why have so many ceased
to pray ? When prayer is one of the funda-
mental instincts of humanity, when prayer is
as natural as love, why have countless men and
women sealed their lips toward God, looking
up into His face coldly and without a sign ?
There must be a reason for the decline of
prayer, and there is. And I believe the rea-
son is this : the practical difficulty of reconcil-
THE DUTY OF PRAYER. 87
ing the New Testament conception of God's
love with the traditional teaching that our
earthly evils, calamities, sicknesses, and be-
reavements are the operations of God's will.
Those who have been well grounded in this
ancestral tradition, and who possess the addi-
tional advantages of submissive dispositions
and religious habits of long standing, pray on,
meekly and patiently, repressing as tempta-
tions of Satan those misgivings which come
from time to time when calamities of unusual
ferocity make unusual demands on their tradi-
tional belief ; but others in this age of clear-
cut thinking, who have not been so bred in the
tradition that the freedom of their thought is
shackled, perceiving the anomaly of maintain-
ing the sweet relations of prayer with One by
Whose will incessant tortures and sufferings
are desolating the earth, simply discard prayer
as being itself but a tradition, but the survival
of an age of credulity and superstition.
From such a conclusion regarding prayer, a
conclusion which discards prayer as obsolescent
and irrational, my mind revolts with horror
and dismay. No greater calamity can befall a
person in this world than that he shall cease to
pray. For when he has ceased to pray he has
sealed up the very outlet of his soul ; he has
88 THE DUTY OF PRAYER.
stifled the natural means of spiritual expres-
sion ; he has done to his own being a most
cruel and disastrous injustice. He was made
with an instinct for prayer. Prayer is a char-
acteristic function of the normal man. When
he is complete, he prays. To disown prayer,
to discard prayer, is a sin against self. It is a
form of self-mutilation. Who can ever forget
Lord Tennyson's glorious outburst concerning
prayer as a part of manhood's birthright? —
" What are men better than sheep, or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer —
Both for themselves and those who call them friend.
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."
Prayer is a duty. Prayer is a comfort.
Prayer is a power. Prayer is a duty commen-
surate with life itself. He Who came in great
tenderness to visit us, taking upon His pre-
existent life the very manhood of man, and
Who, comprehending in His manhood all man's
need, often " continued all night in prayer,"
has laid this duty upon us, saying that men
'*' ought always to pray and not to faint." The
sphere of that duty is commensurate with life
itself: "In everything with prayer and suppli-
cation, let your requests be made known unto
God." The man is to spread out his life, to
THE DUTY OF PRAYER. 89
pour out his heart, to breathe out his thoughts
before God. Whatever mysteries may cluster
about prayer (and how could such a subject
possibly be free from lofty and solemn mys-
tery ?), this is clear : that prayer is a duty.
And what is this but another way of saying
that prayer is a God-given instinct never to be
repressed without sin. Prayer is expression.
Prayer is fellowship. Prayer is friendship. It
is our duty ; our duty to ourself as much as our
duty to God, to pray. Prayer is the intimacy
of a boundless confidence, withholding no-
thing from the Beloved Friend ; in everything
letting the requests be made known, assured
that this outpouring of our hearts is in the
fullest sense according to His will. Familiar
to all is that noble line of the Latin poet :
" I am a man : I deem nothing alien to me that affects hu-
manity."
I remember to have seen that line applied with
magnificent effect to the Incarnate Christ : " I
— the Christ Incarnate — am a Man. I deem
nothing alien to Me that affects Humanity."
Christ's Humanity lifts every human interest
within the scope of prayer, and makes it our
duty as well as our privilege to tell Him all ;
and there are human interests which we can
tell to no one, can explain to no one, but to
90 THE DUTY OF PRAYER.
Christ; and we tell Him with perfect confi-
dence that He understands.
Prayer is a comfort. " In everything let
your requests be made known unto God. And
the peace of God, which passeth all under-
standing, shall guard your hearts and your
thoughts in Christ Jesus." " Casting all your
care upon Him, for He careth for you." " Is
any among you afflicted? Let him pray." It
is most certainly true that many of those who
have believed that all sickness, calamity, and
death are the will of God, sent to punish or
sent to educate, have found great comfort in
prayer, have learned to kiss what they believed
to be the hand that struck them, and to rejoice
in the will that bruised and wasted the body ;
it is true that many have shown both stoicism
and submission in prayer to Him by Whom, as
they believed, every earthly prospect had been
blighted ; but it is also true, most terribly true,
that unnumbered multitudes, unable to attain
this stoicism, have ceased to pray since the
iron of sorrow entered into their souls. They
look at God in silence ; they do not blaspheme,
but neither do they pray.
But when a man can deny — in the fullness
of faith — that these earthly evils are the will
of God, when he can believe that calamity,
THE DUTY OF PRAYER. 91
sickness, and death are as evil to God as
they are to us, then the comfort of prayer be-
comes indeed a peace which passeth all under-
standing. For then he goes to God without
misgivings ; he pours out to his Father the
pent-up emotions of the heart without the
sinister after-thought that he has been confid-
ing in his tormentor ; then the great instinct
of prayer asserts its natural spontaneity, and
nothing can keep him from praying. And the
more wildly blows the tempest of life's con-
fusion, the more intensely he clings to God,
knowing that in Him is refuge and from Him
is strength.
And 2^ ay er is a power. " More things are
wrought by prayer than this world dreams of."
It is a power subjective and objective. It is a
subjective power : a power sent in to strengthen
the spirit of him who prays.
"We kneel, and all around us seems to lower;
We rise, and all the distant and the near
Stands forth in sunny outline, brave and clear.
We kneel, how weak — we rise, how full of power."
What an inrush of this subjective power
comes to him who prays, believing that God is
wholly on his side, as against the pain and
weariness and sad mischance of life. To such,
prayer is often like a vision of God's face.
92 THE DUTY OF PRAYER.
Glory and light pour, as through some rich
window, upon the sombre coloring of life.
Courage and hope are quailed, as with eager
lips, from a chalice of crystal. Christ seems
to share His Omnipotence with us, for we dare
to say : " I can do all things through Christ
Which strengthened me."
But the power of prayer is objective as well as
subjective ; effective to accomplish, as well as
powerful to sustain. What scope for prayer in
every situation ! Is our dear one setting out
upon a journey ? With what wealth of reason-
ableness may we commit that life to the God
Who is the enemy of all evil, lawlessness, ca-
lamity and death ! Is our dear one stricken with
illness ? With what reasonableness can we pray
that He to Whom all hearts and minds lie open
may so calm the mental life of the sufferer, and
may so guide the judgment and inspire the skill
of those who minister to sickness, that blessed
relief and recovery may ensue ! Is our dear
one or ourself caught in the cyclone of disaster ?
To whom first shall we go but unto Him, the
wonderful Counsellor, the Friend of friends, the
Shadow of the rock in the land of weariness ?
Ah ! brothers, for many of us the night is dark,
and we are far from home. The moor, the fen,
the crag, the torrent, are grievously near and
THE DUTY OF PRAYER. 93
real. Is any among you afflicted? Let him
pray ! Yes ! men ought always to pray and
not to faint. Prayer should be a life, and life
should be a prayer. When all is over, we shall
rejoice if neither pleasure seduced us nor pain
shocked us out of prayer.
Can I close these words about prayer more
worthily than in the language 1 of one who
now is with His Saviour in Paradise — Canon
Liddon — perhaps the greatest of all the Can-
ons of St. Paul's : —
" Life is like the summer's day ; and in the
first fresh morning we do not realize the noon-
day heat, and at noon we do not think of the
shadows lengthening across the plain, and of
the setting sun, and of the advancing night.
Yet, to each and all, the sunset comes at last,
and those who have made most of the day are
not unlikely to reflect most bitterly how little
they have made of it. Whatever else they
may look back upon with thankfulness or with
sorrow, it is certain that they will regret no
omissions of duty more keenly than neglect of
prayer ; that they will prize no hours more than
those which have been passed, whether in pri-
vate or in public, before that Throne of Justice
and of Grace upon which they hope to gaze
throughout eternity."
1 Some Elements of Religion, p. 203.
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