Heavenly harmonies for earthly living

^{pHARMONlESl "
FOR EARTHLY LIVING

MALCOLM JAMES M9LE0D

LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

PRINCETON, N. J.

Prl

PRESENTED BY

nceton UniverBity Libra.ry

F

BX 9178 .M28 H4 1902
McLeod, Malcolm James, 186
Heavenly harmonies for
earthly living

1

Heavenly Harmonies

FOR EARTHLY LIVING

/

MALCOLM JAMES McLEOD

WITH PREFACE
BY

HON. JOHN V. FARWELL

>

Fleming H. Revell Company
chicago, new york & toronto

MCMI

Copyright 1902, by Fleming H. Revell Company
Copyright 1 90 1, by Bible Institute Colportage Ass'n

PREFACE.

Being in Pasadena, California, last winter, I at-
tended services in Rev. Malcolm James McLeod's
church, and was so impressed with his sermons that
I requested copies for publication in order that they
might have a wider circulation. To me they were
spiritual poetry in prose, spiritual music in harmony
with man's inmost needs and God's provisions therefor,
spiritual philosophy and experience made vocal with
Christ's gospel of salvation.

I bespeak for Dr. McLeod's addresses an enlarged
usefulness, trusting that, as they proclaim the facts of
sin and salvation, many readers may be transformed
by the new birth and energized by the Holy Ghost.

John V. Farwell.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Harmony of the Christian Walk 9

Harmony with the Will of God 27

Harmony of the Work with the Worker 43

Harmony with Environment 54

Harmony through Experience 71

Harmony with the Christ-life 83

Harmony with the Christ-pity 99

Harmony and Communion of Public Worship. . . 112

CHAPTER I.

HARMONY OF THE CHRISTIAN WALK.

" Enoch walked with God." Gen. 5 :24.

The fifth chapter of Genesis is a monotonous record
of names and numbers. It is like a walk in a forest
of long-lived, leafless oaks. It is, moreover, a wilder-
ness of wickedness. "The whole earth was corrupt
and filled with violence." "It repented the Lord
that He had made man." "Behold, I will destroy
him with a flood of waters." One oak, however, in
the heart of the wilderness was green, like the tree
planted by the river whose leaf withereth not; for
"Enoch walked with God."

Climate and soil do not account for everything.
The palm tree grows on the edge of the desert, with
leaf clean and green. It sends its roots down through
the sand till it reaches moisture in the depths. The
edelweiss, with dense clusters, flowers on the summit
of the Alps. The "traveler's joy" blooms on the
highest peak of Teneriffe. The samphire grows in
clefts of the rock far above the reach of the sea. In
Wyomingthe hot spring flows hard by the snow-drift.
Sodom had its Lot, Egypt its Joseph, Babylon its
Daniel. Abijah dwelt in the house of Jeroboam; and
in this antediluvian chapter of the early twilight,
bracketed with men whose alone biography is that
they lived and died, is found a man who walked with
God.

(9)

10 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Surely the record is remarkable. What reticence!
What omission! He lived 365 years, and yet his is the
briefest biography ever penned. Forster's life of
Dickens covers three volumes. Washington Irving' s
life by his nephew enlarges to four volumes. Masson
takes six folios to complete the tragedy of Milton's
career. Lord Macaulay fills eight duodecimos on six-
teen years of England's history. It takes the author
thirty-two volumes to tell Napoleon's story. But
here a simple line is all. The description is pointed,
yet pregnant. The words cut through the outer shell
and with a single stroke lay bare the man. One could
have wished, indeed, that the full record of his life had
been chronicled, as also the story of his long-lived
son, Methuselah, and many another Bible hero. But
differently has it been decreed. Just one dip of the
pen, one stroke of the pencil, must suffice. Oh, for
grace so to live that when God calls us our monument
may be immortalized with the noblest epitaph that
was ever chiselled into marble — " He walked with
God"!

A man's walk.

Now a man's walk is a revelator of the man. Gait
and gesture are an index to character. You can form
opinion, approximately true, from swing and carriage.
The movement of hand and head and foot is pregnant
with meaning.

He who walks erect and upright evidences emphasis,
self-esteem. The gentle noiseless stepper is a schemer.
The shambler is an idler. The short, quick, American
step is full of business and "go." We all know the
broad, swaggering bully, who stands with feet apart

CHRISTIAN WALK. ii

under lamp post and street corner. One walks "tall,"
another walks "awry," a third has a slouching gait, a
fourth walks "heel and toe." We have students of
phrenology and palmistry ; it is not strange that there
should be a language in the walk.

Scripture figures it. We are to walk, " not after the
flesh, but after the Spirit." We are to walk "worthy
of the vocation wherewith we are called." We are
to walk "worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing." We
are to walk " circumspectly." We are to walk " in the
light. ' ' We are to walk ' ' by faith. ' ' ' ' What doth the
Lord require of thee but to do justly, and love mercy,
and walk humbly with thy God?"

What, then, is implied in walking with God?
Three things: Harmony, humility, holiness.

I. HARMONY.

Walking with God, first of all, implies harmony with
Him.

Now, by nature we are not on good terms with God.
"The carnal man is enmity against God," and there
must first be reconciliation.

"How can two walk together, except they be
agreed?" Amos asked that question, and, Bible or
no Bible, there is remorseless logic in that little word
"can." An appeal is it to the nature of things, and
"the nature of things is the law of God." Harmony
of sound is music. Harmony of word to thought is
poetry. Harmony of color is beauty. The most
beautiful thing in nature is the rainbow; God blends
the colors. Harmony of cog and wheel and axle
makes the perfect mechanism. Everything is in its
place. Part answers part. The most perfect mech-

12 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

anism in the universe is the universe itself. No oiling
does it need, no winding, no repair; every planet in its
orbit ; every star in its appointed function. There the
great system rolls without a murmur — for endless
years the same. All thy works do praise thee, O Lord!
Man alone mutinies and rebels.

Life, the philosophers are telling us, is correspond-
ence with environment. In disease or death some-
thing is thrown out of correspondence. The deaf man
is thrown out of correspondence with the world of
sound ; the blind man with the world of beauty. We
are fearfully and wonderfully made. Co-relation of
part with part is intimate, and any interference means
friction. The perfect workmanship is frictionless.
Sin is disagreement, fermentation, rebellion, aliena-
tion, estrangement, mutiny, discord — the one all-
pervading discord of the universe.

The great dramatist in the Tempest makes Ferdi-
nand and Miranda to fall in love at first meeting. A
glance, he says, and they "changed eyes." The true
Christian is he who has changed eyes with God. He
sees as God sees. "There is not an honest student of
the Bible anywhere," says Joseph Cook, "who is not
willing to admit that salvation is harmony with
God" — loving what God loves, and hating what God
hates.

Whereso'er we differ, here we are at one. Heaven
is not possible save as people are in accord with the
divine law and the divine life. That is what Heaven
means. No more can Heaven be got out of a dis-
ordered character than can music be evoked from a
discordant harp. Culture is pained by contact with
coarseness. The eye of the artist is troubled with a

CHRISTIAN WALK. 13

false blending of color. The ear of the musician is
tortured with dissonance. Handel tells us that a flat-
ness felled him like a blow. And a high, lofty moral
nature is wounded by the world's sin and shame, and
shrinks with grief at its beholding. Love and hate
can never be at peace. Corruption and cleanliness
must necessarily quarrel. This is a law woven into
the nature of things.

By no ingenuity could John Knox and Queen Mary
live a happy life together. John the Baptist could
never be at one with Herod ; no more could Paul with
King Agrippa. When dynamite and fire sleep tran-
quilly together, when lions learn to lie down lovingly
with lambs, when leopards kennel peaceably with kids,
then perhaps right and wrong may clasp hand friendly ;
but till that time Christianity means war. Until a
man is washed in the blood of Jesus from the guilt of
sin and the power of sin and the love of sin, he cannot
be at peace in the presence of infinite holiness.

Strike a note on the piano, and the corresponding
string of the violin in the room vibrates. A voice has
spoken, and kindred voices start up the echo. Like
seeks like. Each note calls up its brother note.
Strike all the keys together, and although there is
discord at first, yet some strong notes will gather up
and drown the others, and the final vibration in the
distance is a soft, pleasing tone. This it is that makes
it so hard to be a Christian. The more refined the
music, the greater the risk of discord, and Christianity
is the most refined music that was ever heard. The
higher the note, the easier to detect a flatness, and the
life of God in Jesus is the highest note that was ever
compassed.

14 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

HARMONY THROUGH OBEDIENCE.

Let US remember that harmony comes through
obedience.

If man is his own best friend, he is also his own worst
enemy. We pull counter to the current of our being.
There is harmony in music because in music there is
no self-will. Music is built on law. Man did not
make this law; he has simply discovered it. If he
breaks it the music ceases. Each Haydn and Handel
is as much bound by it as each amateur.

The same is true of man's relation to his every art.
Find out its principles, and all the genius of that art
is yours. But disobey its principles ; " try to excel in
any other way than by conformity to its nature, and
all that art contends against you, and balks you at
every step." I cannot change ocean current or tide,
but I can build my ship and stretch my sail, and by
adapting me to wind and wave I can gain any Liver-
pool or Queenstown. I cannot conquer lightning
save as I learn the law of lightning and submit.
"Obedience pulls the sting out of the lightning, and
makes it harmless." Fire is a bad master; it is a
good servant. By accepting its mastery I make it
my slave.

So in the spiritual; we must obey God's law. Our
will must be confederate with His will. When we
put ourselves into right relations with divine forces,
then will they do our bidding and be our friends.
Obedience to the law of steel gives the engine its
strength. Obedience to the law of stone gives the
sculptor his Apollo. Obedience to the law of wood
gives the side-board its glossy finish. Obedience to
the law of fire gives the winter home its comfort.

CHRISTIAN WALK. 15

Obedience to the law of electricity gives the telephone
wire its cunning. Obedience to the law of govern-
ment gives the citizen liberty and happiness.

The old Greeks taught their children how to sing,
because it taught them how to be obedient. This is
a difficult universe to the man who drives dead against
it, but to the man who has learned the secret of har-
mony through obedience it is a happy place. Dis-
cord is sickness; harmony is health. Discord is rest-
lessness; harmony is peace. Discord is sorrow; har-
mony is joy. Discord is death; harmony is life.
Discord is hell; harmony is heaven. He who is in
love and peace with his neighbors, filling the sphere
where God has placed him, hath heaven in his heart
already. Only through blue in the eye, the scientist
tells us, can blue out of the eye be seen. Only
through C in the ear can C out of the ear be heard.
Only through Heaven down here can Heaven up there
be interpreted. " The natural man discemeth not the
things of the Spirit." That good German, Bengel,
after a hard day's study, retired to rest. Some one
in the adjoining room heard his prayer —

"Blessed Lord, we are on the same good old terms
to-night."

Then the good man slept. His life was keyed to
the divine life. His heart kept time to the pulse of
God. He had peace.

II. HUMILITY.

The pulpit is fond of noting how the word humility
has changed its meaning. In olden times it was a
word of slaves. It was difficult to offer a man a
greater insult than to call him humble. Humility

i6 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

was considered a loss of self-respect. Christ came.
He took the hateful word and made it honorable.
To-day it is called the Christian's loveliest virtue, and
his crowning grace. It was pride that changed angels
into demons; it is humility that changes demons into
angels.

"The Christian," says Guthrie, "is like the ripening
corn; the riper he grows, the more lowly he bends."

What is humility? It literally means a low esti-
mate of self. But, then, all estimates are relative.
The value of anything depends on the standard used.
Everything hinges on the unit. You are sailing down
the river, and you think your yacht passing swift
until you meet a swifter. So long as a dwarf lives
among dwarfs he thinks himself a giant. Saul was
humbled when he saw Goliath. The Catskills are
huge until they see the Alps — the Alps until they see
the Himalayahs. The atmosphere is clear as crystal
till the room is darkened and a ray of sunshine steals
through the crevice ; then millions of floating particles
can be detected. A poorly clad boy in the presence
of one neatly dressed is conscious of his clothing.
The little stain of rust is very prominent on a polished
razor-blade.

Now, a man's standing according to the Bible is
his standing in God's sight. The apostle writes,
"We all have come short of the glory of God." God
in the world must be the standard of the world.
When you wish to learn the true character of your
life, measure it by the laws of God. They that know
their God will be humble. They that know them-
selves cannot be proud. If prosperity raise thee
to a dizzy height, then, lest thy head be turned,

CHRISTIAN WALK. 17

look up. Do not stoop till you are smaller than
yourself. Stand up at your real stature by the
side of something larger. For a little time walk with
God. Look up and grasp His greatness; then look
down and contemplate thine own littleness; thus is
pride slain. A leading feature of true Christian per-
fection is a consciousness of imperfection.

Do not try to be humble. Some of the proudest
people are those who are trying to be humble. They
are proud of their humility.

" The devil did grin,
For his darling sin
Is pride that apes humility."

Pliny said: "It is as hard to teach pride as to fill
an empty bottle corked." Pride is the attic of the
house — the highest room and the emptiest. It is a
magnet pointing selfward. Proud people are unim-
aginative. They are self-centered. They are so
lifted up with what they are that they blind them-
selves to what they might be.

The certain cure is a vision of the ideal: for the
proud man is looking away from God. He has
turned his back on the fountain of light. He has
set himself against the spirit of incarnate Love, who
said: ''Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are
heavy laden, for I am meek and lowly in heart."
Thus does he make of his life a discord, a jar.

Moreover, pride unfits for service. We cannot do
the Master's work until we are "clothed with humil-
ity," and have the Master's spirit. "I beseech you,"
wrote St. Paul, "by the meekness and gentleness of
Christ." " In lowliness of mind let each esteem other
better than himself.".

i8 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Mr. Speer tells a story of a visit to a college in the
South. It was a poor college, but one that sought
to do the will of God.

"There were not many rooms in it," he goes on to
say, "so the president gave me his room. I was
awakened very early in the morning by my door
opening. I did not want to appear inquisitive, so I
lay quietly and said nothing. It was the president. I
saw him take my boots, carry them into an adjoining
room, kneel down on the floor and black them. That
act went straight to my heart."

This is the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ, who
"made Himself of no reputation, but took upon Him
the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of
men, and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled
Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the
death of the cross."

Let us hasten to note the sad reflection that there
is no vanity save in man. The wind giVes its music
without boasting. The rainbow unrolls its gorgeous
tints without noise or flourish. The modest violet
fills the air with fragrant breath, its own little cheek
hidden among the timothy. Gravity blows no
trumpet on the corner to be seen of men. The night-
ingale pours its little heart out — herself unseen amid
the black leaves of the silent night. Man alone is
pompous and elate. The infinitely little hath a pride
infinitely great.

III. HOLINESS.

There is a series of English words that have the
same root — health, whole, holy. They are all
branches of the same stem. "They that are whole

CHRISTIAN WALK. 19

need not a physician, but they that are sick."
Why? Because sin has halved us. Christian healthi-
ness is Christian holiness. Christian holiness is
Christian wholeness. A perfectly healthy life is a
perfectly holy life and a perfectly whole life. Holiness
is that state of the soul which results when the whole
of it is healthy. This means strength, robustness,
virility, all-roundedness, perfect development. Holi-
ness is the completeness of character.

I like that picture of Jesus by Holman Hunt.
There He stands, not the weak, womanly divinity-
student figure that the old masters paint; but a
strong, ruddy, wholesome lad, in bare foot and with a
far-away look in His eye.

Now, God gives us the laws of spiritual healthiness
in Scripture, and one of these is companionship. *' He
that walketh with the wise shall be wise, but the
companion of fools shall be destroyed."

Lord Bacon says : *' No man doth accompany with
others but he leameth, ere he is aware, some gesture,
voice, or fashion." Shakspere adds: "It is certain
that wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men
take disease , one of another. " * ' Evil communications
corrupt good manners," writes St. Paul. There is an
old Latin proverb: "If you live with those who are
lame, you will learn to limp." He that comes from
the stable has an odor of the horse. He that works
with the chimney smells of its smoke. He who com-
panions with the ugly soon undergoes a sinister trans-
formation. He who frequents places where shame holds
carnival, will soon bear the brand of vice. A man is
known by the company he keeps. If that with which
you consort is below you, it degrades; if above it,

20 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

uplifts. In electricity there are what are called induced
currents. Here are two parallel wires. Pass a cur-
rent through the first. A fainter throb will thrill the
second. That is how they telegraph from moving
trains. There is an electric contagion. Iron near a
magnet is magnetized. There is a valley in California
where nothing is grown but roses. During the flower-
ing season it is a wilderness of flowers. It scents the
atmosphere for miles. So saturated is the air with
perfume that it clings to the clothing for days and
weeks.

Saadi, the Persian poet, was one day bathing. A
friend put into his hand a piece of scented clay.

"Art thou musk or ambergris?" asked the poet.

"I was just a piece of clay," it answered, "but
being in the company of a rose-bush all summer, the
quality of my sweet companion was communicated to
me."

Well did the old philosopher say that each growing
child should have every morning some beautiful
picture to refresh the eye, some immortal music to
delight the ear, and some perfect poem to read and
tone up the sense of beauty. The soul living amid
such loveliness must soon grow fair and lovely.

Astronomers are said to be men of tranquil tem-
perament. Constantly dwelling on the "expressive
silence" of the starry depths, their souls catch the
spirit of the heavenly quiet.

This is the old mystery of environment. Certain
animals take on the color of their habitat. Witness
the sandy hue of the sole and flounder, the white of
the polar bear, the stripes of the Bengal tiger. The
chameleon takes its tint from the branch to which it

CHRISTIAN WALK. 21

clings. Wallace mentions the case of a parrot which
changes its color from green to red when fed on certain
fishes.

In nature environment is revolutionary. Do oranges
grow in Florida? Climate, not soil, is the cause. Is
the polar bear found in Greenland? Climate, not seals
or fishes, is the secret. Is a man a companion of
books? He shows it in his face. Is he a worker in
coal? His body tells the grimy tale. Does he linger
long 'mid honeysuckle and mignonette? There's a
fragrance from his dress. Verily the body is the
soul's interpreter. A man's embodiment is written'
o'er with the history of his companionships.

Nothing writes so unmistakably as the company
we keep. It was said of Keats that " his face was like
the face of one who had seen a vision." So absorbed
was he in the beautiful, so fondly did he love that
vision splendid, that his very face took on the love-
liness. Shakspere's face, we are told, bore the marks
of meditation. There was a fulness and a calmness
that came from brooding o'er the deep things of life.
Charles Dickens pictures a monk beginning his career
as a beautiful child. But he fell into sin. He pon-
dered over vice during the day. He played with little
angel demons in his dreams during the night. For
him to live was iniquity. Soon the face of the inno-
cent youth grew fiend-like and depraved, and he
ended his career a bruised, broken-down, blotched
criminal. By the which Dickens means that asso-
ciating with sin will put a twist in the eye and a
coarseness in the countenance.

When Da Vinci painted his "Last Supper," he had
the faces of the eleven disciples completed before he

22 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

had secured a model for the portrait of either Jesus or
Judas. He spent many months in unsuccessful search.
One day, at a service in the great Milan cathedral, he
caught the eye of a young man in the choir. " There's
my man," thought Leonardo, as he studied the strik-
ing features.

He sought him out and secured him to sit for the
immortal painting to represent our Saviour.

Then Judas alone was left. The artist was many
years seeking a model among the haunts of crime. It
was in Rome it happened. There he met his Judas in
a prison cell, and had him sketched. The pulpit has
never tired telling the story to half-incredulous wor-
shippers of Da Vinci's finding out, later, that these
two men were the same; and the world will never
cease to wonder how a face that was taken for the
calm, strong gentle face of Jesus, could ever, by any
mystery of iniquity, have its lines so defaced and its
beauty so disfigured as to pose, only ten years after,
as a prototype of Judas.

Thus in many ways and strange the face tells the
story of the man. If holiness can write beauty on the
facial features, sin can wash said beauty speedily away.
For sin, like love, hath power to convert. We all,
with open face beholding as in a glass the witchery of
sin, are soon changed into the same image. It was a
patent fact in the olden times that slave-owners, by
living among their slaves, learned to copy their vices.
Notwithstanding that they looked down upon them,
they yet became passionate and cruel like the poor
wretches whom they oppressed. Contrariwise, Plu-
tarch tells us that he wrote his forty-six "parallel
lives" of great and good men in order to fill his mind

CHRISTIAN WALK. 23

with pictures of the best and worthiest characters.
Their virtues served him as a "looking glass in which
he might see how to order and adorn his own life."

Think of that incident related by Henry Drum-
mond. A woman, whose husband was dying, came
late one evening and requested the preacher-scientist
to come to her home.

"My husband is deein', sir. He's no able to speak
wi' you, and he's no able to hear you. But I would
like him to hae a breath o' you aboot him afore he
dees."

Another story is told of Frederick W. Robertson.
Stopford Brooke was writing his biography, and he
went down to Brighton to gather information. He
visited a book-seller who had known Robertson.

"Do you remember anything interesting about
Mr. Robertson?" he asked.

The book-seller, after a little, took him into the
room, and pointing to the great preacher's portrait on
the wall, he said:

"Whenever I am tempted to do anything mean, I
just run in here and look at that picture, and the pure
face recalls me, to my better self."

If a picture of the great preacher had such power,
what must the real man have been! Surely no one
could have lived with Robertson without growing pure
and good. What must it have been to have lived
with Jesus? It is said of Lord Peterborough that
when he lodged for a time with Fenelon, he exclaimed:

" If I stay here much longer I shall be a Christian in
spite of myself."

Perhaps the most pointed story of all is told of John
Wesley. Two rough boys filled their pockets with

24 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

stones, and stole into the room where he was to preach.
When they looked on the old man's face, lighted up
with such a glow of goodness, one of the lads whis-
pered :

"He's not a man. Bill; he's not a man."

When the service was over and Wesley passed out,
the same lad felt the sleeve of his gown, touched the
arm and whispered:

"Bill, he is a man; he is a man."

John Wesley felt the touch, and turned. He saw
the boy's admiring face, so early soiled with sin. He
put his hand on his head.

"The Lord bless thee, my lad."

We do not wonder that he became in later life one
of his band of preachers.

Perhaps from such stories as these we can under-
stand better the narrative of Moses coming down from
the mountain where he had been enjoying the com-
panionship of God. His face shone so that the people
were afraid to look thereon. Or that other narrative
about the martyr Stephen. The council said his face
was as though it had been the face of an angel.

Sweeter than any tint of painter, fairer than any
touch of sculptor, is the beauty with which holiness
brightens up the soul. It lights up the sunken eye of
sickness. It warms the cheek of depression and des-
pair. The old classics tell us that a woman cannot
choose whether or not she shall be beautiful at twenty ;
but it is her own fault if she is not beautiful at sixty,
just as the maple gets gorgeous on the verge of winter.
The Lord God is a Sun, and we will shine, too, if we
get into the stream of His brightness. The vapor,
apart from the sun^ is murky and black, but when the

CHRISTIAN WALK. 25

light pierces it at eventide, it enriches it. See it
drinking in the beams of Hght! It blushes into gold,
and crimson, and cinnabar, and purple, and all manner
of infinite delights. Human life is nothing till you
lift it into the sky. Let us mount nearer Heaven.
Let us draw near to God, and our soul will be pure,
our path luminous.

Walking with God, then, implies harmony, humil-
ity, and holiness. "Without holiness, no man shall
see the Lord." Christianity is the religion of com-
panionship. The eagle cannot rise with one wing;
nor can man. It is the highest type of friendship;
nay, it is the perfecting of friendship. If we company
with Jesus, we must have His mind, we must have His
lowly spirit, and we will gradually grow into His like-
ness. Justification is through the blood of Christ;
sanctification is through the resurrection life of Christ.

We are shaped into the likeness of what we live
with. We are shaped into the likeness of what we
love. When Jesus was on earth, as many as touched
Him were made whole. We all, with unveiled face,
beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are
changed into the same image, even as from the Lord
the Spirit.

People speak of going to Heaven as if it were a
concert-room, to enter which a ticket only is required.
Nothing could be more unscriptural. Nothing could
be more unreasonable. Heaven is not a place to
which we are admitted, but a place into which we are
bom, for " except a man be born again, he cannot see
the Kingdom of God.' ' It is a little short of foolish,
the way some talk of going to heaven when they die.
They exclude God from their life on earth. They find

26 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

no joy in His presence here. Heaven would be a
painful imprisonment to them. The presence of Jesus
on earth was torture to the demons. " Who then shall
ascend into the hill of the Lord? He that hath clean
hands and a pure heart." And our hands are made
clean and our hearts made pure as we trust in the
cleansing blood of Jesus.

Enoch went to Heaven before he died; so must we.
As the old theologians used to say: "We must have
a little heaven to get to heaven in." Enoch kept step
with Deity here below; so must we. His heart was
knit to God by trust — complete, constant trust. For
him to live was always "Nearer, my God, to Thee."
That is what made of his life an epic of completeness.

CHAPTER II.

HARMONY WITH THE WILL OF GOD,

"Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the
ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the
seat of the scornful; but his delight is in the law of the Lord."
Psalm 1:1.

One of the interesting chapters in the tragedy
of great men is the story of Samuel Johnson. His life
was tuned to the minor key. Ill health made him
morbid; poverty made him sour. In Westminster
Abbey he sleeps by the side of David Garrick —
laughter and tears resting together.

Dr. Johnson wrote a famous book called Rasselas.
He tells us he wrote it in the evenings of a week to
pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. It is really
a search for the secret of happiness.

Rasselas, the son of the mighty emperor of Abyssyn-
ia, was confined in a private palace until the order of
succession should call him to the throne. The palace
was situated in a rich valley surrounded on every side
by mountains. It was entered by a canon cut under
the rock, the mouth of which was guarded by huge
iron gates forged by the giants of ancient days. In
the midst of the valley a lake lay, peaceful, stocked
with fish of every species and fowl of every feather,
whom nature has taught "to dip the wing. " On the
sides of the mountain were trees of every leaf. On
the banks of the lake were flowers of every color. No
wind but wafted spices; no garden but breathed

(27)

28 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

freshness; no day but dropped fruits rich and rare.
Every blessing of nature was there collected; every
desire gratified. Nothing that art, music, novelty or
merriment could do ; nothing that sense could wish, or
appetite long for, was wanting to make life lovely in
this blissful retreat.

And yet Rasselas knew not content in this happy
valley. He longed for freedojn beyond the mount-
ains. Alone would he wander in solitary walk,
meditating escape. Week after week would he
spend exploring the canons and clambering the cliffs
to see if there was any aperture. Ofttimes would he
look at the massive iron gate, guarded by sentinels
who never slumbered.

Three years did he spend in this fruitless search, and
then communicated his plans to Imlac. Imlac was
one of the tutors of the royal family, and, walking one
day through the groves with Rasselas, he was telling
him the story of his life.

"Tell me, " said the prince, " tell me truly, art thou
content in this valley, or dost thou wish again thy
wandering life ? "

"Great prince, " said Imlac, " I will speak the truth
to you. I know not one of your teachers who does
not lament the hour he entered this abode. "

" My dear Imlac, " returned the prince, " I will open
to thee my heart. I have long meditated escape.
Teach me how to break my prison bars. Thou shalt
be the partner of my flight. Yon gate is strong, yon
mountain steep, yon sentinels ever sleepless. "

So the two became friends, and next morning
started out to plan their escape. For days they
scaled crag and steep, returning each evening to the

WILL OF GOD. 29

palace. Patience at last rewarded them with a
fissure in the rock. They pierced the cavity, and
issuing to the top of the mountain they beheld the
Nile — a narrow thread — meandering beneath them.
So, laden with jewels, they descended into the plain,
and bade goodbye to the happy valley, as they
believed, forever.

We will not attempt to follow them in their world-
tour. Human life they studied in all its phases —
greatness and lowliness, wisdom and folly, culture and
coarseness, virtue and vice, hardship and ease, the
task and the tool, the cloister and the market-place.
They went to the temple of melody, where St. Cecilia
sang. They went to the temple of laughter, where
Democritus lived. They went to the temple of jus-
tice, where Aristides sat. They went to the temple of
wisdom, where Solomon dropped his mantle. But
happiness was not. Rasselas came back a sadder and
a wiser man.

The search for the blessed secret still goes on.
Rasselas was not the first explorer in a region
unknown; he will not be the last. The quest for
happiness has engaged the minds of earth's wisest
children since the days of Plato and Epictetus. For
many it is life's summum honum: for all of us it hath
attractiveness and charm ; for the Christian it is life's
last reward. And our text lends a clew to the intri-
cate pursuit.

"Oh the happiness of the man that walketh not in
the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of
sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful, but
whose delight is in the law of the Lord. "

Happiness thus consists in being in harmony with

30 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

the law of God, and in finding in that law our medita-
tion and delight. Let each soul ask itself, "What is
the Father's will for me?" then be obedient to the
heavenly vision ; thus will the blessed prize be won.

Perhaps we can simplify the search by limiting the
field of exploration.

Happiness is bounded on the north by contentment of state,
on the south by lowliness of mind,
on the east by helpfulness of life,
on the west by holiness of heart.

I. CONTENTMENT.

** I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therein
to be content." (Phil. 4, 11.) Contentment is har-
mony with the Father's will.

One of Addison's chapters in the Spectator is a
dream which he entitles the ''Mountain of Miseries."
The great essayist dreamed that a proclamation had
been made by Jupiter that every mortal should bring
his griefs and woes on a certain day, and throw them
together in a heap, in a certain large plain that had
been appointed for the purpose. So taking his stand
in the center, he watched with a great deal of interest
the whole human race marching up in line, and throw-
ing down their several loads, which in time grew up
into a prodigious mountain that rose above the
clouds.

One poor old haggard wretch carried a bundle
under her cloak. She threw it down. The name of it
was poverty. Another, after much laboring, dragged
a heavy luggage to the mass, which on opening was
fotmd to be his wife. Old women threw down their
wrinkles, and many negroes their tawny skin. There

WILL OF GOD. 31

were red noses, grey hairs, thick lips, bald heads and
rusty teeth ; in fact the mountain consisted largely of
bodily ailments. Rapidly the great massive bulk
grew and swelled to ponderous dimensions, but
strange to say there was not a vice, or a crime, or a
frailty, or a passion, or a folly, or a sin. It was a
sorrow, or a trouble, or an affliction, or a remorse, or a
disappointment, or a physical distemper.

Standing and regarding very attentively this con-
fusion of chaos and the thronging, surging multitudes
that swarmed around the mountain, the dream was
changed. A second edict proceeded and came forth
from the god of the thunderbolt, that as every one had
to have some burden there was to be an exchange, and
each must return to his home with the bundle that had
been assigned to him.

And now the hurry and nervousness were intense.
Some who had brought sickness went away with
poverty. Some who had carried hunger to the
mountain bore away thirst. One lady exchanged a
birth-mark for a bad reputation. A venerable hump-
backed gentleman exchanged his deformity for a
rebellious boy that had been thrown into the heap by
an angry father. A certain old lady who came with a
lock of grey hair, disappeared with the asthma. The
whole plain was filled with murmuring and discontent.
Every one was repining. There was perfect unan-
imity in one thing, that the new affliction was worse
than the old; " and I learned a lesson, " says the great
essayist, "that our Heavenly Father knows best, and
assigns to each soul the sphere for which it is best
fitted, and the burden which it can most patiently
bear."

32 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Surely that old story of the aged hermit in the
desert hath valuable lessons for us on the blessedness
of trust, and the committal of our lives to Him who
knoweth best. He planted an olive by his hut, and
prayed for rain. So the gentle rain came down, and
gradually grew to torrents. Then fancying some hot
sun would hurry the water down into the roots to free
the salts and phosphates and gases, and force them up
into the leaves and branches, he prayed again, and the
hot sun shot forth its fiery darts. Next, the old
hermit imagined a cool wave might put snap and
hardihood into the fibre. So he prayed a third time,
when next morning hoar frost settled on the ground.
Then thinking a hot wind, to swell the bud and push
out the blossom, might be beneficial, he prayed once
more ; so the south wind blew. In a few days the olive
tree was dead.

The story goes on to tell how some few weeks later,
visiting a brother hermit who had a large, beautiful
olive at his door, he asked :

"Comrade, how came yon goodly tree? "

" I planted it, and left God to take care of it, " came
the answer.

"Ah, I planted one, too, but it died. "

The divine Husbandman knows best where to plant
us, beloved. He knows best how to care for us, too.
He loves us. He will do nothing save what is for our
good. If pnming and purging will make us more
fruit-bearing, that is why He uses the knife. If
dressing and grafting will improve the tone of otir
lives, let us not rebel. It is only that we should bring
forth more fruit, and that our fruit should remain. If

WILL OF GOD. 33

He transplant us it is for our own welfare. He
knows where we will thrive best.

Let us be content to put ourselves entirely in our
Father's care. Let us learn the secret of how to live
in harmony with His will. The life of insurrection is a
life of pain. " Every time the sheep bleats it loses a
mouthful, and every time we grumble we lose a bless-
ing." Only by living the life of trust can happiness
be found. His is the glad heart who has mastered
that contentment of state in which the apostle
rejoiced. To long for the forbidden country is to
invite uneasiness and heart-ache. For happiness is
bounded on the north by contentment.

II. LOWLINESS OF MIND.

On the south, lowliness of mind. Lowliness is the
second boundary to the happy life, for thus only can
we hope to company with Him who said, "Come unto
Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of
Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. "

Paul says, " Do not think more highly of yourself
than you ought to think. " ''In lowliness of mind let
each esteem others better than themselves." "Let
this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who
* * * humbled Himself. " The world has so little
understood the Christian teaching that it uses the
term 'poor-spirited' as a mark of opprobrium. The
voice of the world is: " Happy the great, the rich, the
powerful, the well-to-do! happy the life that lives in
luxury ! happy earth's dignitaries ! happy those unap-
proachable ones who wield the rods of empire and
dictate the forms and etiquettes of life! 'I But such is

34 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

not the mind of the Master. His teaching is that the
great are they who serve; the happy, they who
minister.

There can be little doubt that in the science of living
with men, to feel one's self-importance is to invite
disquiet and aching of heart. For nothing causes
such rankling pain as pride. " The proud man poisons
his own banquet, and then eats it. " Augustus
Caesar bethought himself a god, but how jealous and
irritable it rendered his life! The ruling passion of
Alexander Pope undoubtedly was vanity and love of
applause, and how it soured and embittered his
nature we all know. His was the venom of wounded
pride. Macaulay says of him :

** His life was one long series of tricks. He was all
stiletto and mask. To cheat and malign was his
natural habit, if only reputation could be secured
thereby, for admiration and applause were as neces-
sary to him as the air he breathed. "

How pitifully ludicrous must seem to the all-seeing
One the vauntings of our poor frail human nature!
The old Roman emperors compelled obsequious
courtiers to shade their eyes when being ushered
into their presence, thus acknowledging the glare and
dazzle of their glory. By some strange sophistry we
convince ourselves of our distinction, that we forsooth
are intellectual and great ancj learned, that our fellow-
mortals should look up to us and kneel down before
us and accept our dictum with lowly acquiescence.
Surely the man who reasons thus is certain to be
unhappy, because he is certain to meet with contra-
diction. The man who feels that he is unappreciated
and wronged and slighted unless he gets everything

WILL OF GOD.

35

he wishes, and in the way he wishes, is certain to
suffer mortification and bitterness of soul, because he
cannot possibly get everything he wishes and in the
way he wishes. How much each Dolly Varden suffers
for her self-admiring vanities! Our wonder does not
greatly stir us when we read that Beau Brummel was
imprisoned for debt and thereafter died in an asylum
of remorse, for "pride goeth before destruction, and
an haughty spirit before a fall. " Ofttimes we smile
over Mrs Poyser's cock, who fancied the sun rose every
morning to hear him crow. But are we not all apt to
think that the whole world of men and things was
created more or less as a sort of pleasureable adjunct
to our convenience, that we are the whole triumph,
that our fellow-mortals were made to tickle our vani-
ties and minister to our wants, that even the stars
were set up there in their lofty silence to "make the
sky look interesting for us at night " ? " Fill a person
with love for himself, " says a witty Frenchman, "and
what runs over will be your share. " Aye, truly has it
been said that love is the driving power that moves
humanity, and 'tis flattery that oils the wheels.

Surely a few thoughts should serve to prick the
bubble of man's complacency. What have I that I
have not received? Where did I get it? How long
may I hope to keep it? Let us but know ourselves,
and we will not only reverence ourselves but also
humble ourselves. Self-knowledge is the parent of
self-abasement. For we are but empty vessels until
filled with divine gifts, and even the vessel is His free
sovereign bounty. No honest reverent soul can look
back over the story of his life-history without feeling
that God has made him what he is. Whenever a

36 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Christian gathers up his experience into one
comprehensive truth, that truth has always been,
"By the grace of God I am what I am." He is a
poor pitiable creature and calling for our forbearance,
who does not realize that the best things in him are
not self- wrought, but God- wrought.

Often we hear of self-made men. It is a catchy
phrase, but false. No self-made men are there.
That man who studiously stands before the mirror
and makes devotion, is neither an excellent nor an
admirable figure. If you have any real worth, dear
reader, it is but a small fraction that you owe yourself.
The true architects have been the parents who gave
you birth, the teachers who taught you, the atmos-
phere that nurtured you, and the good kind Father
above who endowed you so munificently with health
and reason and blessings unnumbered. By the grace
of God you have what you have. By the grace of
God you are what you are.

When we have that full consciousness deep-rooted
in our hearts of our entire un worthiness, of how much
we receive, of how little we deserve, then are we seek-
ing the prize of happiness in its native home.

III. HELPFULNESS.

Bounded on the east by helpfulness of life. " Bear
ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of
Christ." (Gal. 6:2.)

Lord Byron says: "All who would win joy must
share it; happiness was born a twin." This is the
peculiar significance of the Christian spirit. Selfish-
ness for the moment is lost sight of. There is a loving
contrivance on the part of every one to provoke

WILL OF GOD. 37

somebody else into being glad. The word miser and
the word miserable have the same root-meaning.
The miser is a miserable man. Selfishness is swift
poison to the soul's peace. If in the kingdom of
happiness discontent hath slain its thousands, and
pride its tens of thousands, surely selfishness can
claim its hundreds of thousands.

The chemist tells us that the carbon and the dia-
mond are chemically identical, the only difference
being that the charcoal drinks in every particle of light
that falls on it, and remains dead black, while the
diamond reflects all, and becomes the most brilliant
of jewels. So there are grasping lives that are wholly
self-centered, but tlie beauty of the life of Jesus was
its considerateness, its helpfulness, its reflecting glory.

" I want it said of me, " said Abraham Lincoln, "by
those who know me best, that I have alv/ays plucked a
thistle and planted a flower wherever a flower would
grow." A friend told me recently that he was once
conducting the funeral service of a member of his
church, and the wife of the departed told him that in
thirty years of married life she did not remember one
morning ever having passed without family worship,
and that in all these years she never heard a prayer
but had this sentence in it,

"Lord, help us to make somebody happy to-day."

Strange that we are so slow in mastering this lesson
of the soul's delight! When we call to mind that it is
written so plainly on every page of our daily living,
how is it that we so easily mistake the letters? " Glad-
ness is found in giving"; our consciences answer
"yes." "More blessed to give than to receive"; 'tis
the Scriptural and eternal law. How doth it happen,

38 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

then, that we persist in wresting Scripture and
experience to our own discomfort? If happiness is
found in making other people happy on the 25th of
December, would it not be wise, some one suggests, to
try the scheme on the 4th of July ? If it holds true on
Sunday, would it not be well to test the plan on
Monday ?

A lady paused in front of the village doctor's house,
and inquired of the child playing on the door step if
his father was at home.

" No, " said the lad, " he's away. "

" Where do you think I could find him? "

"Well," returned the little fellow, innocently,
"you've got to look for some place where people are
sick or hurt, or something like that; papa's always
helping somebody. "

"When the sim shines, it shines everywhere," was
Ruben's motto, and as we look into the great world of
action we find this truth radiating everywhere.
Xerxes proposed a reward to the inventor of a new
pleasure. Every morning such rewards are offered in
the court of the soul-kingdom, and each humblest life
may pluck the prize. No day but lends its many
opportunities for doing good. For neither gold nor
grandeur can make the heart glad; that is alone the
fruitage of loving service.

"You forgot to mention where heaven is, " said the
good lady to her pastor after a sermon on the better
land.

"On yonder hilltop stands a cottage, madam,"
replied the man of God; " a widow lives there in want;
she has no bread, no fuel, no medicine, and her child is
at the point of death. If you will carry to her this

WILL OF GOD. 39

afternoon some little cup of cold water in the name of
Him who went about doing good, you will find the
answer to your inquiry. "

Many will recall the sweet old legend of St. Chris-
topher, who lived in a cave hard by a swift-flowing
river, and whose duty was to take upon his shoulders
and bear across whoever wished to gain the opposite
shore. Many a tired traveler he bore across the
flood, manfully buffeting the billows.

One night, weary from the day's toil, he fell asleep.
Without was cold and dark and stormy. The river's
current raged fiercely. Above the roar of the torrent
and the screech of the winds he heard a cry, so spring-
ing from his couch he plunged into the wild night, and
taking his pole waded across the swollen rapids.
Reaching the other bank, he saw a child of wondrous
beauty pleading to be carried to the thither side.
Taking him on his shoulders, he started across. Just
as they were stepping into the dangerous channel in
the centre of the raging flood, the child's sweet voice
said, " When thou passest through the waters I will be
with thee"; and then only did the old hermit know
that it was the child Jesus whom he carried, and his
arm became strong and his heart became light and
glad. Shall we not learn the lesson of St. Chris-
topher? Every deed of loving service to earth's
humblest orphan child is remembered as done to Him
who said, " He shall in no wise lose his reward. " He
looks upon it as a personal favor. He takes it as to
Himself, for "Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the
least of these, My brethren, ye did it unto Me. "

IV. HOLINESS.

Bounded on the west by holiness of heart. " Happy

40 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

the man that findeth wisdom. " (Prov. 3 : 13). And
the wise king explains what he means by wisdom in
another chapter, when he says: " The fear of the Lord
is the beginning of wisdom. "

There is no happiness worth having that we cannot
pray over, that we cannot take to the Saviour, and upon
which we cannot ask His blessing. True, lasting
happiness is found at the foot of the Cross, nowhere
else. There we can have our sins forgiven and our
souls washed in the all-atoning blood. There we can
find peace of conscience and assurance of final victory,
and go on our way rejoicing. The footpath to happi-
ness stretcheth otit in the same direction as the foot-
path to holiness, and each persevering pilgrim finds
that the journey is not long till the roads meet and
blend and acquire a new name — the straight and
narrow way, which is the footpath to heaven. For
the happiness of each tired traveler consists in finding
out the way in which God is going, and going that
way. Godliness gives real happiness; nothing else
does. "You cannot grow the lilies of the kingdom of
God unless you import the bulbs from heaven. "

Oh, yoimg men of pride and promise, know that
happiness is only found in living the Christian life!
Sin gives pleasure, but the coin is counterfeit. The
pleasures of sin are for a season only. No matter
how cool and inviting seem the paths of unrighteous-
ness, know that lions lie in ambush, and ravenous
beasts prowl about, and serpents lurk on either side,
and the road gets gradually closer and narrower and
more contracted, and the end thereof is death! Go
east or go west, go north or go south, nature is surely
on the track of every sin, with headlong haste, to hurt

WILL OF GOD. 41

and torment and to destroy; "for at the last sin
biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder."
" Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of
the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor
sitteth in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in
the law of the Lord. " Happiness, thus, is a spiritual
attainment, not to be found in things. 'Twere idle
to turn to gold and silver for gladness of heart.

In the olden times there is a story of a great king
who was journeying through the land, and heard a
shepherd making music with his flute. So pleased
was he that he invited him to his palace to charm
away the fret and fever of life. He found him so wise
and trustworthy that he lifted him to the highest seat
in the cabinet of his advisers. But soon the tongue of
envy began to whisper poisoned words in the king's
ears, that the shepherd was secretly plotting for the
throne. It was noted that he retired each day to his
chamber for solitude and quiet. The king, anxious
to discover what he was doing, one day burst open the
door, and there sat the old shepherd clad in his
ancient garb, with the old flute in hand, trying to call
back the joys of his early pastoral life. Worldly
comforts had increased, fame had come unasked, ser-
vants and gold, hardly to be counted, had leaped to
his slightest nod, but they had only brought with
them care and heaviness of heart.

There is a little tract published by the American
Tract Society, entitled "Uncle Johnson." Uncle
Johnson was a Virginia negro, who lived to the age of
120. One day when at work singing in his garden,
his pastor looked over the fence and said:

*' Uncle Eb, you seem very happy to-day. "

42 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

"Yes, Massa, Fse jes tinkin'. "

" What are you thinking about? "

" Oh, Fse jes tinkin', " said the old darkey, and the
tears raced down the channels on his wrinkled face.

"Well, what can it be you are thinking about that
makes you so happy, Uncle Eb? "

"Oh, I'se jes tinkin' dat if de crumbs of joy dat fall
from de Massa's table in dis world is so good, what
will de great loaf in glory be! "

Scatter flowers as you go, dear reader; you have
not passed this way heretofore; you will never pass
this way again.

CHAPTER III.

HARMONY OF THE WORK WITH THE WORKER.

"Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matt. 7:20.
"Believe Me for the works' sake." John 14:11.

A noted scoffer was once interrupted in his noisy
excitement by two questions :

1. What would be the effect upon this world if
everybody was a consistent Christian?

2. What would be the effect upon this world if
everybody was a consistent infidel?

The argument is a crushing one, for of a truth
Christianity can stand such a test with a glory that
would astonish even the most ardent enthusiasts.
And it is the one test, let it be admitted with sorrow,
that a reviling world is not willing to have it judged
by. We insist on reading the Master's challenge:
" By their creeds ye shall know them," and: " Believe
Me for the doctrine's sake." Do men gather grapes
of thorns? Not in the first century, said the Master.
Or figs of thistles? Not in the twentieth. Thorns
bruise. Thistles bleed. All the thorn trees in Los
Angeles County never produced a cluster of muscats.
Jesus is simply enforcing the fact that a good thing
cannot be begotten of a bad thing. If one finds a
large custer of Malagas, he knows it was not plucked
from a Canadian thistle. And if it can be shown
that our faith yields good fruit and nothing but good
fruit, then it must be a good thing; it must be an
evangel. It needs must be a message of glad tidings

(43)

44 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

of great joy, for otherwise, what some one has styled
the "greatest good that ever energized humanity"
has proceeded forth and come from an evil — which
were a self-contradiction.

One cannot help being drawn to these words be-
cause of their sweet reasonableness. There is a ring
about them that is refreshing. It cannot easily be
imagined why any fair truth-seeker should be unwill-
ing to have any debated question judged by this test,
for it doth seem to be a test workable in all of life's
movements. No art, no law, no litany, no cult, no
implement, that cannot afford to accept this standard
and abide by it, because of its final and essential
fairness. A time there never was in the history of
the world when such religious restlessness bestirred
men's thoughts as is seen to-day; never a time when
thinking men were calling so loudly for religious cer-
tainty; never a time when simple ex-cathedra teach-
ing carried such little weight. " Defender of the
Faith" Henry the 8th called himself. "Defender of
the Truth" the church aspires to be. And the one
claim were vain and idle as the other, for ours is a
world where only falsehood needs defense. No pro-
tection does truth need; no buttressing. Truth can
stand alone. Truth rejoices as a strong man to run a
race. Defending the truth were like unto some
Launcelot defending his sword. The best defence
that can be made of any truth is to give it a trial.

Recently a Brooklyn carpenter invented a bullet-
stopping shield consisting of three plates of a chemical
combination of cotton, wood and felt. His claims
were ridiculed until he made of himself a target

WORK WITH THE WORKER. 45

This is Christianity's challenge to the world. "Try
me," saith the Lord. "Come and see."

Take an illustration from astronomy. Up to the
seventeenth century of our era the path of the planets
was believed to be circular. There were many facts
which the circular theory failed to solve, and these
increased until astronomers were perplexed. Then,
in 1609, Kepler announced his elliptical theory. Pos-
sibly no discovery ever created such a stir. At first
it was ridiculed, but in a practical manner it worked.
Difficulties it cleared away. It yielded fruit, and now
for three hundred years — well nigh — it has never been
doubted.

The rule is a good one. The proper test of every-
thing, and the only fair test, is the fruit test. It is the
test of reason, law, government, tool, art, industry.

Here is Christianity. What can it do in a practical
way ? What kind of a community can it form ? What
kind of a government can it formulate? What type
of a man can it remake? This is the vital question.
It thunders from the heights above, and the world is
bound to answer it.

I. THE REALM OF LEARNING.

Let us look at the influence of Jesus Christ in the
realm of learning. Nothing were more unfair than
to speak of Christianity as hostile to the most daring
thought. It lives upon thought, thrives by it, creates
it. If Jesus is immortal love. He is immortal wisdom,
too, for "thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy mind."

The story is told that, passing the college buildings

46 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

at Cambridge one day, a cynic accosted a gentleman
coming down the stone steps.

"And what do you manufacture here?" was the
question.

"Power, sir," said the gentleman, who chanced to
be one of the professors.

"Oh, indeed! What kind of power?"

"Come along with me, sir."

He took him into a room. The wall was covered
with pictures.

"These are some of our boys," said the professor,
sweeping his arm.

The cynic looked up. There was Edmund Spenser,
John Dryden, John Milton, Thomas Gray, Coleridge,
Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson.
They passed into another room, and there were some
more: Oliver Cromwell, William Pitt, Lord Palmer-
ston, William Wilberforce, Lord Macaulay, William
Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Abraham Cowley, George
John Romanes.

" See that seat there? That was Sir Isaac Newton's
seat; the one behind it, Jeremy Taylor's; the one be-
hind it. Bishop Lightfoot's."

And yet it was Christ who made Cambridge a
reality. It was Christ who laid the basal beams of
Oxford and Edinburgh and Glasgow and Dublin and
Aberdeen. It has been claimed that there are not six
colleges in the United States to-day that were not
established as Christian colleges.

" I think the time is coming," said Bishop Newman,
"when there will be a bronze statue in all our college
halls erected to the Son of Mary, because to Him the
college owes its life."

WORK WITH THE WORKER: 47

To-day Jesus Christ commands the world's intellect.
He has the ear of university, congress and court.
There is no speech nor language where His voice is not
heard. His teaching is text, not commentary.
Shakspere borrowed much of his raw material from
Jesus. Milton was suckled at the breast of Bethle-
hem. The green pastures of the New Testament color
Dante's blood. Tennyson's "In Memoriam" is an
exposition of Christian hope. Wordsworth takes an
" excursion " into the fields of nature, and soaks himself
in the New Testament he carries along. Similarly
Coleridge and Browning; their brightness is derived
from the great Sun that prevented them. They are
interpreters, not revealers; satellites, not suns. The
more they absorb of Him, the more brilliant their
creations, as pearls increase in value by exposure to
the glare of day. For all light is sunlight ; all learning
is Christian learning. There is no Alpine edelweiss,
blooming on summit cold and lonely, that is not the
child of the sun. There could not be an iceberg
without the sun. There could not be a Voltaire
without a Christ. Take from Voltaire everything
built upon the Christian idea, and the greater part of
his ninety-seven volumes in Dalibon's edition would
be disembowelled. Some one says that the greatest
star is the one at the little end of the telescope. If
that be so, then the Son of Mary must be the child
supreme of genius, for nearly all mind stars of the
first magnitude has He brought into vision. This
surely must be the puzzle-lock of history — how a
simple carpenter could make of Himself the centre of
all culture, "focusing on Himself the light of the
world's learning."

48 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

How much does each Rembrandt owe to Jesus?
Where were Murillo without his Madonna? If the
gallery were dismantled of what Christ inspired, how
bare the walls! If the library lost what He evoked,
how scanty the shelves! How much would remain?
Apart from ancient classics, would anything remain?
In the early centuries, literature was a tiny thread
trickling from Helicon, and visited by scholars few
and favored. Today literature is a full river, many
branched, flowing almost entirely from the slopes of
Calvary.

Frederick Harrison tells us there are now two
million volumes in the world's libraries, and that
every ten years the press issues enough new volumes
to make a pyramid equal to St. Paul's Cathedral.
Mr. Gladstone, in his famous tilt with the great agnos-
tic, asked him publicly, through the pages of the
Fortnightly Review, if at least one million of these
two million books was not directly traceable to the
Christian concept, and Mr. Harrison never answered
him. Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the whole
matter, for unless this be vain talk, it doth seem
incredible that any fair lover of truth can dispute the
influence of Jesus Christ in the realm of intellect.

II. THE SPHERE OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT.

Perhaps no literary man living to-day wields a
greater influence than Count Tolstoi. For thirty-
five years of his life he was a nihilist, that is, a man
who believed in nothing, a man whose mission was
to destroy. Then ten years ago he tells us his life
underwent a complete transformation, and in the
preface to one of his books he pens these words:

WORK WITH THE WORKER. 49

"All I have done, all I am doing, and all I hope to do
are owing to Jesus Christ."

Though born to luxury, with untold wealth at his
command, and gifted with the finest literary genius,
this lofty nobleman has put all aside and lives in the
simplicity of a peasant, working by the side of his
servants, that he may be true to the life and will of
Jesus.

Take another illustration. Who in this past cen-
tury towers head and shoulders above every other
heart as the highest representative of Jesus Christ in
the world's social betterment? Most fittingly has he
been called "that other disciple whom Jesus loved."
Like Tolstoi, he was born to privilege and distinction ;
a money king by legacy; a member of the English
parliament from boyhood. Surely we are not over-
reaching in our claim that no man in the past century
so closely fulfilled the will of Jesus. It were a sight
for angels to witness to see this child of leisure and
luxury, when parliament closed at midnight, turning
his back on homie and wending his way to Whitechapel
in search of life's unfortunates. He loved music and
the library. He loved the company of scholars and
statesmen, but woe-alleviating was his passion.
Forty industrial schools he founded for the poor, and
thirty-five asylums for the homeless. All of his
enormous income he gave away.

The day he died he arose in the House of Lords,
and began this speech:

"I am now Hke Paul the aged. I feel the years
telling on me. I have tried to do the will of Christ ;
but I hate to leave the world with so much misery
behind me."

so HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Then, overtaxed, he was compelled to sit down.
That night he asked his daughter to read to him the
twenty-third Psalm, and before she had finished he
had passed down to the dock where the Pilot was
awaiting him, and there on the other shore Lord
Shaftesbury lives immortal forever.

My dear hearers, everything in this world that is
pure and good, Jesus Christ is at the root of it; "for
by their fruits ye shall know them." Do we purge
and purify the prison? We do it because He com-
mands. Do we liberate the slave and preach deliver-
ance to the captive ? We do it because He commands.
Do we build the hospital and heal the bruised-bodied
and broken-hearted? We do it because He com-
mands. Do our sons go forth from seats of learning,
with the culture of the schools crowning them, and
do they bury themselves in the center of the world's
sorrows? They do it because He commands. "In-
asmuch as ye do it to one of the least of these My
brethern, ye do it unto Me."

A rose-bud will blossom into a rose more rapidly if
it is cut and placed in water than if left on the bush,
but the cut rose bears no seed. When its leaves fall,
all is over. Thus is it with the philanthrophies and
charities that have blossomed on the stem of Christian
truth. Severed, they cannot perpetuate themselves.

III. THE INDIVIDUAL AND NATION.

But once more let us notice the fruit that Chris-
tianity has borne in the life of the individual and the
nation.

In my little church out West I had two elders. One
was an old officer in the army. All his life he had

WORK WITH THE WORKER. 51

lived among the Indians, that is, the part of his
life he was not in jail, for he had spent six years of it
in the penitentiary. He was what you would call by
nature a rough, shaggy, iron old man. Up to twenty-
five years of age he was a desperado of the Jesse
James type, rifling stores, robbing banks, blowing up
safes and holding up trains. Rumor had it that he
had killed more than one man in his day, but of that
he was always silent.

Then he met the power of God and was converted,
and of his conversion I have no more doubt than of
the apostle Paul's. He married late in life, and God
had blessed him with a boy. And how he loved that
boy ! How he dreaded that some day he might follow
in his father's footsteps ! To see that big great brawny
soldier, with an arm of steel and hand like an
anvil, to see him go home and play the baby, was
something like the magwey tree of Mexico which
shoots up its tall, homely, thorny trunk like a tele-
graph pole, then crowns itself with a perfect wreath of
flowers. There is in geology a stone called the geode,
a coarse bit of rock to look at, but split it open, and
lo! a marvel. There flash before you grottos and
crystals and wreaths and plumes and exquisite beauty.
He was a human geode. To hear that old man talk
in prayer meeting! Ah, he had been through the fire.

"Just to think that God has saved a wretch like
me," he would say.

Then to hear him pray! The penitence, the peace,
the gratitude. The softness of childhood, the fresh-
ness of spring, were in his soul. I heard him pray one
hundred times possibly, and never a prayer but had
this sentence:

52 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

"How shall I ever thank Thee, Lord, for rescuing
a poor wretch like me!"

Dr. Dixon tells the story of a poor little African boy
who was sold into slavery years ago. He was carried
to the coast, and after a varied experience found
himself at work in a store at Lagos. He was thence
shipped to America with other, slaves. The vessel
was captured by an English cruiser, and carried its
human cargo to Sierra Leone, where they were set free.

The boy received an education in a mission school.
He was baptized in 1825 at the age of eighteen, and
returned as a student and became a teacher in the
Fourah Bay College. He was consecrated the first
bishop of the Niger in Canterbury Cathedral. The
University at the same time made him a doctor of
divinity. He died in Lagos, December, 1891, a re-
spected, scholarly man of God.

In his diary he describes a meeting with his savage
mother, after being made bishop. He accidentally
met her in the market place one day after a separation
of twenty-five years. He says:

"When she saw me, she trembled. We looked at
each other in silence. Big tears ran down her savage
face. She called me by my name, and kissed me."

Oh, the perpetual miracle of humanity! From a
poor, ignorant savage heathen woman sprang the
bishop of the Niger. That noble man of God spring-
ing from such an environment! "Believe me for
Bishop Yulang's sake. By their fruits ye shall know
them."

Oh, it is a magnificent thing today to be a Christian.
It is to belong to that great army that is enriching
knowledge, abolishing slavery, ameliorating war, un-

WORK WITH THE WORKER. 53

shackling fetters, elevating man. A diamond in the
dark is dark. It is not fair to the diamond to judge
it in the dark. A diamond has a right to be judged
in the light. A picture has a right to be judged in
the best light. Let us give Christianity at least the
benefit of daylight. Why will men sweep all the dust
into the air and then say there is no dust ? Confucius
has had China in his grip for 2,400 years, and there
is China today. Behold her! Behold her! The
works of Christ are still wrought. His miracles are
still here. Believe me for Formosa's sake. Believe
me for Uganda's sake. For unbelief is ice. Unbelief
is frost. Unbelief is superstition. Unbelief lives in
the fog, in the chill. Christianity is literature, poetry,
science, art, music, jurisprudence, inventiveness, faith,
hope, love, heaven, home, Christ.

CHAPTER IV.

HARMONY WITH ENVIRONMENT.

"Let the sighing of the prisoner come before thee." Psalm 79:11.
" Turn ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope." Zechariah 9 :12.

Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field has an interesting chapter
in one of his books on his visit to Tangiers. Tangiers
is a little town on the northern coast of Africa, famous
for its prison, which has been called the "African
chamber of horrors. " It is quite a considerable
building. The governor lives in one end, the pris-
oners in the other. The prison building itself consists
of two rooms, one for the city and one for the country.
Here the poor creatures are huddled together like
cattle, some afHicted with leprosy, some with insanity,
every known incurable disease being represented;
while the desperadoes are hand-cuffed and chained
around the ankles to the walls. None are compelled
to work. In our penitentiaries we make the inmates
work, but there they starve them; for that is their
punishment — starvation slow but certain.

Sabbath morning came, and Dr. Field went to the
governor and asked permission to give the poor
wretches something to eat. The governor consenting,
he sent a man to the market to purchase a wagon-load
of bread. The loaves were carried out and laid on the
floor outside the iron grating; then going round they
distributed one loaf to each through the iron bars.

What a spectacle it must have been! "They
snatched their share like greedy wolves," says Dr.

(54)

ENVIRONMENT. 55

Field. One poor leper took a huge bite out of his;
thrust the remainder under his rags, and pressed it to
his bosom. More like unto dumb, driven cattle they
seemed than human beings made in our heavenly
Father's image. Not one of them spoke, not one
thanked him, not one even smiled.

When I read that story as only Dr. Field can tell it, I
felt my very flesh creep; and when he gave it a
religious turn and spoke of the millions of spiritual
prisoners in the world to-day, who are living without
hope, and without God — starving for the Bread of
heaven and the loaf of life and love, chained to the
walls of superstition and darkness — I thought I never
heard or read a stronger plea. I thought a stronger
plea could not be made for the great enduring problem
of the heathen and unbelieving world.

Life is filled with prisoners, prisoners of hope, some
of them; prisoners of despair, some; prisoners of the
body; prisoners of the soul. If liberty is harmony
with one's environment, slavery is rebellion against
such environment; and many are the souls in bond-
age. Hegel declared that the great fact of history is
the struggle for freedom. "When I am dead," said
one of the greatest of modern poets, "lay a sword on
my coffin, for I was a soldier in the war for the libera-
tion of humanity. "

We are all locked up, more or less, within walls of
limitation and restriction. Dr. Hillis speaks of the
prisoners of physical misfortune, the prisoners of
misrepresentation and abuse, and the prisoners of
unfilled ambitions; and doubtless these are a great
army.

56 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

PHYSICAL MISFORTUNE.

Here are Robert Hall, and Richard Baxter, and
Douglass Jerrold. Witness Florence Nightingale shut
up in a sick room the greater part of her life; truly
that room became her prison, and she a caged eagle.
Witness Edward Pay son, William Wilberforce, and
Robert Murray McCheyne, nicknamed "the skele-
ton," who put the trumpet of the gospel to his con-
sumptive lips for eight brief years, and fell on death
at twenty-nine. Here is Alexander H. Stevens, who
knew not a well day for over fifty years, weighing
only eighty-five pounds; first using a cane, then a
crutch, then two crutches, then an invalid's chair, in
which he was wheeled into the hall of congress, and the
chamber of senate, and the governor's mansion.
Verily, his body was a cage against whose fleshly bars
the soul was ever fretting for flight and freedom.

At twenty, John Keats and Robert Louis Stevenson
detected a line of bright scarlet in their phlegm, and
each knew that the die had been cast. Each saw the
temple of fame inviting them onward and upward, and
ventured to set foot therein, but ill-health stood lion-
like in the path and disputed every inch of the climb.
One night, just as he was retiring, Keats coughed upon
the pillow-slip, and said to his friend:

'* Brown, bring me the candle and let me see this. "

After regarding it steadfastly he fell back calmly,
saying :

"I know the color; it is arterial; that is my death-
warrant."

He survived twelve months, but it was a life in
death. Surely no youth can read the story of how
these knights of the new chivalry fought hemorrhage

ENVIRONMENT. 57

and pulmonary attack and poverty, and held dissolu-
tion at bay, without a tear of sympathy stealing into
the eye and a note of gratitude into the heart.

For ten years Stevenson expected to die at any
moment. The year before his death he wrote these
words :

" For fourteen years I have not had a day's real
health; I have wakened sick, and gone to bed weary;
and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have
written in bed and out of it, written in hemorrhages,
written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written
when my head swam for weakness ; and for so long, it
seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my
glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking,
since first I came to the Pacific ; and still, few are the
days when I am not in some physical distress. And
the battle goes on — ill or well is a trifle ; so as it goes.
I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so
willed that my battlefield should be this dingy,
inglorious one of the bed and the physic-bottle. At
least I have not failed, but I would have preferred a
place of trumpetings and the open air over my head. "

MISREPRESENTATION AND ABUSE.

Others there are who are prisoners of misrepresenta-
tion and abuse. The story of Joseph, of Daniel, of
Galileo, of John Locke, of William Lloyd Garrison, of
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, are ever-
fresh illustrations of the ingratitude and injustice of
the human heart, of great gifts rejected and cast aside,
of imselfish service disowned.

Dante was banished from Florence as a dangerous
citizen, but that same city, not many years later,

58 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

begged for his ashes and the honor of entombing his
remains. ** Surely no great man ever ate his bread
wet with tears of greater bitterness than did the
author of the Divine Comedy. "

Savonarola is strangled and burned in the market-
place to-day at the instance of the pope. To-morrow,
Michael Angelo is instructed to paint his portrait for
the walls of the Vatican, as one of the sainted doctors
of the church.

Perhaps man's inhumanity to man was never more
strikingly illustrated than in the story of Firdausi, the
great epic poet of Persia. How sore that life must
have been through jealousy and treachery! For
thirty years he sang his country's praise in many a
noble number, for the which he received in his white-
haired old age, at the hands of his fellow-citizens,
banishment and exile. And the crowning touch of
pathos is at the close, when one hundred thousand
pieces of gold were brought to him in reparation for
the wrong that had been done. As the camels bearing
the treasure entered one of the gates of the city,
Firdausi's dead body was being reverently borne by a
group of strangers to its last resting place through
another.

Jeremiah was one of the greatest of Hebrew
prophets. He predicted the downfall of the theocracy
and advised voluntary submission as the only means
of escaping complete destruction; for which he was
cast into a dungeon. After being set free, he was
forced by the people to accompany them to Egypt,
although he had advised against the expedition, as
displeasing to God, and in Egypt they stoned him to
death. It is interesting to read how after death he

ENVIRONMENT. 59

was turned into a hero, how his words were studied
and memorized by his fellow-countrymen in exile, and
how he came to be regarded as the prophet who
should reappear again.

For some strange reason a prophet hath no honor in
his own country. It seems as if great hearts must
be unappreciated while living, else have their great-
ness first recognized in some foreign land. Nations
seem to prefer postponing their gratitude to earth's
wisest teachers, keenest seers, and sweetest singers,
till the hero is beyond reach of sight or hearing, till the
hand, alas! is vanished, and the voice is still. The
history of all reform seems to be the old story of some
leader vilified in life, deified in death. Verily, the
prisoners of misrepresentation and abuse are a great
number.

DISAPPOINTED HOPES.

A great multitude, too, are the prisoners of dis-
appointed hopes.

That hymn of Mrs. Steele's was born out of pain.
Such perfect lines could only come forth from the
fiery furnace. The authoress met with an accident in
childhood which made of her a life-long invalid.
Engaged to be married to a gentleman whom she
dearly loved, and awaiting his arrival on the eve of
her bridal mom, a messenger came with the sad news
that he had been drowned. Prostrated, she retired to
her prison-chamber, and penned the lines:

" Father, whate'er of earthly bliss
Thy sovereign will denies,
Accepted at Thy throne of grace
Let this petition rise:

6o HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Give me a calm, a thankful heart

From every murmur free ;
The blessings of Thy grace impart,

And let me live to Thee.

Let the sweet hope that Thou art mine

My path of life attend;
Thy presence through my journey sliine,

And bless its happy end."

Some are hedged in by circumstances; others are
grappling with their evil star; while many lose heart
for want of breathing room. How pitiable to witness
anything over-large for its place! Goethe says: "If
you put an oak tree in a jardiniere, either the jardi-
niere will break or the oak must die." In his dun-
geon in London tower, Sir Walter Raleigh could pace
but twice his length, and thousands there are to whom
their environment says : ' ' You shall not live your best ;
you have no room to swing your arms, no room to
swing your heart. " Like ships are they aground and
helpless for lack of water depth.

One of Maupassant's short stories is called "The
Necklace. " It treats of a young wife who suffered
keenly, feeling herself born for luxury and high life.
The poverty of her home hurt her — the worn-out
chairs, the faded curtains, the bare walls. When she
sat down with her husband to their modest fare, she
dreamed of silverware and tapestry, delicious dishes,
the pink flesh of trout and wing of quail. She felt
herself a caged prisoner. Alas, how many such there
are in life — prisoners of unf^dfilled ambitions.

Here is an old college friend. Many a happy hour
we spent together. We graduated together. His an
intellect as keen and clear and bracing as a frosty,

ENVIRONMENT. 6i

moonlight sleigh-ride in a northern winter. His, too,
a tall, stately figure with the face of an Apollo — lofty
in thought, noble in spirit, spotless in character.
Splendid are the visions of which he dreams, but the
seeds of death are in his lungs, and he is poor. His
truly is a soul in fetters — "looking before and after,
and pining for what is not. "

And time would fail to tell of the prisoners of pros-
perity, for they, too, are a great multitude. Strange
that prosperity should tend so to incage the soul, but
the facts are unmistakable. Prosperity is a test that
few can stand. Some men cannot succeed because
they lack capacity for leadership. As long as they
are fighting in the ranks they do unselfish, heroic
service; but placed in command they lose brain-
steadiness, and grow dizzy. Benedict Arnold was for
many years a patriot above reproach. No better
soldier through those long Ontario marches than he.
But when British gold glittered before his eyes, he lost
his poise and fell. Verily, to climb high up the ladder
of distinction without losing balance, that is the task
for all that man hath of strength and fortitude.

Strange that prosperity can so easily belittle;
strange that it can so readily enslave! Some things in
this world are dangerous to possess, because of their
tendency to possess us. " Many a man going up the
hill of prosperity meets his soul coming down." A
few there are who have sensed the danger and taken
warning. Witness the late Samuel Appleton. He
was becoming very wealthy. He had a ship at sea,
uninsured. She was many days over-due, and he
was growing anxious and worried. One night, ner-
vous and sleepless, he arose, saying to his soul:

62 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

" Soul, this must not be. "

He took his pen, estimated the value of ship and
cargo, wrote out a check for the amount to some
benevolence — without knowing whether or not it
would ever arrive. Thus did he assert his freedom.

Balzac has a story in three books, called the " Magic
Skin. " It opens with a young Paris student, Raphael
by name, entering a gambling nest of human vipers
one afternoon, throwing down his last gold napoleon
with a chink, and losing; then, dazed, walking out as
in a vertigo, thinking only of the five-franc piece
which the prefect of the Seine would pay to the boat-
man as the price of his body. Passing the shop of an
old, fleshless antiquary, who had seen the storms of
1 02 winters, he turned in and asked permission to
look over the curios ; for he was questioning himself if
darkness were not the better time to die, which were
in truth an effort to gain courage. There were porce-
lain plates, ivory dishes, mummies, jewel cases, ara-
besques, miniatures, carved shrines, panoplies, vases
of Egyptian porphyry, a vast bazaar of ancient relics,
and an ass' skin, very much like that of a fox, on
which was written in Arabic :

"Dost thou desire me? Take me.
God will grant thee thy wishes.
But at every wish of thine I shrink,
And with me thy days."

"Take it," said the old man; "you are welcome;
only once taken you can never get rid of it. Every
wish it will gain for thee, but with the fulfillment of
every desire it will shrink, and with it thy days. Any
desire thou mayest have, but at the cost of thy life. "

The young man signed the compact, seized the

ENVIRONMENT. 63

leather, rolled it into the pocket of his coat and
rushed out.

His first thought was to plunge into some wild orgy.
So to the banqueting hall he turned, where the wealth
and culture of Paris made midnight tumultuous.
The tables were white as snow new-fallen; the cut
glass shed prismatic colors in its starry reflection ; the
viands served upon golden dishes sharpened curiosity
and appetite; claret, burgundy and madeira flowed in
regal profusion. By the time the last course was
served, all the guests were wallowing in the delights of
that limbo "where the lamps of the mind go out,
where the fires of the body are kindled, where the
passions are delivered over unto the delicious joys of
liberty." The ladies, beautiful and bejeweled, stag-
gered from the table. Passionate eyes glared like the
beads of a reptile.

And now the guests were gathered in the parlors.
Groups were formed. Revelry rose like the pande-
monium of Milton. The air grew hotter and hotter
with wine and wassail, till soon each victim fell over in
sickening self-helplessness. Gradually the candela-
bras burned low, flickered and went out. Night now
wrapt its black crape around the hideous spectacle.
Silence reigned — an awful silence. At noon next day
the guests began to stir, stiff in limb, sore in body.
The women, whose elegantly arranged tresses were
dishevelled, and whose dresses were disordered by the
tossings of a cramped sleep, presented a picture
repulsive to the freshness of dawn. Sobered eyes
were dulled by lassitude. Each haggard face read the
confusion. Like flowers crushed in the street they
seemed, after the passing of the tournament. "It

64 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

was the awakening of Vice, when excess with strong
hand has squeezed the wine from the grape of Hfe and
left only the peeling and the refuse. "

Raphael leaped up, as if startled by some bullet-
wound. He felt for the magic skin, and a cold chill
crept over his flesh when he saw that it had shrivelled.

The next book is called "The Woman Without a
Heart." Her name is Fedora, and she represents
modern society. A young woman of twenty-two,
beautiful, fabulously rich, with all Paris at her feet.

Raphael falls in love with Fedora. To win her
was life's one ambition. Her heart was the last
ticket in his fortune's lottery. Then follow the ins and
outs of this strange love episode — a passage, no doubt,
from Balzac's own autobiography. A young man
was he of marked intellectual gifts, but born to bit-
terest poverty, living in a garret, and yet seeking to
win the heart of a woman that lived for glitter and
dazzle and bubble and affectation and parade and
pomp and show — a woman without a heart.

Fedora inoculated Raphael with the leprosy of her
vanity. Deeper and deeper into debt he fell; deeper
and deeper into despair.

"To the devil with death," he exclaimed, one day,
brandishing the magic skin, "I choose to live, to be
rich, to win Fedora. Never will she be won till I am
rich. I wish for 200,000 francs a year, must have it,
200,000 a year! Then shall I break her heart. "

One night at a feast a notary entered.

" Is there one Raphael de Valentine here? " he asked.

" Your pleasure, Monsieur? "

" I bring you six million francs, sir from the death of
yourimcle. "

ENVIRONMENT. 65

A storm of cheers from his boon revelers made the
dishes rattle. Raphael took out the magic skin,
spread it open upon the table. A dreadful pallor
defined every muscle in his haggard face. He took a
pair of compasses and measured it. He felt the steel
of a knife cutting through his flesh when he saw that
the leather was smaller. Three times he looked at
the talisman. Three times he flushed and paled.
Was it not the image of his being? He could gratify
any sensual enjoyment, but at the cost of his life.

In the last book Raphael endeavors to destroy the
fatal leather. He who started out with suicide as a
goal now desires life with an intense and awful long-
ing. He turns to life's wise teachers, but they could
not fathom it. The mechanic strove to annihilate it
by violence, the chemist by reagents. Into a white-
hot furnace they thrust it, but it came out unsinged.
They subjected it to the full force of a voltaic battery,
but without avail. He knew, for had not the old
antiquary told him that whoso signed the compact
was thereby committed to the end, and could no
more repent and return than could a man repent and
return who should throw himself from the pinnacle of
some Eiffel tower.

One day he hurled it into the bottom of the well,
and plunged that night into some wild orgy. Next
morning the gardener brought it in, to show it to his
master.

" In drawing a bucket of water, monsieur, I brought
up this strange marine plant, and although it lives in
the water it is as dry as a fungus."

So saying, the man handed Raphael the inexorable
skin, now reduced to six square inches.

66 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

"Great God," he cried, measuring it, "I have but
two months to live. All the delights of life are danc-
ing like beautiful women around my dying bed. If I
call to them I die, for every wish is suicidal."

And now Raphael realizes the inevitable, and des-
pairingly returns homeward to face death. He retires
from the world, closets himself in seclusion, and strives
to live a vegetable life — to strip his soul of every wish
and all the glories of desire. But a long career of
self-indulgence has weakened his will-power, and the
gratification of his lower passions masters him. Ex-
cess has enervated and unnerved him. He is a pris-
oner to his passions. There hangs the magic talisman
upon the wall, fastened to a white cloth on which its
dreadful outline was accurately marked.

Four physicians now attended him. and soothed his
wasted body with opiates. That dry, sepulchral
cough bespoke strange murmurings of disease. He
saw it shrink gradually to the dimensions of a vinca
leaf; and as the strangling death rattle proclaimed the
end, the last morsel of the skin melted into nothing-
ness, and was gone.

Beloved, we have given a brief of this awful allegory
in much of the novelist's own words. Do you recog-
nize the types? The magic skin is the undisciplined
desire for worldly success, indulgence in which
shortens life by exhausting the nervous energy. Have
you not seen men devoting themselves to the posses-
sion of some prize, and finding, when the prize was
won, that they were no longer capable of deriving
pleasure from it ? Have you not seen men grow rich
and at the same time losing the power to enjoy their
riches? Do you remember, in Greek mythology, the

ENVIRONMENT. 67

story of Tantalus, from which our word "tantalize"
is derived? Do you recall the punishment the gods
meted out to him in the lower world? He stood up
to his neck in water, which fled from him when he
tried to drink it, and over his head hung fruits rich
and rare, which the wind wafted when he tried to
grasp them. Are we not having that scene enacted
before our eyes every day? There are men who can
adorn the walls of their homes with any number of
beautiful pictures, but who cannot appreciate them;
men whose library is filled with the choicest books,
but do not care to open one, unless it is a cash book.
Have you not seen such men?

Some years ago George William Curtis published a
volume called " Prue and I." There is a chapter in it
entitled Mr. Tidbottom's spectacles. The magical
quality of these glasses was that when their owner
looked at any one through them he saw the real man.
He looked at one man and saw a ledger, at another
and saw a champagne bottle.

There is an old proverb which says: "It is not
worth while to kill yourself to keep yourself." How
many are doing just that ! How many are losing the
higher life in grasping the endeavor to gain the lower
life! King James, learning of the poverty of Ben
Jonson, sent him five shillings. Jonson said to the
messenger:

"The king sends me five shillings because I live in
an alley; tell him his soul lives in an alley."

We do not admire the ingratitude of Jonson or his
unkind reply, but the lesson is plain : it is possible for
the life to enlarge and at the same time for the real
man to shrink ; it is possible to augment a fortune and

68 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

to diminish a man. Prosperity should be a life pre-
server; alas, full oft it is a life destroyer!

PRISONERS OF JESUS CHRIST.

But if the prisoners of adversity are ever with us,
and the prisoners of prosperity are a large and increas-
ing number, let us hasten, in conclusion, to take note
of that considerable and growing circle who are the
slaves of the higher life. These are that choice company
of select children who pride themselves in being called
the prisoners of Jesus Christ.

Such was the great apostle to the Gentiles. His
favorite introduction of himself is: "I, the prisoner
of Jesus Christ " ; his favorite title, " doulos." He was
a slave, and he gloried in it. " For from henceforth
let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the
marks of the Lord Jesus."

I have a friend with whom I spent many happy
years in college, and at the time of his graduation he
offered himself for missionary work in Africa. His
was a tall, handsome, personable physique, turning
the scale at 230 pounds. He would enter the football
field as captain of our college eleven, and not a man
but looked up to him as far and away, in every line,
the first athlete on the gridiron. For three years he
was pitcher on the 'varsity nine. He would enter the
examination hall, and when the marks were
announced he was at the top of his class, not in
one subject alone, but in all. At the time of his
graduation, he received the gold medal, and the
honor of being the only man in the history of the
institution that ever came out first in every depart-
ment of study. But he "sacrificed" a brilliant intel-

ENVIRONMANT. 69

lect and a great muscle for Christ. He went to
Africa.

Pray, dear reader, what sent him thither.? Was it
gold? Indeed to some of us who knew him best it
seemed as if all the wealth of Pierpont Morgan would
not avail to keep him home, so determined was he.
Was fame the enticement? Never will he be known.
What power, then, could it have been that drew him
from a lovely home and a lovely mother and two
lovely sisters to a place so uninviting? Ah, it was
the power of the cross, the slavery of Jesus — the same
slavery that sent Livingstone to Africa, and Duff to
India, and MacKay to Formosa, and Patteson to
Melanesia.

" Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all."

To all of life's captive children come the glad news
that the truth can make us free. " Is not this the fast
that I have chosen," saith the Lord, "to loose the
bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and
to let the oppressed go free?" Christ is the fountain
of all freedom. He is a door to those in custody;
wings is He to the cast-down in soul, hope to the
disquieted. He is health to the broken-hearted,
deliverance to the captives, liberty to the bruised.
He unshackles fetters. He emancipates serfs. Come
into His service, dear reader. Come voluntarily,
cheerfully, gladly. Disobedience and resistance are
bondage. The willing slavery of the best is liberty.
"In tune with the infinite" is liberty. "Life," says
Dr. Vandyke, "is self-change to meet environment."

70 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Is thine a weak body? Consecrate it to Him, and thy
very weakness will be made strength. Art thou
hampered by circumstance, and cast down by
adversity and ingratitude? Know that to those who
love God, who are the called according to His purpose,
all things work together for good. Is prosperity at
thy disposal? Watch and pray, lest it enthrall thee.
Surrender thine all to Him, a living sacrifice — body,
soul, spirit, time, talent, wealth, business cares, influ-
ence, duty, labor, home, wife, child. Be transformed
by the renewing of thy mind. Thus wilt thou find
that perfect slavery which is perfect freedom, as thou
dost prove what is that good, and acceptable, and
perfect will of God.

CHAPTER V.

HARMONY THROUGH EXPERIENCE.
"Come and see." John 1:46.

These words are wholesome. They are frank, open
and above board. The Gospel courts inspection.
Take your sledge and sound every stone in the build-
ing. No room in the temple is locked. Knock, and it
shall be opened. Free is the holy of holies to all.
Personal experience is the vital note.

The Christian religion has everything to gain from
thorough probing. It has no favors to ask; all its
favors are gifts. It submits itself to the test of
science. It asks men to think and prove. It places
us on the hills ; yonder is the north and the south, the
east and the west. It wishes nothing secreted. It is
for the daylight and the uplands. Let there be no
political wire-pulling, or slating or doctoring in the
dark. Let nothing be done in a corner. Let the
examination be merciless and thorough. Let the
whole truth be told. Search, sift, satisfy, question,
cross-question. Neglect not hammer and scalpel and
retort and reagent and electric coil and vernier. If
the investigation be open, and accurate, and honest,
and healthy, and keen, there is no doubt of the verdict.

Never was there such heart-hunger for truth as
to-day; never did the world ask such questions, and
so many; never was age so interrogative, never such a
cry for evidence. Is it a healthy sign? Surely.
Inquiry must not be crushed, but courted rather.

(71)

72 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

"If my faith is false, " said Bishop Berkeley, " I want
to know it; I want to know it now." The hope
immortal must not rest on what is perishable. The
Bible is a book that welcomes the strongest light that
lens can focus. There is nothing close or stifling in the
temple of revealed truth — no bad ventilation. Its
windows are open. The air is pure. Walking
through it one feels as if he were inhaling a breeze
from the mountain, a whiff from the ocean.

Jesus trusts His message to a world of thinking
men. Here it is in the open. There is no cloud, no
concealment. It has no mysterious esoteric pass-
word. It learns every language, sets its foot on every
silver shore; "its wings were made to flap in the
firmament." Such faith has our Lord in the inde-
structibility of what He came to teach, that He
charged His followers to proclaim it from the house-
top.

With this thought uppermost, let us hasten to the
text before us. '' Philip saith unto Nathaniel, Come
and see"; and for memory-support let us move
along two lines :

I. Come and see.

II. Come and see Jesus.

I. COME AND SEE.

Nathaniel could not believe that the Messiah had
come from Nazareth; but a little out-of-the-way
hamlet up in the highlands was Nazareth.

" Very well, " Philip says, " come with me. Do not
make up your mind until you see. Do not criticise
first, and then come. Come first, and then criticise. "

Surely that is fair ; verily that would be accepted by

EXPERIENCE. 73

any American jury. Christianity is the most reason-
able proposal that was ever presented to a thinking
world. Never does it drive, but draw; never does it
compel assent, but rather coax inquiry; it can be
tested. For certainty can be had on religious matters
as on scientific matters. Not all experimenting is
monopolized by the chemist. The soul, too, can
handle his tools with advantage. "O taste and see
that the Lord is good. " Nothing is more convincing
than the sense of taste. If a babe has once tasted
honey, all the nurses in town cannot persuade its little
tongue that it is not sweet. If you take a piece of
gold to the jeweller he applies the test of acid; should
the acid leave a stain, the claim of pure gold is falsified.

Some years ago there was a discussion in the press
as to the benefits of vaccination; it is not a question
for argument, but for statistics. A few years ago a
Frenchman, Mesmer by name, discovered what he
called mesmerism. It was scoffed at by the wise as
deception; but a committee of investigation was
appointed, and they reported favorably. Thus, and
in many ways, it may be seen that a large percentage
of questions in this world is experimental.

One may be a greater chemist than Faraday and a
greater reasoner than William Pitt, but he cannot tell
by mere reasoning whether a precipitate will be
formed by adding ammonia to mercuric chloride ; it is
a question, not of reasoning but of seeing. Dr.
Lardner, an eminent mathematician in the university
of Oxford, wrote an article for Blackwood's Magazine,
proving that no steamship could ever cross the
Atlantic; but the steamer "Sirius, " only a few
months later brought that article to America. He

74 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

also staked his repute as a man of science before the
House of Commons that no railway train could ever go
faster than ten miles an hour. Again it was a ques-
tion, not of reasoning but of seeing. We have not yet
forgotten that eminent engineer who once declared
that no bridge could ever be built across the Missis-
sippi; and we remember, too, that Babinet, the
French calculator, asserted that the idea of trans-
mitting a telegram from Queenstown to New York
was childish. Is it not recorded in the life of Comte,
that the great philosopher advised his followers to
cease attempting to find out anything about the filled
stars, because such knowledge was forever beyond the
reach of man? And does not the same historian tell
us that before he had been dead ten years the spectro-
scope was discovered ? And now our knowledge of the
fixed stars is respectably considerable. The dark
valleys and mountain peaks on Mars cannot be rea-
soned out; they must be seen. The monks of four
hundred years ago might have beheld Jupiter's
moons, had they only been willing to condescend and
look through Galileo's telescope. Ours is a universe
where stars crowd into the sky-ceiling in proportion as
the eye is assisted and made far-sighted.

There is what is called the "cushion of the sea.''
Down beneath the agitated surface there is a part that
is never stirred, peaceful as a vault. Formerly it was
believed there was no life down there. Learnedly and
conclusively did each, Thompson and Tyndall, prove
that the tremendous pressure and absence of light
made life at certain depths impossible. In the year
1880 the ship "Challenger" dropped Brooke's sound-
ing weight five miles deep in the Indian Ocean. The

EXPERIENCE. 75

valve of the weight was opened and closed, and some
of the dredgings brought to the surface. When
Prof. Bailey examined it, little marine insects were
uncovered. Diatoms he named them, and assigned
them to the vegetable world. Once more it was a
question, not of reasoning, but of seeing.

It is personal experience and sensuous perception
that carries with it the logic unanswerable. What
cared the man born blind that the Pharisees rejected
Jesus? He knew He had made him to see. What
cared Galileo for deductions against the motions of
the earth when he pointed his newly constructed glass
to those million jewels that blaze on the brow of night?
What cared Fulton for the laughs and jeers of his
cynical countrymen when he proposed to take a party
up the Hudson on the " Clermont " ? " The thing will
burst," says one; "it'll burn up," another cries;
"they'll all be drowned," exclaimed a third; "put
Fulton and his folly in the asylum," shouted the
multitudes that lined the banks. The great inventor
simply smiled and said: "Wait and see." Then the
paddle wheels began to turn.

THE BEST PROOF.

Suppose you deny the saving power of Christ's
blood to a man who is a living witness of that power;
what then? Is not the best proof that which needs
no proof? Self-evidence cannot be proved; it is its
own proof. When Mozart walked out into the fresh-
ness of the morning air and listened to the lark, he did
not feel like dissecting it to find the music.

"Sing on, sweet messenger," the great composer
said; "sing on, sing on.".

76 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

When Rosetti once plucked a rose he did not shake
its petals in the dust to find the beauty.

" Let the little diamond blow and blush," the poet-
painter thought; *'by this I know the rose is beautiful,
and that there is better beauty in the heart of God."

I do not wish to analyze my mother's love; I would
rather feel it. It were difficult to prove in syllogism
convincing that a parent loves its child, but what no
syllogism can state the heart knows. I do not under-
stand the exact relationship of Christ to the everlast-
ing Father; I have not mastered the metaphysical
analysis of His matchless character; I would much
rather just see Christ ; and as Lord Byron had himself
shut up all night in a dungeon in Venice that he might
have a truer appreciation of the life of the prisoners
and the joy of his own life of freedom, so I would shut
myself up in the quiet of my own closet and on bended
knee come face to face with my personal Saviour, that
I might have a truer conception of the slavery and
hideousness and enormity of my sins, and the glorious
liberty of the life to which He calls me.

But ever mindful let us be that the tests of truth
are multiform and various. Corn calls for a Fair-
banks, timber for a foot rule. We approach harmony
with the eye, and melody with the ear, beauty with
the taste, and duty with the conscience. The star
requires a telescope; the bacillus a microscope; but
the "heart is the window through which we see
heavenly things." No Gladstone would take a tape
measure to see how far aloft Homer's thought ran,
nor a steel-yard to weigh the heavy syllogisms of
Bishop Butler. You cannot sweep up sunshine with
a broom, nor raise doubts with a derrick. A great

EXPERIENCE. 77

cartoonist makes us smile by sketching some hod-
carrier as he examines a Turner masterpiece with his
penknife. It is as absurd to go to physical science
for the proof of Scripture as to consult solid geometry
for information on Bright's disease. Natural things
are naturally discerned; supernatural things, super-
naturally.

Just here let us pause to add, in passing, that
patient lovers of truth have been imposed on by the
unreasonableness of men who imagine that scientific
eminence entitles them to weigh Christianity; and
because they are experts with the electric coil and
scalpel, that they are, therefore, necessarily experts
in everything else. When John Locke's famous blind
man was once asked what scarlet was like, he an-
swered, "Like the sound of a trumpet"; when asked
what blue was like he answered, "Like the tones of
a flute." Not much more considerable was Sir
Robert Peel's estimate of Tennyson's poetry when
he offered the laureate a pension, confessing at the
time that he had never read a line of his writings.

Within his own province we admit the right of every
man to speak with note commanding. Here, for in-
stance, is some Audubon who has devoted all his life
to the study of birds. On that subject let us hasten
to kneel to his authority ; let us accept with becoming
modesty the deep results of his research. But herein
lies the danger of specialism. Our expert ornithol-
ogist becomes ambitious to dogmatize in some field
where he is not an authority, not even a fair judge.
Think of some Beecher writing a treatise on juris-
prudence, crossing swords with Blackstone! Think
of Mr. Darwin writing a commentary on Shakspere!

78 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Does not the story go on to tell us that one evening,
picking up Hamlet, the great naturalist found it so
dull as to drop into slumber? Think of Sir Isaac
Newton writing an introduction to "Paradise Lost"!
Once upon a time did he not read it and ask contempt-
uously at the close: "What does it all prove?" A
beautiful concept meant nothing to Sir Isaac, unless
it proved something; surely he forgot that his mother's
love was beyond the carnal grip of proof. Think of
Mr. Huxley publishing a volume of lay sermons on
the Gospel of John! Now, Mr, Huxley was a prince
among scientists, and Mr. Beecher was a king among
preachers; but the legal brotherhood respectfully de-
cline to take Mr. Beecher as their authority on juris-
prudence, and surely the church cannot be accused of
any extreme narrowness if she declines Mr. Huxley as
her prophet on religion.

II. COME AND SEE JESUS.

But the third little monosyllable of our text is a
transitive verb. Philip's invitation to Nathaniel was
to come and see Jesus. This must be our "gospel
for an age of doubt."

Today honest inquiry does not reject Christ; what
it does reject is misconception and caricature. It
rejects creed, but Christ's magnificence can be crushed
into no creed, it matters not how pliant and plastic.
A man climbing the flanks of Pike's peak cannot form
a final estimate of the survey; he is getting higher
every moment; the horizon is retreating, the vision
widening. There are traditional interpretations of
the Nazarene's teachings, just as there are traditional
photographs of His profile; but the world owns no

EXPERIENCE. 79

portraiture of the man, and the distortions of the one
are sometimes as pronounced as those of the other.
For as the heaven is high above the earth, so high is
character above creed and deed above doctrine. Mis-
sionaries tell us that there are Mohammedans, who
when they see a man intoxicated, exclaim: "He has
left Mohammed and gone over to Jesus." Such scan-
dal have we brought upon the sacred Name! Paul
says that if the men around the cross had only known
the true Christ, they would not have crucified the
Lord of Glory. If a doubting world would but come
and see the real Saviour as He is, they would no
longer antagonize and reject Him.

In the ancient myth, Orion, while sleeping on the
seashore, had his eyes put out; he recovered sight by
looking to the rising sun. If the inner eye be dark-
ened, let us turn our blinded hearts to the Sun of
Righteousness. Jesus is the true Light which lighteth
every man that cometh into the world. Thus will
our spiritual vision be recovered and made clear. For
no person was ever so open and accessible as Jesus.

Religion has nothing to fear from criticism. Ours
is an evangel, let us repeat once more, that thrives
best where the sunlight is strongest. It is for the
rostrum and the market-place. It brooks no monop-
oly. It is the friend of the daylight. It works best
in the fresh air and on the naked hills. It lives for
the commonwealth.

There is a famous passage in the opening bars of
Mendelssohn's "Elijah," in which the musician tries
to represent the despair of a nation perishing from
thirst. There are sullen, restless murmurings; there
are cries of heart-rending agony. The world has tried

8o HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

to slake its thirst at the dry wells of agnosticism, and
positivism, and a Christless Christianity; but to-day
the wail comes back, "Give us back the Christ we
have lost." The cry of the world to-day is, ''Sirs,
we would see Jesus"; not through a glass darkly,
not distorted by human prejudice or clouded by
faulty conception, but Jesus as He is, the real Jesus.

It is not Calvinism the world wants, nor Armenian-
ism; not the thirty nine-articles; nor is it creed and
confessional. Nothing but the living Christ Himself
will satisfy. There is a hungering and a yearning at
the world's heart for the living Bread which came
down from Heaven. Men have grown tired of a
lifeless verbiage. A Christianity without Christ is a
husk. What the world wants, what the world must
have, is the personal Jesus — Son of Man, Son of Mary,
Son of God. Personal experience of the Lord Jesus
Christ is the only harmonizer of the world's noisy
discordant, doubting voices.

If a student refuse to believe that a circle is round,
then it were folly for him to enter on the study of the
higher geometry. A physician cannot persuade his
patient that the medicine is not distasteful if he shuts
his mouth and clenches his teeth. "Come," the
Scriptures say, and they say it six hundred and
forty-two times. "Come, come, come!"

Come and see this meek and lowly Man for thyself.
Some things are plain till you commence to explain;
the noon-day star is lost in the brightness. Some
things are lustrous till you begin to illustrate. The
good Christian lady said that the commentary on
"Pilgrim's Progress," which her pastor had sent to
her, was not as clear as the text. No sermon about

EXPERIENCE. 81

Jesus was ever so simple and understandable as
Jesus. He hides Himself to irreverent approach, but
there is a beautiful simplicity about Him to the
child-spirit. The way-faring man, though a fool,
need not go astray. "Oh, taste and see that the
Lord is good." No doctrine do we propound; simply
an acquaintance with the real Jesus. Will you not
give me the honor, dear hearer, to introduce you to
the King? Come and see for yourself. Be satisfied
with no creed, no confessional. Let no priest or
pastor come 'twixt you and your Lord. Christ is
Christianity; come and see Christ.

A dreadful battle that was between Caesar and
Pompey, when 80,000 brave soldiers lost their lives.
Caesar tells us that he did not want to fight, but
Pompey pressed him. After the battle he stood upon
the field and exclaimed :

*' Alas, he would have it so! "

Dear sinner, if you are lost, it is because you will
have it so. Jesus invites you. He wants you. He
pleads with you. He yearns for you. He died for
you, and rose again. "Come and try me," He says.
"Give Me a chance. See whether or not I will
deceive you. If after a fair trial you find Me false,
you can return to your old companionships. "

Could any proposition be simpler, fairer ? You will
lose nothing. You may gain everything.

There are two lives possible for us. There is the
life of trust and the life of insurrection. The life of
trust is the life of surrender, which is the life of obedi-
ence, which is the life of harmony, which is the life of
happiness, which is the life of peace. The life of
insurrection is the life of self-will, which is the life of

82 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

rebellion, which is the life of estrangement, which is
the life of discord, which is the life of unrest.

Dearly beloved, are you in trouble? Won't you
come and see Jesus? Are you in temptation? Why
not come to Jesus? Are you in doubt? Are you
groping for the light ? Are you concerned about your
sins? Are you interested in pardon and peace of
conscience? Are you honestly anxious to find the
way? Do you feel the skepticism of the age eating
into the groundwork of your early faith? Let me
plead with you to come and make the acquaintance of
this man Jesus. I believe He will show you the light.
He will make things plain. He will make the way
clear. He will remove doubts. He will make your
confidence steadfast. He will give you assurance.
He will make you strong, and clean, and happy, and
brave. If I did not believe that with all my heart and
soul and strength and mind, I'd never preach again.

" I heard the voice of Jesus say,

I am this dark world's light;
Look unto me, thy morn shall rise,

And all thy day be bright.
I looked to Jesus, and I found

In Him my Star, my Sun ;
And in that light of life I'll walk,

Till traveling days are done."

CHAPTER VI.

HARMONY WITH THE CHRIST-LIFE.

" That in all things He might have the pre-emmence." Col. 1 :18.

The heroes of history are in danger of being lost.
After death a great man is ofttimes idealized. The
popular fancy plays around him with a glamor.
Stories pass current that have no factual ground.
Memory weaves myth. The pathway of the past
loses its roughness, for "'tis always twilight in the
land of Memory. "

Memory is the mother of mythology. Plato for
long was thought to have been bom of a virgin.
Alexander was believed to have been the son of a god.
All the Caesars were deified as soon as they were dead.
The early Greeks placed the Golden Age in the begin-
ning. Then Saturn lived in person on the earth. He
was the father of gods and men. There was no pain,
no sorrow, no disease. Sin was as yet unborn. This
was succeeded by the age of Bronze, when the gods
left the earth, and life and government declined.
Then followed the age of Brass, and finally the age of
Iron. And so the closer we approach the living
picture of the present, the coarser its coloring. It
seems a smear, a smudge, a melancholy daub. Verily,
indeed, a prophet hath no honor in his own country,
for '' distance lends enchantment. "

Attention has been drawn to our own George
Washington, who, alas! has been buried in aprocrypha
and haze. The real Washington has given way to the

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84 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

ideal. One genealogist has traced his ancestry back
to Odin. The Washington that had his weaknesses
is gone, and we have instead canonized a Washington
— Washington the saint, Washington the savior.

What has history done with Jesus? Let us hasten
to confess the strange anomaly that history has both
loved and hated Him. Criticism has attempted to
destroy Him. Scholars have labored to resolve Him
into Greek myth and Hebrew legend, but unavailingly.
At one time His humanity, at another His divinity has
been obscured. Socinus gave way to Strauss ; Strauss
to Renan. Stesichorus says that Helena, the heroine
of Grecian story, was never carried to Troy at all, and
that the Greeks and Trojans fought for a figure of the
far-famed beauty; so, it is claimed, did the evangelist
historians. "They wove the wondrous texture from
the tangled threads of fond remembrance ; the Sun of
Righteousness is a torch of human kindling. " But
the final verdict, and calm, is that He is historical.
His story is not a cunningly concocted tale. He is not
fabric, but fact. His personality remains imperish-
able. He is substantial and abiding. Men could not
have created Him if they would. That were unthink-
able. The creator is more than the creature. Did
Matthew create Jesus ? Then, truly has it been noted,
Matthew is greater than Jesus, and Matthew was a
tax-collector and a Jew. You cannot evolve a
Christ from a Matthew. . "It takes a Newton to forge
a Newton," said Theodore Parker. A real historical
Christ appeared. No other alternative fulfills the
facts. This is what Vandyke calls the "Gospel of a
Person. "

Of late years there has been a searching study of

CHRIST-LIFE. 85

the real Christ. The Christ of the gospels is better
known. The literature of His age has been examined
with such method and minuteness that we have a
truer setting. Heretofore we have known the Christ
of theological systems, the Christ of Chalcedon and
Constance and Trent and Westminster. To-day we
are studying as never before the Christ of Nazareth
and Jerusalem. And what is the reuslt? By consent
unanimous the world thrones Him to-day supreme in
the realm of Mentality, Morality, Ministry.

JESUS CHRIST AN INTELLECTUAL FORCE.

I. — Mentality. Jesus Christ is to-day an intellec-
tual force in the world. There is no school or court or
forum where His influence is not felt. There is no
speech or language where His voice is not heard. His
sound has gone out through all the earth, and His
words to the end of the world; they are ever ger-
minating, ever fruiting.

The test of greatness is its creativeness, and the
forces it sets astir. The Jews were an inartistic race
fenced around by the artist nations of earth — Assyria,'
Babylonia, Egypt and Greece. The apostles, who
never referred to the subject at all, have yet been
made the subject of more painting and statuary and
architectural memorial than the pagan gods of
Greece and Rome. St. Paul, who stood on Mar's
Hill seemingly oblivious to the friezes of Phidias, has
yet figured in the great cartoons of Raphael and the
oratorios of the masters. This is the commanding
and perpetual surprise of history, how twelve illiterate
fishermen have become the centre of all culture.
Jesus said: "I am the hght of the world," and cer-

86 HEAVENLY HARMONIES;

tainly He has "focused on Himself the light of the
world's learning." Haydn and Handel in music;
Raphael and Reynolds in painting; Angelo and
Canova in sculpture ; Grotius and Gladstone in states-
manship ; Blackstone and Burke in law. His teaching
has lent melody to Mozart's music, grace to Dona-
tello's marble, loveliness to Fiessole's faces. How
much does each Rembrandt owe to Jesus ! It was the
Madonna that made Murillo.

No one can see the whole Christ at once, just as no
one can see the whole mountain at once. He is the
gigantic figure of history. To take in His full propor-
tions, one must fall back. Some things are best seen a
little way off, as stars become visible when you look a
little away from them. Clamber up the flanks of
Mount Blanc and you are disappointed; but come
down into the vale of Chamounix and see the mighty
monarch tower!

His speech is not big in bulk. St. Augustine asks
for thirty volumes to systematize his theology; John
Calvin is even more ambitious, calling for forty folios.
But Jesus Christ can be read in half an hour. He
never tried to preserve it Himself, and He never asked
another to preserve it. But there is no speech like it.
It is so simple in phrase that a child need stumble not ;
it stands alone. Goldsmith says of Dr. Johnson,
"You make your little fishes talk like whales."
There is a foolish fondness in many literatteurs for
swollen language ; yet He spoke of heavenly things in
homely garb and humble fashion. Nothing could be
simpler or freer from sign of effort than the mountain-
talk. Without firstlies, secondlies, or thirdlies, it is so
informal as to baffle analysis. It does not suggest

CHRIST-LIFE. 87

Aristotle's Organons or Calvin's dialectics. " It is the
art that conceals art." It is not a mosaic; it is a
living unit. There are few quotations from learned
names. There is no long list of citations from any
Hillel or Shammai. He is not an expositor; He is a
revealer. His teaching is not commentary ; it is text.
It is not apologetic ; it is dogmatic. It does not have
to be changed to suit each changing age. It fits every
century — the nineteenth as well as the first, the first
as well as the nineteenth. It carries the same attrac-
tion to the west as to the east, to the east as to the
west. Gibbon sneered at the idea of our Lord's
sayings being original. He said he had read some of
them in a work written four hundred years before the
Nazarene ever saw the light of Palestine. But what
of that? The rising orb of day mocks not the paling
Venus. By its own superior glory it throws it into
shade, even as the glow worm keeps its enemies at
bay by the blinding brightness of its own flash.
Venus only caught her brilliant disk by reflection,
just as the mountain peaks are all ablaze long ere
sunrise, and flash to the valleys long after setting, the
glories that bathe their commanding crests. Music, so
the poet tells us, does not exist until you come to
man. Nature is a jangle of sounds — the roll of the
river, the plaint of the pine, the scream of the storm,
the liberty of the lark. Music means emotion. There
are a number of beautiful sounds echoing adown the
corridors of time, but only when Jesus came was
sound turned into music.

The intellect of Jesus was a puzzle to the scholars of
His day. It had a depth and a catholicity they could
not explain ; it had a passion and a poise they could

88 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

not account for; it had a positiveness and a con-
structiveness they could not interpret. This note of
authority was the more strange as He had not been in
their schools. He dwelt in realm apart. He came
not asking questions, but answering. Therefore, in
bewilderment, they said: "Whence hath this man
these things?" Emerging from the narrowest of
nations, provincial in thought and texture. He
stepped out on the arena of life to preach the widest
of faiths. Nine and forty times in the evangelists do
we read: ** But I say unto you. " " Here we have the
amazing picture of a simple Hebrew peasant placing
Himself, in words presumptuous, above His own
traditions, and asserting authority over human con-
duct. " He was a Jew at a time when Judaism was
clannishest. Judea was then the margin of the
civilized world.

Surely neither time nor place account for Him ; nor
does family. He came not of royal blood nor priestly
line. ** Is not this the carpenter, the son of Joseph? "
Hannibal is the incarnation of the wild Punic spirit.
The glory of a nation in the science of war calls forth a
Caesar or a Charlemagne. The poetry and polity and
philosophy of Athens explain a Plato. The culture of
the Renaissance accounts for Shakspere and Bacon.
The decadence of the church for Luther and Wesley.
But no law of heredity or environment embraces
Christ. ** There are no antecedents large enough for
His coming, no parentage lofty enough for such a
Son. " He stands in solitude.

Christianity has an ethical side, and much has
been made of it; but it has also an intellectual side,
and not sufficiently has it been stressed. It has a

CHRIST-LIFE. 89

message for the realm of truth as well as for the
realm of intellect. Christ is made unto us wisdom.
Among His disciples have been strong, heroic, ven-
turesome, clean-cut thinkers. Jesus places in the
fore of His teaching His comprehensive command:
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
mind." Our faith thrives not in the atmosphere of
fear, but of a sound mind. It does not serve roots
and dry, prickly shrubs to our mind-hunger. The
Christian who starves his mind starves it not for
scarcity of strong meat. "Christ reigns today as no
god in Rome, as no deity in Greece, as no divinity in
Egypt ever reigned — over civilized, free, progressive
men." He is so built into our being that no history
can be written without Him. His voice is on the rolling
wind. The light of His presence is flashed across the
mighty deep. The thoughts of His intellect are
woven into the web of the world's wisdom. Knowl-
edge of Him has created the richest culture, and
faith in Him has wielded the mightiest power.

THE REALM OF MORALS.

2. Morality. Jesus is supreme, secondly, in the
realm of morals.

In describing any great man, some one or two
terms are used. He is wise, or benevolent, or brave.
But otherwise is it with Jesus. In terming Him
intellectual, we do not mean that He is more intel-
lectual than moral or spiritual. His nature is cubic.
"The length and the breadth and the height of it are
equal." No one trait describes Him, because all
others are equally bold. His is not a mountainous
nature whose every peak has its corresponding valley,

90 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Switzerland-like. He is all mountain, and hence all
plain. His perfection shuts Him off from definition,
as a sphere cannot be grasped for roundness. Many-
years before Plato had expressed the hope that the
moral law might become incarnate. Law alone was
cold and colorless. Fulfilling this heart-hunger,
"the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."

Now, some of our brainiest thinkers have been
sadly defective in character and conduct. You are
to see the glowing genius, the daring achievement,
the immortal lyric, the literary charm. Byron and
Paul Verlaine soar with eye sunward and heart on
carrion; so, many of our sons of genius have had
depraved appetites and affections. Bums could sing
like the lark, and fly where foulness lay, like the
condor. How brilliant Aaron Burr the lawyer, how
like a beast the man! Oft in our biographical rev-
ellings the eye greets Bacchus dancing to the strains
of some Mozart or Mendelssohn. The abattoir is
hidden in honeysuckle. Looseness and license are
gilded with lustre, as a mud puddle might be fringed
with golden border.

Not thus Jesus. His character supports His intel-
lect even as the column supports the capital. In the
Houses of Parliament at London there is a standard
linear measurement built into the walls; it is avail-
able to all, and infallible. Jesus Christ is the infallible
standard of perfect manhood, built into the temple
of our humanity. In vain we search for lapse or
flaw. The strongest glass does not expose a blemish.
Enemies have searched His career with lamp and
candle, but no profane tongue has ever whispered a
suggestion against His blameless name. His char-

CHRIST-LIFE. 91

acter is blotless; His life spotless. His was piety
without penitence. His perfection has no parallel,
no approach.

Proof needed? Witness Channing, the Unitarian:
"His character is wholly removed from human com-
prehension." Witness Theodore Parker: *'His is
the mightiest heart that ever beat in human breast."
Witness Jean Paul, the freethinker: "Jesus is the
purest among the mighty, the mightiest among the
pure." Witness Strauss, the skeptic: "He is the
highest model of religion within the reach of human
thought." Witness Renan: "Whatever the sur-
prises of history, Jesus will never be surpassed."
We will add no more. He needs no certificate of
recommendation signed by any of earth's Rousseaus
or Voltaires. It helps not, nor does it hinder, what
John Stuart Mill thought of Jesus. Full oft we grieve
Him with patronage, but the verdict is interesting.

Now, character has this remarkable distinction:
you can place it. Given a certain character, and
you can tell when it lived and where. If a man is an
expert archaeologist and you give him a mummy, he
can tell exactly where the body was embalmed and
when. Denuding the dead of its wrappings, and
studying swathe and texture, he can fix precisely
place and period — anywhere between 3,800 b. c. and
700 A. D., the two extremes between which the art
was practiced. So with a code of laws. The political
economist can trace it to its indigenous clime and soil
and habitat.

But Christ cannot be localized. He belongs to the
nineteenth century as much as to the first, nay more,
for just as Handel must needs wait for our age with

92 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

its improved instrumentation and superior skill to
have a worthier rendering and a fitter embodiment
for his oratorios, even so the nineteenth century is
nearer Christ than the second, the second is at a
greater remove from Him than the nineteenth.
Verily He is the "man without a country," because
the man of every country. All national lines are lost
in Him. He belongs to all territory, all time. He
belongs to no class; He is beyond class.

Does the age explain Him? Great men some-
times are the incarnation of the spirit of the age. It
is not strange that Socrates should preach sobriety,
as when he philosophized the Spartans were a sober
people. Think, then, of the times in which Jesus
lived. Virgil and Horace had just died; Livy was
yet living, and at the apex of his fame. What say
they? The jury is unanimous; it was the corruptest
age that the world had ever seen. On Mount Olym-
pus were gods and goddesses representing every
human passion. Mars was the god of war. Mercury
of theft, Bacchus of drink. You could not offer a
greater insult to a Roman gentleman than to tell him
he was like his god. When Herod the Great gave
the order from his death-bed that his own child
should be strangled, he did nothing shocking to the
sentiment of his time. Froude tells us that few
statesmen died a natural death. Plato grouped
slaves and wives together in his "Ideal Republic."
Juvenal says: "Many are divorced ere their nuptial
flowers are faded." Seneca tells us that "many
women counted their years by the number of their
husbands." What saith Tacitus? That the Roman
Empire was so corrupt that he preferred not to detail.

CHRIST-LIFE. 93

"We can," he says, "but stand at the cavern's mouth
and glance into its dark depths; were we to enter,
our lamp would be quenched by the foul air." And
what saith our Matthew Arnold? If he has any
prejudices, they certainly lean not our way.

"On that hard pagan world, disgust
And sated loathing fell;
Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell."

Surely no honest man will claim that the age ex-
plains Jesus. " He was a root out of a dry ground."
Heaven's brightest glory and earth's blackest guilt
seem here to meet. In the mire a lily blooms.

Material bodies throw off emanations. The violets
breathe their aroma modestly. The mignonette
throws itself out farther and fills a wider circle. The
orange grove flings its fragrance far afield, flavoring
whole leagues with its welcome. So likewise men;
some have good atmosphere, some a bad. Some
seem born in the spring, some in the autumn. Some
breathe balm, some brimstone. Margaret informs
Faust that the very sight of Mephistopheles made
her blood curdle. She knew him not. He might
have been a holy hermit for aught she could tell.
His mouth was bubbling o'er with pious platitude.
Yet, in some way mysterious, she felt his approach
freezing to lofty impulse. She could not pray when
he was near.

How differently Jesus! In His presence faith
revived and blushed into bloom and color. Hypoc-
risy was quieted, and prayer found vent and voice.
There was a certain atmosphere around Him that
made it easier for His followers to believe in goodness.

94 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

Men were at their best in His company. They were
conscious of an uphft.

Not many Gladstones, a certain historian notes,
but there are a few that share with him the wreaths
of the rostrum. Not many Napoleons, but there are
some who dispute his empire in the art of war. Not
many Schuberts; some, however. Poets are plen-
tiful as stars in the evening, and perhaps Shakspere
approaches loneliness the nearest; but the gap be-
tween Shakspere and Milton is finite, while 'twixt
Jesus and His nearest rival the sweep is infinite. Of
Jesus alone can it be said that He had absolutely no
competitor. He is the peerless Christ. This is the
unique glory of the Virgin's Son — His aloneness.
There have been other sacred singers — Seneca, Con-
fucius, Zoroaster; but they are twittering sparrows to
the lark. Here is Socrates and Buddha and Marcus
Aurelius, but how they dwindle in the measurement!
"What prepossession," said Rousseau, ''to compare
the son of Sophroniscus with the Son of Mary ! What
an infinite disproportion!" Scripture has a gallery
of worthies — Enoch, Abraham, David, Paul — what
a roll call of immortals ! Yet one thing is common to
them all. They are all concluded under sin, and all
are penitent for sin. Jesus alone is sinless. In Him
all graces meet, as all colors melt into the white solar
ray. We do not see the several colors because they
are so blended. His is the full action of a perfect
nattire.

THE MINISTERING CHRIST.

3. Ministry. Whether we measure Christ by the
shadow He has cast upon each century or by the light

CHRIST-LIFE. 95

He has thrown across it, He is equally great. He
called Himself the light of the world. It takes light
to create shadow, and the greatest shadow is the
shadow of Himself — the Cross.

Certainly more hearts have been touched by the
shadow than the brightness. The death of Jesus is
the divine center of Christianity, the culmination of
His ministry, and the controlling chapter of the
Gospel story. Of Tissot's 365 paintings, 310 are on
the ministry and passion. "I, if I be lifted up from
the earth, will draw all men unto Me." "His suffer-
ings," says Renan, "will melt the noblest hearts until
the end of time." A theory is only powerful when a
heart stands behind it and fills it with its life, as the
reseiVoir lives behind the faucet, as the Rocky Moun-
tains live behind the Mississippi.

If He was the model preacher, He was also the
model pastor. Da Vinci paints Him a man burdened
with sorrow, but when the true artist arises he will
figure a ministering Christ. " He came not to be
ministered unto, but to minister." It is claimed
that Tintoret approaches nearest to that ideal. Im-
possible to discover a single selfish action in His whole
unparalleled career; so self- forgetful was He. His
love was mingled with pity. When He saw the mul-
titude He was moved with passion and compassion.
He went about doing good. He was brother to the
beggar. He never gave a thought to His own phys-
ical ease. He never performed a miracle for His own
comfort. He could have turned stones into bread,
and yet He hungered. His ministry was so manifold
that there was no phase of life it did not reach. He
went to the homes of the poor and the haunts of the

96 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

outcast, helping and healing. He never cloistered
Himself. He lived in the open. He ministered to
human tear by human touch. Truly man never
spake like this man, nor did Man ever live like Him.
His parables He first spoke, then acted. "He came
to seek and to save the lost."

The greatest are those who serve. Ever since, this
has become the foundation of all true chivalry. Here
is Antigone dying rather than desert the body of her
dead brother. Here is George Atley, a young
Englishman in the Central African Mission, with the
instincts and heart of a hero. The story came to us
last year of his being attacked by a party of natives.
He had with him a Winchester repeating rifle with
ten chambers loaded ; he had the party completely at
his mercy. Calmly and coolly he summed up the
situation, and finally concluded that if he killed them
he would do more harm to the mission than were he to
let them take his own life. So as a lamb to the
slaughter he was led, and when his dead body was
found in the stream, his rifle was also found, its ten
chambers untouched.

Here is a young doctor dying recently in one of our
hospitals. In a case of malignant diphtheria it
became necessary to clear the throat of the sufferer
by suction. He knew the outcome of the experiment ;
yet in the interest of science and suffering he volun-
teered, and saved a life by the sacrifice of his own.

And what shall we more say? Time would fail us
to tell of the Patons and Pattesons, the Allan Gard-
ners and Wilberforces, the Goughs and Willards.
Long the scroll of the self-sacrificing engineers and
captains and heroes unlettered, who did their duty in

CHRIST-LIFE. 97

the "scorn of consequences." Who are the true
Garibaldis and Garrisons and Grace Darlings of earth ?
Sons and daughters of ministry are they all. Rubens
never painted a picture like the career of Florence
Nightingale. No Handel ever composed an oratorio
like the career of John Howard. The Napoleons and
Caesars of earth have been murderers, not ministers.
They soaked the soil with the blood of their brothers,
but they never shed their own blood. Joseph Mazzini
was a true hero. He shed his own blood. Father
Damien was a true hero. He shed his own blood.
Abraham Lincoln was a true hero. He shed his own
blood. But if the greatness of these worthies is only
reflected greatness, their love is only reflected love.

Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the whole
matter. Criticism and culture throne the Christ pre-
eminent. Now abide His mind, His morals and His
ministry — these three. He is supreme in all, but the
greatest of these is His ministry. He is the great
theme of the pulpit. He remains the " chief est among
ten thousand and the altogether lovely." "If
Shakspere were to enter this room," said Charles
Lamb, "I would rise up to do him honor; but if
Jesus Christ w^ere to enter, I would fall down in wor-
ship and adore. " The old legend tells of the god
imprisoned in the tree. Whoever cut the tree
wounded the god. Ofttimes in our preaching we
feel we have been mutilating His glory. But take no
thought. That were impossible. The subject is too
lovely to be marred, too rich to be impoverished. No
man can rob the Matterhom of its majesty. Eighteen
hundred years of infidel distortion have not served to
fade the immortal features. They are lovelier than

98 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

ever; Voltaire said that he would pass through the
forest of Scripture and girdle all the trees, so that in
one hundred years not a limb would be left to fence
the sacred enclosure from profanity. But the one
hundred years are gone, and not a leaf hath withered,
and still the trunks are full of sap. We know Him no
more after the flesh, and yet His glory lingers on the
mountain tops and loathes to leave.

But there are some in whose eyes He hath no
beauty. He is despised and rejected of men. Think
it not strange. There are some in whose eyes the
sunset hath no beauty. But He shall see of the
travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied. Not in
vain was He wounded for our transgressions, and
bruised for our iniquities. With His stripes we have
been healed and reconciled to God. " For He is the
head of the body, the church, who is the beginning,
the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He
might have the pre-eminence. "

CHAPTER VII.

HARMONY WITH THE CHRIST-PITY.

" When He saw the multitude He was moved with pity." Matt.
9:36.

"Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, a
heart full of pity." Col. 3:12.

" Like as a father pitieth his children. Psalm 103 :13.

Turning over the pages of the Christ-teaching, how
wonderful, how summery, is the picture of God! He
is our Father, waiting on bird and beast; caring for
lily and sparrow; with tears for the under-man; not
breaking the bruised reed ; not quenching the smoking
flax; covering us with His feathers; with a great, big,
bursting human heart of pity for life's unfortunate
children.

How partial any paraphrase of ours must be of the
great world-Shepherd! Photographers tell us that
these mountains round about are too large for their
camera-plates. Compelled are they to take Baldy and
Greyback and San- Jacinto in sections. Thus, God is
too big for definition, too far away for perfect imprint.

So we turn to something tender; turn our kodak on
the foot hills, as it were, with their warmth and
greenery.

"When He saw the multitude He was moved with pity."
"Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved,
a heart full of pity."

"Like as a father pitieth his children."

" Pity, " says J. F. Clarke, " lies at the core of all the
great religions. " The chapters of the Koran, all of

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loo HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

them, begin with these words: "In the name of God,
the compassionate, the merciful. " The vast reHgion
of Buddha numbers fivehundredmillion votaries, and
pity is the key-note to it all.

KINDNESS TO ANIMALS.

Let us first speak a word on behalf of the brute
world.

That was rather a startling charge brought against
us Christians at the Parliament of Religions, some
years ago, by the Brahmins and Buddhists present,
when they said :

** You Christians are cruel to animals. "

Such sport as we witnessed once in a little Western
village cannot soon be lost to memory, when twelve
poor, helpless rabbits were let loose and hounded —
their limbs dismembered and torn apart, their flesh
hacked into pieces and tossed hither and thither by
the dogs, while cowardly oaths and cheers filled the
air with blasphemy.

Some one says there were no wild beasts until there
were wild men. Fallen man becomes a savage, and
asks for a gun. He would civilize with shot and
powder. He would be cruel to his own horse; his
own dog he would starve. Even the little feathered
songsters of the forest flee with trembling when man
comes near. The poet sings of man's inhumanity to
man. Alas, too, for man's inhumanity to brutes
and birds !

There is a bird called the white heron, that has its
habitat along the coast of Florida. There birds have
beautiful white feathers, known in milliners' shops as
aigrette plumes. Artistic and admirable are they,

CHRIST-PITY. loi

did we not know how they are obtained ; for at breed-
ing time the parent-birds are shot down in their nests,
and while the body of the mother is left to rot in the
sun, the little brood of young herons is left to starve in
the nest. It is not many months ago that we read of a
New York merchant boasting that in one season his
men had killed 150,000 birds for millinery purposes
along the coast of Florida, the result being that the
white heron is now almost exterminated.

Passing strange and wonderful, how the hand and
heart of man seem to delight in the inflicting of pain!
Our wonder grows apace when we remember that
man likes to tease and torture himself so little. Boys
pin insects to the floor, pull wings from flies, and
mutilate fowls and fishes. Not a sparrow falls to the
ground without our Father's notice, but for sport
older boys — grey-headed ones — will wound and lacer-
ate these innocent little chirpers. For the sake of
science, thousands of animals are yearly taken into
each laboratory, laid on a table of torment, and
slowly poisoned by some inoculating virus. For the
lust of land, nations will revel in the sickening cruelties
of war, and look with complacency on their brother
man in pain. Yet all the while the voice divine keeps
whispering to each ruthless persecutor, **Be ye kind
one to another, tender hearted, " pointing anon to that
glad time when the wolf shall lie down with the lamb,
the leopard with the kid; when the calf and fatling
and young lion shall walk together, and a little child
shall lead them; there being nothing to hurt or
destroy in all God's holy mountain.

" If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen,
how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" It

102 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

does not stir our wonder over-much that those who
are pitiless and without feehng toward God's innocent
creatures of the field and forest, should be hard and
unrelenting likewise toward their fellow-toilers on the
street and in the home.

When a statesman was once asked how the poor
people were to live through a famine, he replied :

" To with the people ; let them eat grass. "

When Marie Antoinette was riding to her betrothal
in Notre Dame, she ordered all beggars, cripples, and
paupers from the line of march. She would not have
even a glimpse of misery's children. Even a man as
great as Edmund Burke, referring to the manner in
which this selfish woman was afterwards treated,
speaks of the ** swinish multitude." When Prince
Mettemich, the Austrian diplomat, once told Napo-
leon that his scheme would cost the lives of 100,000
men. Napoleon laughed :

" 100,000 men! what are 100,000 men tome?"

Robert Louis Stevenson once crossed the Atlantic
in the steerage of an ocean liner. Although the most
considerable passenger aboard, he went in the steerage
from choice, not necessity. In his story, "The
Amateur Emigrant, " he describes for us what he saw.
He saw a supercilious parade of wealth that grieved
him, an insolence that enraged him.

Recently it was my privilege to converse with a
manufacturer of note. Standing at the window of his
office, he watched his workingmen coming out of the
mill and hastening to their noon-day meal.

"A lot of animals, " he gruffly remarked; "only by
holding the whip over them can I get anything out of
them. I treat them like animals. "

CHRIST-PITY. 103

Contrariwise, here is John Brown, his body pierced
with bullets, stooping to kiss the little colored lad on
his way to the gallows.

Here is Livingstone found dead on his knees in
prayer in the heart of Africa, with that great craggy
head tipped over resting on his open Bible, and his
finger pointing to the last words he ever penned in his
diary :

"Oh, God, when will the open sore of the world
be healed?"

Here is Mrs. Booth. When first she went to Shef-
field, it seemed as though the angry mob hurled every
foul epithet at her. They cursed her, egged her,
howled at her like drunken demons, silenced her in the
middle of her story. She stood before them on the
platform and burst into tears, and just said:

" My dear friends, I love you. "

Here is Lord Shaftesbury. A little before his
death, Miss Cobb wrote him a letter, asking what it
could have been that ever tempted him from the
society of royalty to be the knight-errant of the poor.
The answer he gave was never published till after his
death. He said that when a lad of ten or twelve, he
was sored to see that nearly all the aristocratic boys
with whom he played looked down on the poorer
children and taunted them.

Here is John Ruskin, heir to a million dollars and
with his pen earning a million more — the first prose
writer of the century, world-famous as an author at
twenty-one. Court and college strove to banquet
and do him reverence. No door of privilege but
swung wide open to his gentlest knock. Walking
through Whitechapel one day, he saw sights that

I04 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

made his heart sick. He saw every brick discharging
matter. He saw anarchy rampant, and hell let loose.
No blade of grass, no park, no herb, no shrub, no
flower, no marble, no book, no picture. When he
saw the degradation he was moved.

In that hour East London seemed to him like some
earthly inferno whose smothered Macedonian sob was
crying out: ''Won't you come and help us?" To
this place John Ruskin felt he must go. He founded
museums, clubs, schools, charities. He gave them
his paintings, curios, books, art- treasures. Weekly
he went thither to give them himself.

One day on his weekly visits there was a beggar on
the comer who asked of him daily an alms, and who
never had been refused. This day the grateful beg-
gar suddenly caught the outstretched hand and
kissed it. Mr. Ruskin, with a sudden impulse, bent
forward and kissed the beggar's cheek. Next morn-
ing the poor fellow came to his lodgings with tears in
his eyes, bringing a gift.

"Just a piece of brown cloth," said the beggar,
"from the robe of St. Francis."

This relic Ruskin cherished through life, thinking
it more beautiful than anything Turner ever drew.

A story of Henry Ward Beecher at his last service
in Plymouth Church is vouched for by the choir. It
was the last sermon he ever preached. Coming down
from his pulpit after the great congregation had
scattered, he felt tired and weary. He saw two little
ragged street waifs far back in the rear. Passing the
door, they had heard the choir rehearsing, and tim-
orously wandered in. The piece they were singing
was: "I heard the voice of Jesus say.*! The great

CHRIST-PITY. 105

man walked down the aisle, put his arm round each
little waif, stooped down and kissed them tenderly,
then walked out into the street, leaving that great
arena of his triumphs forever. How beautiful! The
great, big-hearted genius loving the little beggars.

And what shall we say more? Here lastly is Jesus.
When He saw the multitude He was moved. He
chose for His earthly home the place where were the
multitudes. Wherever He went He saw that sea of
swelling, surging life, that ceaseless pour, that noisy,
restless flow of faces. It appealed to Him. He saw
the crowd, and the depth of His being was stirred.
Dr. Morton, a Boston dentist, discovered anaesthesia
in 1846. The other day, in London, the jubilee of
this blessed boon to mankind was signalized. It
seemed to be the conviction of the great company of
medical experts present that the human body is
becoming increasingly sensitive to pain. How ex-
quisitively sensitive our Master was! How keenly
He could feel! How easily shrink! How alive in
every nerve of His nature! His surely was the most
impressive spirit that ever felt life's pathos.

Strauss was so touched by our Lord's tenderness
that George Elliot said she could not do justice to
translating the pages of the great German critic
without having the crucifix before her.

Ah, beloved, we may call ourselves disciples of the
Master; but if we are insolent toward the lowly,
high-minded toward the humble ones, we are not
His disciples. He will not, cannot own us.

Ours is an age that worships intellect. Many of
you have seen Delaroche's immortal oil painting in
the French Academy. He grouped around a marble

io6 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

chair of state the master minds of all ages — artists,
architects, sculptors, thinkers, inventors, statesmen,
scientists. He puts intellect on the throne. The
great hearts of the world are crowded out. Shaks-
pere is there, Homer is there, Newton is there.
La Place is there; but the John Howards and David
Livingstones and Florence Nightingales of earth are
not there. For in Delaroche's estimate heart had
no right to a niche in the Temple of Fame.

How different that scene in the Gospel gallery,
where the Lord of glory is seen washing the disciples'
feet, and teaching that the greatest are they who
serve.

Not that our faith belittles brain. It refuses to
assign to it the first place ; that is all. It champions
a truthful perspective. Its assault is on the heart.
Salvation means salvation of the heart; any other
kind of salvation were mythological. Let the head
rule the heart, and you have the Spanish inquisition.
Let the heart rule the head, and you have the Refor-
mation. Head without heart is cold, conventional
— a picture without color. No man will die for a
truth till that truth twines itself around the tendril
of his heart. Erasmus was keener-witted than
Luther, but Luther was bigger-hearted, and Luther,
not Erasmus, did the work. Daniel Webster had a
mightier brain than Harriet Beecher Stowe, but
Daniel Webster stood for slavery. It has been said
that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" did more to sweep the
slave curse from our beloved land than all the intel-
lects in Congress. The seal of Whitfield had for its
device a winged heart soaring above the stars. Jenny
Lind captivated the multitudes because her heart

CHRIST-PITY. 107

was sweeter than her voice. Once Ruskin and
Carlyle were discussing the literature of their day.

"Why is it," said Carlyle, *'that Emerson and
yourself scarcely pay for the cost of publishing,
while trashy novels run up into the hundred thou-
sands?"

Ruskin thought for a little, then answered:

"Because the novel has love in it."

Surely it is so. Man is not complete until some
great love possesses him. Love lifts the tired feet
forward and lends wings. Love levels the hills,
tunnels the mountains, shortens the journey along
which duty calls, cuts a foot-path through the forest.
No man can be great who is not tender-hearted. He
may be a great fighter like Alexander, or a great bear
like Carlyle, but not a great man. A great man is a
man easily touched. He is not the best general who
has a thirst for blood. He is the best general who
is the most humane.

Many there are to-day who steel themselves against
the tender in religion. They love to hear an intel-
lectual discourse, they tell us. But the appeal that
moves and melts they stifle and suppress. They
regard it as a synonym for weakness. If men feel
thus, not so God. His message is nothing if not
tender; the old, old story of the Gospel is full of tears.
Woe to the man who never weeps! Unworthy the
man who glories in it. Heroes have always wept,
from the giants that stride through Homer's lines
down to Grant and Farragut and Abraham Lincoln.
The man who thinks it weak to sob in the presence of
sorrow is not the child of strength or greatness. We
pity people born deformed in body, the man with a

io8 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

club foot, him of the withered arm. Shall we have no
sympathy for the man with withered morals, for the
pathos of life, its sadness, its anguish, its sins?

Sin it was that necessitated Calvary. In Geth-
semane I see my Saviour sweating blood-drops for the
sin of the world. On Calvary I see Him wrestling
with the enemy, and pouring out His life. Has that
no appeal for my heart ? When He looked down upon
the multitude, He wept. He saw them as sheep
not having a shepherd. He wept over their hardness,
their unbelief, their turning a deaf ear to their own
eternal welfare. He wept when He thought of what
they were missing. Never did He weep for Himself.
No nails driven in His hands or feet ever started a sigh.
When man denied Him, betrayed Him, mocked Him,
spat upon Him, crucified Him, He did not weep; but
when He came nigh unto Jerusalem, that wicked city.
He burst out into tears :

"Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the
prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee,
how often would I have gathered thy children
together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her
wings, but ye would not ! "

He weeps over you, this morning, sinner. He weeps
over your hard, cold indifference. He weeps because
you reject His overtures of love. " You will not come
unto Me, that you might have life ! "

Let us note, lastly, that love is never at its highest
till it is mingled with pity.

Balzac has driven home this truth with a story.
He brings us back to an old Flemish mansion in the
year 1812, where a woman, Josephine by name, was
sitting in a deep arm chair one evening, looking out

CHRIST-PITY. 109

upon the garden. She was hard-featured ; she was
plain. Her thick, black hair fell in heavy curls upon
her shoulders. Her forehead, very prominent and
narrow at the temples, was yellow in tint. Her face,
Spanish in type, was dark-skinned, and pitted with
the small-pox. Hot tears were rolling from her eyes.
The nose, aquiline as the beak of an eagle, gave the
impression of some interior malformation. The lip
was large and curved, yet betraying the pride of noble
birth. Yes, she was ordinary, that was clear; and
still the worst is not told, for she was both lame and
deformed. She belonged to one of the illustrious fam-
ilies of Belgium, but she had renounced her share of
her father's property to enable her brother to make a
marriage worthy of the name, for she never expected
to marry herself, being weighted down by a sense of
physical disfigurement.

And now the rich nobleman, Balthazar, appears
and wishes to wed her; but her poverty and his
wealth, her deformity and his handsome physique,
make her distrustful. The sense of her admitted
imperfections made her difficult to win as the most
beautiful of women. The fear of some day displeasing
the eye of her lover roused her pride. She asked
herself if Balthazar were not playing with her; were
not seeking a domestic slave ; whether he had himself
no secret defect to be satisfied with a poor, ill-favored
girl who had nothing to offer him. It would need a
volume, the novelist goes on to say, to paint the love
of a young girl humbly submissive to the verdict of a
world that calls her plain. It involves fierce jealousy
of happiness, freaks of cruel vengeance against some
fancied rival, that exaltation of heart which the face

no HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

must not betray, the fear that we may not be under-
stood, and the boundless joy of being so; for ugliness
hath no charm. A beautiful woman can be her
natural self, the world overlooks her little foibles ; but
a single glance can check the noblest expression on the
lips of a homely creature, give timidity to the eye and
awkwardness to her carriage.

Often, to test his love, she refused to wear the
draperies that partially concealed her deformities, and
her Spanish eyes fairly danced when she saw that
Balthazar thought her beautiful as before. The glory
of our humanity is to be adored for an imperfection.
Not to observe a woman's deformity may be human,
but to love her because she is deformed, that surely is
divine. What is that beautiful thought of Beaumont
and Fletcher? ** Of all the paths that lead to woman's
heart, pity is the strongest." There are those who
are loved for their beauty, as there are those who are
married for their money. But love bestowed upon
life's disinherited children, verily that must be the
mysterious passion, the perfect flower of heaven.

And this is the sermon that Balzac's story preaches
with such splendid effect, that love is only perfect
when mingled with pity. This is our Heavenly
Father's love. "He saw us ruined in the fall, yet
loved us notwithstanding all." "Like as a father
pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear
Him. For He knoweth our frame; He remembereth
that we are dust. "

Oh, mother, dear, why do you waste such love on
that poor child? Do you not see that he is a cripple,
has curvature of the spine, always will be a cripple?
See the little fellow creeping on his hands and knees!

CHRIST-PITY. Ill

The doctor says he can never be strong; always will
be a source of anxiety to you; most likely never will
be able to walk. Why worry so over him? What
good will he ever be ?

Ah, if you spoke thus, she would give you a look that
would shrivel you.

" My silent boy, I hold thee to my breast.

Just as I did when thou wast newly bom.
It may be sinful, but I love thee best,

And kiss thy lips the longest night and mom.
Oh, thou art dear to me beyond all others,

And when I breathe my trust and bend my knee
For blessing on thy sisters and thy brothers,

God seems the nighest when I pray for thee."

Such, dear reader, is God's love for us — His poor
sin-crippled children.

CHAPTER VIII.

HARMONY AND COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP.

" Why is the house of God forsaken? Neh. 13 :11.
"Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as
the manner of some is." Heb. 10 25.

Two voices from long-ago!

Back, far away in the twilight of History, the
prophet seeth the forlorn condition of his people now
returning from exile, and moumeth the fact that the
temple of worship was being deserted; while many
centuries later the writer to the Hebrews takes up a
like lament, wameth his readers against a similar
neglect, provoking them conjointly to love and good
works and the duty of public assembling.

Herein is surely found a danger-lesson for us. For
it were so patent on the very face as to seem scarcely
needing of proof, that the sanctuary to-day is being
abandoned, that church attendance is on the wane,
that it is no longer *' not respectable " to live aloof, but
rather that some of the most honored, upright and
reputable of our citizens are stone deaf to the call of
church chime and steeple, that in our large cities at
least three-fourths of our voters never darken the
doorway of any meeting place for prayer or praise, and
that from one end of our beloved land to the other the
same cry is heard: "Why is the house of God for-
saken ? " The church to-day has lost its foregone hold
upon men. Altogether is that statement beyond a
doubt. So noticeable is the lapse as scarcely to be
entitled to serious debate.

(112)

COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 113

What may some of the reasons be that are forth-
coming in answer to the question the prophet asks
with such heaviness of heart?

Many there be who find explanation within the
church itself — charging her, as at present organized,
with being behind the times, with slavery to tradition,
with intellectual iron-rule, with having a shivering
dread of thinking, with emphasizing doctrine to the
discount of deed, with sermon weakness and over-
stress of the emotional.

These are not uneducated men. Ofttimes they are
educated men, men of sight and insight, and this is the
result of their honest review. On the other side they
pass by. In truth, hardly could they do otherwise.
Carrying out their convictions to the letter, they will
not ask her ministrations, even in sorrow. Having
ignored it in life, to be consistent they should ignore it
also in death; and compared with the man who lives
indifferently and apart, and yet wishes a Christian
burial, men of that type the church rather admires.

A large company there is who have forsaken the
church because they claim they need the Sabbath for
rest and outdoor diversion.

"I labor all the week," the clerk says, "in an
atmosphere of dust and impurity. I feel the need
when Sunday comes, for fresher vision, for purer light ;
a breath of the ocean will lift me higher unto things
unseen. What need for a building made with hands,
when out yonder is the greater building not made with
hands? Can I not find God in the wide temple of
nature on the mountain top, under the oak tree, by
the sea shore, where the mighty Maker is the organist,

114 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

where the heaving billows are the bellows, where the
sea birds are the choir? "

And time would fail us to detail the varied lesser
reasons that have estranged so many from the sanc-
tuary; that the poor are excluded from its worship;
that the clergy are the servants of the moneyed class ;
that the pew rental system grades the people and robs
the service of its spiritual brotherhood and equality;
that the pulpit rings not with a genuine note. Many
and multiform are the reasons given why the temple of
worship is being forsaken.

Excuses, alas, not reasons! For it doth seem that
the real reason is rarely confessed. Ours is an age in
which, in religious matters, men hasten to shift the
real issue ; and the clear, concurrent testimony of our
students and seers to-day sweeps all pretence aside,
leads direct to the inner life, and points to the skepti-
cism of a materialistic and mammon- worshipping age,
which has changed the emphasis from Eternity back to
Time, as the root-cause of all our spiritual unrest.

It is the purpose, then, of this chapter to introduce
the Gospel message by hastening to note that for
which the temple of prayer forever stands — immova-
ble, impregnable.

I.-^GOD.

God is the one answer of every human want. No
age, no nation, no people, but has some time uttered
the cry: ** Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! "
Tribes there are without written speech, without mar-
riage, without government-code ; but no tribe without
its deity. Perhaps it is a deity of wood or stone or
tree or star or reptile; a deity, may-be, of dead

COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 115

ancestors; but some deity. The soul of humanity
looks Godward as easily, as naturally, as the eagle-
wing soars cloud ward. To say that such a universal
instinct means nothing were as unreasonable as to say
that the lifting of the vapor from the river-depths
means nothing.

The belief is all the more remarkable when we
remember that it runs athwart the grain of life's
natural temper. It lays a tax upon the time, the
talent, the opportunity, the possession, the outfit. It
asks for tithes, temples, pagodas, sacrifices, priests,
idols, graven images, golden calves. It imposes obli-
gations men do not care to meet. Why does not sober
reason rise and overturn a faith that is distasteful?
Because the faith is rooted in human life. To tear it
out would tear out man's humanity.

In the early years of the past century there arose in
France a most remarkable man. Poor was he,
inordinately ambitious, trained to hardship, clothed
with exceptional brain-power, and yet withal a man of
toil, indefatigable, unceasing — Augustus Comte. He
was an authority on astronomy, political economy,
mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. He died
in 1857, and to this day the anniversary of his death is
celebrated by his French and English followers, by
such men as John Morley, Frederic Harrison, and, in
her day, George Elliot. For sheer intellectual grasp
and vigor, Comte ranks with Leibnitz and Descartes.
Humboldt was one of his admirers, and John Stuart
Mill called him the "most wonderful deep sea thinker
since the age of Aristotle. " His character was stern,
inflexible, but pure, high-minded, and with an iron

ii6 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

devotion to what he considered the service of man-
kind.

He was the founder of a system of thought called
the Positivist School; that is, nothing is to be accepted
which cannot be proven by the positive agreement of
the senses. The truths of religion, like the facts of
science, were made to rest on certainty. Thus God
was swept aside. " He led Him to the confines of the
universe and bowed Him out." Religion was done
away with. Bibles were knocked down with ruthless
and fearful iconoclasm. Hard it is to believe, and yet
the fact abides, that before Augustus Comte died he
established a church of his own, with its calendar of
saints, its sacred days, its catechism, its Sabbath, its
Bible, its God. The cathedral mind of this great man
had bowed the Deity out, but the heart insurrected
and rebelled.

Surely it were difficult to conceive a more convinc-
ing proof that God is grounded in human life. That is
the witness of every temple. No steeple throughout
the land but points the heart to the Unseen One
whose throne is heaven, whose footstool is earth. Day
unto day the church spire speaks, and night unto
night it showeth knowledge. With steel point and in
starry letter it writes its creed across the breast of
night, "I believe in God the Father, Almighty Maker
of heaven and earth. "

II. — WORSHIP.

The Greeks called man "anthropos," meaning the
upward-looking one. "Man is the creature of
religious instincts, and must worship something," is
the pronoimcement of Kant. If dogmatism be suf-

COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 117

ferable anywhere, surely it is here, for man, wherever
found, is a worshipful creature, capable of appreciating
capable of admiring, capable of extolling. That
outburst of the soul, that rapture and rush of the
emotions, that exclamation in the presence of the
picturesque, that is the natural sentiment of worship.
Education and study exalt it into a culture; revela-
tion into a duty.

This power of appreciation it is that elevates man
and places him on the heights. That which lifts
us above the savage is the capacity to admire, and
the wider the range of one's admirations the higher the
type of his manhood. He who can enthuse over a
sweet song, a beautiful landscape, a perfect poem, a
noble painting, a faultless statue, a clever mechanism,
any perfect piece of art, he, we say, is an all rounded
character. Turner, standing on the foothills watch-
ing the sunset tinting the Matterhorn, bared his head,
bended his knee. He spake not, for voice were dumb,
speech irreverent. He who can discover nothing in
the gallery of beauty to kneel before, he who can find
in the temple of wisdom nothing more to learn, he
surely asks claim on our long suffering and pity.

When Rubenstein was in this country some years
ago, a friend took him to hear his pastor preach.
Asked the following Sabbath if he cared to go again,
Rubenstein replied:

"Yes, but you must take me to hear a man who
will tempt me to the impossible."

Rubenstein felt the need of some excellence unat-
tainable to tone up his jaded nature. Ideals we call
them. Ideals each true life must have. If there
were no God, the human heart must make One, for

ii8 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

where there is no vision of the Infinite, the people
perish. Worship is a true soul-view of God; rather
is it a soul-view of the true God. It is the highest
admiration, because the admiration of the highest.
Worship is worthship — a confession of worth. It is
a reverential upward-look. It is the attitude of the
penitent rising and turning his face skyward. Most
truly does some one say that the evil of atheism is
not its open avowal that there is no God, but rather
its silent implication that nowhere in all this universe
lives one greater, wiser, holier than itself. The evil
of atheism is its monumental self- deification.

During the past century Renan has been the
acknowledged leader of the critical school in France.
Perhaps he had as little innate reverence as any
scholar of his time. His teaching at bottom is
atheistic. In the preface to his "Recollections" he
pens these words:

"One of the most popular legends in Brittany is
that relating to an imaginary town called Is, which
is supposed to have been swallowed up by the sea at
some unknown time. There are several places along
the cost which are pointed out as the site of this
imaginary city, and the fishermen have many strange
tales to tell of it. According to them, the tips of the
spires of the churches may be seen in the hollows of
the waves when the sea is rough, while during a calm
the music of the bells rises above the waters. I often
fancy in my calmer moments that I have at the
bottom of my heart a city of Is, with its bells calling
me to devotion. At times I stop to listen to these
gentle murmurings, which seem to come from hidden
depths, like voices from another world."

COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 119

Truly a wondrous confession for the great French
skeptic! Underneath the cynical thinking and prof-
ligate life of this wonderful man, the voice of God
was clamoring for homage. For praise and honor
are claimed by Him who fiUeth all in all.

Surely there is deep need in our land to-day for
some embankment to stem the tide of our growing
irreverence. In these days when veneration, like
meditation, is becoming a lost art, what hope is there
for America's rising youth if the tabernacle of prayer
becomes empty of its penitent children? When
humbling before the Most High is set at naught,
when the awful holiness of Him we worship, when
the voice of hosanna and the principles of eternal
truth are no longer heard in prayer of song or sermon,
whither then shall we be found tending? Is it pos-
sible for a nation to become godless? That is, is it
possible for a nation to lose its conception of the
divine hohness? For a surety this is not a little
matter. It is vital. Bound is it to tell in society's
forward march. The church is the shrine of God-
reverence. It asks the youth whose garments have
been soiled, to fall forward into the dust and cry:
"Unworthy, unclean!" Thus, by the grace and
power of Christ, will he be Hfted and rise up a worthier,
a better man; "for he that exalteth himself shall be
abased, and he that humble th himself shall be ex-
alted."

III. HOLINESS.

And holiness is the only pledge and hope of the
future life, for the church is the perpetual memorial
to that life. Godliness is to be the church's pole-star

120 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

till time shall be no more. One calls it the "human
life of God," as that life was faultlessly enfleshed in
Jesus. Righteousness, holiness. Godliness — this is to
be our never-ageing message. The church stands for
the most vital thing in life — the art of teaching men
how to live. On creeds and articles the minds of
men have always differed, and there is no sure evi-
dence forthcoming that the future will not repeat the
past; but right and wrong are as old as Orion and its
nebula. Right will never lose its lustre ; never wrong
its shame. Full oft and repeatedly we hear the
criticism made that the church is narrow; but how
otherwise could she be? Is she not the only organi-
zation in the world to-day that stands for unflinching
antagonism to wrong? Her battle cry must ever be
hostility, not victory. Victory is sure, but victory
belongeth unto Him for whom are all things and by
whom are all things. To us pertains the warfare,
and "unconditional surrender" are the terms. "If
the church were not," means that the supremacy of
evil would be unchallenged, the field abandoned, and
Satan have his own wicked swing.

Thus far we have not entered on the disputable.
So many are the immortal verities on which all minds
agree, that life were over-brief to exhaust even these,
and the world is slowly learning that, as the certain-
ties are more than sufficient to fill Hfe's hurrying
hours, fighting and quarreling over things debatable
is time- waste, sheer and simple. God and worship
and right living are not problems controvertible. So
how honest-hearted, fair-minded business men can
remain stone-deaf to the Macedonian cry the church
is uttering to-day, were passing strange and puzzling.

COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 121

Recently it was my fortune to spend a day with a
great manufacturer of national note. Two thousand
five hundred men has he in his employ. Relating the
story of his strict, early training, he told me how he
had been brought up on porridge and the shorter
catechism. Dropping into a familiar mood, he said:

"I haven't been to church for eleven years."

Emboldened by his freedom, I ventured to inquire
how he spent his Sabbaths.

"Well," he answered, "I generally play a game of
golf on Sabbath morning, sleep on Sabbath after-
noon, glance over a magazine Sabbath evening, retir-
ing not later than nine, and awaken to my work
Monday morning, fresh as an athlete."

Meanwhile this wealthy magnate, with his abound-
ing influence, with two thousand five hundred work-
ingmen watching his every movement, with five
thousand children of these workingmen growing up
around him to repeat his example, has deserted the
faith of his fathers, left the village preacher and a
few good women to teach these children in the Sab-
bath school the commandments of safe and holy
living, not dreaming that some day a strike may be
forthcoming, when these very boys will rise up in
their envy to burn his buildings, tear down his prop-
erty, and threaten his life. For the church to-day is
the only peace-pleading tribune between the rich and
poor. Her mission is to heal wounds, to pour oil
upon troubled waters, to proclaim the gospel of
brotherhood and good will. When we see in our
literature the widening spread of a revolutionary
socialism ; when we mark how money is growing year
by year to be the universal monarch of men; when

122 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

we see how ease, which usually means disease, is
eating into the body politic; when we watch realism
wedging its way into the realm of fiction; when we
note the slavery of social arrogance and the lustful
heartlessness of corporate wealth; when we see the
yawning gulf between the privileged and the lowly
deepening each year, aye, and widening; when we
study the drink curse, the gambling, the lust, the
sins of a violent and vulgar nature, those of a soft
and sinuous type; and then, when we remember that
the church is confessedly the only intermediary, the
only hope of our American society, the only healing
ointment for her sores and bruises, the only antidote
to her sins — the burden is laid heavily upon our hearts
to ask how it is that patriotic, country-loving men
can so easily emancipate themselves from the great
Christian brotherhood and shirk its duties, its toil, its
labor, its support.

Some years ago Prof. Henry Rogers wrote a book
which he called *' The Eclipse of Faith." He dreamed
that on a certain morning the world awoke to find
that the Bible had been absolutely banished from it.
Every copy of every Bible in every tongue had dis-
appeared, and even the quotations from the Script-
ures had become extinct. The very name and
memory were lost. A striking conception it was,
and leading to some startling conclusions.

In fancy let us picture a like lament over the
passing of the church. Every cathedral, church,
chapel and cloister in this great land of ours razed
level with the ground; 30,000 pulpits from Maine to
Mexico hushed; the voice of the preacher no longer
heard in the land; the words of Jesus forgotten; no

COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 123

longer a handful of men to lift up a little wooden
cross between heaven and earth; no more any refuge
for the weary and heavy-laden, the man bankrupt in
hope, the woman bankrupt in love; no longer any
listening to what the unchangeable God has to say
concerning sin and pain and want and woe and pardon
and peace. The world has lost its faith.

Tennyson has drawn for us this picture in its
startling outline. They are husband and wife. At
length they make up their minds to drown them-
selves, and you fancy you see them wading into the
water as he says:

" Lightly step over the sands ! The waters — you hear them call !
Life with its anguish, and horrors, and errors — away with it all !'
And she laid her hand in my own — she was always loyal and

sweet —
Till the points of the foam in the dusk came playing about our

feet.
There was a strong sea-current would sweep us out to the

main.
Ah, God, though I felt as I spoke, I was taking the name in

vain —
Ah, God, and we turned to each other, we kissed, we em-
braced, she and I,
Knowing the love we were used to believe everlasting, would

die:
"We had read their know-nothing books, and we lean'd to the

darker side —
Ah, God, should we find Him, perhaps, perhaps, if we died, if

we died !
"We never had found Him on earth, this earth is a fatherless hell —
Dear love, forever and ever, for ever and ever farewell !
Never a cry so desolate, not since the world began,
Never a kiss so sad, no, not since the coming of man."

The church has now entered upon a struggle for
life. The coming revival is to be one of righteous-

t^4 HEAVENLY HARMONIES.

ness. Every consideration to-day that makes for
the permanence of our institutions asks for the pros-
perity and welfare of the church, and the refusal of
men to come out boldly and lend it their support — to
say the least — is ungenerous, and savors of selfish-
ness "The rich and the poor meet together, the
Lord is the Maker of them all." That is Christian
socialism. No man can genuinely love his brother
man imtil they have clasped hands and hearts around
the Father's hearthstone. Europe is a standing wit-
ness to that fact to-day; where the sanctuary of
prayer is empty, there class hatred is found ferment-
ing.

Once it was my fortune to sail up New York harbor
on a peaceful Sabbath morning. Far away the bells
were tolling, and hard by old Trinity, with its slender
spire shooting above the smoke, was calling the
people to forget the noise and din and clatter of the
counter and come apart into a quiet place to rest
awhile. New York was summoning her tired chil-
dren to the feet of that Father in whom we live and
move and have our being. The great metropolis was
calling her weary ones to worship, her erring ones to
pardon, her fainting ones to rest and peace.

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