Lay sermons

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LAY SEEMONS

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LAY SEEMONS

BY

JOHN STUAET BLACKIR

PROFESSOR OF GREEK
IN THE UMVERSITF OF EDINBURGH

NEW YOllK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

743 AND 745 Broadway
1881

4703r'0

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TO

AETHUE MITCHELL

M.D., LL.D.

FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES SCOTLAND,

COMMISSIONER OF LUNACY FOR SCOTLAND,

AN EFFICIENT PUBLIC SERVANT, A SOUND ARCH^OLOGIST,

AND A MAN WISE IN THE BEST WISDOM OF LIFE,

THESE DISCOURSES

ARE WITH SINCERE ESTEEM DEDICATED
BY

THE AUTHOE

PEEFACE.

These Discourses originated in a series of Sabbath
evening Addresses, which, at the request of the late
excellent Maurice Lothian, I delivered to the Young
Men's Association connected with Dr. Guthrie's congre-
gation. One or two of the Discourses delivered there,
written out after delivery, appear here ; others were
delivered on other occasions to different audiences ;
some published in Good Words, one in the Contemporary
Review ; and all of them submitted to a severe process
of thorough study, revision, and, where necessary, en-
largement. I have called them Sermons, not Lectures,
because, though some of them were delivered in the
form of popular lecture, they have all a direct practical
drift, and are intended either to apply Christian Ethics
or to expound Christian doctrine in reference to matters
of special interest in the present age of theological
disturbance and religious transition.

viii PREFACE.

I may mention that I am in no wise walking out
of the proper sphere of my studies in taking up theo-
logical subjects, having been educated for the Church,
and habitually prosecuted the study of the Scriptures
in the original tongues as one of the most fruitful fields
of scholarly activity.

College, Edinburgh,
October 1881.

CONTENTS.

I.

PAGE

The Creation of the World 1

11.

The Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Lord's Day . 81

III.
Faith 113

IV.

The Utilisation of Evil . . . . . .138

V.

Landlords and Land Laws . . . . .157

VI.

The Politics of Christianity 191

X CONTENTS.

VII.

I'AHE

Thk Dignity of Lauour 221

VIII

The Scottish Covenanters . . . .236

IX.

On Symbolism, Ceremonialism, Formalism, and the

New Creature 299

APPENDIX.

The Metaphysics of Genesis I. .... 333

THE CEEATION OF THE WOELD,

(Genesis i. 1-31 ; ii. 1-3.)

I HAVE often thought of that strange misfortune of
human nature — or wonderful condition of all nature,
should we not rather say ? — by which a high power of a
good thing so readily becomes a bad thing, and the
superlative degree of a great advantage turns over, by
a slight touch, into a great disadvantage. Without
light, for instance, as we all know, no picture is possible ;
but much light certainly spoils the picture ; nay, the
greatest skill of the greatest artists is shown in nothing
so much as in the cunning management of darkness.
Money, again, is a good thing, a very good thing, an
indispensable thing : so Aristotle taught on the banks
of the Ilissus more than two thousand years ago ; so
venerable and thoughtful pundits teach on the banks of
the Ganges at the present hour; so cunning Greeks,
and canny Scots, and vigorous Englishmen, always have
believed, and always will believe, with a most persistent
orthodoxy. Yet mountains of money, we see every day,

B

2 LAY SERMONS.

often serve no other purpose than to smother and to
bury the best humanity of the man who has made it ;
and as for those who do not make it, but only get it,
there is no surer receipt for riding post-haste to perdi-
tion tlian to give a young man of a certain average
quality of blood, at a certain stage of his existence, a
thousand pounds or two in his pocket. So it has often
struck me, in reference to Christianity, that a great
many people at the present day really do not know how
good a thing it is, merely for this reason, that they have
got so much of it that their eyes are over-flooded and
their ears over-echoed with it ; that they are constantly
living in the very atmosphere and breath of it ; so that,
as the German proverb says, they " cannot see the wood
for trees." The first Christians liad unquestionably this
grand advantage over us, which arose out of their great
disadvantage ; they saw the gospel directly confronted
with idolatry; the God-man Christ Jesus against a
sensual Bacchus and a carnal Venus ; light in miracu-
lous radiance made more manifest by the pitchy dark-
ness through whicli it shot. It is difficult for some of
us in these latter days to get a glimpse of Christianity
as the grandest phenomenon in the history of the moral
world ; we take out our sectarian spectacles and micro-
scopes, and we scan our special form of Christianity —
our Episcoi)acy, our Presbyterianism, our Independency,
our Popery — most minutely; but we find tlie utmost
difficulty in getting out of this habit of over-nice in-
spection, and adapting our eye to a Larger range of

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 3

vision. We become, so to speak, short-sighted in
spiritual matters, and we see only the fingers and the
nails of the great statue of divine Truth, not the whole
figure. Nay, worse; there are some of us who have
got into an evil habit of looking exclusively at the
small spots and scratches which our microscopic habits
have taught us to discover on the fair nails of the
statue ; and we seem vastly conceited with this dis-
covery. There is nothing wliich seems to delight a
certain class of minds so much as finding faults in
beautiful things ; as Coleridge tells a story of a smart
Cockney who could see nothing in Dannecker's beauti-
ful statue of Ariadne at Frankfort, but a few blue spots
in the marble, " very like Stilton cheese " ! Comments
not very different in spirit, I fear, are often made on
the Divine image of moral beauty presented to us in
the. gospel, and on some of the more prominent pass-
ages of the Bible. Among others, the first chapter of
Genesis, wliich has always appeared to me a perfect
model of sublime and simple wisdom, has come in for
its fair share of microscopic inspection, and of short-
sighted misconception. It has been curiously dissected
in parts, but not looked at as a whole, or comprehended
in its grand drift and universal significance ; it has
been tortured into all shapes by all sorts of impertinent
scientific appliances, instead of being looked at as a
revelation of the great lines of theological and philo-
sophical truth ; it has been confronted with Playfair
and Hutton, and the minute shell -fish of Murchison's

4 LAY SERMONS.

Silurian rocks, not, as it ought to have been, with
Homer, and Hesiod, and Thales, and Heraclitus, or the
portentous cosmogonies of the Indian Puranas. It is
my intention, in the present paper, to present the
Mosaic account of the creation in its natural grand
points of contrast with the heathen mythologies and
philosophies which it supplanted ; to show by what
profound, though plain, statements of eternal wisdom,
it has declared for all times and all places a philosophy
of the divine architecture of the world, beyond which
the human mind can never reach ; and to accustom the
thoughtful reader to look seriously upon this most
venerable of all documents, in its own natural aspect
and attitude, placed where it properly stands in the
moral and intellectual history of the world, not, as
it may appear, after having been forced into all sorts of
unnatural positions, by curious speculations of merely
pliysical science, which, whether true or false, do not
in the slightest degree affect its theological import.

What, then, I ask, are the grand truths, philoso-
phical or theological (for philosophy and theology at
the fountain-head are one), which this document
reveals ? It appears to me that they naturally arrange
themselves under the following heads : —

I. In the first place we have the philosophy of
Creatiox. And here we must first ask wliat the
^losaic record means by this word. It is a word, as
commonly used, which goes into depths which a man

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 5

with human thought can no more fathom, than with
human legs he can tread the pathless air. Creation,
we say, is " to make something out of nothing ; " and
this is the meaning of the word which, with a few
exceptions, we believe, has always been accepted by the
Christian Church. But the creation of something out
of nothing, though it may be concluded from specu-
lative reasons, and is generally supposed to be enun-
ciated in the words of the Apostle (Hebrews xi. 3), is
an abstract metaphysical truth, and does not naturally
lie in the scope of the Scriptures, given as they were
mainly for the purposes of practical piety, and for intel-
lectual enlightenment only so far as this is necessary

to achieve that end. We shall not, therefore, be sur-

»

prised to find that the idea of creation out of nothing,
however it may have entered the system of Christian
doctrine, certainly does not lie in the words or in the
scope of the Mosaic account of creation. By creation,
Moses means only the creation of order out of con-
fusion : this is certain, both from the whole drift of the
document, and from the meaning of the Hebrew word
hcn^a (identical with our word hear ; Greek, <^e/9a) ;
Latin, fero, pario ; Sanscrit, hliri), as expounded by
Gesenius and other lexicographers. Sanscrit scholars
tell us that there is not in the whole vocabulary of the
Brahmanic language, copious as it is, a single word
answering to our word matter;^ this I believe. Equally

^ See the learned and ingenious exposition of the first three chapters
of Genesis, lately published by Dr. Ballantyne,

6 ' LAY SERMONS.

certain is it to me that in the Hebrew language there
is no word answering to our idea of "to create* out
of nothing ; " for this plain reason, that the grand ex-
cellence of the Hebrew theology lies in its avoidance
of all subtle and unprofitable questions, and founding
godly action on the faith of those unquestioned divine
truths wliich every soundly-constituted intellect can
comprehend. If there is one point more than another
which distinguishes tlie theology of Moses from that of
the Vedas, and some of the Greek philosophers, it is
this — its essential and pervading practicality. Theo-
logical truths exciting only to subtle speculation, and
leading to no practical result, are not propounded by
Moses. Creation out of nothing, however true, is a
barren truth for us ; for, with our finite faculties, we
cannot comprehend it, and even if we did, we could
make no use of the conception. But the other meaning
of creation, whicli Moses enunciates, though it does not
puzzle our idle wit, tells us something which, while it
is absolutely and eternally true, is clearly comprehen-
sible by every rational being, and is capable of being
turned to use by us at every moment of our existence.
Creation is the production of order. What a simple,
but at the same time comprehensive and pregnant
principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no
ultimate truth of more ])ervading significance. Order
is the law of all iutelligiljle existence. Everything that
exists in the world, everything that has either been
made by God, or has l)een jjroduced by man, of any

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 7

permanent value, is only some manifestation of order
in its tliousandfold possibilities. Everything that has
a shape is a manifestation of order; shape is only
a consistent arrangement of parts; shapelessness is
found only in the whirling columns that sweep across
African Saharas; but even these columns have their
curious balance, which calculators of forces might fore-
tell, and the individual grains of sand of which they
are composed reveal mathematical miracles to the
microscope. Every blade of grass in the field is
measured ; the green cups and the coloured crowns of
every flower are curiously counted; the stars of the
firmament wheel in cunningly calculated orbits ; even
the storms have their laws. In human doings and
human productions we see everywhere the same mani-
festation. Well-ordered stones make architecture;
well-ordered social regulations make a constitution and
a police; well-ordered ideas make good logic; well-
ordered words make good writing ; well-ordered imagi-
nations and emotions make good poetry ; well-ordered
facts make science. Disorder, on the other hand,
makes nothing at all, but unmakes everything. Stones
in disorder produce ruins ; an ill-ordered social condi-
tion is decline, revolution, or anarchy ; ill-ordered ideas
are absurdity ; ill-ordered words are neither sense nor
grammar; ill-ordered imaginations and emotions are
madness; ill-ordered facts are chaos. What then is
this wonderful enchanter called order ? Wliat exactly
do we mean by it ? If we look into it more narrowly

8 LAY SERMONS.

we shall find that it implies the separation, division,
and distribution of things according to their qualities,
in certain definite well -calculated times and spaces.
Number and measure are of the essence of it. The
sands of the desert cannot be numbered — at least not
by us ; relatively to our faculties they are mere chaos.
But the soldiers of a well-ordered army, arranged in
rank and file, can be numbered, and their thousands
told, with as much ease as the units of a small sum,
if only the arrangement be completed. So then order
consists in dividing a confused multitude of individual
elements into groups that bear a natural resemblance
to one another in kind, in number, and in measure.
A squad of full-grown soldiers, five in front, and three
in depth, like the band of the old Greek chorus, is per-
fect order; each unit being like the other, and the
whole being composed of parts that bear a definite
relation of equality or proportion to the whole ; the
many under the controlling power of order have be-
come one, and with that unity have acquired a distinct
character, and are capable of answering a definite pur-
pose. This, and this only, is the difference between an
avalanche of shattered rocks on the storm-battered sides
of Mont Blanc or Ben Muic-Dhuibh, and the stable
piles of the Mempliian pyi-amids, or the chaste columns
of the Parthenon ; between what tlie great Scotch poet
paints as

" Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurled,
Tlie fragments of an earlier world,"

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 9

and the beautiful procession of things which Moses
describes as marching forth into existence at the fiat of
the Omnipotent. So it is with forms. Forces also are
subject to the same law. Take a kettle of boiling water.
Look at the steam coming out of its neck ; how it
bubbles and blows and puffs and whiffs and wheezes,
and makes all sorts of irregular inorganic movements
and noises. The atoms of which that vapour is com-
posed are, as the chemist well knows, composed of ele-
ments that come not together at random, but are subject
to a calculation as nice and exact as those which measure
the orbits of the stars, and the flux and reflux of the
tides ; but the vapoury mass itself, as it issues from the
kettle, is a blind force, not produced with any object
other than that of disengaging itself, and not productive
of any result such as well-ordered forces are daily seen
to produce. Well ! take that same hot vapour, spitting
and spurting in its wild unlicensed way, and confine it
in a cylinder ; then by the calculated injection of cold
water, cause it to contract and expand at certain inter-
vals ; and the originally blind force, made subject now
to calculation and order and law, becomes a serviceable
power, which, acting on a series of pistons, beams, and
wheels, becomes a steam-engine! — a machine which,
like a Briareus with a hundred arms, can achieve all
sorts of weighty work, with a touch as light as the hand
of a little child playing with a hoop. And thus an idle
puff of evanescent vapour becomes the great wonder
and wonder-worker of the age ; the greatest mechanical

10 LAY SERMONS.

wonder, perhaps, of all ages that have been since the
world began. Such are the triumphs of order.

II. In the second place, we have the Cause of
Creation. If all things, knowable and cognisable, are
only different forms of ORDER, the question arises, Hcnu
is order produced ? Now, in order to look with proper
reverence at the profound simplicity with which Moses
lias answered this question, the best thing we can do is
to inquire, first, how the great popular oracles of ancient
times answered it. What does Homer say ? —

" Ocean the prime generator of gods, and Tetliys the mother." i

What does Hesiod say, who was a greater authority in
these matters with the Greeks, because he was a doctor
of divinity — or all that the good Boeotians had for one —
about eight hundred years before Christ, and wrote a
genealogy of the gods, meant to instruct the Greeks in
those very matters in which we are now instructed by
the first chapter of Genesis. Well, this Boeotian theo-
loger says : —

" In the beginning was Chaos : and after Chaos primeval
Earth broad-breasted, the firm fonndation of all that existeth ;
Murky Tartarus then in the broad-wayed Earth's abysmal
Deep recesses ; then Love, the fairest of all the Immortals,
Love, that loosens the firm-knit limb, and sweetly subdueth
Wisest of men to lier will, and gods that rule in Olympus.
Then from Oliaos was Erebds born, and the sable-vested

^ lUmL xiv. 201.

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 11

Night ; from Night came Ether, and glorious Day into being,
Born from Night, when Erebus knew her with kindly embrace-

ment.
Earth, then, like to herself in breadth produced the expanded
Starry Heaven, to curtain the Earth, and provide for Immortals
Lucid seats on the brazen floors of unshaken Olympus ;
Also from Earth the Mountains came forth, the lofty, the

rugged,
Dear to Oread Nymphs who haunt tlie rocky retirement.
Then the billowy Sea, the bare, the briny, the barren.
Fatherless, born of herself ; but after, in kindly embracement
She to Heaven brought forth the vast deep-eddying Ocean ;
Likemse Cceus, and Crius, Iapetus, and HYPERfoN,
Theia, Rhea, and Themis, and Memory, mother of Muses,
Phcebe, with golden diadem bound, and beautiful Tethys."

Along with this specimen of cosmogonic speculation
from the most intellectual people of the West, we shall
wisely set down the corresponding conclusions of the
most celebrated people of the early East — the Babylon-
ians. Their doctrine concerning the creation of the
world we have from three sou'rces, — from the works of
Berosus, a learned Chaldean historian, who flourished in
the time of Alexander the Great ; from the report of
Damascius, a subtle Greek speculator, who wrote a
work about the principles of things some four hundred
years after our era ; and, lastly, from certain tablets of
the ancient Cuneiform writing, the decipherment of
which has encircled with such a halo of glory the philo-
logy of the nineteenth centviry. I set them down here
in this order.

12 LAY SERMONS.

Berosus.

" There was a time in which what existed was mere
darkness and water ; and in the darkness and the water
animals of strange and monstrous forms w^ere produced.
Men were born, some with two wings, and some with
four wings and two faces, and with one body and two
heads, one of a man, and one of a woman.

" And there were other men, with goats' legs and
goats' horns ; others with horses' hoofs ; others had the
hinder part of their bodies as the body of horses, and the
front of men, like what the Greeks call Hippocentaurs ;
and there were also produced bulls with the heads of
men, and dogs with four bodies, but with fishes' tails ; also
dog-headed horses, and men and other animals with the
heads and bodies of horses, and the tails of fish ; and
otlier animals, of all kinds of strange shapes. In addi-
tion to these there were fish and creeping things and
serpents. There were other animals of strange and
mysterious form, as they are to be seen represented in
the temple of Belus. They say, further, that a woman
ruled over all these, whose name was Omorca, or, as it
is called in the Chaldean language, Thalatth, which in
Greek is OaAarra, the sea.

"Things being in this condition, Belus came and
clove the woman through the middle in two. Of the
one half of her he made the earth, and of the other half
he made the heavens, and caused all the animals to

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 13

perish. Then the annalist goes on to say that these
things were allegories of what exists in nature : the
whole of things being water, and animals being pro-
duced in it. This god, he further declares, cut off his
own head ; and the other gods mingled the blood with
the clay, and therewith formed men ; and from this
cause they are intelligent, and participate in the Divine
mind. Further, they say that Belus, which they inter-
pret as Zeu? or Jove, separated the earth from the
heavens, and arranged the universe, but that the animals,
not being able to endure the power of the air, perished ;
whereupon, seeing the world waste and uninhabited, he
ordered one of the gods to produce other animals, able
to endure the light ; and Belus created the sun and the
moon and the five planets." ^

Damascius.

" Of the Barbarians the Babylonians seem to make
no mention of one original first cause of the universe,
but give us two — Tauthe and Apason", the latter the
husband of the former, and this female power they call
the mother of the gods. From this pair they say a son
was born, called Moumin, which I conceive to be the
intelligible world, proceeding from two principles. From
the same pair another offspring came forth, named Lache
and Lachos ; and again, from the same another pair,
KissAKE and AssoFOS, from whom were born three,

1 Berosi qufe supersunt. Edit. Ricliter. Lips. 1825, p. 49.

14 LAY SERMONS.

Anos, and Illinos, and Aos ; from which Aos and
Dauke a son was born, Belus, whom they call the
demiurfre or artificer of the universe." ^

'O"

Chaldean Account of the Creation.

THE FIRST tablet.

1. When the upper region was not yet called Heaven,

2. And the lower region was not yet called Earth,

3. And the abyss of Hades had not yet opened its arms,

4. Then the Chaos of Waters gave birth to all of them,

5. And the waters were gathered into one place.

6. No men yet dwelt together ; no animals yet wandered

about ;

7. None of the gods had yet been born.

8. Their names were not spoken ; their attributes were not

known.

9. Then the eldest of the gods —

10. Lakhma and Lakhama — were born,

1 1 . And grew up.

1 2. AssAR and Kissar were born next,

1 3. And Hved through long periods.

14. ANU.

THE FIFTH TABLET.

1. He constructed dwellings for the great gods.

2. He fixed up constellations, wliose figures were like animals.

3. He made the year ; into four quarters he divided it.

4. Twelve months he established, witli tlieir constelhitions, three

by three.

5. And for the days of the year he appointed festivals.

^ Damascii quiustioiics de itiincipiis. Edit. Kopji., 1826, ji. 384.

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 15

6. He made dwellings for the planets, for their rising and

setting.

7. And that nothing should go amiss, and that the course of

none should be retarded,

8. He placed with them the dwellings of Bel and Hea.

9. He opened great gates on every side ;

10. He made strong the portals, on the left hand and on the

right ;

11. In the centre he placed Luminaries.

12. The Moon he appointed to rule the night,

1 3. And to wander through the night until the dawn of day.

14. Every month without fail he made holy assembly days.

1 5. In the beginning of the month, at the rising of the night,

16. It shot forth its horn to illuminate the Heavens.

17. On the seventh day he appointed a holy day,

18. And to cease from all business he commanded.

19. Then arose the Sun in the horizon of Heaven in glory.^

Now, these are curious, and in some views beautiful,
passages ; but when we reflect seriously, and begin to
ask what wisdom they contain, we feel a terrible void — a
void as terrible as the chaos which is the first link in this
strange genealogy. Our pious desire to know what may
be known of things supersensible is rudely baffled ; and

^ Records of the Past, vol. ix. Assyrian texts. Translator — H. Fox
Talbot, F.R.S. This translator, however, is not confirmed by Smith
and Sayce in the indication of the Jewish Sahhath, which he flatters
himself to have discovered in the 17th and 18tli lines. These lines
appear thus in Sayce's edition of Smith's Chaldean account of Genesis,
London, 1880: — (17) ''On the seventh day thy circle — the moon's —
begins to fiU ; (18) but open in darkness will remain the half on the
right ; " and on this 18th line Professor Sayce remarks that the ver-
sion given is Dr. Oppert's, but the line is so mutilated as to make any
attempt at translation extremely doubtful.

16 LAY SERMONS.

we see plainly that we have been fooled in expecting
wisdom from this quarter ; certainly they from whom
we asked bread have given us a stone. Let us
take the Greek first ; and at the first glance it becomes
plain that the old doctor of Boeotian theology does not
touch the important question at all which we have now
raised — What is the cause of order ? He only tells you
that before order was chaos, and that light was evolved
out of darkness. This is all very true as a historical
sequence — ^just as true as that a chicken comes out of
an Q^g, or a child out of the womb. But the point of
cause is not touched on at all ; for the Qgg is certainly
not the cause of the chicken, as we all know that it
required a hen previously to produce the ^gg. As little,
when I take a phosphorus match, and by rubbing it
on the hearthstone, produce light, can it be said that
this darkness, out of which the light came, caused the
light ; it only preceded it. Hesiod and Homer, it will
be observed, do not at all agree in the first link that
they set forth in the great chain of existing things. The
secular poet says that all the gods are produced from
Ocean and Tethys — the male and female powers of
water ; the theological doctor, that Chaos and Earth
were first; that Chaos had no productive power; but
that from Earth were produced Tartarus, Night, Day,
Heaven, Ocean, etc., and by descent from them, as the
sequel of the poem teaches, Jove, Apollo, Juno, Venus,
and all the heavenly Powers. But in one thing they
both agree : they speak of an evolution and a develop-

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 17

ment by the ordinary method of generation, which, as
we all know, is not a cause but a process. When grain
is put into the hopper of a mill, it will certainly be
drawn in, and by a constant action of wisely-arranged
machinery come out changed into well -ground meal.
But the clear perception of this process does not help me
a single step to the comprehension of that other question.
How came the mill to be so curiously contrived, and
whence came the grain that w^as put into the hopper ?
Or again, if in a large manufactory you see a little
wheel which takes its motion from the teeth of a big
wheel, and that big wheel takes its motion from a yet
bigger wheel, and that wheel again from a rolling
cylinder, and that cylinder from a perpendicular shaft,
and that shaft from a horizontal beam ; in such a case
you would never dream for a moment of confounding
the different steps by which the motion is conveyed
with the source of the motion ; you must go on till you
come to the steam and the water, and the boiler and
the fire, and beyond that also you must go till you come
to James Watt. The cause of the motion of the little
wheel wdth which you commenced is the mind of
James Watt, directing, for a certain purpose, the elastic
force of the aeriform water, which we call steam. So
we say to wise old Homer, whose writings the Greeks
fondly conceited themselves to contain all wisdom,
What do you mean when you say that Ocean is the
prime generator of gods? Do you mean only that,
according to the old adage, " water is best," not be-

G

18 LAY SERMONS.

cause the inventors of that proverb were total abstainers,
but because that without water no living organism can
exist (turn water into a solid — as at the poles — and all
vegetation ceases) ; and, therefore, that the existence of
water is the first condition of all vital being on this
earth ? This we willingly believe ; but it is only one
important fact connected with a great process ; for
when you are singing the praises of water, Heraclitus,
the son of Blyson, a grave old gentleman who philoso-
phised at Ephesus about four hundred years after
Homer, bethinks himself that as all water becomes
solid by the abstraction of heat, so the existence of
water is possible only under the supposition that Fire
previously exists. Fire, therefore, or heat, or, if you pre-
fer a learned Latin word, caloric, is the first principle
or cause of all things. Well, this seems to go a little bit
farther than either Homer or Hesiod ; but, after aU, our
thinking appetite has got nothing that it can feed on ;
for what is Fire ? And whatever it be, what virtue has
it to produce order ? Does it not rather, in our expe-
rience, tend as much to produce disorder ? Is it not
one of the great agents of dissolution, destruction, and
death ? Strange ! Nevertheless the chemist comes in
and tells me very dogmatically, that whatever heat may
be, it acts, in his department at least, in a very orderly
way ; for the elements to whose mutual action it is
necessary, will not unite except in certain fixed and
definite proportions, the recognition of which is now
necessary to the most rudimentary knowledge of

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 19

cliemistry. Water, to whose atomical composition we
previously alluded, is made up of two gases or airs —
oxygen and hydrogen — which, in forming that com-
pound, will unite only in the proportion of two bulks
of the latter to one of the former. And in the same
way of all other bodies. The elements of which they
are composed are combined, under the expansive action
of heat, in certain curiously calculated proportions.
And in this way we seem plainly to arrive at the old
doctrine of Pythagoras, promulgated about 550 before
Christ, that number or measure is the first principle of
all things. But this also is only a fact, not a cause. For
the cause of Number, which indeed is only another
name for order, and for that cunning proportion among
the atoms of compound bodies which the great Dalton
discovered, we must go a step beyond Dalton, a step
beyond Pythagoras, a step beyond Heraclitus, a step
beyond Homer. "Will the Babylonian help us to make
this step? Scarcely. Belus, no doubt, is the great
plastic artificer — S7)fjLcovpy6<i — who disposes the primi-
tive jumble of things into the existing beautiful order,
by the action, one must suppose, though it is not ex-
pressly said, of a designing intellect ; but whence came
Belus ? Like Zeus in the Greek mythology, he is not
a primitive self-existent power, but the product of pre-
existent forces ; he is more indeed than Jove, whom
the Greeks worshipped as the supreme head of the
existing order of affairs, physical and moral, but not as
the author of that order. Belus seems really, in some

20 LAY SERMONS.

sense, to be the author of the world which he governs ;
but like an heir to an entailed, neglected, mismanaged,
and bankrupt estate, he receives it rather as an inherit-
ance to recreate and to remodel, than as a possession
lorded from the first by no one but himself. In fact,
so far as one can see from our fragmentary notices, the
Supreme God of the Babylonians, no less than the Jove of
the Greeks, is conceived in the first place as the effective
result of a historical sequence, rather than as the prime
figure in a chain of metaphysical causation. And w^e
may say generally, I imagine, that in all polytheistic
mythologies the purely theological or metaphysical
question of the original cause of the creation lies outside
of the popular conception of the gods, who demand our
fear and our acknowledgment directly as the unseen con-
trolling agents of those mysterious phenomenal forces,
on which the happiness of human beings to such a
great extent depends. Their earliest cosmogonic poetry,
accordingly, would give them no answer to a question
which the popular intellect had never raised. The
utmost that the Boeotian theologer could do, was to
bring in "Epco<; IT o^o?, love or DESIRE, as the fourth
term in his list of original forces ; but TTo^o? was not
a creative god eminently — only a name to express in a
personal figure that miraculous blind instinct by which
men are led to the reproduction of their kind. Gods
and men, somehow or other, are produced by a transcen-
d(3ntal process of generative evolution, of which love or
DESIKE is the motive force, as water is the motive force

CKEATION OF THE WORLD. 21

of a mill-wheel. And the dualism of male and female,
which lies at the bottom equally of the Babylonian and
the Hellenic cosmogony, plainly shows that the whole
scheme has been devised after the analogy of the
common process of generation in our little dependent
world, without ascending to the idea of an independent,
self-existent Cause of the Creation, such as we are now
seeking for. That they might have found out such a
cause without much difficulty, had they been inclined,
there seems no reason to doubt ; for, as Paul says
(Eomans i. 20), the visible things of the universe stand
out as a living blazon of the invisible excellence behind,
which only the blind can fail to perceive. But as a
man will sometimes not hear even the sound of a
cannon, when his faculties are diverted far off in a
different direction ; so the people that formed those
early cosmogonies, being in a poetical and imaginative,
rather than a philosophic and metaphysical stage of
being, either allowed the question of the ultimate cause
of the cosmic order to drop altogether, or solved it in a
half-hearted blundering sort of way, which could satisfy
only the half-thinkers. Let us see then how we have
to proceed now-a-days, when, brushing aside all those
strange cosmogonic imaginations, we essay to find the
ultimate cause of the cosmic order from observing
carefully what takes place under our own eyes.
We have constantly, in every action of life, to
do w^ith order and disorder ; we are constantly em-
ployed in creating either the one or the other ; so we

22 LAY SERMONS.

cannot be at a loss to discover their cause. A father
makes a present of a curious toy to his little boy.
Tommy amuses himself with it for a day or two, or it
may be a week or more, according to the laws of legiti-
mate sport in youthful gentlemen ; but in due season
he tires of it, and longs for something new ; and to
make public proclamation to papa and other powerful
patrons that the old toy has served its purpose, he
takes it all to pieces some morning before papa is out
of bed, and strews the fragmentary pegs and wheels
and springs, and various - coloured beads, upon the
parlour floor in motley confusion. Here we have an
example of the creation of disorder. How? In the
simplest way possible ! By utter thoughtlessness, and
a restless, impatient activity on the part of a witless
child. The boy needed no wisdom to achieve this deed.
He did not purposely wish to do anything ; he only
wished to undo a thing that another had done. What
was necessary for the accomplishment of such a purely
negative result ? Nothing but blind force. A monkey
in sport, as readily as a man with a reasoning purpose,
could do a business of this kind ; a maundering idiot,
an unreasoning madman, as easily as an Aristotle,
a Newton, or a Gioberti. Blind force, therefore,
unreasoning, uncalculating impulse, is the author
of disorder. But with the making even of the
simplest toy it is quite a different affair. We know
that no most assiduous action of blind puffs and
strokes will make a toy. Toys are made by in-

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 23

genious, thinking minds, and by a series of pro-
cesses, of which ingenious, thinking minds are the
authors. We find, therefore, that mind, and mind only,
disposes a few pieces of painted wood, flexible steel, and
shining studs, into that finely calculated trifle which
we call a toy. So we find in all other cases. A wild,
raging, passion-stung rabble can pull down a palace
in a few hours, which it required years of thoughtful
toil in the architect to scheme, and in the builder
to erect. A sudden fit of what we call fever, which is
a violent irregular action of the blood and venous
system, will turn into a chaotic babblement the utter-
ance of a mind, whose words, before this intrusion of a
disorderly force, might have hymned the poetry of the
universe in a lofty epos, or directed the fate of kingdoms
by a salutary ordinance. All that exists without and
beyond chaos exists only by virtue of indwelling or
controlling mind — mind not cognitive merely and con-
templative, but active ; that is to say, intelligent force,
as contrasted with blind force. Here, therefore, we
have, within the space of our own direct knowledge and
experience, the most indubitable proof of the real cause
of order. In no branch of the many-armed activity of
human life do we see any other principle than this at
-work — mind constantly the cause of order ; disorder as
constantly proceeding from the absence of mind. ISTor
is there the slightest room to suppose that, while we
make this conclusion safely with regard to what falls
within our human sphere of action, we are making a

24 LAY SERMONS.

rash leap into the dark when we say that the presence
of a like mind always and everywhere is the cause, and
the only cause, of all orderly operations and results in
the external universe. For the order which we per-
ceive in the external universe is exactly similar to that
which we create by our own activity ; and to suppose
different or contrary causes for effects altogether similar
and identical is unphilosophical. Nay, more ; the most
curious machines which we can make, with the highest
power of our most highly cultivated reason, have already
been made, and are already constructed iu the world
over which we exercise no control, exactly on the same
principles as those which are the product of our thought-
directed finger. The eye, as everybody knows, is a
telescope. The man who doubts that the power which
made the human eye is, in its manner of working, not
only similar to, but absolutely identical with, the mind
which invented the telescope, may as well doubt
whether the little paper boat which young Bobbie or
Billy launches upon the pond floats there upon the
same principle by which the mighty ocean bears the
armadas of England and France and America upon its
bosom. Doubters of this description labour under a
disease for which argument certainly is not the proper

^ The self-evidential character of the world, as the expression of
order and design in a plastic mind, is the reason why this truth has
been universally recognised wherever men existed in the normal state,
or unsophisticated by the perversity and puzzle-headedness of a later

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 25

We have thus arrived at the cause of order, in a very
simple way, by actual experience of the fact, than which
nothing, — no, not even the boasted necessity of mathe-
matics,— is more certain. It is not more certain that
two and two make four, or that the angle at the centre
of a circle is double the angle at the circumference,

generation of sopliists, more anxious to show their own cleverness by
making petty objections, than to repose on the deep bosom of
catholic truth. How different the wretched quibbling of a Hume in
this view from the healthy instinct of Aristotle, ' * the great master of
those who know," who assumes the catholic utterance of human instinct
in this matter as the postulate of all reasonable thinking with regard
to the cause of the order which is the universe. 'Apxcuos fih odu tis
X670S Trai iraTpLbs ecTTL iraaLv avOpwirois tis e/c deov to. travTa Kol 5td deov
7]fjui/ crvv^aTT]K€V ovde/xia 5^ (pvcn% avrrj Kad' iavrrjv avrdpKrjs iptjix(adeiaa t^s
€K TovTov aojTTipia^ {De Mmido, 6), which is just what St. Paul says in
Acts xvii. 28. See also the beautiful passage from the great thinker's
exoteric works in Cicero, de Nat. deorum, ii. 37. TJie theology of
Aristotle, which has to be collected from various passages of his meta-
physics and physical tracts, is thus concisely and distinctly stated by
BiESfe, — "Neither the universal in separation from the individual,
nor the individual for itself, can be the principle of the actual and
spiritual world ; but the alone absolute principle is God, the highest
self-thinking Reason, which is unlimited energy ; His thought is
DEED ; and his deeds are the vital and vivifying principle through
which only the world becomes possessed of actuality and truth " (BiEsi;,
Philosophie des Aristoteles, Berlin, 1835, vol. i. p. 611). The self-think-
ing force is called by Aristotle, vdrjais vorjcreus, thinking of which
thought is the subject, as an artist thinks of his own self-engendered
idea, and not about anything external. He shapes from his shaping
thought, and acts as a god so far as the giving of actuality to concep-
tion is concerned ; only, not having life in himself, he cannot confer
vitality on his realised conceptions. But God is not only thought, but
life, and His thought is essentially vital.

26 LAY SERMONS.

than it is that a grand exhibition of curiously calculated
reasonable results could not have proceeded from the
action of a blind, unreasoning force, or the combination
of a host of such forces. Yet must we not be surprised
if the world and the wise men of the world did not at
once arrive at this natural, necessary, and inevitable
conclusion. In the secret consciousness of the healthy
human intellect, the thought of the eternal, universal
cause, no doubt, ever resides, not only as the greatest
truth, but as the root of all possible truth. The wide-
spread existence of Polytheistic forms of faith forms no
exception to this rule. Every form of Polytheism either
acknowledges one Supreme God as the preserver of
order in the universe — as Jove among the Greeks ; or
at least conceives the existence of certain superhuman
powers, which, if they do not act always on the noblest
principles, nevertheless are there, and do act in some
way to preserve the recognised order of the universe, so
far as human minds in a very low state of culture are
capable of recognising that order. For it must be
observed that the order of the physical universe, how-
ever cunning and certain, is on so great a scale, and
involves so many complex relations, that unthinking
and uncalculatiug minds may often fail to have any
very clear perception of it. The cleverest monkey,
with all the action of its most clever conceits, will
remain at an infinite distance from the possibility of
comprehending a steam-engine ; and men born with-
out the organ of tune shall have their ears besieged

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 27

by all the sweet, subtle forces of a Mozart and a
Beethoven in vain. As there are individual men de-
ficient in certain faculties and sensibilities, so there
may be whole races of men whose faculty of think-
ing is so little cultivated that they have very little
idea of what thought means in their own narrow,
meagre life ; much less are they able to rise to a clear
perception of that thoughtful order of things in the
great whole, w^hich made the Greeks designate the
visible universe so significantly a /cocr/i09, or garniture.
Besides, many things are constantly taking place in the
physical and moral world, which, to a superficial view,
seem actually the result, not of reasonable calculation,
but of blind force. Storms, hurricanes, blights, burnings,
volcanic explosions, subterranean quakings of the earth,
civil wars, murders, rapines, and the triumphal march
of prosperous injustice, as it appears, are phenomena
which, even to thoughtful minds, have often suggested
horrible forecasts of Atheism and blind Necessity.
Deeper thought, no doubt, always teaches the absurdity
of fixing our eyes on these irregular, and, to us, incal-
culable, exhibitions of force, as any foundation for
systematic atheism. The connection and ultimate pur-
pose of all the violent and most sweeping movements
of the world can no more be comprehended by us than
a fish can comprehend the currents of the ocean in which
it swims, or a fly the revolutions of the wheel on which
it has fixed itself. But the existence of these irregular,
and, so far as their immediate and most obvious opera-

28 LAY SERMONS.

tion goes, destructive phenomena, may, along with a
low state of culture, easily explain the existence of a
sort of atheism among various races of men. I do not
see, however, any proof that absolute atheism, or the
belief in an absolute unreasoning Something, without a
name, as the cause of the definite reasonable Something,
which we call the world, has ever prevailed extensively
amons the human race. The Buddhists, it has been
said, are atheists. But the atheism which they profess,^
is, so far as my studies have taught me, not so much a
formal denial of intellectual causality in the universe,
as a fixture of the feeling of reverence upon a great
human preacher of righteousness, to the neglect of the
great fountain of all righteousness. This is a very
different thing from the perverse scepticism of certain
irreverent individuals of highly cultivated intellect,
who can bring themselves to believe in no intelligent
author of the universe, because, with all their cleverness,
they are so shallow as not to know the difference
between a cause and a sequence, or because they are so
despotic in a certain intellectual selfishness as not to be
willing to allow any intellect in the universe superior
to their own. Such men require a moral conversion,
not a logical refutation. Professed and vainglorious
atheists must just be allowed to pass as ghosts which
haunt the day, with which a sound living eye can hold
no converse —

^ See tlxe chapter *' Buddhism " in my Natural History of Atheism.
London, 1877.

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 29

" Just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to men ;
Unless there be who think not God at all ;

If any be, they walk obscure ;
For of such doctrine never was there school,
But the heart of the fool.
And no man therein doctor but himself."

We have now talked over some twenty-eight pages,
and yet are not beyond the breadth of that significant
verse : IN the beginning god created the heaven and
THE EARTH. We have seen how Hesiod and Homer and
Heraclitus dealt with this important matter, and how
they failed to approach the sublime significance of that
enunciation. But let us not believe that all the Greeks
who sought after wisdom were so unfortunate as their
first pioneers. On the contrary, the wisest Greeks
declare the doctrine of the first book of Moses in the
plainest terms. Of these pious heathen philosophers,
the name is legion ; but we shall content ourselves with
three of the most notable — Anaxagoras, Socrates, and
Plato. Let their testimony, however, be preceded fitly
by something perhaps older than the oldest of them,
certainly of a more venerable and hoary pedigree.
" The first Being," says the great Indian Epos, " the
Mahabharata, is called Manasa,^ or Intellectual, and
is so celebrated by great sages ; he is God without be-
ginning or end, indivisible, immortal, undecaying." ^

^ Latin, incns ; Greek, fxiuos ; German, meinen ; English, mean,
mind. " Wilson's Vishmc Purana, p. 14, note.

30 LAY SERMONS.

So far superior is the theology that grew up on the
sacred banks of the Ganges to anything that Helicon,
Parnassus, or Olympus could boast of in the earliest
ages of Greek wisdom. But, as we have said, the Greeks
were a subtle people, whose special mission it was, as
St. Paul testifies, to seek wisdom ; and that their specu-
lation should long have wandered about without hitting
on the grand truth, which is the only possible key-stone
of all coherent thought, was not to be expected. That
Orpheus, Olen, Linus, and the most ancient worshippers
of Apollo, were pious theists and believers, by a healthy,
poetic instinct in one original Mind, the cause of the
universe, is extremely probable ; but the first philoso-
phical speculator that distinctly announced to the Greeks
the great truth Of the first words of Moses was Anaxa-
goras. This remarkable man, born at Clazomense, in
Asia Minor, about the year 500 B.C., was the intimate
friend of Pericles, the great Athenian statesman, in
whose Life, by Plutarch, we find the statement that
"this philosopher was the first who taught that not
Chance or Necessity, but Mind, pure and unmixed
(yovv (iKparov), was the principle of the universe, this
mind possessing the virtue of separating the particles in
a confused compound, and forming thereby new homo-
geneous wholes." This is exactly what we described
above as the proper definition of order ; and the creator
of this order, with the clear-sighted old Ionian thinker,
is not mere attraction, or repulsion, or elective affinity,
or any such juggle of words, serving to conceal ignorance,

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 31

or to cloak atheism ; but simply and directly Mind.
For this satisfactory enunciation the pious philosopher
had the honour of being accused of impiety by the
Athenian mob ; which is pretty much like the case of
the beer-toper in the humorous German drinking-song,
who, coming out of a smoky tap-room into the clear
moonlight, and finding the moon looking somewhat
asquint, the houses all nodding, and the lanterns stag-
gering about, concludes with great satisfaction that the
whole external world is drunk, and goes forthwith back
into the beer-shop as the only sober quarter of the world
known to him at that moment ! But Aristotle, the
great encyclopaBdist, knew better who was drunk and who
was sober in this matter. He says distinctly that all
those who philosophised before about the first principle
appear as mere infantile babblers, compared with the
great man who first enounced z^oO? as the alone author-
ised oracle to answer all the questions of all the philo-
sophers. After Anaxagoras, Socrates appeared on the
Athenian stage ; a man no less distinguished for sound
common sense and genial humour than for profound
piety, and a healthy, intelligible philosophy. This great
teacher, " the acknowledged master of all eminent
thinkers who have since lived," ^ in an argument with
a little dapper gentleman called Aristodemus, reported
by Xenophon, states the whole doctrine of Natural
Theology, as it has since been taught by Paley and

^ J. S. Mill on Liberty, p. 46, in a splendid passage of one of the
finest books in the English language.

32 LAY SERMONS.

other Christian philosophers, with a distinctness of
view and a happiness of illustration that leaves little
to desire. He exhibits in detail the many instances of
exquisite and benevolent design in the structure of the
human frame ; he shows how the gods, so far from
neglecting human beings, have fitted them out with so
many gifts, that they do actually live as gods upon the
earth, when compared with other animals ; he shows
that religion is the true sign, badge, and privilege of
reasonable, as compared with unreasoning, creatures ;
and he asserts finally, that as the Divine Being is every-
where present, and everywhere cognisant of whatever
takes place, a wise man will take care not only to avoid
disreputable actions before men, but will preserve his
purity with holy reverence, even in the lonely desert.
Not less lofty or less sublime on all questions connected
with God and the god-like element in man, was his
great disciple Plato, who again and again declares that
" Intellect alone is the great first principle," for that " all
the wisest men with one voice witness that Mind is
king of all things, whether in heaven above, or on the
earth below." ^

III. It may seem scarcely necessary, after the
immediately preceding remarks, to assert articulately
in a separate proposition that the doctrine of Design
or reasonable purpose and plan existing in the world,
and in the Creative Mind of which it is the product,

1 See Philehus, 15.

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 33

if not in so many words, is certainly implied in every
paragraph of the Mosaic account of the creation ; but
as it has become fashionable with certain professors of
physical science, and one or two abstract thinkers since
Bacon's time, in this country, to talk slightingly of final
causes, and to scout teleology, or the doctrine of design
as a manifest deduction from the phenomena of the
Universe, we shall be readily excused in making a
few special remarks on tha,t point here. If Moses, or
whoever it was that wrote the book, does not assert
design as a substantive proposition, it is simply because
he did not conceive that any reasonable being with his
eyes open could have denied it. The cause of the
world, according to his account, is the direct action of
divine volition in a self-existent plastic mind by its
own inherent virtue, bringing order out of confusion ;
and how this can be done without a design of putting
an end to confusion by bringing in order, no sane
man can understand. Design is only another word to
express the fact that the order of things which we call
the world, proceeds according to a marked-out plan —
designare — without which in the direction of order it
manifestly could not proceed at all. How comes it then
that men of such high and commanding intellects as
Bacon, Spinoza, Goethe, and others of less note, have come
to talk contemptuously of final causes ? So far as I see,
from two reasons, of which the first is a transference of
the mental attitude naturally assumed by the students
of physical science to the domain of metaphysics, where

34 LAY SERMONS.

it is altogether inapplicable. The question Why or
What for is, as Goethe wisely remarked,^ not a scientific
question. The scientific man asks Hoiv, and with that
he is content. How is water made ? By the union of
oxygen and hydrogen in certain proportions, cries the
chemist, and therewith blazons to all the world the
singular glory of his peculiarly analytic science. Let
all the universe be analysed in the same fashion, and
the result is always a series of answers full of most
curious interest to the question How, but in no case
trenching on the independent right of that other question,
Why ? and to ivhat j^u^yose ? and luith what effect ? — as
little in any way touching that deeper question, which
may justly be divined to contain the root of the final cause.
Whence and from what source ? The question how a salad
is made, for instance — a well-known case proposed by
Kepler to his wife — may be answered very simply as
to the hovj, by saying that it is a certain admixture of
green vegetables, vinegar, cream, sugar, and oil ; but two
important questions still remain behind ; first, whether
it could make itself as well by a chance jumble as by a
careful preparation ; to which question Madam Kepler
answered, Certainly not ; and second, what the purpose
was for wliich in this case the lady scientifically pre-
pared the salad, viz. as a pleasantly-stimulant adjunct
to the mid-day meal of a great philosopher. It is plain,
therefore, that the hunting out and laying bare of a
series of invariable sequences, for a successful series of

^ See Eckernianirs Conversations.

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 35

answers to the question Row, does not in the slightest de-
gree supersede, much less render illegitimate, the putting
of the question IVliat for ? On the contrary, the illegiti-
macy is all the other way. The rejection or ignoring of
final causes, because the knowledge of them does not
enable us to answer the question how, is an illegitimate
transference, and an impertinent intrusion into a foreign
domain. There is a narrow-mindedness in scientists as
well as in theologians ; and the narrow-mindedness of the
scientists shows itself in a tendency to deny the exist-
ence of all forces of which they cannot take cognisance
with their microscopes or handle with their pincers. But
the highest things are precisely those which are neither
measureable nor tangible ; and here the scientist ought
to stop. But no man likes to be stopped, especially
in the full career of triumphant discovery ; and so, like
our great conquerors, the scientific man plants himself
valiantly on the back of the world, with the one Law
which happens to be in vogue at the time, and conceits
himself to have explained all, or protests at least that
nothing is explicable which happens to be beyond the
reach of his formula. But there is another reason which
helps us to explain the strange phenomenon that in a
world blossoming all over and radiant with divine reason,
a certain class of persons, rather above the average in
point of culture, should persist in seeing no marks of
that design wdiich can nowhere be absent where reason
is energetically present. It is a fact that there are
persons styling themselves atheists, who, when closely

36 LAY SERMONS.

examined, may be brought to confess that what they
disbelieve is not the existence of self-existent plastic
reason, as the substantial cause of a reasonable world,^
but the unreasonable God that certain unreasonable,
ignorant, and presumptuous persons have created out of
their own imaginations. In the same way a well-
trained scientist may persistently deny that he sees
any signs of design in the structure of the universe,

^ A notable example of this we luive in the poet Shelley, who,
having in the style of bravura natural to a young man, flung forth
the startling sentence in his text,

There is no God,

forthwith explains in his note that ''this negation must be under-
stood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading
Spirit co-eternal -with the universe remains unshaken " — an atheism
consequently meaning only a denial of an impertinent theological
interpretation forced upon two innocent phrases of the first verse of
the Hebrew Bible ! In the same way the atomic atheism of Democritus
might be made to lose a little of its manifest absurdity, if he could be
cross-questioned on the words oiihev Xpij/na /xdrTju ylveraL, dWd irdvTa,
e/c \6yov re koI vir dfdyKTjs (Mullach, p. 216). For, though X670S here
is neither the Reason of Plato nor the vovs of Anaxagoras, but only
calculation, 2>roportion, method, yet, as the great atomist posits KlvqaL^
or motion, as indispensable to set his atoms into action, he might well
be asked what is Xoyosplus KiuTjais, unless pretty much what theists call
God ? In truth, the fact that the same word, both in Greek and Latin
— X670S, ratio — expresses both calculation and reason, shows plainly
enough the true instinct of unsophisticated minds, that the two things
spring out of one root, and that there can be no calculation, or
orderly method of any kind, witliout Reason or Mind. As for dvd-yKTf
or Necessity, that is not a force or a power in any sense, but only the
assertion of the invariable self-consistent method of action, which
belongs inherently to the divine A070J.

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 37

when he merely means to deny some particular object,
design, or purpose, which superficial persons have in-
terpolated into the divine scheme ; and we should thus
have here only another instance of the familiar principle
of reaction or revulsion, which plays such an important
part in the play of moral no less than of physical forces
in the universe.-^ Under this head fall, of course, all
those ready-handed interpretations of judgments, in
which certain good people, more pious than wise, are
apt to indulge. If the potato crop, for instance, happens
to fail, or a boat taking a pleasure trip on Sunday to be
swamjDed, or an eloquent atheist is suddenly struck
dumb, and afflicted with incurable aphasia, these pious
interpreters of the divine procedure have no hesitation
in attributing all such evil chances to the express inter-
position of the Divine Being, with the design of inflict-

^ I am glad to find a most judicious and accurate writer on physical
science agreeing with me here. ' * One often hears final causes spoken of
with a contempt which is indeed only a revulsion from a style of
writing which will not now find man}^ admirers, in which adaptations
were found by. pointing out what extraordinary consequences would
follow some impossible alteration in Nature, and finally were made to
do the duty of efficient causes ; but in the history of the vertebrate
heart may be seen a remarkable instance of the definite evolution of a
complex mechanism to perform a particular kind of work. There is
no reason to doubt that here we have morphological evolution and
final causes combined ; just as it is possible to imagine, though we
may have little experience of it, a building morphologically belong-
ing to the Gothic order, yet teleologically fitted for the wants of modern
life." Evolution, Expressioyi, and Sensation, by John Cleland, M.D.,
F.R.S., Professor of Anatomy, University, Glasgow. Maclehose, 1881
(p. 30).

38 LAY SERMONS.

ing special castigation, after a human fashion, for some
special offence. But notions of this kind, however
powerful in the days when augurs and soothsayers
might lame the hand of the wisest commander in the
conduct of a campaign, exercise such a secondary in-
fluence now, that they do not require any serious refuta-
tion. Of more relevance to the present point is the hahit
which certain people have of assuming a special divine
intention in any use which they may find it convenient
to make of any created object. Things are used not
always because the use made of them lay in the design
of the maker, but because it lies in the necessities of the
user. If any person, with human utilities only in view,
should assert that bears, and foxes, and sheep, and
other hairy or fleecy animals were provided with such
covering with the design of furnishing warm clothing to
human beings in cokl climates, he would be making a
most false conclusion.^ They were provided with these

^ Not at all au uncommon conclusion, however, I fear ; Spinoza
at least assumes that it is a general prejudice *^ dicimt enim homines
et pro certo statuunt Deum omnia propter hominem fecisse "
{Ethics, i. 36) ; and in the same chapter he goes on to complain justly
that men have devised systems of theology in such a fashion " ut Deus
illos supra rcliqiios diligcret, et totavi naturam in usum cccccc illorum
cupiditatis ct insatiahilis avariticc dirigeret ;" and then, of course, if
everything in nature exists only to subserve human happiness, if storms
and tempests, and potato diseases, and other exhibitions of nature's
potency occur, not at all conducive to human comfort or well-being, men
forthwith conclude " quod Dii irati sunt oh hijurias sibi ab homini-
hus facias ; et quanquatn expcrientia in dies reclamat et infinitis exem-
plis ostcndat coiamoda atquc incoiniaoda piis ocque ac impiis x>romiscue

CREATION OF THE WOELD. 39

coverings with the design of rendering their own exist-
ence possible ; and the adaptation of their integuments
to the clothing of man is only a secondary purpose,
which they accidentally serve, from coming in contact
with naked and thinly-clad human beings. As an in-
strument made expressly for one operation may, in the
hands of an expert operator, be made to do efficient
service in a foreign sphere, so the fact of a certain pur-
pose being served by a certain contrivance does not in
anywise necessarily prove that the contrivance was
made with the express design of effecting that purpose.
In a rich and various world, any object — as trees, for
instance — in the large oeconomy of terrene existence may
serve various purposes ; but their primary purpose is
simply to exist. The millions of flowers that, as the
poet has it, were born to blush unseen, serve this pri-
mary purpose as much as the gayest bouquet that ever
was used to adorn fair breast or garnish forth a splendid
banquet. We shall, therefore, at once agree with the
iconoclasts of design, in so far as they accentuate the
important doctrine that human uses are by no means
always identical with divine designs, and that in this,

cvenire non ideo ah inveterato 2^'^<^judicio desistimt." And Pollock
(Spinoza, p, 166) tells of "tlie theological conception of tlie universe
as created and governed by a magnificent human despot, which indi-
rectly makes man the measure of all things " — a passage, the phrase-
ology of -which gives us the key, if key were needed, to the strange
atheistic proclivities of some of our modern writers, who constantly
confound scientific theology with the most crude notions of unthinking
anthromorphism.

40 LAY SERMONS.

as in the more serious sphere of the moral government
of the world, " His ways are not as our ways, nor His
thoughts as our tlioughts." But He has thoughts, the
pious Hebrew believed, only more wide in their range,
and more complex in their operation, than many of our
human thoughts ; whereas the dogmatic denouncers of
all teleology in our times seem to delight in excluding
thought and thinking altogether from the universe, and
leaving the most skilful combinations of nicely com-
pacted vital machinery to be explained by unreasoned
evolutions and accidental variabilities. That all organ-
isms will be liable to modification from the action of
various accidental causes is self-evident. A ship re-
turning from an arctic expedition, after having squeezed
its way successfully through floating armies of icebergs,
will present some very serious modifications, no doubt,
of its external trimmings to the observant eye. A pet
cat also, or a pampered lapdog,will be modified not incon-
siderably, both in outward appearance and inward dispo-
sition, by the peculiar enfeebling treatment to which it has
been subjected. But no sane man imagines that the
powers which are calculated to modify the appearance
or condition of any object, or to adapt it to new circum-
stances, are the same kind of powers that could plastically
form that object. The bowsprit of a ship may be broken
off by an iceberg, but only a ship-carpenter could make
the ship. In the same way, though the human being is
tlie most adaptable of animals in respect of the various
adverse influences under which he can maintain exist-

CHEATION OF THE WORLD. 41

ence, no man ever dreams that this power of adaptation,
and the variety of human type thereby produced, has
anything to do with the production of the man, or could
render the marks of design in the wonderful structure
of his body, less eloquent now than they were to
Socrates more than two thousand years ago. The vari-
ability of type which climatic influences produce may
with time possibly assume the form, and be allowed to
assert the position of permanent species ; but it is the
most unwarranted of all assumptions to suppose that
any variety of solar or terrene influences could make
the seed of a rose grow up into a lily. External influ-
ences produce only external differences, and accidental
variations can never be the mother of systematic or-
ganisations. The virtue that makes the type is internal,
and being the more powerful factor of the two, is able
to resist successfully any invasion from without that
would deprive it of its essential character. It will
sooner die than be transmuted. The idea that a mere
uncalculated germ of something coming into an acci-
dental conjunction with an uncalculated anything could
develop itself in a blind groping sort of way into a
curiously constructed living machine, capable of achiev-
ing the most difficult ends with the smallest amount of
cunningly applied force, can be regarded only as one of
those startling paradoxes in which science divorced from
philosophy delights, while cradling itself into the plea-
sant belief of its own infallibility, and endowing de-
spotically the charm of a favourite idea with the virtue

42 LAY SERMONS.

of a -aniversal solvent. Such fancies will have their
day ; there will always be ingenious men doting over
their own cogitations, as mothers do over their crazy
brats ; men who will be willing to spin paradoxes by the
yard ; and there will always be no less hundreds of per-
sons, willing to receive those flashes of ingenious fancy
for authoritative revelations ; but it never can be a safe
thing in the long run for science to exercise itself, like
certain forms of church orthodoxy, in plucking the
beard of reason and planting itself in rude antago-
nism to the common instincts of mankind, and the
catholic experience of the world. To all such negative
and abnormal self-assertors I feel inclined to give the
hint which Cromwell gave to the Presbyterian theolo-
gians,— / do hescecJi your reverences, for once to think it
possiUe you may he ivrong. And it certainly is in every
way more likely that the apostles of unreasoned evolu-
tion, like Ixion in the fable, thinking to wed Juno,
should have embraced a cloud, than that Moses and
David, and Pythagoras and Socrates, and Plato and
Aristotle, and Dante and Newton, Kej)ler and Milton,
should have been mistaken in believing design to be
the one legitimate exponent of divine wisdom in the
cunning framework of the universe.

IV. Another striking principle in the wonderful
process of creative energy, which the Mosaic cosmogony
sets before us with such simple and dignified dramatic
grace, is that of Progression — gradation from less to

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 43

greater, and from greater to greatest ; and, as indis-
solubly connected with this, the principle of inferiority
and superiority, or, in a single word, subordination.
The principle of progression in the life of the cosmos,
a principle with which in political history we are all
sufficiently familiar, is set forth by Moses under the
form of a period of six days of creative activity, with a
special act of the divine plasticity put forth in each day,
with its specific result of progressive vitality. The
progression, of course, is from the more simple to the
more complex ; from the more easy and obvious to the
more difficult achievements of organising energy ; from
the teeming life of fish in the water, which old wisdom
always recognised as the prolific source of the lower
forms of vitality, to the more perfect organisation of
birds and quadrupeds, up to the king of the mammals,
Man. Anything like a concise and minute sequence of
the stages of zoological development, as they are pointed
out now-a-days by the experts in geological science, no
reasonable reader will look for in a writing meant to
assert great theological principles, not to indicate the
line of detailed scientific research. In the main, how-
ever, the coincidence between the ladder of life as
constructed in this first chapter of Genesis and the
successive stages of the growth of animal life on the
globe, as demonstrated by geological science, is
sufficiently striking to excite our unqualified admira-
tion. Compared with the Babylonian account, for
instance, which we have given above, it asserts a

44 LAY SERMONS.

superiority in respect of taste, of science, and of
theological dignity, as great as the utterance of a full-
grown thinker does above the babblings of a child.
But while it thus keeps free from the grotesque confu-
sion of other sacred cosmogonies, it avoids with equal
wisdom the opposite extreme of despotic simplicity, a
rage for which has taken some of our most ingenious
naturalists in these times into a strange captivity. Of
evolution, as distinguished from progressive creativeness,
Moses knew nothing. Had he been minded to use the
phrase, he would certainly have said that all things were
evolved out of God, not out of one another. And this
phraseology also would have been nearer to the scientific
truth ; for growth, gradual, slow% and to the vulgar eye
scarcely visible from moment to moment, is the eternal
miracle of the divine creativeness ; and growth is only
common colloquial English for what the scientists call
evolution, only without the superadded notion that one
tiling grows or is evolved out of another. Moses, how-
ever, was not concerned so much to use scientifically
correct as dramatically effective language ; and the
force of the divine volition, on which radically all
divine manifestation depends, was made more apparent
by the picturesque representation of single strokes of
creation than by a prosaic following of the minute
stages of a rising development. We must never forget
that all early literature is poetry, and that the earliest
form of poetry, so far as it is not pure song, is dramatic
narrative. Progression, therefore, by well - marked

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 45

steps, and each step loyally performed in obedience to a
separate act of sovereign divine volition, was the only
form that the Mosaic theology, to assure itself of popu-
lar comprehension, could assume. The general law
of progression thus dramatically indicated does not in
the slightest degree conflict with the scientific doc-
trine of evolution, if that doctrine still prove to be
more than a pretty fancy, and if it choose to remain
in its natural close attachment to the necessary root
of all organic evolution, viz. self-existing, plastic, or-
ganising Mind. Without this it is a mere phrase,
calculated only to amuse the ingenious, and to confound
the superficial ; for that one army of blind forces and
unpurposed appetencies should lead another army of
forces and appetencies equally blind, and not fall into
a ditch, is a law of progress which only the bastard
philosophy of a one-eyed squinting science can dream
that it comprehends ; but which must ever remain
incomprehensible to the man who knows that in no
possible world could the motley multiplicity of dis-
orderly chaotic forces work itself into a well-ordered
cosmos without the constant controlling agency of an
ordering mind, and that the blind rattle of an infinity of
chances, after the lapse of an infinity of years, would
be as far from producing a finely proportioned and
nicely balanced and nicely adapted scheme of things as
it was at the first throw.

The principle of development by progression in an
ascending line from lowest to highest brings us directly

46 LAY SERMONS.

in face of the antagonist principle of equality, which
some political speculators and socialist dreamers have
been eager to interpolate into the divine constitution of
things. Manifestly, in a world rich in a luxuriant
variety of ascending types, subordination, not equality,
must be the expression of the law which binds them
into a harmonious whole. In such a system of calcu-
lated gradation every one must know his place and
keep his place, if the harmony is not to be changed into
a jar, and the fair association of kindred parts to resolve
itself into the original jumble. In the various strata of
unreasoning and unspeculating things, whether vege-
table or animal, which remain directly under the firm
rein of divinely regulated instinct, no attempt to trans-
gress the natural bounds set to the subordinated species
is visible. A moss cannot elevate itself into a rose, nor
a grass rise into a palm. No amount of straining or
striving and appetency for wings would ever allow a
worm to become a wren, or a boa constrictor to become
an eagle. With all wisdom, therefore, the worm remains
a worm, and the serpent a serpent. But with man, in
some sense, it has been conceived to be otherwise. And
no doubt man is an animal of wide range, wonderful
capacity, and special adaptability. Endowed with tlie
perilous gift of liberty and self- direction within certain
limits, we see him daily rise, so to speak, above him-
self, and sink below himself, in a fashion which no
brute can emulate ; but to him also are bounds set
which lie cannot pass. The constituent law of the

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 47

internal type, and the modifying influence of potent
external circumstance, equally conspire to prevent the
low man from mounting up to the platform of the high,
or the high man from usurping the throne of the
highest. Equality amongst men is a condition only
possible on the postulate that the low shall universally
conspire to degrade the high, and that both shall deHght
to play their parts in a dull drama of the most wearisome
monotony. Equality in a political sense only means
that all men are men, and are entitled to be treated as
such, — that all citizens are citizens, and not to be handled
as chattels or slaves ; but it cannot mean that they
are all equally strong, equally fair, equally good, or
equally wise ; and if not, they are entitled also to a
treatment where such differences come into account,
different according to the quantity and quality of the
difference. So of liberty and fraternity, the other two
pet words of those who, harping on crazy old French
harps, set their faces stoutly against the great law of
graduated subordination in the universe. Every man
ought to be at liberty to use the faculties which God
has given him for the purposes which they serve ; but
he is not at liberty to shake himself free from those
thousandfold limitations, partly natural, partly artificial,
which render society possible and progress certain.
Eraternity, again, is true only in so far as in a bird's-eye
view of human nature all men belong to one family, of
whom the father is God ; but this equality is more a
sentiment than a fact. When the brothers of a family

48 LAY SERMONS.

which counts by millions are cast in every variety of
mould, exhibit every various grade of excellence, and
are driven to action by the most diverse, and not
seldom the most hostile instincts, the fraternity becomes
a phrase of no more practical value than if an orange
and a cannon ball should claim fraternity in virtue of
the round of a mathematical circle, which is the type
of both. The progress which the divine system of
things is constantly working out, in the political as in
the physical world, tends rather to difference than to
equality. The greatest possible variety, under the con-
trol of the most stringent unity, and the greatest
possible freedom in limited circles, under the firm guid-
ance of a reasonable sovereignty, — this is what the
wisdom of Moses teaches us to accept as the formula
for the interpretation of the divine order of things
under which we live, — not an equality contradicted by
every fact of existence, or a lawless liberty which, if
allowed full swing, would turn every garden into a
wilderness, every harmony into a dissonance, and every
most compact organism into dust.

V. In the twenty-sixth verse of the grand roll of
creation, the great Hebrew lawgiver announces the last
or culminating step of the creative process, with the very
peculiar phraseology, "Let v.s make Man in our image,
after our lihencssr This leads us at once to inquire
into the differential and distinctive features of the great
king of the mammals : and brings emphatically before

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 49

us the glowing contrast between the lofty wisdom of
Moses and the low fancies of a certain school of ma-
terialising philosophers that have recently been making
broad their phylacteries in the British Isles ; and not
here only, but in Germany also, though hatched from a
very different egg. The monistic cosmogony of Haekel,
which is only Darwinianism followed out to its con-
sistent absurdity, is merely the extreme revulsion from
the transcendental spiritualism in which Schiller, Fichte,
Hegel, and other notable Teutonic speculators, had wan-
tonly indulged. Germany, to whom the pathless air
had long been assigned as her peculiar province, and to
whom, careering in metaphysical balloons filled with
inflammable gas had long been a familiar exercitation,
now bethinks herself, for a change, if from no better
motive, of becoming practical ; and this she does in two
w^ays — first, by testing the value of modern theories of
political oeconomy under the dictatorial captainship of
Bismarck, and then by flinging herself as far as possible
down from the Platonic throne of imperial Mind {^aai-
\iKo<; Nov?) into the midst of the blind conflict of atoms
in the Epicurean void. But John Bull's recent flirta-
tion with the material cosmogony of Epicurus has a
very different origin. Naturally Bull has no philosophy,
except what he finds embalmed in church creeds, and
which he rarely knows how to reanimate. An instinc-
tive horror for speculative ideas and comprehensive
constructive principles is his boast ; and so, as he must
have something to give him an air of wisdom, he

50 LAY SERMONS.

betakes himself to induction from outside phenomena,
and deems himself on the sure road to certainty, when
he deduces his whole confession of faith from his senses
and from his fingers, not from his soul. In this way, of
course, all soul, all reason — X0709, vov^; — is practically
discounted from his philosophy; ingenious attempts are
paraded to educe unity from multiplicity, and to in-
terpret everything internal, spiritual, and intellectual,
as only the necessary result of an accidental conjunction
and co-operation of things external, material, and unrea-
soning ; and then to juggle the unthinking multitude
of would-be philosophers. Protoplasm, or some other
Greek compound, — meaning something or nothing, or
anything, — is formally stamped and publicly promul-
gated as the god of this new scientific world, in whom
all men not willing to be thought fools are called upon
to believe. To this substitution of Protoplasm for Elo-
him we have it plainly to attribute the antagonism
between the peculiar divinity, written on the front of
man by the Hebrew legislator, and the brotherhood of
the baboon so ostentatiously proclaimed by some of our
modern philosophasters. Man, says Moses, is a creature
distinctively and exceptionally created in the image of
God. Not at all, says Darwin, he is only a transmuted
monkey, as the monkey is a transmuted ascidian, and an
ascidian only a fully developed blot or bubble of Proto-
plasm. To carry out tliis theory after the favourite
Baconian method, by external induction, — that is, by col-
lecting all low external facts and neglecting all high

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 51

internal factors, — two things seemed extremely service-
able : in the first place, to direct attention to the lowest
type of human beings, of whom travellers give any
account, and then to parade the wonderful instincts of
even the lowest animals, as performing feats indicative
of reasoning faculties, not only equal but far superior
to the boasted reason of the human being. But both
these are illegitimate arguments, and fail altogether to
abolish the broad lines of distinction which Nature has
traced betwixt reasoning man and the unreasoning
brute. As to the savage tribes with whose habits
Tylor and Lubbock have done so much to make us
familiar, so far as we may creditably believe that they
ever present themselves in a form scarcely to be dis-
tinguished from the dumb, unthinking, inexpressive
brute, we can only say, as fair reasoners, that these
are not normal specimens of the type which they are
produced to illustrate ; and from normal specimens
only can the distinctive mark of any natural genus
be scientifically concluded. As a bird without wings
is not a bird, and a fox without a tail is no just
specimen of the classical Eeynard of the mediaeval
stories, so neither is the fatuity or the furiosity of an
inmate of a lunatic asylum, nor the rank animal
savagery of the inhabitant of some lone, neglected island
in the Australian seas, a specimen which can be fairly
taken as distinctive of the reasonable featherless biped
whom we call Man. As for the instincts of the lower
animals, there is nothing new in teaching us to admire

WEBSTEE • FEEE • LIBEARY,

52 LAY SERMONS.

them ; nothing more true than that they possess powers
of divination, let us call them, or of transcendental
intuition, acting within a prescribed sphere, which sur-
pass the most subtle achievements of human reason, and
are, in fact, so far as our faculty of exposition goes,
miraculous.^ But this only proves that they are divine.
All Nature is divine ; and what we call life, with its
treasure of secret potencies, and its array of magnificent
functions, is only the constant, abiding operation of
the plastic energy of the self - existent, all -causative
Eeason which we call God, — a power which to us weak,
dependent creatures, is always in its nature essentially
miraculous, and only not so called because it is common.
There is as much miracle in the regular beating of the
heart, the index of life, as in the wanderings of a home-
seeking cat, the migrations of a tropical bird, or the
nosings of a venatorial hound. All animals are con-
stantly doing things which defy and transcend all
reason, but do not therefore give the slightest ground
to suspect that they either use reason in what they do,
or possess any germ of speculation that could possibly
— with the help of millions of years — be developed into
reason. You ask why the lower animals do these mira-
culous things ? Simply because they are in the hand
of God ; because He leads them, and they may go, and
must go, with a miraculous unconscious guidance, to
any goal which for them, by His presiding forethought

^ "111 brutis plura observaiitur (juac humauam sagacitatem longe
superaut." — Spinoza, Ethics, III. 2.

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 53

purpose, may be set. They are tools in the hand of
God, and therefore they do their work more surely
than man; but not, therefore, are they superior to
man, or in any way commensurate with him ; for they
have not been elevated into the throne of conscious
liberty and possible blunder, which is at once the privi-
lege and the penalty of the sons of Adam. Let us
look, then, at man in his broad aspects, on the highroad
of his career, not on those devious and dim byways
where speculators, more anxious for novelty than for
truth, pick up the exceptional facts out of which
they spin their perverse philosophies. There are two
undisguisable forms of expression in virtue of which
the human creature emphatically marks himself out
as generically different from the brute — Language ^
and Laughter. Let us inquire what these mean. By
language of course we cannot mean here the language
of gesticulation, or of ejaculation, or of any sort of
sounds that any voiceful creatures may make to
express their wants, to give vent to their sorrow, or to
revel in their joy. Such language may exist in many
animals considerably below the model monkey soon to
be a man, or the model ascidian in whose heart the
dream of eventual monkeyhood is beginning to germ.
But by language we mean in this argument that cun-
ningly articulated system of articulate sounds, expressing

^ 'E/c aov yap y^uos ^(Xfiev Irjs /tt/ii;/xa Xaxovrey
MoOvoL, Sera i'wei rcKal epiret 6v7]t eTrt yatav.

Cleaxthes, Hymn to Jove.

54 LAY SERMONS.

ideas, which of all animals man only is known to have
evoked and to possess. What are ideas ? Our scholas-
tic teachers tell us that they are conventional terms
denoting not individual objects, apprehended by sen-
sation, but genera or families of objects created by
thought ; and they are right. An orange, and the idea
of an orange, may seem in some senses very cognate
things ; nevertheless, they are not only different things,
but things formed from a different centre, and placed
by nature in irreconcileable antagonism to one another.
Not one orange, or two, or two score, or two millions
of oranges, could give rise to the idea of an orange,
unless some composing, combining, and discriminating
faculty were present to separate the accidental from the
essential of the phenomenon, and stamp the word to the
intelligence with the features that belong to the genus,
to the exclusion of what may belong to the individual.
Jaffa oranges, for instance, are of large size, and have
thick skins ; but neither their size nor their thickness
has anything to do with the significance of the word
ORANGE. Of the sensations which bring individual
oranges to our perceptive faculty, externality and
multiplicity are the characteristics ; in the creation of
the idea, notion, or concept of an orange, internality
and unity are the indispensable factors. We may fitly
compare the individual notices supplied by sense to the
evidence given in a court of law by the various wit-
nesses : these form the materials on which the case is
to be decided ; but the decision comes from the judge ;

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 55

and the judge is one ; and his judgment collects and
includes, and by wonderful alchemy of construction and
assimilation, works into a harmonious unity, the con-
flicting variety of the evidence. Or again, we may say,
as his thousands of soldiers who fight the battle are to
the great general who schemes the campaign, so are the
sensations of a reasoning being like man to his ideas,
essential to one another, and incapable of separate
action, but different, nevertheless, and distinct, ener-
gising from opposite centres, antagonistic in their atti-
tude, and sometimes, as in the case of a mutiny, even
hostile in their action. Of these ideas, language is the
natural bearer and exponent ; and not only natural, but
necessary, we may surely say ; for the sum of Nature is
made up everywhere of inward forces, which reveal
themselves in outward forms ; and an internal world of
ideas without any external form for making itself mani-
fest would be an anomaly in the constitution of things
which we have no right to assume. If, when an ex-
truded cat moans woefully through a frosty night, or a
stray dog whimpers piteously at your gate, you are
entitled to conclude that he is expressing in his way
the feelings which a poor human child would experience
in the same circumstances, the absence of all articulate
signs expressive of ideas in the brute creation affords a
just ground for denying their existence altogether in the
lower platform of life. Nature is not wont to be defeated
of her object in this stupid sort of way. If she has put
a well of ideas into the breast of any of her creatures,

5 6 LAY SERMONS.

they will find their way to manifestation in some adequate
form, we may depend on it. The brutes, therefore, have
no language which is the body of ideas ; have no ideas
such as claim that body as their natural concomitant ;
labour plainly under the want of that God-like faculty
distinctive of man, which, according to Moses, marks
his superiority in the scale of created beings. And
not only is there here a marked inferiority in degree,
but a marked difference in kind ; not only is the differ-
ence one of ascending steps in a slope, but rather a
gap such as that which exists between a crystal of
mica and a lichen crust, or between a lichen crust and a
sheep's fleece. And this will the more appear if we con-
sider further the culmination of ideas in w^hat are called
Ideals. Man may well be defined an animal that delights
in conceiving and is destined to find his highest happiness
in strufrfrling after the realisation of Ideals. What does
this mean ? What are Ideals ? Whence do they come ? and
how do they specially assert their existence in the dis-
tinctively human scenes of the grand drama of human life ?
The ideal of a thing is just the most perfect type of the
thing ; and its genesis is clearly traceable to the innate
God-implanted aspiration after excellence in the human
soul operating upon the materials supplied by the senses
to the generalising and unifying action of the understand-
ing. Now, the ideal of a circle is the concrete circle
which most closely corresponds to the abstract circle of
the mathematician ; the ideal of a man is that man, exist-
ing or not existing, in whose composition and character

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 57

are combined all the excellent qualities which most dis-
tinctly and most emphatically make up manhood. The
ideal woman, in the same way, is the woman in whose
presentation all that is most womanly stands forth most
attractively, and takes captive most irresistibly. Nov/
the natural result of a delight in Ideals is to create a
certain noble discontent with what is common, accom-
panied by a fine relish for whatever approximates to the
ideal. Hence the potency of Love in the world, " Love,
unvanquished in fight," as Sophocles sings, whether
against gods or men ; for, discounting the mere sexual
appetency which moves brutes as well as men, the love
of which poets sing, and philosophers discourse, is
neither more nor less than a rapturous recognition of
an Ideal, or, as we may vary the phrase, an impassioned
admiration of Excellence. Every man, of course, is not
gifted with this capacity for ideal rapture in the highest
degree. When it asserts itself in a very high degree
we are accustomed to call it genius ; but it is, neverthe-
less, a widely human capacity, and may be recognised
not seldom in the humblest spheres, where it has re-
ceived that fair amount of culture which all human
excellence requires. In the back slums of our great
manufacturing cities, where the human being grows up
imder the most adverse influences, you will find not
seldom little patches of order and neatness amidst the
general disarray, from which you might furnish a useful
hint or two to my lady in the equipment of her boudoir ;
and the crude rudiments of architecture in the wig-

68 LAY SERMONS.

warns of the Indian savas^e are not without touches of
graceful ornamentation, which the most accomplished
architect may not disdain to appropriate. In literature
and the arts a high capacity for the ideal presents itself,
either passively and receptively, in the production of
what is called a fine taste and delicate sensibility for
beauty, or energetically and constructively in the shape
of the creations of literary and artistic genius. And
here at last Ave have the image of God in man set forth
in lines of most indubitable parallelism. The poet is a
maker and a creator ; so is the sculptor, the painter,
the musician, the artist, each moulding the proper
material at his disposal, and lording over it like a god.^
The analytic investigations in which chemists, ana-
tomists, physiologists, and other such scientists deKght,
justly excite our admiration ; but the peculiar style of
their researches, having to do rather with breaking up
than with building up, prevents them from exhibiting
that perfect analogy to the divine energising in the
work of creation which we find in the constructive

^ When Spinoza {Ethics, I. 17) asserts in the strongest terms that
the human intellect and the divine have nothing in common but the
name, he must be thinking either of the analytic action of the cognitive
intellect, mentioned immediately in the text, or he must be conti'asting
the absolute dependence of the human soul with the absolute inde-
pendence of the self-existent and self-causative Divine Nature ; for
as far as concerns the intellectual work of an ideal artist, we have only
to conceive the soul of the sculptor shaping out his ideal in the inside
of the clay, which serves him as a body, and we have a similitude
of the action of the divine and human intellect, than which nothing
could be more complete.

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 59

productions of the poet, the painter, and the architect.
We justly attribute knowledge to the Supreme Being ;
but though the term scientiiic may well be applied to
the divine workmanship, it is never applied to the
divine function ; whereas, if we choose to call the
world the living Epos of the great cosmic poet, whose
words are deeds, and whose deeds are miracles, we
should be saying what no pious person would con-
sider irreverent, and no thoughtful person imperti-
nent.-^ Nor is it in the world of fair thoughts and
grand imaginations only that the divine faculty of
creative sovereignty displays itself in man. In the
general who masses a confused host into calculated
order and deft disposal ; in the statesman who wisely
uses the prejudices and the passions of a heterogeneous
multitude, and bends them to his purpose as Neptune
does the waves ; in the apostle who sallies forth into
waste fields of social decay and organises the crude
hosts of human straojsjlers into well-ordered churches
and communities ; — in all such men the inspiration, the
work, and the triumph of an ideal are even more clearly
visible than in the less substantial creations of the poet
and the painter. Napoleon, Bismarck, and Wesley are
gods, each in his own world and after his proper fashion.
Why then, we may now ask, have the lower animals no

^ Almost the same as Plato's phrase in the closing sentence of the
Timceics — o k6<x/xos elKwu rod votjtou QeoO aladrjros — the sensible image
of the intelligible God ; for the work of an artist is in very deed the most
express image of his thought.

60 LAY SERMONS.

poets, no painters, no prophets, no apostles, no literature,
no churches, no worship ? Simply because they are not
created in the image of God in the special sense in which
man is. No doubt they have their work to do, and they
do it well ; but it is marked out for them in definite and
invariable lines, not projected with the freedom of a
self- determining ideal. What they do, more correctly
speaking, is done for them, — by them only as tools
in the hands of a workman. They are machines ; they
are chronometers, which go without fail only because
they cannot go otherwise. They cannot blunder be-
cause they cannot choose. They are the most perfect
and accomplished of all slaves, but slaves nevertheless ;
and, therefore, not created in the image of God.

So much for language and the ideas and ideals which,
as an essentially human endowment, it expresses. The
other broadly human characteristic which presented
itself for notice under this head — Laughter — may be
discussed in a single sentence. The ridiculous is the
reverse side of the reasonable ; and as the obverse side
deals with the congruous and the proper, so the reverse
with the incongruous and the absurd. Of course the
perception of both depends on comparison ; and a laugh
is a judgment, accompanied with an agreeable kind of
nervous excitement, pronounced on the unsuitableness
of the junction of two things which are in their nature
apart. But brutes pronounce no judgments, therefore
they cannot laugh. They may be astonished or scared

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 61

by any odd appearance, as of a man standing with liis
head between his legs, which they say frightens bulls ;
they may even grin perhaps occasionally, in the lowest
sense of that word ; but they certainly never laugh.

VI. A sixth important principle .contained in this
pregnant scheme of the Creation is the doctrine of
periodical seasons of Eest and cessation in the process
of the creative energy, indicated by the constitution of
the Sabbath (chap. ii. 2, 3). How this hangs together
with the abolition of the Saturday's rest under the
Christian dispensation, and the consecration of the first
day of the week for religious purposes, will be discussed
in detail afterwards in a separate discourse. For the
present, it will be enough to say that what all history
and all geology prove to have been a prominent fact in
all stages of the world's development, is here set down
in the narrative form as an institution, prophetic of the
special Seventh Day's abstinence from labour, after-
wards so prominent amid the peculiarities of the
Hebrew polity. What we have to learn from it is
simply this, — that as the alternation of rest and labour
lies deeply seated in the constitution of things, being
visible equally in the seasonal changes of the physical
world, and in the periods of repose in which society
seems to be gathering strength for the successive acts
of its destined progress — taught by these broad facts of
mundane life, and even more feelingly by our own per-
sonal experience, let us fix it in our minds that the

62 LAY SERMONS.

only way to preserve a capacity for continued work is
diligently to observe recurrent periods of rest, and that
we shall in vain hope to reap the full fruits of our
waldng hours, so long as we persist in withholding its
natural dues from Sleep.

VII. One only point remains in conclusion. At
the end of each day's work, the seal of divine appro-
bation is stamped on the result in the words, "And God
SAW THAT IT WAS GooD," — a feeling of satisfaction in the
contemplation of the ever-fresh miracle of the creation,
which sounds everywhere through the lyrical utter-
ances of the Hebrew mind, in the psalms of David, and
elsewhere. And this, no doubt, is the healthy and the
happy and wdse way of looking at the rich blossom of
reality, of which we are a part, as the greatest of
modern poet -philosophers has expressed it in the in-
troductor}^ hymn to his significant drama of human
destiny : —

Raphael.
" The Sun doth chime his ancient music

'Mid brothered spheres' contending song,

And on his fore-appointed journey

With pace of thunder rolls along.

Strength drink the angels from his glory,

Though none may throughly search his way :

God's works rehearse their wondrous story

As bright as on Creation's day.

Gabriel.
And swift and swift Leyond conceiving

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 63

The pomp of earth is wheeled around,
Alternating Elysian brightness
With awful gloom of night profound.
Up foams the sea, a surging river,
And smites the steep rock's echoing base,
And rock and sea, unwearied ever,
Spin their eternal circling race.

Michael.
And storm meets storm with rival greeting,
From sea to land, from land to sea,
While from their war a virtue floweth.
That thrills with life all things that be.
The lightning darts his fury, blazing
Before the thunder's sounding way ;
But still thy servants, Lord, are praising
The gentle going of thy day.

All the Three.

Strength drink the angels from thj^ gloiy,
Though none may search thy wondrous way :
Thy works repeat their radiant story
As bright as on Creation's day." ^

But, as we all know, there is another side to the pic-
ture,— a side brought prominently forward by the Evil
Spirit in the great German drama, and by certain
negative and meagre, or it may be, to speak more
cbaritably, morbidly sensitive and unreasonably im-
patient philosophers among ourselves. "/cA hin cler
Geist der stets verneint," says Mephistopheles : *' / am
the Sjmnt that always say NO !" and there are persons

^ Goethe's Faust : Prologue in Heaven.

64 LAY SEKMONS.

at all times — not a few — without any pretensions to
diabolic inspiration, who make a frequent use of this
unfertile particle. There is, no doubt, such a thing as
Evil ; and whoso is forward to find faults right and
left and all round in this world will have no difficulty
in finding them ; for even the pious Pindar complains
that the gods to mortal men dispense two bad things for
one good. Some likewise have gone forth in these
latter times, and have asked plainly, " Is life worth
living V so that the question becomes a serious one,
Whence this Evil in a world blazoned so full of goodness
has its fount ? and it is a question which may be asked
and answered modestly, with a fair amount of satisfac-
tion to reasonable persons. The old Persian solution of
the difficulty, by assuming the existence of an Evil God,
co-equal with the Good God, but eternally at war with
Him, must be rejected, for the obvious reason that
Good and Evil in the world do not appear arrayed in
hostile and distinct ranks, but seem to grow out of the
same root, and get entangled in a tissue which no
mortal skill can disenravel. Besides, if it can be
clearly proved that one great part of what we call Evil
is clearly relative, and another great part is demon-
strably necessary for the attainment of a higher good,
the theory of a Supreme Evil Principle will be found
to explain a great deal too much. Another theory that
has been called in to explain the inequalities of
fortune, and the unmerited sufferings of so many
unfortunates wearing the front of the human form

CREATION OF THE WOELD. 65

divine, is the theory of guilt transmitted from a
previous state of existence. " Has this man sinned or
Ms jparents, that he was horn blind?" But this prin-
ciple, however practically efficient in the faith of
the Brahmanists and Buddhists, and however fairly
enshrined by the prose of Plato and the verse of
Yirgil, may wisely be dismissed on what appears to
have been the ground taken by our Saviour, that we
know and can know nothing about it, and that religion
has to do always with the question what we are and
where we are, not whence we came or with what in-
heritance. A third method of dealing with the diffi-
culty is that which has been generally received in the
Christian Churches, and takes its start, like the Brah-
manic and Buddhist theologies, from the principle
of inherited guilt ; but guilt in this case, not confined
in its operation to the individual who committed the
original sin, but spreading itself from the first created
man, like a leprosy, over the countless millions of the
unhappy human race. According to this theory, the
w^orld, as originally made, was perfect, and in every
respect deserving of the blessing pronounced on it by
the Great Artificer ; but since the fatal disobedience
of the first man, it was shaken out of joint, dislocated,
and disrupted, so as to present the spectacle that the
Eoman Empire did in the days when such monsters
as Heliogabalus and Commodus could wear the purple
where the Scipios and the Catos had been citizens. This
tremendous theory of a sweeping inherited curse seems

66 LAY SERMONS.

originally to have been worked up from the narrative
in the third chapter of Genesis of the primitive sinless
state of our first parents in the garden of Eden, and
their ejection in consequence of disobedience to the
divine command. But it is more than doubtful whether
the Christian Churclies have not here committed a
grave mistake, by their prosaic habit of interpreting as
literal historical fact what was penned in the spirit of
Oriental parable and allegory. In this sense Adam is
merely a name for every man, or any man, who at any
time or place plants his individual will in stout self-
sufftciency against the divine ordinances by which the
world is maintained in its propriety.^ Every man who

^ I am glad to see that I have here stumbled upon almost the very
words of Buiisen with regard to the fall in his great Bibelwerk,
Genesis ii. 5, whence I translate as follows : — "As to what concerns
the Fall of IMan, it belongs plainly not to the world of historical
men, but to the general idea of man ; an idea, however, which
becomes history in the case of every individual man. The fall of
Adam is the personal deed of every individual human being from the
beginning of history to the present day," And in this view I say ydi\\
him, V. 16, " That the Serpent is the selfish understanding asserting
itself rebelliously against the moral nature and the divine command."
Le Clerc's commentary on the nature and significance of the serpent,
"Nobis ut in re obscurd, tutissima vidctur ignorantice confcssio," would
not have been necessary at the present day, when comparative philology
and comparative theology have opened to us a wide field of induction
in such matters, of which a hundred years ago scarcely one or two of
the Avisest could have dreamt. Dillviann, in his Commentary on
Genesis {Leipzig, 1875), while dissenting from Bunsen, says in a general
way wliat is really not generically different : " The serpent (iii. 1) is a
real power, not a mere symbol of cunning thoughts cherished in the

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 67

sins yields to the seduction of the serpent — that is,
the conceit of superior knowledge to be obtained by an
act of disobedience to the Supreme Disposer ; and the
consequence is to every man to-day, and to the end of
time, as long as sin shall be in the world, ejection from
Paradise. And the Western Churches unfortunately
were not the only persons who, by an overstrained
consistency to a literal interpretation of an allegorical
text, turned the broad fact of original sin, as we see
it daily before our eyes, into a sternly compacted
doctrine of inherited guilt. We see in the Evangelic
history repeated instances of how the Apostles them-
selves required to be enlightened as to the real spiritual
meaninof of the allegorical o;arb in which our Saviour
was wont to clothe his higher teaching ; and even St.
Paul, though no man tore himself more valiantly free
from subjection to the ceremonial literalness of his
countrymen, may have derived from the teaching
of the Talmudic schools in which he was educated^
certain notions about the significance of Old Testa-
ment figures foreign to the spirit of the essentially

heart of man against the divine law." Symbol or no symbol, it means
the rebellion of unsanctified individual intellect against cosmic order
and law ; and this is all with which the intelligent and religious reader
has at the present day to do.

1 The doctrine of a historical fall is distinctly taught in the Apoc-
lyphal book, Wisdom of Solomon, ii. 23-4, a passage in this respect
perfectly singular, I believe, in the whole breadth of the Old Testa-
ment writings. Here also the word 5td/3oXos, devil, is used for the
first time.

68 LAY SERMONS.

ethical gospel which he preached. Certain it is that iu
the Epistle to the Eomans, though in nowise essential
to his main argument, he seems to place an historical
Adam in the same position that our federal theologians
do, as the representative head of a race doomed to
misery by the inheritance of a rebellious blood from his
veins. Whether the Christian Churches are bound to
consider themselves committed to the stern consistency
of this doctrine (of which I find no trace in the Gospels),
theologians may decide ; but it certainly does appear
to me that such a fashion of explaining the origin of
evil raises more difficulties than it removes, and is
chargeable, no less than the other shifts of a meta-
physical theology, with proving a great deal too much ;
the fact being, as I shall now show, that the great
majority of the evils which the doctrine of the fall of
man lays at Adam's door are no evils at all, but only the
unavoidable imperfections which cleave to all finite
creations, or they form the necessary stage for the en-
actment of the great drama of human life. Take Death
for instance. That it is an evil, and a great evil to the
individual, who can doubt ? To be torn away roughly
and darkly from the familiar vision of this glorious world,
our home for so many pleasantly varied years, with
all its fond looks of human love, and glimpses of super-
natural grandeur ; to be severed from all this rudely by
a sudden pitiless stroke, or a slow, cruel, unrelenting
wrench, though it were only for a season, to return again
like the fabled Pythagoras, with a more glorious body to

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 69

revisit the shimmerings of the sun, with a new heaven
and a new earth ; — this indeed is a great evil, on which
only a wise Socrates, once in a thousand years, or a
triumphant martyr at the stake, can look with calmness.
But is it an evil to the world ? Think for a moment.
If there were no deaths, in a very short time there could
be no births ? If the millions of Coptic race in the
days of the Pharaohs had remained in a lusty longevity,
from century to century peopling the green fringe of
the fertile flowing Nile, where would have been room
for the Greeks and the Arabs and the Turks that
came in afterwards? The never-ceasing succession
of fresh young lives, the eternal rejuvenescence of the
race, always springing up most luxuriantly when most
savagely trampled down, always leaping up from the
womb of time with a joyful curiosity to greet the ever-
new spectacle of the ever-old wonder of the universe —
this constant outburst of fresh life from the inner foun-
tains of the Divine creativeness could not possibly be
without Death. Therefore, as Doctor Paley, the great
genius of British common sense, said, Immortality on
this earth is out of the question. In the great scheme of
Providence, death, as Goethe somewhere has it, is only
a trick of nature, to show the fertility of her resources,
and to clear the course for the display of a more abun-
dant life. But, if we must die, why in such a painful
and disagreeable way ? Well, that is like asking why
a strong and well-compacted box cannot be broken up
with a light puff, as you would blow out a candle. I

70 LAY SERMONS.

cannot tell you why, except in a general way, that the
laws of the world were not made, nor its solid consist-
ency cared for, merely with a view to your convenience.-^
Do you demand that the law of gravitation shall
cease to act, when on any occasion you may be
passing under a cliff, whence a fragment of a rock
may topple down and break your bones ? God is om-
nipotent, you think, and might easily, in such cases,
interpose to save the pain and increase the comfort of
his creatures. Believe me, good friend, that such inter-
position, for the sake of your leg or your little linger,
and the legs and little fingers of thousands and tens of
thousands of persons coming into misfortuned collision
with the great forces of the universe, would end in
universal confusion and universal carelessness. Self-
importance is the vice that lies, at the root of all quer-
ulous complaints against the divine order of things ;
and so it is here. Imagine yourself, for a moment, not
a man, but some other creature — say a salmon, — and
consider how you would be affected in judging of some of
the evils that this creature may have to encounter in its
adventurous passage from a salt to a fresh water sojourn.
You are a salmon ; and just when you have commenced

^ Rerum pcrfeclio ex sold ear am naticrd et j^otentid est cestimanda ;
nee ideo res inagis aut minus perfectcc s^int propterea quod hominum
sensum delectant vcl offeiidunt, quod Jiuviancc naturcc conducunt vel quod
cidcm repugnant." — Spinoza, Mhic I., Appendix in fine. And Makcus
Antoninus, irpSaea-TL 8r] rb avayKoiov Kai rb rip 6'Xw Kbcriup (TVix<pipov oiJ
fxepos el' TravTL 5e (pvaeojs [xipeL a-yadbv 5 0^pet i] rod S\ov (pixn^, Kai 5
e/cetVT/s ecTTt cwaTLKov. — De rchxLS sxiis, ii. 3.

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 71

to shake your scales clear from the brine, and are brac-
ing yourself for your upward voyage, eager as a racer
to run a race, you come right against a steep black wall
of basaltic rock, down which the broad current comes
with headlong fling, and sweeping scourge, and thunder-
ing lash, that debars all progress. "What then ? You, as
a salmon, no doubt, think you are grievously wronged,
and conclude somehow that the world is out of joint,
and wonder why the Almighty does not interpose to
smooth all river courses, or to give you the power of
a miraculous leap wherever you may desire it. But
what says the philosopher looking down from the top
of the cataract, or the angler Avatching at the bottom of
the swirling cauldron ? Simply this, that the courses
of rivers were never shaped, and in the nature of things
could not possibly have been shaped, to serve the con-
venience of migratory fish ; and that salmon have no
right to complain when their progress up a stream is
stopped by the impediment of a beautiful waterfall, or
even if they should happen to be hooked by a false fly,
or entangled in a treacherous net to furnish a lightly
dispensable delicacy to the banquet of some dainty
feeder. And so in similar cases of which the number is
legion. The evil is always an evil to the man or to
the salmon, as the chance may be (for evil is never by
design, only accidental), but not to the universe.

Some people, in arguing these grave matters, are
willing to concede the truth of the view just stated in
reference to physical evil ; but betwixt this and moral

72 LAY SERMONS.

evil, they are accustomed to draw a broad line of dis-
tinction. But the more closely I scan this imagined
demarcation, the less clearly do I discern it. In the
main, I feel in every case compelled to "account for
moral as for natural things," and to say with the poet —

" If storms and tempests mar not Heaven's design,
Wliy then a Borgia or a Catiline 1 "

All moral evils grow from two roots — from ignorance
or from selfishness ; from lack of knowledge, or from
lack of love. Let us see how far in the general case
these evils, no less than the physical evils at which Tve
have glanced, are altogether relative, and absolutely
necessary for the production of a higher good. Let us
for a moment suppose all ignorance banished, and what
would be the consequence ? Most people have heard
the famous saying attributed to Lessiiig, that if an
angel from heaven were to offer him knowledge in the
one hand, or the search after knowledge on the other,
he would prefer the search. This answer, with a single
stroke, clears away the mist from many a mystery.
Ignorance in itself is not an evil ; but the forbidding
of ignorance to grow up into knowledge, when the
divinely implanted germ thereto lies in every creature.
Growth in knowledge and the search after truth are
amongst the purest and most stimulating of human
pleasures ; yet both grow, and by the very terms of the
case can grow, only out of the root of ignorance. Banish
ignorance ; and forthwith you banish not only the plea-

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 73

sure of seeking for knowledge, but the pleasant relation
of teacher and taught, and the lively play of intellect-
ual communication between the less informed and the
better informed members of an intelligent society. A
world in which everybody knew everything as well as
any other body would be a world in which nobody
could learn anything from anybody ; as a garden in
which no weeds grew would be a garden in which the
gardener would have nothing to do. For let it be
taken always as a necessary postulate in all moral ques-
tions, that excellence and happiness consist in the evok-
ing of energy ; and that energy can in no wise be evoked
so well as by struggling with evils and overcoming
difficulties. Let us therefore accept ignorance as the
gardener accepts nettles, or the farmer field marigold, to
be dealt with in the way of disappearance, but with a
certain catholic recognition of their right to have been
what and where they are, not with a curse. Nor is it
otherwise with vice, which indeed bears exactly the
same relation of finite imperfection to virtue that ignor-
ance does to knowledge. This the Greeks saw clearly,
and therefore marked all moral deflection by the same
word that signifies an error in precision of vision —
dfjuaprdvco — to miss the mark, to eri\ to sin. And does
not Solomon also say that every sinner is a fool, and
every sin a folly ? and does not Socrates, the great mis-
sionary of practical reason, bring the matter to a proved
paradox, that to sin is merely not to know what
you are and where you are, and to dash your head

74 LAY SERMONS.

against a hard granite wall, imagining it to be a soft
cushion ? Yes, verily, to sin is always to blunder ; and,
as imperfect short-sighted creatures, we have no right
to be surprised if it be our destiny to grow up in a
school of blunders, that we may learn not to blunder,
as children by falling frequently learn to stand, and by
creeping to march. ISTo doubt the mere knowing
faculty, however acute, will never make a hero, or
work out a noble life. In man, being man, and not
tiger, the social instincts, which Socrates calls the
TCL (ptXiKaj must always be supposed ; but granting
that element to make a human society possible,
immoral conduct must always be unreasonable conduct,
and must lead to the ruin and wreckage of a human
life, just as certainly as an error in one step of his
calculation must vitiate the summation of an arithme-
tician. But if sin be only a mistake, what then is
guilt ? — guilt, the greatest of all human evils, according
to Schiller —

" Das Leben ist der QUter hochstes nicht :
Der Ubel Grosstes aher ist die Schold."

Guilt certainly is fundamentally nothing more than a
mistake ; but it is a mistake, or rather a feeling that
flows from a mistake of a very peculiar kind, a mistake
very different from that of making a false move at
chess, or giving a false ball at cricket. It is a mistake
which involves the betrayal of the citadel of a man's
own soul ; it is a mistake which puts a man into

CEEATION OF THE WORLD. 75

startling antagonism, not only with the whole moral
world, of which he is a part, but into woeful contra-
diction to himself ; it is a mistake which implies the
dethronement of the highest faculty in man, and the
usurpation of the moral sovereignty by the lowest.
Therefore it is justly held to be a much more serious
thing than an error in any speculation, or in a curious
analysis of things indifferent — things which are less
connected with his real happiness, it may be, than
the button upon his coat. N"evertheless, in its greatest
potency it is only a mistake arising either from
deficiency in the social instinct or a habitual neglect
in the application of reason to social relations ; but in
any case, in its essential character not less of the nature
of a blunder than any blunder that it is in the nature
of a variously limited and curiously composite creature
to make. The possibility, or rather the certainty, of
moral blunders is given in the existence of such a
creature as man. Sin, therefore, is not absolutely an
evil, the existence of which mars the perfection of the
divine creation : it is only an imperfection naturally
cleaving to a finite creature so wonderfully constituted
as man.^

^ Spinoza rather looks upon sin and all other defects as a proof of
the perfection of the universe— perfect, that is to say, in such a
fashion that, like a well-furnished museum, it contains specimens of
all things from the lowest to the highest, from the worst to the best.
'^ lis auiem qui quccrunt Cur Dciis omnes homines non ita creavit ut solo
rationis clucfAC guheniarentur, nihil aliud rcsjwndco quam, quia ei non
defuit materia, ad omnia ex summo nimirum ad infimum 'perfedionis

V6 LAY SERMONS.

Then "every siu cleserveth not God's wrath and
curse both in this world and that which is to come."
Certainly NOT. Sin is bad enough without that. It
has been the fashion of theological dogmatists in all
ages to intensify and exaggerate moral instincts till
they become immoral absurdities. In pulpit logic I
have heard it stated, not once or twice, but many times,
that a sin against the law of an Infinite Being deserves
an infinite punishment. It is as true logically, and
much more true morally, that a sin by a finite being
deserves a finite punishment. Punishment, indeed, in
the concatenation of things which belongs to the
scheme of a perfectly wise and good Beiug can mean
only a spur to produce amendment ; without which
issue in a well-ordered world it has no right to exist.
The permanent existence of essential Evil in a world
which exists for the manifestation of good is incon-
ceivable ; and an inexorable persistence in castigation,
which would be savage and barbarous in an earthly
father to his child, cannot be benevolent or beneficial
in the attitude of the Fatlier of all good things to his
erring progeny.

One final difficulty remains. Though the sorrow
which is the fruit of sin be a natural sequence, and a
condition precedent of higher good, we cannot certainly

(jmdum creanda." — Ethics I., Ajjpendix, in fine — that is to say, a
world composed solely of creatures of the highest degree of perfection
would be a world deficient in the variety of possible forms, and in this
respect, as a whole, more meagre and less perfect.

CREATION OF THE WOELD. 77

pretend to say the same of the sufferings, which not
only confound the innocent with the guilty, — as may
lightly happen under the action of invariable physical
laws, — but which seem to afflict the best men in the
worst times with peculiar persecution, ignominy,
and anguish. This is really the only chapter of
Evil in the world that ever gave me any very
serious consideration. Let any one ponder seriously
the sufferings of the noble Italians who first stirred
the insurrection against Austrian intrusion, before the
recent liberation, the long-drawn sorrows of a Pellico
in a Venetian, and of his fellow-patriots in a Moravian,
dungeon ; or look back to the twenty-seven years of
butchery practised on the faithful Covenanters of Scot-
land some two hundred years ago by a perjured king
and a brutal ministry ; or indeed, any account — for
their number is not few — of the cruelties and barbarities
which have been systematically carried on by bad men
armed with power, against good men mailed with
honesty ; — and he will then clearly enough perceive that
in such cases honesty has not been, as the proverb has it,
the best policy, but the direct road to misery, humilia-
tion, and death. Of this sort of thing St. Paul and all
his fellow-soldiers in the glorious work of redeeming
the world from the intolerable yoke of Eoman violence
and Greek sensualism had large experience ; and his view
of the matter he expressed in a sentence which will
leap spontaneously from the bosom of every sound-
hearted man, when those pages of history, carved in suffer-

78 LAY SERMONS.

iiig and blazoned in blood, are brought vividly before liim.
" If in this life only we have hope in christ, we are
OF ALL men most MISERABLE." And this is the feeling
unquestionably, that has led noble spirits in all ages to
plant the banner of hope on the grave, and to claim
citizenship in a world beyond, where the oppressor
comes not with his blind scourge, and righteousness
never fails of its just reward, — an optimism this, the
only one the human imagination can conceive, that shall
completely wipe out this great evil from the chronicles of
the divine administration. But even short of this optim-
ism there are not wanting some considerations which
go strongly to moderate, if not altogether to remove, the
painful impressions made by these sanguine memorials
of human folly, or human wrath. In the first place,
they are altogether exceptional phenomena, occurring
only at great intervals or periods of the remoulding and
reconstitution of society ; they are the throes that
accompany a new social birth ; and it may, in the nature
of things, be impossible that any great social birth can
take place without labour and sorrow ; for the old and
the new state of things, in such circumstances, will
never adjust themselves without a struggle ; and a
struggle between such mighty forces means blood. In
the general case, however, it is not Folly but Wisdom
that governs the world ; not wrong but rigliteousness
that prevails. In the common law of things, the good
man is the prosperous man ; and piety combined with
sense and energy will lead to no persecution but such

CREATION OF THE WORLD. 79

as a proper man will bear lightly, and be all the better
for bearing. This the brave old Hebrews knew well,
and have bravely proclaimed in many golden sentences :
" Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man
that getteth understanding : for the merchandise of it
is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain
thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than
rubies : and all the things thou canst desire are not to
be compared unto her. Length of days is in her right
hand ; and in her left hand riches and honour. Her
ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are
peace. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon
her ; and happy is every one that retaineth her." ^
Then consider this further. Martyrs and confessors are
not the only class of persons who lay down their lives
for the good of the human community to which they
belong. Every man who, in critical circumstances,
faithfully stands to the post of danger where he is
placed, is giving up his life freely in order to save the
lives of others. The conscript boy, torn from his father
and all that he holds dear, to dice away his sweet young
life in a cause with which he has no concern, and which
may not even be for the honour of his people, is a
martyr no less than Patrick Hamilton blazing in his
coat of pitch in front of the Castle of St. Andrews, to
gloat the sacerdotal insolence of Cardinal Beaton. The
only difference is that the one is a martyr to the ex-
ternal force which makes absolute obedience in the last

1 Proverbs iii. 13-18.

80 LAY SERMONS.

resort the cement of the social edifice, and the other
to that inward force of moral conviction, from whose
lordship the soul of man can no more withdraw itself
than his bodily eye can refuse to rejoice in the bright-
ness of the sun. And, sooth to say, there are many
deaths of fools and sinners every day that have more
pain, and less compensation for their anguish, than the
philosophic protester with the cup of hemlock for his
evening draught, or the martyr in the Eoman Colosseum,
with the grip of the tiger at his throat ; and so we may
take the breath from all large lamentation over the
unmerited sufferings of humanity, by roughly saying :
Death is the penalty, sharp but short, which all men
must pay in some shape or other, for the glorious
privilege of liaving been alive. This is the Stoical view
of the matter. Christianity gives brighter hopes. The
Stoic or the Academy may jjreach resignation ; but con-
solation is to be found only at the foot of the Cross.^

^ Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe asked himself the question
■why there should be a future existence ; and he answered : " Because
on any other hypothesis the workl would be a piece of magnificent
nonsense." — From Dean Stanley's preface to the Eastern Question,
by Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe. London, 1881.

I do not go so far as this ; but it certainly seems to me, that without
the complement of a future state, not a few things happen in the
present state, which, to our moral nature, necessarily appear in a high
degree imperfect and unsatisfactory. Goethe founded his faith in im-
mortality (see Eckermann, and the second part of Faust) on what we
may call the law of guaranteed progression ; that is to say, a law in
the moral world analogous to the law in the physical world, which
makes the bud of the spring pledge the flower of the summer, and the
flower of the summer a sure prophecy of the fruitage of the autumn.

11.

THE JEWISH SABBATH AND THE CHRISTIAN
LOED'S DAY.

" Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect
of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath days." — Col.
ii. 16.

There is no institution open to general observation that
so emplaatically marks a Christian country as the obser-
vance of the first day of the week as a day of rest in
some form or other. No doubt the difference in the
details of observance, so far as they assume a positive
shape, varies considerably ; but in one negative point
they all agree, the abstinence from week-day work or
regular business. Diverse indeed is the form which the
Christian Sabbath presents to the European traveller,
in Paris say, and in Edinburgh, in a west Eoss-shire
glen, or in a Middlesex tea-garden. In Paris every
foot is tripping, every causeway is rattling, and every
face is gay ; in Dingwall or in Stornoway there is a
silence in the streets, a heaviness in the tread, and a
gravity of aspect in the people, that to the superficial
Continental observer might seem the result of a secret

82 LAY SERMONS.

congrviity "between the souls of the inhabitants and the
cloudy influences under which they behold the light of
the sun. Many a west Eoss-shire man would fear to
look his clergyman in the face on Monday, if he were
seen on Sunday carelessly and with an unscrewed face
sauntering beyond the precincts of the farmyard ; in
any German town you will see the whole population,
according to the picturesque description in Goethe's
Faust, streaming out of the city gates on Sunday as
thick as Londoners on Epsom Day. To a passing
observer the Scottish Sunday might appear altogether
religious, inspired both inside and outside the Church
with a genuine piety of an unusually sombre aspect ;
the German or Parisian Sunday altogether secular. But
the contrast is not so complete in detail as it appears
in the gross. Let the critical Scottish Sabbatarian, who
imagines himself more holy than his neighbours, only
rise a little earlier in the morning, and take a turn into
a Catholic Cathedral at Munster or Cologne, and he will
find the floor of the building like a theatre on a benefit
night, crowded with prostrate worshippers of all sexes
and sizes. Neither is the evening altogether devoted
to amusement, as any one may see in Holy Eome,
where some of the most effective services with cere-
monial and preaching are given in the afternoon. So
much for the variety of presentation ; but the principle
everywhere remains the same, strictly in accordance
with the negative character of the command, " On it
thou shalt do no work." The conmiand was Jewish

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 83

originally, and continued distinctively so during the
early centuries of the Church ; at what time it was
adopted as a distinctive badge or symbol in the Christian
escutcheon I cannot exactly say : perhaps nobody knows.
But the practice of affixing the ten commandments to
the wall of our English churches very prominently
behind the altar, gave an open public warrant for the
transference of the fourth commandment, with its name
and obligations, literally and distinctively to the Chris-
tian Lord's Day.

How far this was logically and consistently done it
will be the object of the present discourse to inquire.

Of the beneficial nature of Sabbatical institutions
generally, no sane man can have the slightest occasion
to doubt. The alternation of labour and rest, exertion
and repose, lies too deeply seated in the constitution of
the universe to be ignored in the machinery of any
well-constituted society. Accordingly, in all countries,
whether the months are divided into heptads, as with
modern Europeans, or into decads, as with the ancient
Greeks, we find long lists of feast days and holidays
spread largely through the year, which served practically
the beneficial purpose of the Jewish Sabbath. No doubt
the hebdomadal observance of a day of rest, like so
many other enactments of the great Hebrew lawgiver,
went far ahead of the general wisdom of the Greeks and
Romans in this matter. The certainty and shortness of
the recurrent day of total rest is a blessing to the
modern man far above that which the holidays of the

84 LAY SERMONS.

ancients could confer upon the Athenian man of busi-
ness and his slaves, who might perhaps, under a hard
taskmaster, be excluded from the general relaxation
without any legal ground of complaint. Still the prin-
ciple of the necessity of days of rest and recreation was
fully admitted, and the combination of this rest with
solemn religious services publicly acknowledged.

That there should be a Sabbath, therefore, in the
shape of periodical cessation from hard work and pro-
fessional business, I take for granted as an undisputed
position in every sound system of Sociology. And
each seventh day having been consecrated both by
Church usage and public enactment for this purpose in
all Christian countries, there can be no reason with
practical men for interfering with so beneficial and
authoritative an arrangement. It is only, therefore, with
the manner in which the hebdomadal rest is to be ob-
served that any difference of opinion can exist ; and as
this difference of opinion with regard to the use of the
sacred day grows in certain classes of society out of the
teachings of their recognised guides in spiritual matters,
with regard to the nature of the Sabbatical obligation,
we shall require to discuss both these matters in some
detail. The grounds on which the obligation for Sabbath
observance is placed are by no means a matter of indif-
ference. In a large community there are always not a
few people, especially if they are swayed by a strong
bias in one direction, who will be ready, as soon as they
find a flaw in the logic by which a good cause is sup-

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 85

ported, to rush to tlie conclusion that there is a rottenness
in the cause. Against such in the present day there is
special reason to provide.

We have chosen our text from St. Paul's Epistle to
the Colossians, as being a very distinct and emphatic
one ; but, to show the full significance and bearing of
that text, it will be better to take the matter historically,
beginning with the Gospels, so that step by step we may
feel our footing sure, and not be led, in a fashion too
common with professional theologians, into a one-sided
conclusion from an exaggerated importance attached to
an isolated text.

Now, in the first place, whosoever is even superfi-
cially familiar with the character and tone of the
Gospels, must have felt that their main characteristics
are pure ethics and rational piety in their most human
aspects and in their most catholic principles ; and that
there is extremely little either of institutional enact-
ment or intellectual doctrine in their composition. A
doctor of theology with Athanasian and other metaphy-
sical dogmas in his head, to be believed implicitly on
pain of damnation, our Saviour certainly was not; much
less was he a lawgiver like Moses, with a book of Levi-
ticus, full of ceremonial, judicial, sanatory, and political
regulations affecting the external conduct of individuals
and the material framework of society. The Captain of
our salvation is a Man of the Spirit, who does not pre-
scribe outward conduct, but breathes into us the breath
of a new life, out of which, as from a vital seed, the

86 LAY SERMONS.

firm root, the stout stem, the exuberant leafage, and the
fruitful blossom, will be evolved by the necessary law
of growth. This contrast between the legal character
of the Mosaic dispensation and the ethical tone of the
Gospel, was prominently put before his disciples by our
Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, — a discourse in which
to any man who has a moral sense, the peculiar charac-
ter of Evangelic teaching stands as unmistakably out
as the character of Scottish scenery amid the pine
forests of Braemar or the birchen groves of Killie-
crankie. Now the Sabbath is distinctly a matter not
of ethical motive but of institutional law ; and the pre-
sumption therefore is, that in such spiritual teaching as
our Lord delights in no such enactment could appear.
The Sabbath, although springing out of the universally
human necessity for periodically recurrent times of rest,
is, in its particular form of a special sanctity attached
to every seventh day, and in the necessity which it
involves of an understanding with the civil authorities
to make it effectual, essentially the outcome of insti-
tutional law, and cannot find a place in a gospel of
purely moral motives. No doubt Jesus did observe the
Jewish Sabbath ; but this he did simply because he was
a Jew and had been circumcised as a Jew, and celebrated
the passover after the fashion of the Jews to the very
end of his life. His relation to Judaism was like that
of Savonarola to l^opery : he never protested against the
seat of Moses as Luther protested against the Papal
chair. The contrast between his own doctrine and that

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 87

of the men of old time, so emphatically stated in the
Sermon on the Mount, was not a contrast which neces-
sarily implied war ; it was a contrast between the
severe schoolmaster of boys and the mild teacher of
men ; a contrast destined to disappear by development,
in virtue of which the great teacher could most truth-
fully say — " / came not to destroy the law, hut to fulfil it!'
That the founder of the Christian Church did not
formally abolish the Jewish Sabbath proceeded from
the same reason tliat he did not formally abolish cir-
cumcision or the passover. It was not these ceremonies
and institutions to which he objected, but the placing
of the power and virtue of religion in institutions,
ceremonies, and sacerdotal traditions of any kind.
Nevertheless, after his death, these things naturally,
though gradually no doubt, and not without a struggle,
fell off ; simply, of course, in spite of St. Paul's frequent
protest that he was a Jew, and in spirit a much better
one than his accusers (Acts xxvi. 22, and xxviii. 17),
because his unreformed brethren cast him out of their
communion, as the Pope and his Cardinals cast out
Martin Luther. The Christian Church thus became
distinctly antagonistic to the Jewish ; and in the same
way that our Protestant Preformation forced the PtC-
formers to denounce openly certain prominent doctrines
of the Eoman Church, while they allowed or half allowed
others, so the Christians had formed themselves into a
separate and antagonistic society, when certain of the
Pharisees, who, like St. Paul, had become Christians,

88 LAY SERMONS.

and, like him, did not cease in one sense to remain
Jews, declared their notions of the essential Judaism
inherent in Christianity by insisting that "it was
necessary for all converts to be circumcised and to
keep the law of Moses " (Acts xv. 5). Now in this law
of Moses the Sabbath as a peculiar institution (Neh. x.
31, and Ezek. xx. 12) was included ; and the venerable
assembly of Apostles and Presbyters in Jerusalem had
the whole question formally brought before them as to
how far, and in what special points, the Jewish law was
obligatory on the early converts from Heathenism.
Their answer, therefore, was as comprehensive as it was
public and authoritative ; and what did they say ?
That the Gentile converts were bound to " abstain from
things polluted by being offered to idols, and from
fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood."
]^ow the Gentiles of Antioch, to whom this apostolic
rescript was sent, must have been destitute of common
sense, if after this they could have imagined that either
circumcision, or the seventh day abstinence from work,
or any other characteristically Jewish observance, was
obligatory on Gentile Christians. And if any more
authoritative testimony on this point could be required,
the witness of the great apostle of the Gentiles, who was
himself by descent and connection a Pharisee, and who
was literally face to face with Judaising Christians in
all parts of the known world, will supply the additional
weight. In the text which heads these remarks he
flings overboard with a lofty evangelic disdain those

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 89

very sabbaths and new moons, and certain notions of
abstinence from meats and drinks, which assume so
formidable a place in the solemn league and covenant,
to which, under the guidance of Nehemiah, the as-
sembled princes and Levites, and priests of the people,
set their seal. That St. Paul, in his position as apostle
of the Gentiles and founder of the Christian Church in
Asia Minor and in Greece, could have used such lan-
guage to the Colossians, if he believed the observance
of the Sabbath obligatory on Christians, is not credible.
The great apostle, whatever things have been said of
him by persons who have a trick of pitting him against
his Master, was at least a man of sense and a gentleman,
which is more, I fear, than can be said of not a few of
his expositors.

The above two passages contain all that is distinctly
laid down in the New Testament with regard to the
observance of the Jewish Sabbath. Its express dis-
ownment in these passages by apostolic authority
is not in the slightest degree affected by the fact
mentioned (Acts xiii 42-44), that the Gentile Chris-
tians, in the early ages of the Church at Antioch, were
wont to come together and hear the Christian doctrine
expounded to them on the Sabbath day ; for the syna-
gogue was the necessary cradle of the Church ; and it
was only as strangers intermingling with a Jewish con-
gregation, in a Jewish place of worship, that the first
converts had any opportunity of hearing the gospel
preached. Their observance of the Sabbath in these

90 LAY SERxMONS.

cases, or rather the use they made of the Sabbath, was
a matter of necessity, or convenience, certainly not of
obligation.

In the argument for the Jewish Sabbath, as stated
by Scottish theologians, great use is frequently made of
the Old Testament and of the Ten Commandments ; as
indeed it was a common habit of Divines and Lawgivers
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to quote from
the Bible as one book, and not a collection of books
belonging to different times and places, and to interpret
it accordingly. But this is a method utterly destitute
of any critical basis, and leading to not a few most
unwarrantable conclusions and arbitrary restrictions.

Foremost amongst the arguments from the Old
Testament, of course, stands the Statute of the Ten
Commandments, which not only, as already remarked,
asserted a special place on the walls of our churches
before the Reformation, but is put forward with equal
prominence in the popular catechisms of the most
extreme of our Protestant places of worship. Never-
theless, I think it is plain, both on the face of history,
and from the nature of the case, that these Ten Com-
mandments are a part of the Jewish Law, were pro-
mulgated in a legal form to the Jews, and were never
re-promulgated in the same form to the Christian
Church. That they bear in the main a legal type,
savouring nothing of the spirit of the gospel, opposed
as it is to mere legality, is quite plain from the
negative terms in which most of the enactments are

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 91

couclied. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit
adultery, and so forth, are commandments which are
given to prevent crime, not motives supplied to create
virtue. No doubt the keystone of all Jewish law, the
grand central truth of the Divine Unity, as opposed to
the general polytheistic tendencies of the ancient world,
is given in a positive form ; so also is the grand social
bond of reverence to parents : but this is by no means
sufficient to give to the body of these Ten Command-
ments the spiritual character belonging to gospel
precepts. The prominence given to the fourth com-
mandment in the Decalogue — a commandment of
a distinctly institutional and arbitrary character, and
recognised by the Jews as peculiarly national (Ezek. xx.
12) — ought to be sufficient with unprejudiced minds
to show that the Decalogue was not promulgated, and
was never intended to be accepted, as a universally
binding human charter of social morals. Our Lord
we read recognised these commandments, just as He
recognised the Sabbath, circumcision, and the passover,
because they happened to be there, and were there also
in their right place, and with all due sanction, so long
as Judaism existed as the larva out of which the
chrysalis Christianity was to be evolved. But this is
a very different thing from formally re-enacting an
institutional statute in the body of a new economy.
We must rather say that our Saviour looked on the
negative enactments of the Decalogue as schoolboy
elements, to serve the purpose of juvenile drill, till the

92 LAY SERMONS.

teaching of ripe manhood should be in season. And the
commandments which He enunciated, and which should
have been taken as their watchword by the Christian
Churches, and blazoned in gold letters on their walls,
were the well-known tw^o of a positive and penetrative
quality and with an essentially generative potency —
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God loith all thy heart, and
thy neighhour as thyself. And in this view it is signifi-
cant enough, that when He addressed the well-known
words to the young man, Keep the commandments, the
Sabbath day is not mentioned, — an omission which
admits of only two explanations : either our Lord did
omit the commandment, as the wTiter of the Gospel
leads us to believe (and in this case the natural reason
of the omission is to be found in the arbitrary and insti-
tutional nature of the injunction, which is altogether
foreign from a religion of spiritual motives) ; or, if the
narrator and not the speaker is to be credited with the
omission, in this case the presumption is, that the
narrator and the documents which he used, made the
report on the supposition that our Lord could not have
given his sanction to the keeping of a commandment
which was at the time one of the most distinctive
badges of Judaism, as opposed to the practice of the
Christian Church. A similar remark applies to St. Paul.
In a familiar passage of the Corinthians (1 Cor. xvi. 2),
he certainly does not mention the fourth commandment ;
and it is inconsistent not only with the passage in the
Colossians, but with the spirit and scope of his teaching,

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 93

that he should have intended, in a general incidental
remark of this kind, to have given any formal sanction
to a notion which he had in other places formally
disclaimed.

But what does the Mosaic record itself say ? The
20th chapter of Exodus distinctly enough, I imagine,
puts the Decalogue as a compend of the main points of
social law, given specially as an introduction to the
general body of Jewish social and ceremonial law : so
that the only ground on which the general human obli-
gation of the Sabbath can be placed must be outside of
the Mosaic ceremonial altogether, and coeval with the
existence of the human race, as may appear at first
blush from the general impression made on modern
readers by the well-known passage (Gen. ii. 3). But
modern readers, in interpreting ancient books, and
especially Oriental books, are continually falling into
blunders. It is well known to all Biblical students
that the book called the first book of Moses is no more
entitled to be looked on as a homogeneous composition
of the man Moses, than the book of Psalms is to be
looked on as the homogeneous composition of the man
David. Instead, therefore, of looking on the 1st chapter
of Genesis (and the three first verses of chapter ii.,
which belong to it) as the first chapter of an old his-
torical record, let us understand that it is no history at
all, but rather a philosophico- theological account of
the creation of the world, in a narrative form, like the
parables of the New Testament, and as such complete

94 LAY SERMONS. \

in itself ; and in this light let us attend to the real
philosophical truths which it announces, not to the
social institutions which it is imagined to inaugurate.
]^ot to mention the other great cosmic principles which
it embodies, it is plain that the principle of periods of
rest closing in epochs of formative energy is set forth
in the institution of the Sabbath, which, as it appears
in Genesis, may be looked on as supplying to the Jews
the philosophical principle on which their peculiar insti-
tution depended, not as issuing a formal command to
all the sons of men, from the rising to the setting sun.
But even supposing that the vulgar notion of a primeval
cosmic command did belong to this narrative cosmogony,
and that the observance of one day in seven was a duty
divinely imposed on the whole human race from the
birth of man downwards, it is plain to me, from the
language of the Apostle Paul, as also from the whole
tone and temper of the New Testament, that this insti-
tutional ordinance and restrictive statute — for such, in
lawyer's language, it is — not having been formally
sanctioned at the launching of a new and spiritual
economy, must be considered as having been formally
abolished, or tolerated only out of kindly considera-
tions in those assemblies of the early Christian Church
which could not tear themselves free from the restric-
tions of the Jewish law under which they had been
brought up. In addition to all this it ought to be con-
sidered that for the assertion that the Sabbath was
originally proclaimed as an obligatory enactment on the

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 95

whole human race, there is not the slightest vestige of
a proof, either inside the Mosaic Jiistory of the patriarchs
or outside of it ; for the hebdomadal division of time
alluded to in Genesis was a matter that arose out of the
natural presidency of the moon with its four phases over
the twelve months of the year ; and even this hebdom-
adal division of time, though known to the Egyptians,
who were great astronomers, was not acknowledged by
the Greeks and Eomans till the age of the Empire when
the foundations of all old usages were loosened, and all
novelties were lightly engrafted. This is carefully
stated by Dion Cassius, the Eoman historian, who
flourished about 200 A.D., in an interesting passage about
the Jews in the last part of his account of Pompey and
the subjugation of Palestine.

If to all this mass of Scriptural evidence we add the
admitted fact that for three whole centuries up to the
time of the Council of Nice and the Emperor Constan-
tine, there is a continuous chain of evidence to the effect
that Sabbatarian observances were regarded as a feature
of the Jewish as opposed to the Christian Church, we
may, with all the cogency of a strictly logical argument,
lay down the proposition : — That the Sdbhath is not a
divine institutio7i now, hy direct sanction of God's law,
oUigcttory on any Christian. It is obligatory only on
Jews.

The special dicta of the Fathers and Church Councils
on this subject, which, as we have said, so firmly nail
down the conclusion, will be given forthwith ; but as

96 LAY SERMONS.

their testimonies are closely interwoven with the observ^-
ance of the Christian Lord's Day, as contrasted with
the Jewish Sabbath, it will be convenient, in the first
place, to state the Scriptural argument, with regard to
the Lord's Day also, before we wander into a region
where certain classes of extreme Protestants, however
unreasonably, are less careful to be at home. And here
let me make one general observation. The incidental
manner in which these external observances, whether
relating to holydays or to the form of polity, are men-
tioned, taken together wdth the spiritual character of the
Christian religion, ought to be sufficient to show to any
reasonable person that it was not in the view of our
Lord and his apostles to deal with the details of what
may be called the working machinery of the Church ;
they were anxious only to supply the steam and the
plastic forces. Beyond this they left things to take their
form as circumstances might allow, common sense dic-
tate, or expediency tolerate, with the general overriding
proviso, of course, " that all things be done decently
and in order." Christianity is not a religion of ordi-
nances ; so, when we turn up that most valuable record
of the earliest doings of the Church, the Acts of the
Apostles, we find that when St. Paul, in the course of
his frequent missionary voyages, was at Troas, he found
the disciples on the first day of the w^eek assembled
there to break bread, and took advantage of the occasion
to deliver them an expository discourse. Kow, standing
alone, this single text w^ould warrant no conclusion ; but

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 97

when we find the same apostle making a collection for
the poor Christians in Jerusalem, and telling the Cor-
inthians to lay by something for them on the first day
of the week, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the
Church in the earliest times had a habit of coming
together as a Church, and for some religious purpose, on
the first day of the week, to which practice it is plain
that the apostle alludes in his admonition to the
Hebrews (x. 25), that "they should not forsake the
assembling of themselves together, as the manner of
some is." These passages, interpreted by the nature of
the circumstances, and by universal practice through
long centuries, simply prove that the day of the week
called by the Eomans Sunday (solis dies), and by the
Jews the first day of the week, was afterwards called by
the Christians the Lord's Day, the dies Dominica of the
Western Calendar, and if not by direct apostolic insti-
tution, certainly with apostolic approval and sanction,
fixed by them for their weekly meetings as a Church,
for the sake of religious worship and mutual exhorta-
tion. This is all we know or can know from Scripture
of the great Christian festival of the Lord's Day, as
distinct from the Jewish Sabbath, with which some
Judaising Christians in the early centuries, and some
rigid Calvinistic Protestants in the north part of these
islands, have been so forward to confound it.

The doctrine and practice of the early Apostolic
Church in this matter, which we have now shortly to
indicate, is precisely what might have been expected, —

H

98 LAY SERMONS.

flows, indeed, as naturally from the teaching and lan-
guage of the Apostle Paul as a corollary in Euclid fol-
lows from the primal proposition. Nothing, in fact,
but a violent invasion of some foreign force into the
infant Church, could have introduced an element which
apostolic authority had so emphatically thrust out.

The following extracts from two of the most notable
of the patristic authorities, in a matter so universally
acknowledged, may serve for a whole chain. In the
Apology of Justin Martyr (i. 67), who flourished in the
second century, we read as follows : —

" We Christians always keep together, and those among us
who are rich help those who are poor. And for everything that
we eat we offer up thanks to the Maker of All, through Jesus
Christ and the Holy Spirit. And on the day of the Sun all who
live whether in the town or in the country have a meeting ; and
when they are come together the memoirs of the apostles are read,
and the writings of the prophets, as far as time allows. After the
reading, the president of the meeting gives an address, exhorting
to the imitation of the excellent things that liave been read.
Then we all rise and pray. And when the prayer is finished,
bread and wine and water are brought round, and the president
prays and gives thanks according to his power, and the distri-
buticm is then made, and the participation in the elements which
have been blessed, which also are sent round by the deacons to
those who may be absent. Then the wealthy among us, every one
according to liis good pleasure, gives a contribution, and the sum,
when collected, is deposited with the president ; and he out of
these contributions gives liclp to oiyhans and widows, to sick
persons, or those who are in prison, to strangers, and equally to
all who are in want. And tlie reason why we come togetlier on
tlic day of the sun is because it is tlie first day of the week, the

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 99

(lay in which God, scattering the darkness, brought a world out
of chaos, and the day also in which Christ our Saviour rose from
the dead ; for on the day before the day of Saturn he was cru-
cified, and on the day after Saturn (which is the day of the sun)
he appeared unto his disciples, and taught them those things
which we have delivered unto you."

The same author, in his Dialogue with Try^pJio the
Jew (8), introduces his adversar}'-, saying —

" If therefore you will hear me, first be circumcised, then
keep according to our custom the Sabbath day, and the feasts
and the new moons, and generally do all that is written in the
law : then haply God will have mercy on you."

This is distinct enough ; and his own, the Christian
point of view, is no less sharply outlined (12, 18, 43) —

" You pride yourselves on circumcision in the flesh, but
what you require is a new circumcision in the heart ; and the
new law enjoins on all men a jperpetual Sabbath. But you
for one day of the week keep yourselves idle, and think this is
piety, not understanding for what purpose the Sabbath was pre-
scribed to you ; abstaining in the same way from unleavened
bread, you imagine that you are fulfilling the will of God. But
in all these things the Lord God whom we worship hath no
pleasure. But if any one amongst you is a perjured person or a
purloiner, let him cease from his evil ways : if a fornicator, let
him repent ; this cessation from evil works is the Sabbath and
true Sabbath of God."

" We also, 0 Jew, would have observed unconditionally this
fleshly circumcision of yours, and these Sabbaths and these
feasts, if we had not known on what account they were imposed
upon you, viz. on account of your iniquities, and on account of
the hardness of your hearts."

" As therefore with Abraham commenced circumcision, and

470380

100 LAY SERMONS.

with Moses Sabbatlis and oflferings and feast days, and you
on account of the hardness of your hearts were enjoined to ob-
serve these things, so, according to the counsel of the Fathers, all
these things were ordained to cease by the advent of his Son, of
the stock of Abraham, of the tribe of Judah, born of a virgin,
even Christ the Son of God, who, as the eternal law and the
New Covenant, was proclaimed to all men in your own prophetic
books."

Our next witness is Eusebius, the well-known
Church historian, contemporary and biographer of Con-
stantine, whose name, as connected with the iirst formal
public disownment of Greek and Eoman idolatry, indi-
cates a new starting-point in the moral history of the
human race. In his Ecclesiastical History (i. 4) this
writer has the following characteristic and highly inter-
esting passage : —

" Wliosoever will say that all the righteous men that lived
from Abraham backwards to the first man, were, if not in name,
yet in deed Christians, ^\•ill not be far from the truth : for the
name of Christian signifies nothing more than a person who
through the knowledge and teaching of Christ is distinguished
for sober-mindedness and righteousness and order and moral
courage and piety, and the confession of one true God who is
above all : and all these virtues the earliest patriarchs practised
no less than we. But of the circumcision of the body they
knew nothing : as neither do we : of Sahhath observance also they
were ignorant, even as we ; nor had they any care of meats,
clean and unclean, or any such things : all which were introduced
afterwards by Moses, and ordered to be observed as typical of
something better ; whence it comes to pass that among us
Christians no such observances are at all kno^^^l."

It remains now only to state as a historical fact in

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 101

wliat manner and to wliat extent the Eoman Emperors
gave a civil sanction to tlie celebration of the Christian
Lord's Day. An institution like the Jewish Sabbath
among all classes of society implying an abstinence
from business at certain recurrent periods plainly could
not exist without a common religious conviction
possessing the whole community, and asserting itself
by penalties when the common regulation was counter-
vened. In other words, a regularly and strictly kept
Sabbath or day of rest is impossible, except as a State
ordinance. It not only, therefore, did not exist in the
Christian Church before the conversion of Constantine,
but could not exist. Nine-tenths of the early Christian
congregations, as the social machine was then regulated,
were engaged in some sort of obligatory work both on
the Saturday and the Sunday ; and therefore their
Lord's Day observance could not consist in a Judaical
abstinence from business on that day, but simply in
using the leisure hours of the day for a congregational
meeting, in the same way as prayer meetings and
charity sermons and missionary meetings are often held
among ourselves on the evenings of week days when
the shops and counting-houses are shut. The Lord's
Day to the Christians of the first three centuries was in
no sense a day of rest, or a Sabbatising, but only a day
of worship and fraternal recognition. This, however,
was manifestly far from a satisfactory state of things ;
and one of the first favours, therefore, that acknowledged
Christianity had to ask from the civil ruler was that

102 LAY SERMONS.

such an interruption of public business might take
place on the Sunday, that devoutly disposed Christian
persons might have an opportunity of assembling to-
gether for religious purposes without the distraction and
the weariness which the occupations of everyday life
too frequently bring along with them. A representa-
tion of this kind was no doubt the motive power which
called forth the enactment of the imperial convert so
lauded by his ecclesiastical biographer. Here it is : —

Imperator Constantinus Aug. Helpidio.

Omnes judices, urban(Eq}ie idlebes et cunctarum artium officia venera-
hili die soils qiiiescant. Euri tamen positi agrorum cidturce libere
Ucenterque inserviantj quoniam frequenter evenit ut non aptius alio
die frumenta sulcis aid mnem scrohibus mandentur, ne occasione
momenti pereat commoditas ccelesti provisione concessa. Dai. Xon.
Mar. Grispo II. et Gomtantino II. Coss. — Cod. Just. iii. 12, 3.

The exception here made by the Eoman Emperor in
favour of afrricultural work midit well be made
occasionally by the authorities, civil and ecclesiastical,
of the more humid and inclement part of the world
which we inhabit ; for here, as in all other matters
connected with Sabbatical observances, the grand
human maxim which cuts at the root of all superstitious
rigours and artificial orthodoxies is regulative, " The
Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath!'

The only other imperial edict with which we need
trouble ourselves is that of Theodosius, who was a
much more thorough -going religious reformer than
Constantino ; for two statutes exist in his code, one in

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 103

which he declares it sacrilege for any person to carry
on lawsuits or business of any kind on Sunday, or the
Lord's Day, and another specially in favour of the
Jews, to the effect that no revenue officer or tax-gatherer
should sue them for money on Saturday, or any other
of their sacred days; the terms of the two distinct
enactments plainly showing that there was no confusion
in the imperial mind between the Jewish Sabbath and
the Christian Lord's Day.-^ The fiction of some Scottish
theologians that the law of the Jewish Sabbath was
transferred by divine command into the Christian
Lord's Day finds no support from these enactments.
So far as rest from general business was concerned,
both were co-existing distinct festivals, or sacred days,
the one kept sacred by Christians, the other by Jews ;
and both from their very nature incapable of receiving
social recognition except from the order of the civil
magistrate. The abstinence from business on the
Lord's Day is in all Christian countries a matter of
civil statute, not of divine law.

^ YHL 8, 3. — Solis die quam dominicam rite dixere majores,
oinniutn omnino litium negotiorum, conventionunn quiescat intentio.
Dehitum publicum privatumque nullus efflagitet ne apud ipsos quidem
arhitros vel in judiciis Jlagitatos vel sponte delectos ulla sit agnitio
jurgiorum. Et non modo notahilis verurti etiam sacrilegus judicetur
qui a sandce religionis instituto rituve deflexerit.

Vni. 8, 8. — Die Sahhati ac reliquis sub tcmp)ore quo Judoei cultus
sui reverentiam servant neminem aut facere aliquid ulla ex parte
conveniri decere precipimus, cum fiscalihus commodis et litigiis
privatorum constet reliquos dAes piosse sufficere .

104 LAY SERMONS.

How then is the Christian Lord's Day to be observed
by all good Christians and wise citizens of Christendom
in this nineteenth century ? Nothing can be more
plain. In the first place, the distinctive character of
the Christian institution as contrasted with the Jewish
one must in no wise be forgotten ; abstinence from
labour is the one and sole obligation laid on tlie Jews
by the Mosaic code ; congregational assembly for the
purpose of religious worship is the one and sole obliga-
tion laid on Christians by the immemorial practice of
the Church, not certainly without apostolic sanction,
and, what is not of less consequence, by the essential
naturalness, reasonableness, and profitableness of the
observance. The observance of the whole or some part of
the first day of the week for religious exercises is a part
of the consuetudinary law of the Church, with which no
man but a whimsical crotchet-monger would quarrel, and
which every sound thinker on social science, even though
himself not a Christian or a religious man, must approve.
The objections which we not unfrequently hear against
Sabbath observance in this country, so far as they pro-
ceed from sober thinkers, are aimed not against the
rational observance of a day of rest, or a day of worship
at certain recurrent times, but only against those exag-
gerations and caricatures of the observance, which some
formalists among the ancient Jews, or Judaising Chris-
tians in the early centuries, and some grim rigorists in
this Scottish corner of the world, have pushed into
public prominence. Among the ancient Jews, one

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 105

section contenting themselves with the most easy literal
observance of the fourth commandment, seem to have
satisfied their consciences with the merely negative
abstinence from w^ork, and allowing every seventh day
either to rot in swinish indolence, or to fume itself off
in dainty luxury. Against these St. Augustine, in a
well-known commentary on the 91st Psalm, uttered a
weighty word, contrasting in sharp terms the Sabbath
which Christians keep, a spiritual Sabbath of the soul,
consisting in the serenity and peace of mind which
can be obtained only by a rest from sin and every
evil w^ork.^ Another section of the Jews, connected
probably with the ascetic sect of the Essenes, a sort of
Quaker and Total Abstinence fraternity, carried their
rigorous superstition about Sabbath observance to such
a ridiculous extreme, that, as Origen tells us, emulating
the self-emaciating absurdities of the Hindoo Yogees,
one of their most notable heads, a Samaritan, by name
Dositheus, actually made it a point of holy duty, in
whatever attitude the first moment of the day had
found him, in that position to remain till the lapse of
the fully reckoned time : if sitting, then to Sabbatise in
the sitting attitude; if standing, then to continue stand-
ing; and if recumbent, then in recumbency to remain !^
These absurdities have not been equalled even by the
sober genius of the most grim of Scottish Calvinists,
who seem, by screwing their countenances on Sunday

^ Augustini Opera Col. Agripp., 1616, viii. 366.
- Origen, De Principiis, iv. 17.

106 LAY SERMONS.

to a minute exactness of enforced gravity, to wish to
make amends for the singular disrespect with which
they treat all the most hallowed and most typical
festivals of tlie early Christian Church. But apart
from these ridiculous oddities of grim Calvinistic
Modernism, the recurrent season of rest, which con-
venience and propriety have brought in as a statutory
adjunct of the religious services of the Lord's Day, is in
every view so natural, so salutary, so civilising, and so
elevating, that the observance of a Sabbath, in fact,
from the very constitution of human nature, becomes a
duty imperative on every man who will live reasonably
in this reasonable world. About the details of the
observance there is little need to enlarge; the main
point is that people should set distinctly before them
the grand problem of life, to make each man of himself
as complete a human being as possible, and to know
assuredly that no practice tends so much to the develop-
ment of a complete, well-harmonised, and well-rounded
human character, as the wise keeping of one day of rest
in seven. The two thinc^s to avoid, and for the avoid-
ance of which Sabbatarianism is a sovereign remedy,
are, first, the weakening of the functions by the unre-
mitted strain, which in these fast times is a great
mischief worker, even with the help of the Sabbath ;
and again, the narrowing and cramping influence which
mere professional occupation never fails to exert on the
persons who suffer themselves to be engrossed thereby.
About the first nothing need be said ; the maxim

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 107

Est modus in 7'ehus; sunt certi denique fines,
Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum,

lias been sounded in the popular ear by every wise man
from Homer to Horace, and from Horace to Wordsworth,
and needs only to be enounced, to be attended to ; and
whoso attends not to it will certainly pay for his
neglect not seldom the severest penalty of the inexor-
able divine law, however sweet may have been the
seductions by which he was led into the path of the
grave transgression. But the other evil influence which
Sabbatarianism was instituted to check, is not so gener-
ally acknowledged, and therefore less frequently guarded
against. If it be true, as the poet has it, that a man
grows larger with his larger sphere, it is no less true
conversely, that a narrower sphere makes the man nar-
rower ; and of all narroAving influences known, the most
persistent and the most unavoidable is what is vulgarly
called " the shop." ISTo matter how intellectual, or how
morally elevating the habitual occupation of a man may
be, still the day after day exercise of the same function,
within a certain prescribed circle, as in a treadmill,
tends, while producing a preternatural dexterity in one
direction, to wither, and at last altogether to stupefy and
deaden the sensibilities of the soul. The " shop," by its
demands and continuous action, really forms a sort of
prison, from which a man should set himself free on
every convenient occasion ; and for this necessary act
of self-liberation the Sabbath is for all men the wisely
instituted opportunity. Show me a man who habitually

108 LAY SERMONS.

carries on, so far as tlie law of the country allows him,
his weekly occupation without intermission on Sunday,
and I will show you a man narrow in his sympathies,
awkward in his adaptation to circumstances, and the
slave of some artificial machinery of which he ought
to be the master.

Supposing then the Sunday free from the trammels
of business, and the tyranny of a professional train of
ideas, how shall a man employ himself? A Christian
of course will go to church, at least for one diet of the
day ; and he who is not a Christian will do so wisely
also ; for two reasons, first, because Christianity is essen-
tially an ethical religion, by the teachings of which
every moral being may profit, and then because it is an
unhappy thing for a man, a member of a social organism,
to withdraw himself from all part in that which, accord-
ing to Socrates, is the most distinctive act of a reason-
ing animal — the acknowledgment of the great common
source of all existence, of all reason, and of all excellence.
The necessity of the religious nature being gratified, a
reasonable man is free to spend the remainder of the
Lord's Day in the manner most beneficial to his own
special well-being. If he is what is called a working
man, — that is, a man who, by the hard labour of bone and
muscle, feels himself much in want of a periodical ces-
sation from all exertion, — he may spend much part of
the Sabbath most profitably by lying at length on a
sofa, on a primrose bank, or a thymy hillside, as his
circumstances may allow. Those who are less exhausted

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. 109

by their week-day work will of course use the day of
rest not so much for absolute repose as for various
kinds of mental exertion, such as may interfere as little
as possible with the serene temper that belongs to the
day, and at the same time may in no wise invade the
rest to man and beast provided with such benevolent
foresight by the great Jewish legislator. Music and
sketching in the country, easy social gatherings among
friends, and healthy games, such as croquet, lawn-tennis,
golf, boating, though scarcely permitted by British usage,
are contrary neither to the letter nor to the spirit of the
Mosaic command, which, though not enjoined on Chris-
tians, has, from the wisest motives, been adopted into
our code of social ethics. The same remark applies to
the visitation of Botanic Gardens and Public Museums
of Art and Science, which not only afford an agreeable
recreation to the most intelligent part of the working
classes, but may hel23 to withdraw a section of them
from places of low and even vicious resort. The only
tiling to be seriously attended to here is, that no Sab-
bath sports shall be allowed to commence before two
o'clock in the afternoon ; otherwise, recreation might
run away with religion ; and one day in seven spent in
a round of frivolous dissipation would tend to intensify
instead of allaying the evils arising from the strain of
unremitted business. For persons of extraordinary
energy, that portion of the day of rest which is not
employed in the exercises of religious worship will
usually be devoted to whatever kind of exercise is least

no LAY SERMONS.

provided for by tlie habits of their profession. Seden-
tary persons should walk as much as possible ; persons
whose time is consumed in a mechanical routine of
unintellectual business should devote some part of the
Sunday to the cultivation of some favourite science, in
the prosecution of which intensity of zeal might com-
pensate for scant leisure; while scholars and professional
teachers would find it for their advantage to open no
professional book on the Lord's Day ; but, if they will
read, to take a long swim in the broad sea of general
human sympathy. But before all things, on Sunday
a man should take care to give special attention to his
moral and spiritual nature, a culture only too apt to be
neglected in the engrossing pursuit of gain or power,
or honour or reputation, or whatever other bubble the
foolish world may be hunting after, instead of the jewel
wisdom. This special culture may best be found in
the study of the Scriptures, and in the lives of great
reformers, such as Buddha, Confucius, Martin Luther,
Dr. Chalmers, Oberlin, Dr. Channing, and generally
of OTcat and oood men and women who have done
something noteworthy for the elevation of their species,
whether under the Christian or the heathen dispensa-
tion. There are no more profitable ''Sunday books,"
using that phrase in the moral and not the religious
sense of the phrase, than the works of such good, pure,
and noble heathens as Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Mar-
cus Antoninus, Cicero, and Seneca. The study of such
authors, — pursued not in a philological spirit, but for

THE JEWISH SABBATH, ETC. Ill

the sake of their human contents only, — brings with it
the double benefit of presenting to us immutable morality
free from the technical slang and sectarian shibboleths
with which it is so aj^t to be intertwined, and at the
same time stimulating our moral energies by the ex-
ample of men who stood on a platform of equal moral
altitude with our own, but with much more difficulty
in the assertion of it. Minute and copious rules with
regard to Sabbath-keeping no wise man will lay down ;
but he who knows not how to use this blessed oppor-
tunity for cherishing that purity and nobility of purpose
in life, which business may strangle, and professions
can but feebly cultivate, does not treat himself as a
good rider treats his horse, and will come out, whenever
the balance of life requires to be struck, in some import-
ant respects as a deficient man. The Scottish people
have exposed themselves to no little just ridicule by
their strict views on Sabbath observance ; but it has not
always been considered that strict Sabbatising, with
its natural accompaniment, Bible - reading, has acted
for three centuries as the principal agent in the forma-
tion of the serious, solid, substantial, and thoroughly
reliable character so typical of our people. It is better,
as human beings are constituted, to be a trifle too seri-
ous, than to float through life in an element of levity
and frivolity, — better, since the golden mean of virtue
can scarcely be obtained, to hold the rein too tight than
to have no reins to hold ; for out of a certain ethical
severity, as from a root, the greatest national virtue has

112 LAY SEKMONS.

been found to grow ; while from looseness of ethical
ideas and levity of practice the greatest nations have
been mined. If the Scottish people are destined to
such great overthrow as overtook Tyre and Sidon, Eome
and Constantinople, it will not be the severity of Sab-
batical observance that will prove the occasion of their
fall, but their inability to reconcile their theology with
the science of the age, and the spiritual creed which
they profess with the pomp of seductive materialism
with which they are surrounded.

Til.
FAITH.

* * Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen." — Heb. xi. 1.

I HAVE often wondered, having been a church-goer in
churchly Scotland for half a century and more, how
amid the prominence justly given by all thoughtful
men of all parties to the great Pauline and Protestant
doctrine of salvation by faith, those who enlarge on this
theme have so often, or I may say, in Scotland, almost
universally, taken the key-note of their discourse
rather from the Epistle to the Ptomans than from that
notable chapter in the Hebrews to which the prefixed
verse belongs. For without entering into the disputed
question of the authorship of this Epistle, which cannot
in the slightest degree affect its place in the canon, it
must strike any person who applies even a superficial
amount of thinking to the study of the ISTew Testament
that this chapter is the only one in which a formal de-
finition of faith in a purely scientific shape is given ;
and not this only, but given with a long sequence of

I

114 LAY SERMONS.

striking illustrations, which must render the practical
significance of the abstract definition patent to all un-
derstandings : whereas, in the Epistle to the Eomans,
through the whole sweep of the argument, down to the
end of the eleventh chapter, where the practical part
commences, the writer has certain sacerdotal preten-
sions, Pharisaic conceits, presumptuous imaginations,
and vainglorious notions, mainly in his eyes, with
reference to which the doctrine of salvation by faith is
stated in a peculiar contrast to works, which does not,
and, indeed, could not, occur in the more wide and
general view of the great moral principle given after
the philosophical definition in the Hebrews.

Let any man, therefore, who wishes to know philo-
sophically and practically the length and the breadth
of this glorious principle of Christian faith — the
great root of all moral soundness in society — breaking
loose bravely from the crust of local prejudice and the
pressure of an inherited terminology, look this chapter
of the Hebrews freely and fully in the face, and see
what it means as the great authorised interpreter of the
moral history of the world, not only in the case of Abra-
ham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses and Daniel, and Samuel
and all the prophets, but also in all the leading asser-
tions of human worth and social dignity in later times,
whether against sacerdotal intolerance in Constantinople
and Eome, or political atrocity in Naples and Milan.

On the technical words used in tlie definition — for
they are in a manner technical, having been appro-

FAITH. 115

priated both in metaphysical theology and in logic — it
is not necessary to make any detailed remarks. The
English word sulstance is merely the curtailed form
of the Latin suhstantia ; and this, again, is merely the
Latin transference of the Greek viroo-racri^, meaning
that which stands under or underlies, suhstratum. That,
therefore, which distinguishes a reasonable faith, con-
viction, or belief from a vain wish is simply the amount
of solid substantial element which it contains. Li other
words, faith is a reasonable and a substantial hope, and
it is at the same time a proof (^^67^09, clenchus) ; for, as
neither the future nor the invisible can be seen, — the
future because it is not arrived, and the invisible be-
cause it is incognisable by sense, — the one proof or
evidence that belons^s to both is the reasonable sub-
stratal element which they imply.

Of faith, conviction, or belief, there are three kinds,
not to be confounded, all of which, to a certain ex-
tent, seem to have been within the view of the writer
of this chapter. First, There is historical belief, or
faith in the reality of some fact not known directly
to the believer. Second, Metaphysical or theological
faith, faith in an inward invisible power, not distinctly
apprehended, but necessarily inferred from its significant
manifestation. Third, Moral or practical faith, an abid-
ing conviction of some truth, which necessarily leads to
action tending to a realisation of that truth. This last
is peculiarly the living faith of Christians, which has
produced all the victorious apostleship, fruitful martyr-

116 LAY SERMONS.

dom, and triumphal progress of the moral world : and
it is this, of course, which the writer of our chapter
mainly insists on and largely illustrates. Nevertheless,
a word or two, by way of contrast and qualification, may
be profitable on the other two kinds, which, like the
axioms and postulates in Euclid, however relatively
small in bulk, are necessarily implied as the starting-
point or root of the rich ramifications of the third. As
for the first, the historical faith, or the belief in credibly
attested facts, there are religions, such as the ancient
Greek, in which the historical element is so small and
so accidental to the system, that it need not be practi-
cally taken into account. Greek religious mythology,
or mythological religion, was so purely the growth of a
reverential imagination, acting on the powerful forces
of the physical and the powerful passions of the moral
w^orld, that a devout Pindar, ^schylus, Socrates, or
Xenophon, might feel his faith firmly rooted in it, with-
out having been called on to append his credence to a
single seriously attested fact ; but it is otherwise with
our Christianity, a religion so deeply grounded not only
in the personal character and lives of its founders, but
in the accredited history of continuous centuries, tliat for
this very reason the writer of our Epistle rather assumes
the historical materials of his faith as an admitted pos-
tulate, than sets himself, like a professor in a University,
to prove the necessity of a firm foundation of historical
belief to every man calling himself a Christian. The
early Christian Churches, indeed, stood where they stood.

FAITH. 117

and professed what they professed, on the basis of certain
generally accredited historical facts ; and a mason could
no more j)ile a pyramid or a palace without bricks or
square stones, than the writer of the Epistle to the
Hebrews could argue as he does, without the postulate
of a strong substratum of received facts. As for St.
Paul himself, it is quite certain, not only from several
notable places in his Epistles, but also from his mission-
ary discourses in the Acts, that he considered the literal
reality of the resurrection of our Saviour as the key-
stone of his whole preaching. Nevertheless this historical
faith, being rather a necessary reasonable postulate of
Christianity, than Christian faith as a vital principle of
action, is not specially alluded to in our chapter, unless
indeed we assert that the creation of the world mentioned
in the third verse, as apprehended by an act of faith,
must be understood to mean a belief in that grand
manifestation of Divine wisdom, on the authority of the
author of the Book of Genesis. We prefer, however, to
regard the faith spoken of in the third verse, by which
we know God as the Creator of the world, and the act
of faith likewise mentioned in the sixth verse, without
which it is impossible to please God, as falling under
our second category of metaphysical, philosophical, or
theological faith, — that is, the belief in an ultimate un-
seen cause or principle, of which all outward, visible,
and sensual things are the manifestation and the effect ;
and what the apostle in the Eomans states as the ground
of this faith, that every reasonable manifestation of

118 LAY SERMONS.

effects necessarily implies a reasonable cause of that
manifestation, is precisely the same as the argument of
Socrates, that I have as much cause for believing in
God by his manifestation in the world, as I have for
believing in myself or any of my friends, by the expres-
sion of their character in their features and in the
dramatic process of their life. This is the language at
once of all profound thinking, all sound theology, all
high poetry, and all healthy instinct ; and if there be
any that think otherwise, as in this age of feverous
transition there haply may be, who boast themselves of
the hollow vacuities and negative absurdities of Atheism
or Nihilism, we must just let them lie like drunk men
in the ditch till the fit is over.

The second great fundamental article of the Chris-
tian's creed, as stated by the apostle, is, as we have
stated, the moral government of the world. This, thougli
no doubt, as much as the first, a metaphysical proposi-
tion, to which a merely intellectual assent may be
conceded, is nevertheless very different from it ; for it
concerns not the world of thoughtful speculation, but
the world of moral energy, and cannot, without a mani-
fest force on nature, be believed seriously without
leading to a deliberate and determinate course of action.
A man may believe that two and two make four
without counting his pennies ; but he cannot believe
that decapitation is the penalty of high treason, and at
the same time indulge lightly in familiar confabulation
with conspirators. As to the ground of tlie moral law,

FAITH. 119

and the reality of the Divine government from which it
derives its sanction, we come to acknowledge it by an
infallible manifestation of its power, exactly as in the
case of physical law, only in a different region, and
under more various and complex conditions. Society
is an organism as much as a plant or an animal, and as
such exists only by the cohesive power of certain moral
laws, the cessation of whose action would instantly be
followed by its resolution into an aggregate of hostile,
confounding, and mutually exterminating elements.
One does not require to travel to Bulgaria, or to be
familiar with Turkish misgovernment, or no government,
in any part of the world, to be made startlingly alive to
the fact that the normal state of human gregariousness,
which we call society, may at any moment cease when
the cement of society, which we call sympathy, ceases
to act, and the controlling power of justice or practical
reason is disowned. Man is man essentially and
characteristically by his consistent, reasonable action in
relation to his fellows ; in other words, by acknowledg-
ing the moral law. The moment he throws this law
aside he becomes a beast, a tiger or a fox, or a combina-
tion of the two, with the addition of intellectual in-
genuity to make the ferocity of the tiger more systematic,
and the cunning of the fox more treacherous. And
thus, as Mephistopheles says in Faust, he becomes
" more brutish than any brute can be " — becomes trans-
formed, in fact, into a fiend, a demon or a devil, in the
fashion of which the records of our criminal courts, and

120 LAY SERMONS.

the lives of unbridled men, drunk with power and
pleasure in high places, furnish only too numerous
examples. There can be no doubt, therefore, that man
is by the constitution of his nature essentially a moral
animal ; and as the constitution of human nature, as
of all nature, is Divine, and comes directly from God,
the belief in the obligation of the law finds its root
instinctively in the acknowledgment of the lawgiver.
It is possible, no doubt, for a moral man to be an
atheist, but it is not natural. The natural keystone of
all moral ideas is God. " He that cometh to God must
believe that he is, and that he is the rewarder of them
that diligently seek him ; " in which verse seeking God
and coming to God can only mean seeking to know and
to conform to the divine law of which God is at once
the author and the administrator. And this order
of things is not arbitrary, but inwrought into the very
conception of a social organism. It is, in fact, as
absurd to suppose that the driving in of a nail or a
screw should not tend to the binding together of two
planks, as that the observance of the moral law should
not tend to the well-being of society ; for if, without
law, society, as we have seen, cannot exist at all, much
less can it exist comfortably or enjoy ably. What we
call a disorderly life and an ill-governed country is
simply a person in whom, or a country in which, the
action of moral law is feeble or irregular ; and in all
such cases it follows, as surely as ashes from flames,
that the vitality of the person will be lowered, and the

FAITH. 121

power of the Sta.te decline. God cannot deny his own
nature; and the laws of nature, both physical and moral,
which are the marshalled display of the divine wisdom,
power, and goodness, cannot in any one case be contra-
vened without a certain departure from the source of all
divine reality ; and this, if repeated and continued in the
same negative direction, must end in that separation and
divorce from all essentially vitalising influences, which
w^e call death — physical or moral, as the case may be.
Look round about you, not far but very near, and see
how the sorrowful records of broken fortunes, shattered
health, and degraded character, in which novels and
newspaper columns abound, give constant confirmation
of the truth of this text. The persons who afford these
sad illustrations of shipwrecked faith and ruined lives,
did simply, in foolish thoughtlessness, insolent pre-
sumption, or unbridled wantonness, tear themselves
away from the divine law, which, as in the person of
our Saviour specially, so everywhere, is the stem of the
vine, giving support and sap to all the branches ; and
the branch now lies soulless and sapless, of all green
beauty and purple glory divested, fit only to be cast
into the fire. No doubt the extreme penalty which
human authorities, as ministers of the divine law, im-
pose on social offenders, may sometimes be escaped ; but
the inward rottenness remains, eating surely and silently
through the heart of a life at whose outward flourishes
and painted prosperity the envious gaze of a thousand
fools may be directed ; and no one can tell what amount

122 LAY SERMONS.

of misery, degradation, and corruption may, in the
natural process of the generations, evolve itself from
the taint of one ancestral crime. The Greeks, as may be
seen in their tragedies, had a strong feeling of this law of
moral retribution ; and we Christians should be quick at
once to see its operation more largely, and to feel its
terrors more effectively.

We now leave the ground of abstract principle, to
consider how faith in God and in his moral government
displays itself in the formation of character on the stage
of history, and in the great drama of human life ; and
we shall start here with two familiar illustrations — one
of a young person learning to swim, and the other of
Christopher Columbus crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and
discovering the New World. No fact is more commonly
known than that the human body is lighter than its bulk
of water, and therefore that it cannot sink unless pushed
down. Why, then, do most persons find it so difficult
to learn to swim ? Simply because they have little faith
in what they are told, that they will not sink, if they
spread themselves fairly out on the wave, and use their
palms steadily for oars, striking backwards as ducks do
with their web feet. The want of faith implies the
presence of fear ; and so, being apprehensive of sinking,
in the flutter of their spirits, instead of striking back
with their palms quietly, they begin to beat the wave
with a succession of violent plashes, which of course
drives them down, the body not being light enough to
stand any pressure in addition to its natural weight ;

FAITH. 123

and thus, from lack of cool conviction and firm faith in
the witness of experienced persons, months and years
are often spent in futile attempts at achieving a dexterity
which is one of the easiest that human beings can exer-
cise— much easier certainly than leaping a wire fence,
or riding a horse in Numidian wise at full speed without
stirrups. Now, to pass from one of the cheapest exer-
cises of faith to one of the most sublime, let us take the
case of Columbus, on whose great achievement in navi-
gation Schiller has written the beautiful lines —

" Steer, doughty sailor, though the withng sneer,
And faithless pilots droop with craven fear ;
Stdl westward, westward, there the land must lie ;
Even now thou seest it, there in thy mind's eye.
Trust in thy God ; the land is there, or would
Eise from the wave to make thy venture good ;
Nature is leagued with genius to fulfil
Her prophet's thought, and serve his venturous will."

And to the same purpose the following lines, entitled

"WISDOM AND PRUDENCE.

" AVhoso to wisdom's top would rise must know
To bear a sneer from prudent wits below,
Who see his starting-point with blinking eyes,
But not his goal far 'mid the starry skies."

'Now, what this means in plain prose most people
know. Columbus was a poor boy, son of a Genoese
woolcomber, who had gone to sea in his youth, and also,
by study at the University of Pavia, had acquired such

124 LAY SERMONS.

knowledge of geometry, geography, astronomy, and navi-
gation, as was to be had at the time. His adventurous
genius was fired by the accounts which he read of far
distant parts of the w^orld, whether in the books of the
ancient geographers, or in the travels of the famous
Venetian, Marco Polo. These accounts, taken together
with the sphericity of the globe, in which he believed,
warranted the firm faith that, if he only sailed far enough
westward, he w^ould certainly arrive, by a course the
reverse of that generally practised, at the extreme east
parts of Asia, China, Japan, and some vague extent of
country beyond, known to poets down to the present
hour under the name of Cathay. This conviction, as
every one sees now, was in the highest degree reasonable,
it being quite certain that if he could have held out long
enough, and had the West Indies and America not stood
directly in his way, he must have arrived at the far east
land by steering ever more and more to the west. But
the inspirations of genius and the prophetic indications
of science were disowned alike by the prudence, the fear,
the laziness, the indifference, or, in a single word, by the
lack of faith in those to whom he made his appeal for
the means to make this voyage of discovery ; and even
when fairly embarked, it was with the utmost difficulty,
and with the lielp of a pious lie occasionally, that he
could induce his doubting and despairing crew to obey
liis command, and follow out the adventurous quest.
This example brings out most emphatically one essential
quality of Christian faith, as displayed in most of the

FAITH. 125

illustrations given by the author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews, viz. courage, resolution, determination, and per-
sistency ; courage, be it observed, not only of the common
military kind, which a man, like a dog, naturally has, being
a fighting animal, but moral courage, to face without flinch-
ing whole batteries of ridicule and sneers, and words of
grave authority and prudent warning from those who
are wise in the wisdom that lies behind and around us,
but who lack the vision and the prophetic faculty to see
beforehand the reasonable possibilities of the future.
This vision belongs to faith ; faith removes mountains.
The man of faith must succeed : because, to have a
reasonable object, and to follow after that object with a
wise persistency, are the two conditions out of which
all high achievement grows. Nature, as Schiller says,
is in league with genius ; or, to use the language of
religion, God, the author of external nature, being also
the author of the inward reasonable convictions which
are summed up in faith, cannot fail to make the external
and the internal factors of human action meet in a
common result. As the eye seeks the light, and the
light finds the eye, so every grand inspiration, whether
of prophet or poet, political or ecclesiastical reformer,
geographical explorer or cunning engineer, finds the
materials and the tools which it requires abundantly
provided for the need. But the man who will succeed
must seek, and he must see, and he must strike, and,
above all things, he must believe. Nature does nothing
for doubters.

126 LAY SERMONS.

Let us now take an example of living, active faith
in the field of devout patriotic achievement, which the
apostle, in this chapter, had more directly in view;
and we cannot do better here than take the example
whose features himself touches most in detail, viz.
jMoses. The position of the Israelites in Egypt was
that of a band of foreign settlers, favoured originally, no
doubt, by the patronage of the native monarch, but
falling soon into the neglect and contempt whicli is the
natural lot of an alien minority, and, in an absolute
monarchy such as prevailed in Egypt, liable always to
be reserved for doing the lowest kind of forced labour,
under the most galling penalties, whenever an incon-
siderate or ambitious ruler chose to strain his privilege
to the utmost. Add to this, that besides being politically
in Egypt, as prostrate before the native authorities as the
Helots in Greece were before the Spartans, the Hebrews
under the Pharaohs were living in a state of open and
declared antagonism to the established religion of the
land, — a state which, in a sacerdotal country like Egypt,
necessarily added the bitterness of sacred bigotry to the
insolence of despotic authority. Well, under these
circumstances, Moses, a comely son of a stout Hebrew
mother, providentially rescued from an early death in
the swelling w^aters of the Nile, grew up under the
notice and favour of a princess of the royal house, and,
in this position, had prospects of worldly honour and
advancement opened up, to which no limits might be
set ; for in all absolute monarchies, where there is

FAITH. 127

practically no aristocracy, a,ny man of talent, as we may
see in Turkey and in modern Egypt at the present hour,
may lightly leap to the right hand of the throne. A
worldly man, — that is to say a selfish man, who lived
merely to wield a selfish power, and to gratify his
vanity by the adjuncts of a brilliant social position, —
would never have allowed the advantages of such a
situation to slip through his fingers. He would have
served the Egyptians faithfully, as certain notorious
Italians served the Austrians in Milan, that he might
rise and rule ; but he would have done so, as worldly
men always do, only by sacrificing his best affections as
a Hebrew, his moral dignity as a man, and the human
ties by which he was naturally bound to his race, for a
position of eminence, which, however worthy in itself,
he could not honourably hold. But Moses was a man
of honour, or let us rather say a man of faith ; for he
not only scorned to abandon his poor oppressed countr}'-
men that he might become a court-favourite, but, as
his future career showed, he had that in him which
marked him out for being the deliverer of his enslaved
kinship, and the creator of a mighty people ; and the
sacred narrative makes it abundantly plain that no man
can do these things without faith in God, who is ever
ready to help those who are willing to help themselves.
The liberation of an enslaved people is indeed at all
times an achievement which requires the highest exer-
cise of faith of which a moral being is capable. Eor
the difficulties in the way of such a systematic reversal

128 LAY SERMONS.

of social position are immense, and the dangers of
failure gi'eat ; so that whosoever undertakes such a
work, whether an ancient Hebrew lawgiver, or a modern
revolutionary captain of volunteers like Garibaldi, must
do so under the assured conviction that God is with
him, and that he is fighting, and willing to give his life
for the constitution of things which from the beginning
God ordained for all times and all places. This is the
foundation of what Dr. Paley, I think, calls "the sacred
right of insurrection," — insurrection, indeed, never
lightly to be advised, or hastily to be undertaken ; but
there are unquestionably extreme cases, in which a man
who firmly believes in a divine government of the world
dare not allow himself to live under conditions which
lend a continual sanction to the most shameless rapacity
and the most systematic atrocity. When those who
wield the sword wield it in the service, not of God, but
of the devil ; when the fundamental maxim of those
who sit in the seat of authority is to promote all base-
ness and to crush all nobleness ; when, in fact, civilised
man becomes more ignoble under a civilised magistracy,
in many respects, than the uncivilised savage and the
vague wandering nomad ; — then the man of faith stands
up and says : "I will tolerate this no longer. God will
help the man who helps the creatures of God to the
free use of their natural faculties, and the free exercise
of their natural rights." And whatever the advocates
of peace at any price may say, this abnormal state of
legalised lawlessness and authorised oppression is the

FAITH. 129

real justification and the sacred necessity of war. '' I
came not to send peace but a sword !" as the Evangelic
text has it ; or, as it stands on the pedestal of the statue
of stout old Maurice Arndt, on the esplanade above the
Khine at Bonn, " Der Gott der Eisen wachsen liess, der
wollte keine Knechten." " The God that caused the iron
to grow luished not that slaves shoidd exist''

We shall now take a hero from the modern world,
in one of its most recent and notable achievements,
Victor Emmanuel, the late King of Italy, and under-
stand how the same principle operates under circum-
stances considerably different. Here, however, to avoid
misapprehension, let us distinctly premise that we hold
up this monarch as an example only in his public
capacity as a king of men. His faults and offences in
one private direction may have been as great as they
are commonly accredited, or may have been much more
venial ; anyhow, the examples of Solomon and King
David in sacred Scripture, and of not a few others well
known in secular story, seem to carry with them a
special lesson of charity. With this proviso, let us
endeavour to cast a sympathetic glance into the notable
public career of Victor Emmanuel.

The Congress of Vienna, in the first quarter of the
present century, which wound up the long series of
political throes and convulsions that arose out of the
great French Eevolution, issuing its ordinances after a
military triumph over the great Continental despot and
usurper, General Napoleon Buonaparte, naturally placed

130 LAY SERMONS.

its results on the page of history as a Restoration of the
previous state of things, which that transcendental ful-
niinator had overthrown ; but though naturally, by no
means wisely ; for Napoleon, however selfish in his
nature and despotic in his proceedings, struck into the
neighbouring European nations not in the vulgar style
of an Asiatic conqueror, but rather, to adopt one of
Hazlitt's well-known phrases, as the armed apostle of
democracy, and, as such, along with his imperialism and
Gallicism, had brought both into Germany and Italy a
democratic element, which, when contrasted with the
feudalism and petty princedom it overthrew, was of
decidedly beneficent operation. But this the men of
the Kestoration, with Metternich, the great Austrian
diplomatist at their head, could not or would not under-
stand ; they restored wholesale the bad along with the
good that had been overthrown ; and a war which had
been undertaken in the name of liberty, to free Europe
from the intolerable yoke of one great French tyranny,
ended in re-establishing a number of petty tyrannies in
the countries which had been made links by compulsion
of the great French Empire ; and poor Italy, the garden
of Europe, whose beauty had long made her a marked
prey for lustful neighbours, was not only parcelled
out among the trooj) of petty absolutists under whom it
had suffered such degradations, but was handed over
witliout limitation to the disposal of Austria, the most
blind, bigoted, persistently and ruthlessly conservative
of all the great European powers. Only a nation sunk

FAITH. 131

in the lowest depths of social degradation could tolerate
this ; so, in the year 1821, the great secret conspiracy
of the Carbonari arose in Naples, and planted there the
small seed of the glorious tree of Italian unity and inde-
pendence with which good men in these later days have
refreshed their eyes. The first outbreak of this noble
conspiracy to make one free Italy, and shake the Aus-
trian out of the saddle, as generally happens in such
cases, failed. It was not till the year 1848, under the
influence of the famous Liberal manifestoes put forth
to the electric joy of Italy by the late Pope on his
accession, that Charles Albert, the King of Sardinia,
who had succeeded to the throne in 1831, came boldly
forward and asserted from Turin the principles of con-
stitutional freedom in the face of the foreign govern-
ment by soldiers, priests, and policemen, which had its
dark fortress, and enacted its grim tragedies, at Milan.
Of this Charles Albert Victor Emmanuel was the son ;
and when the father, after the unfortunate issue of the
campaign of 1848, resigned the throne, for the wise
reason that he did not feel he could do any more good
in that position, his son Victor took his place, and had
to transact the humiliating conditions of peace that
followed the defeat of the Italian cause at Novara. Now
this was the moment in which the faith of the king was
tried as the faith of Moses was tried in Pharaoh's court,
and in the modern as in the ancient case came out
triumphant. The Austrian general, Marshal Ptadetzky,
at a meeting with the young king, when he naturally

132 LAY SERMONS.

hoped to find the petty sovereign of Turin as meek and
yielding as a small pigeon between the claws of a great
hawk, proposed as the prime postulate of the most
favourable conditions of peace, that the Italian sovereign
should abolish the constitutional statute, or charter,
granted to his people by his father, and adopt the policy
of repression and obscuration followed by Austria as the
great representative of absolutism in Italy. But Victor
Emmanuel, though in a position as riskful and as
apparently hopeless as that of Moses beneath the
shadow of the Memphian pyramids, would not betray
his people. He was a man of faith; and his faith
taught him to believe that the government of Italy by
German foreigners, with the conditions and qualities
which are inherent in such a government, was contrary
to the will of God and the ridit moral order of nations
and peoples ; that, as a king, the trustee of the liberties
of his people, it would be high treason in him to sell
those liberties to Austria or any other power for a mess
of pottage or a bag of gold ; that in obedience to the
will of God he must absolutely reject all conditions,
however favoural^le, that would stamp his name with
dishonour and brand his people with slavery ; and that,
hopeless as it at first appeared to dislodge the great
enemy of Italy from the seat of power, changes in the
political world were sure to occur, perhaps at no distant
date, which, if wisely taken advantage of, would result
in the long-desired ejection of the Germans and the
gathering of all Italians under a native Government.

FAITH. 133

The following, accordingly, are the recorded words with
which — his first public act — the young king replied to
the proposals of the Austrian marshal.

" Marshal, I reject your proposals ; and sooner than
subscribe to such degrading conditions, I am ready to
renounce, not one crown only, but a thousand. The
charter which my father granted to his people, his son
will maintain. Is it a war to the knife which you
desire ? Be it so ; you shall have it. I will make an
appeal to my people ; and, severe as is the blow with
which you seem to have crushed us, you may yet find
to your cost what a general rising of the Piedmontese
people can do ; or, if we must succumb, we will succumb
without shame. The House of Savoy knows the path
of exile, but not the path of dishonour." On hearing
this declaration, the marshal, though he was obliged to
withdraw his conditions of a more favourable peace, yet
had the generosity to make his noble adversary certain
concessions, which, in default of that nobility, would
have been withheld ; and history narrates that, after the
conclusion of the peace, on parting, he made the obser-
vation to his generals : " Dieser Mann ist ein edler
Mann ; er vjird icns viel zu tJiun geben!' " This man
is a nolle man; he will give us much to doT'^ And so
verily he did. Victor Emmanuel, through his whole
life, remained true to his principles, and had not, as
all the world knows, to wait long years before favour-

^ See Vittorio Emamielle 11. , Re d' Italia, by Felice Venosta,
Milan, 1878.

134 LAY SERMONS.

able events in France and Germany, wisely taken
advantage of, enabled the king of little Sardinia to be-
come the monarch of big Italy, bravely redeemed at last
from the iron hoof of a foreign despotism, and from
the nightmare of a secular priestcraft.

From these and such-like examples, those who are
accustomed to interpret with humility and reverence the
lessons of Divine Providence in that concatenation and
sequence of things which we call history, will under-
stand that all heroism, of whatever kind, whether in the
political or the religious world, or the world of individual
achievement, is the result of some sort of faith, — a faith
if not always in God and the divine government of the
world, which is the culminating form of all faith, at
least in a fixed order of things and the progress and
happiness of human beings, as dependent on an uncon-
ditional and self-sacrificinf]j recoojnition of that order.

It remains now that we indicate with a single word
the relation of the general doctrine of faith as ex-
pounded in our chapter to the special teaching of St.
Paul in the Epistle to the Eomans. The relation of
these two epistles in the matter of faith is exactly that
which we have just expressed by the words general and
special. T]ie author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
teaches positively, and in its widest range, the doctrine
of faith. The direct object of St. Paul was not to ex-
pound faith in a positive and comprehensive form, but
to expose the vanity of a certain kind of works, and of
works generally in a certain aspect, put forward as a

FAITH. 135

substitute for faith. The works against which the
epistle is directly written are tlie ceremonial and legal
works, mainly of an external character, on which the
Jews plumed themselves, and in virtue of which they
conceited themselves to be something inherently better
than their neighbours, and possessing a certain special
recommendation to the favour of the Almighty. These
conceits were pretty much like those which some of
our modern oligarchs or pseudo-aristocrats entertain in
this country ; who, because they happen to have been
born of famous ancestors, or of fathers and grandfathers
in a certain honourable position in society, think them-
selves entitled to assume an air of superiority, and to
look down on what they call their inferiors with con-
tempt. All such claims of imaginary excellence before
God and in the face of men St. Paul puts down, in the
first place, as showing a total misapprehension of the
nature of the moral law, and the true dignity of man
founded thereon ; for he is not a Jew who is one out-
wardly and in external observance, but inwardly and in
the spirit ; just as we might, in reference to the aristo-
cratic snobbery just alluded to, say that he is not a
duke who is greeted in the court and in the market-place
as your Grace this and your Grace that, but who is a
leader of the people in spirit and in fact, according to
the proper signification of the word dux. And, in the
second place, the great apostle uses what the logicians
call an a fortiori argument, to the effect that, as the
moral law is an ideal of perfection to which imperfect

136 LAY SERMONS.

and finite creatures can never altogether attain, it is a
law confronted with which all men, even the best, must
confess themselves sinners ; much less can the most
strict observance of the merely external and ceremonial
part of such law entitle any sinful creature to put forth
proofs of merit and claims of reward before an all-holy
God. It was not, therefore, at all against w^orks
absolutely viewed, but against works put forth as a
meritorious claim, or against the vain conceit of self-
righteousness, that the Epistle to the Eomans was
written ; and we see plainly that, whereas faith, the
mother, as we have seen, of all heroism, and the gen-
eral inspiring soul of all noble acts, implies a belief
in an ideal state of the moral world which is not, but
ought by all means to be, — self-righteousness, as a sub-
stitute for this moral steam, so to speak, implies a low
and generally also an artificial ideal of the law of duty
with which persons of feeble moral pulse and low social
aspirations are only too apt to remain content. And
herein we have the true key not only to St. Paul's
glorification of faith in the Eomans, but also to the
emphasis given to that doctrine by Martin Luther,
Calvin, and other most prominent fathers of the Pro-
testant Churches. As the Jews with the ceremonial
law in St. Paul's time, so Christians generally, at the
age of the Reformers, were, by the teaching of the
priesthood, seduced into the belief that works princi-
pally of an external and ceremonial kind, performed in
obedience to Church authority, might be substituted for

FAITH. 137

the length and the breadth of the moral law applied to
all the relations of life as the alone adequate measure of
all social duty and all saintly attainment. Thus indi-
vidual acts of real or imaginary virtue were divorced
from the soul that ought to inspire them, and religion
was made to consist in observances which had no vital
connection with a noble life or a manly character.

As for St. James, whose denunciation of faith has
been a stumbling-block occasionally to a certain class of
extreme Pauline Christians, it is scarcely necessary to
remark that he only says prominently and categorically
what St. Paul says incidentally or by implication, viz.
that Christian faith has no meaning at all, and does not
in fact exist, unless as manifested in Christian works.
The contradiction between the two writers, as in not a
few vexed moral questions, is only verbal. Works as a
claim are one thing: works as an evidence another
thing.

IV.

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL.

" Did this man sin or his parents, that he was born blind ? "
John ix. 2.

The question proposed here is a distinctly metaphysical
one ; and as such the Great Teacher of the faith which
worketh by love might well have waived it as idle and
profitless ; which, indeed, He did on a similar occasion,
when He was asked by certain inquisitive and captious
persons, whether they on whom the tower of Siloam
fell were sinners above the rest of their brethren ; to
which question the answer then was : / tell you, Nay;
hut except ye repent^ ye shall all likewise perish ; — words
plainly intended to direct the speculative faculty of
men away from the fruitless inquiry of why evil has
happened to others, in order that it may settle fruitfully
on the great interest of preventing evil that may happen
to themselves. Here we see, in an eminently striking
light, the practical character of Christianity set forth in
opposition to that seductive itch for expending intel-
lectual strength on insoluble problems, for which the
ancient Greeks and the modern Germans have been so

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL. 139

distinguished. The persons who put the deepest ques-
tions are not always the deepest thinkers ; because, if
they would only think a little deeper, they might find
that the question is one which cannot be answered, and
therefore should not be proposed ; or, even if it can be
answered, the answer is one which could do the ques-
tioner in his present position no good, or might even
do him harm by distracting his attention from the duty
that lies directly before him. Nevertheless, the imagina-
tive tendency in the human mind was not created in
vain ; men are entitled to ask questions on the most
difficult subjects, and to expect an answer to them, so
far as the limit of the human faculties allows of the
answer being understood. Children are constantly put-
ting questions, to which they will often receive from
an intelligent parent a perfectly satisfactory answer ; but
sometimes the father or the mother will say wisely —
That is a question ivhich I cannot ansiver just now ; the
materials which swpjily the ansiver are not yet within the
scope of your vision or the grasp of your hands ; when
you are ten years older I will tell you ; or perhaps you
ivill have found out the answer for yourself. Just so
with grown persons — who are all children in respect of
the Infinite Father — in the domain of religion. God
may answer our thoughtful questions about the method
of His government of the world, or He may not ; but
He never does forbid us absolutely to put questions,
provided always they are proposed not in a pert and
petulant spirit, but with an earnest love of truth, a

140 LAY SEEMONS.

liiimble sense of our limited capacities, a loving sym-
pathy with what is beyond, and a sacred reverence for
what is above ourselves. It is the spirit that makes the
question good or bad, pleasing or displeasing to God ;
the answer is given according to the capacity, temper,
and position of the questioner at the time when the
question is put ; or it may not be given at all. We
are not entitled to have all questions answered, any
more than we have a right to fly like eagles, to run like
hounds, or to be all eyes like the cherubim.

The questions which an inquiring mind is led to
make in reference to the many and complex phenomena
of the material and moral world that compose our en-
vironment are, when analysed, found to be of three
kinds : — First, the question lioiv, or through what instru-
mentality, any phenomenon is produced? Second, By
what agency, by what force, or power ? Third, For what
purpose, and with what result or, as we shortly say,
IVliyt The two first of these questions, belonging partly
to physical science as the science of external phenomena,
partly to metaphysical science as the science of unseen,
primary, and originating forces, are questions which con-
cern methods of operation, or the doctrine of operating
forces generally ; the third question is a question of aim,
object, and result, or, as Aristotle loved to call it, riXo^,
the end or consummation of a thing. This last question
is in its very nature always practical, while the other
two may be put and answered for the mere gratification
of a speculative curiosity. No doubt the knowledge

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL. 141

that thunder is caused by the discharge of a subtle and
fervid fluid dispersed through the world, of the same
nature as that which any man may produce by the fric-
tion of certain dry bodies in connection with a certain
simple machinery, — this knowledge, I say, may lead to
important practical results, as we see in the manufacture
of thunder rods, and other wisely calculated safeguards
against the action of the electric matter. But this
practical application of the knowledge obtained by the
answer of the question How ? is not necessarily con-
nected therewith ; stands, in fact, so widely apart from
it that the discovery of a method of operation among
natural phenomena is often made by one person, and
the practical application by another. But the question
For what purpose ? leads directly into the field of action,
and comprises accordingly the whole important domain
of personal and social morals, of politics, and that most
important field of theology, always to be approached
with reverence and sacred caution, which is called the
theory of the Divine Government. What is the chief
end of man? For what purpose do you and I walk
the earth ? For what purpose did God create the world ?
Why, above all things, proceeding as it does from so
powerful and perfect an intelligence, is it so compassed
about with misery everywhere, so blotted with vice, so
marred with every sort of irregularity ? These, it will
be observed, are among the most serious, the most
important, and also the most difficult questions that
the human mind can propose ; and questions which

142 LAY SERMONS.

evidently go so deep into the whole scheme of the
Divine Government, that if, in reference to some points,
an answer were altogether withheld, we should wisely
consider it as the most natural thing in the world.
What we are entitled to know certainly, created as we
are wdth reasonable faculties, is the object or purpose
for which we ourselves exist, the good to which we
must direct our steps, the model from which we must
take our design. If we have no means of knowing
this, we are indeed the most miserable of creatures ;
and a pig which asks no questions, or a worm which
looks up to no stars, will be a much more happy, and
in its way a more perfect creature than man. But
beyond this sphere of our plain and well-marked life-
w^ork, if, in reference to the great complex whole of
things, we ask the old question, What is the origin
of evil? or, For what purpose does evil exist in the
world ? we have no right to expect a complete answer
— w^hich, indeed, from our point of view, may most pro-
bably be impossible ; we have no right to expect any
answer at all. And yet God, who is always more lavish
of His gifts than we are wise to use them, has given an
answer to at least one of these questions. In the case
of the man born blind the question is answered, not
from what cause or by what agency, but for what object
and with what result. " Neither hath this man sinned,
nor his parents ; but that the luorJcs of God might he
made manifest in him;'' in other words, that Christ
might be glorified before men by removing the blind-

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL. 143

ness ; or more generally, Evil exists that there may he a
field for the manifestation of goodness.'' Let us endea-
vour to throw light on this great principle by showing
its application in the wide field of cosmical phenomena
and human life ; and let us look upon it altogether
practically, as the Great Teacher did. Men are the
grand instruments whom God uses in the perpetual
world- work of transmuting evil into good. This is our
highest honour and privilege here, — always to be
"fellow -workers with God." Work we must most
certainly, in some fashion or other, so long as we live ;
and working with God as willing tools in His hands is
our only guarantee, whether for comfort in our work or
for permanency in its issues. To work in any other
way is to dash our head against a granite wall, or to
spill precious ointment on the ground, of which no man
shall be able to give any account.

Let us look, first, at some obvious phenomena of
evil in the physical world. What is more common in
this land of flood and mountain than a storm ? What
is more terrible than the sudden black squall coming
down from the toj) of a Highland gully, spreading a
frown of savage iron-blue over the shimmering face of
the loch, and lashing into a wild race of angry billows
its lately placid breast ? Contrast with this exhibition
of the fierce and savage element in nature the serene
beauty with which the purple shoulders of our High-
land Bens are often clad for bright weeks together in
the month of August or September, and the balmy

144 LAY SERMONS.

breath which easy mortals inhale for eight months iu
the year on the fertile banks of the Kile, or beneath the
pillared shadows of the Athenian Acropolis ; and you
wish that this golden peace of physical nature were
eternal, and that no such things as storms and squalls,
and whirlwinds and waterspouts, thunder and light-
ning, and terrible fits of subterranean fever, w^ere
known in the world. This is natural. But let us
suppose your wish granted, and all the stormy evil
which you lament in the outward world instantly and for
ever abolished. You will have made a great gain, no
doubt. But have you lost nothing by this banishing of
the stormy form of evil from the physical world ? One
thing you certainly have lost — the variety which you at
present enjoy in the change of the seasons, the wonder-
ful charm of ever-recurring novelty amid deathless re-
juvenescence. Is it possible that unvarying monotony
of any kind, even of perfect peace, should be productive
of as much happiness as the change of rest and com-
motion in nature which we now enjoy ? Again, let us
consider that, though light be the great good of the
outer world — pre-eminently, indeed, the good — yet that
mere light, without a certain admixture of darkness,
could not be productive of those striking effects of
variously distributed light in which a great part of the
beauty of the world consists. Let us remember that a
picture is not possible by mere light. So far, therefore,
as the luxury of the eye and the feast of the pictorial
imagination are concerned, we may see certainly how that

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL. 145

darkness, which is an evil, and one of the greatest, exists
with this effect, that the works of light are thereby more
effectively manifested. But to recur to the storm : — If
there were no storms at sea, there would, of course, be
no shipwrecks, but most certainly also there would be
no seamanship. Eemove storms and currents and sunk
reefs — which are the evils which beset the path of the
sailor through the briny depths — ^then skill is no more
necessary to navigate the sea ; then that grand admix-
ture of adventure and caution and presence of mind
which makes the naval hero, would no more be required ;
and any child who launches a paper boat might do the
work of a Cook, a Franklin, and a M'Clintock. If there
were not a constant expectation of sudden danger, it
seems impossible that the watchfulness, the circum-
spection, and the prompitude of character necessary for
the avoidance of danger should exist. The forms of
danger, therefore, that constantly meet us in the ex-
ternal world, whether in the shape of storm or any other
unexpected difficulty, though comprising some of the
worst forms of evil, plainly exist to render a greater
good possible ; that is, to form the strength of char-
acter which grapples with and overcomes them ; and
in this way the works of God are made manifest amid
the tumult of the tempest and the roar of wild winds,
after a fashion which, in the cradled bosom of peace,
were utterly impossible.

Let us now cast a glance on the intellectual world.
The two great forms of evil here are ignorance and

L

146 LAY SERMONS.

stupidity. How many eDliglitened statesmen in every
part of Europe at the present moment are daily and
hourly grappling valiantly with the first of these evils ;
how many laborious schoolmasters and schoolmistresses
and learned professors are lamenting vainly over the
second ! And not only teachers of youth, and minis-
ters of education and sharp-eyed inspectors, and writers
of leading articles and publishers of encyclopaedias,
but lawyers and doctors and engineers, and all sorts
of persons, are engaged in a life -long battle with
various forms of ignorance and stupidity. How many
law-pleas arise, not from mere selfishness and a desire
to overreach, but from the want of clear-headedness and
distinct definite ideas about what the parties concerned
really meant — from some misty understanding out of
which a misunderstanding is sure, on the first convenient
opportunity, to emerge, and out of this misuderstanding
again, a lawsuit ? How much work of all kinds in the
world is constantly going on merely to remedy the evils
which a want of calculation and foresight in the original
designers had caused ? A lamentable fact, you will say.
Well, I allow it has a lamentable aspect ; but if you
were to have your pious wish, and to abolish ignorance
and stupidity altogether, I rather think it easy to show
that you would produce a state of things much more
lamentable. Only suppose a world from which ignor-
ance was altogether banished — that is, a world in which
everybody knew everything from the moment they were
born. In such a world there would be neither teachers

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL. 147

nor taught : no teachers where there were none that
wanted teaching; no taught where all was already
learned. Now only consider what this implies. The
pursuit of truth is by universal admission one of the
greatest pleasures of which a reasonable soul is capable.
The commonest facts in education show this. In
school and college it is by no means the mere outward
attractiveness of the subject that fixes the fluttering
attention of the young student — not the piercing blaze
from the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, or the gay coat of the
humming-bird, or the various play of colour in the
symmetrical crystal, but it is the pleasure which he feels
in' hunting out a principle, and ascending from the
subject position of the scattered individual fact to the
lordship of a general idea; that is to say, that which
gives zest to his acquisition of knowledge is the fact
that he is working his way out of ignorance. Know-
ledge, it has been said, is power — that is, when acquired
and in the production of a result ; but the sense of
power is even greater in the acquisition of knowledge
than in its application when acquired. James Watt,
we may be sure, had more pleasure in inventing the
first steam engine than Watt and Bolton had in
making the hundreds and thousands of them that came
afterwards. Here, therefore, we have the key to the
existence of this particular form of evil in the world.
Ignorance exists that the works of God may be mani-
fested in the search after truth and the creation of
knowledoje.

148 LAY SERMONS.

Let us now notice the operation of the same great
principle in the moral world — that stage on which all
of us must act our parts in that fashion which makes
our mortal lives either a harmony or a discord. For
assuredly it is not intellect or reason merely in its
purely cognitive and speculative form, which makes a
man a man and not a monkey — a creature with a
certain power of shaping his own destinies and realis-
ing his own self-projected ideal. Man is essentially a
practical animal ; he grows naturally up into a state
and a church, and every variety of organised action ; and
to be practical he must be moral, for practice without
morality is only another name for confusion, anarchy,
and self-destruction. In this view the German poet
sings well —

^^ Das Leben ist dcr Giitcr hochstes nicht ;
Der Ubel grosstes dber ist die ScJiuld.^'

" The greatest earthly blessing is not life ;
But of all human ills the worst is guilt."

This fearful nature of guilt, its mysterious power of
ren.ding, shattering, and ruining the soul, renders us
much more prone to be startled and shocked by the
existence of moral evil in the world than by the con-
templation of those physical and intellectual disturb-
ances which we have just been considering. Neverthe-
less, it may be shown, as certainly as any demonstration
in Euclid, that this most terrible of all evils is not
permitted to exist in the world without a distinct view
to a higher good. " God hath made all things for

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL. 149

himself, even the wicked for the day of his power."
So spoke the great Old Testament preacher ; and we
shall not require to go beyond the most obvious experi-
ence of common life to have the observation forced
upon us, that not a few of the highest forms of virtue
in a world without evil would be simply impossible.
Take temperance, for instance. There are persons in
the present day who are accustomed to speak as if the
only proper way to deal with all sins of excess were to
make them impossible, by removing to an impracticable
distance, or by altogether annihilating, the stimulants to
indulgence. I do not dispute the wisdom of this policy
in a special class of cases, where the object proposed is
to save weak characters from ruin. But if the object
be to form strong characters, it is manifest that to
remove the temptation is to destroy the virtue, to make
tliis world no longer a school of noble self-training and
manly self-control. If such virtues as moderation and
temperance are to exist at all, they can only be found
in a world where stimulus is strong and appetite unruly.
In such a world God has placed us ; and if we would
act in happy accordance with that constitution of things
which is His will, instead of yielding weakly to every
flattering seduction that may approach us, we should
rejoice in the offered opportunity of proving that we are
men and not beasts, and that, if in other respects cer-
tainly inferior, in the habit of resisting strong tempta-
tions we are to all appearance superior even to the
angels. At least so Seneca, the wisest of Eoman

150 LAY SERMONS.

moralists, thought, when he uttered his often-quoted
sentence, that the successful struggles of a truly virtu-
ous man' in this world are often such as the blessed
gods, in their shining Olympian seats, must look upon
with envy.

Again, let us look for a moment at the highest of
all human virtues — moral courage, a virtue which is
possible only when a sacred passion, a firm will, and a
strong reason, combine to give the world assurance of
perfect manhood. In what atmosphere, I pray you
consider, does this virtue flourish ? The very idea of it
certainly implies this, that at the time and place when
its exercise is called for, the majority of men are wrong :
01 iroXkoi KaKoi, according to the adage of the old
Greek sage — " The majority are bad, or at least weak and
cowardly." Plato, in his famous argument about the
nature of justice in the Eepublic, fancies a case in which
his pattern just man shall stand alone amid a world of
slanderers and persecutors — a world in which he shall
not even have the consolation of a single faithful bosom
into which to pour the bitter stream of his sorrow for
the degradation of the humanity to which he belongs.
And he asks, as a testing question, whether justice, in
such a world as this, will still be preferable to injustice,
and holiness to sin. Such a case, so absolutely shorn of
all elements of moral alleviation, has probably never
occurred ; for a Socrates, when he drinks the hemlock,
has generally not only the good witness of his own soul,
but the believing tears of a select band of disciples to

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL. 151

fling a glory round the darkness of his last hour. But
this unquestionably is a fact, that when the first great
step is taken in any age of transition, when the whole
mechanism of corrupt Church and State requires to
be remodelled, the man who takes it must generally
do so alone ; and those who march to victory on the
path which his finger foreshows must often do so over
his grave. There are various epochs, not unfrequently
repeated in the history of the world, when, if you be-
lieve very strongly in God, you are sure, like that very
Socrates, to be accused of atheism. There are unhappy
epochs when fools and brute beasts and diabolical
monsters, or — what for purposes of government is little
better — mere lay-figures and inarticulate wooden forms
of humanity, are perched with the ensigns of authority
upon thrones, while the wise and the good, and the
noble and the brave — like the gallant Scottish Cove-
nanters— are hunted over the moors by bloodhounds,
and trampled under foot by savage dragoons. In such
times whoever dares to be a man is sure to be called a
traitor ; and, while stars and honours and places of
power are lavished on the worthless and unprincipled,
the prison and the scaffold and the bare sea rock are
the appointed wages of the virtuous. No doubt, when
circumstances are favourable, you may come out of such
a perilous struggle, like Knox, stamping a whole people
with the mould of Christian manliness, or, like Luther,
with the cheers of a regenerated world in your ears ; but
the chances are as great that whosoever meddles boldly

152 LAY SERMONS.

with the perilous business of putting new life into the
ossified framework of some crazy but long-venerated
social organism, will be cut off, like Huss, violently, in
the vigour of manly years, with a shirt of flaming pitch
about his breast, while his ashes shall be cast into the
rolling river to find their way down to the billows of
the restless ocean. Here, therefore, in the most distinct
language, we read that the greatest virtue in the world
is possible only when the world is possessed by a half-
stupid, half-diabolical determination to have nothing to
do with virtue. The most confounding spectacle in the
world — the conspiracy of all the Mights to crush the
single little innocent Eight — takes place, that the works
of God may be manifested in that strength of soul
which can defy a world in the single consciousness of
rectitude. Never, indeed, does innocence appear more
innocent, never does strength appear more strong, than
on such occasions. The flames that envelope, but con-
sume not, preserve the manifest witness of the God-
protected child ; and the little seed which is watered
by the martyr's blood grows up into rich luxuriance
in places where the common dews of heaven would
have been ineffective. Such is the mystery of evil,
by divine predestination constantly transmuted into
good.

The practical conclusion to be drawn from the con-
sideration of this subject is sufficiently obvious. All
speculations about the origin of evil, which end in mere
speculation, are idle, and receive no encouragement

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL. 153

from the teaching of Christ as it is exhibited in the
interesting history from which our text is taken. But
the practical purpose which evil serves in this world
under Divine superintendence, we are not only permitted,
but invited to consider, viz. that the works of God may
be manifested in and through men, by every variety of
human agency exercised upon, every variety of human
condition. This, therefore, is our business. If we meet
with obstructions in our path — as who does not ? — we
are not to inquire whence they come, unless that ques-
tion, when answered, may help us to the practical
solution of the only question which properly belongs to
us : How may they be removed ? We are to rejoice in
all difficulties as the grand training-school of a hardy
and vigorous manhood. We have to deal with moral
impediments when they meet us in the course of life,
just as engineers do when they are making a road and
find a huge mountain in their way — either tunnel through
it or wind round it. If we meet with opposition in our
attempts to preach truth, or to do good in our particular
sphere, we are not to let our hearts sink forthwith and
our hands drop, saying, ISTothing can be done ; but we
must say bravely, as the ancient Eomans did. What are
OUT enemies hut fuel to feed tlie flame of our victories ?
If we fall heir to a field which is so thickly beset with
thistles and stones that we with difficulty find a free
spot for the dropping in of good seed, let us not sit
down whimpering for some fat shining paradise in
Buckinghamshire or Haddington, but let us rather, in

154 LAY SERMONS.

the spirit of our text, remember that, if evil in the shaj^e
of thistles and stones were not permitted, the works of
God could not be manifested in the farmer's clod-sub-
duing skiU, and in the continuous inroads which the
cultured land in all well-conditioned countries is taught
to make on the waste. Are there many weeds in your
garden ? This text teaches that weeds are only a luxu-
riant device of nature to make a good gardener possible.
A gardener who should puzzle his brain about the origin
of weeds, instead of taxing his muscle to pull them out,
would justly be laughed at ; but we are all gardeners,
each in his several corner of the Lord's vineyard, and
we have no right to indulge in fruitless speculation
about the origin of what is bad, so long as a single
turn of a hoe or a spade can make it in any degree
better.

To conclude : I am not averse that young gentlemen
at college, and others at their time of life, should try
their intellectual strength occasionally by attempting
the solution of a metaphysical problem. But the ex-
perience of more than fifty years' continuous thinking
on the different questions of human origin and destiny
has taught me that the principal use of such exercita-
tions is to teach us the very moderate limits within
which they can be healthily and innocently indulged.
If we do not fall in love with some pretty crotchet of
our own, and attribute to it imaginary virtues — as all
fathers are fond to do with their own children — we shall
not be long of coming to the conviction that action, not

THE UTILISATION OF EVIL. 155

speculation, is the proper business of men on this earth,
and that a man can no more gratify certain longings of
the soul with regard to metaphysical truth than he can
learn to leap out of his own skin, or drop a candle into
the deep dark well whence his brightest thoughts often
spring up. Puzzled and perplexed by the baffled attempt
at the solution of what, to us, under our present limita-
tions, must ever remain insoluble, we shall be driven into
action, as to the only field where intellectual energy, if
combined with moral dignity, is sure, under the divine
blessing, to produce a double fruitage — the fruit of
prosperous growth without and the fruit of pure satis-
faction within. Eegard this life as a brave soldier does
a great campaign, determined to " do or die," and you
have the only sure guarantee at once for happiness and
victory. And remember that it is not in your power,
any more than it is in that of a soldier on the eve of a
battle, to alter the conditions under which you act. To
run away you will find practically impossible, and to
fight feebly is always more dangerous than to close
hand-to-hand with the enemy. Life is a serious business,
and you must learn to treat it seriously. " Me7a9 o
a7<wz^," says Plato, in an often-quoted and noble sentence
of old Greek wisdom, "/xe7<x9 6 aycov tj '^pTjcrrbv tj
KaKov ^evkaQaiP " Noble is the struggle of which the
issue is whether a man, in the life which he leads here
below, is to be bad or good ; " but it would not be noble,
if it were not a struggle ; and it could not be a struggle,
did not such a power as evil exist against which good

156 LAY SERMONS.

had to figlit a battle and to achieve a victory. This is
a great mystery ; but it is also a great fact. Be it our
business to deal with this fact wisely ; for upon this
depends the great issue whether our human life, under
its present conditions, shall be a shameful blunder or a
glorious success.

V.

LANDLOEDS AND LAND LAWS.

" Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field,
till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of
the earth." — Isaiah v. 8.

There is no ingredient in what may be called the raw
material of society more important than landed pro-
perty ; and no fact connected with this ingredient more
important than its well-proportioned and well-balanced
distribution through all the classes of which the State,
as an organised society of human beings, is composed.
How this arises we may readily see ; because, before
the growth and expansion of manufactures, which are
always secondary in the development of the social
forces, and in their full blossom deal in much that
is superfluous, in all countries the land was the quarry
out of which the possibility of existence was evolved ;
the foundation on which depended both the number
and the character of the men that formed the nucleus,
and were to remain the bones and sinews, of the body
social. The land was the scene on which the great
drama of social life was enacted ; the root out of which
the most necessary element of popular well-being firmly

158 LAY SERMONS.

grew ; that part of the social organism which was at
once most permanent in its character, most firm in its
hold, and most vivifying in its associations. If Pro aris
et focis be the great and most potent battle-cry of all
nations, who by virtue of this cry achieved for them-
selves a place amongst noble and independent peoples,
pro agris might have been present by implication to
complete the triad ; for the patriotic passion is robbed
of its most powerful feeder when the family and the
fireside are left without their natural adjunct in the
field. A man with gold in his pocket may prosper any-
where ; and a lucrative trade in articles for which there
is a large demand may be carried on by the sagacious
capitalist in any part of the world; but the posses-
sion of landed property makes a man naturally belong
to a definite spot ; and the facts, and the forces, and the
associations of that spot make him feel a home there,
and there only, as a bird feels in its nest. It must,
therefore, be the aim of every wise State to have as
many persons as possible brought up under the influ-
ence of this firmest of social bonds, and this most
potent of patriotic inspirations ; in other words, a well-
calculated distribution of landed property among the
citizens is, and always must be, one of the principal
objects of a wise Government.

This being the case, we shall not be surprised to
find that this matter of the wide distribution of landed
property among the citizens was one of the principal
points on whicli the legislation of the most notable free

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 159

peoples of antiquity turned ; and the great point kept
in view by tliese legislators seems to have been equality;
at least, such a distribution of the landed property — the
qualification for citizenship — as would prevent its be-
coming a monopoly, and, as such, an instrument of
oppression, in the hands of a few. Citizens were not
to be beggars ; and in order to prevent them being such,
arrangements must be made to hinder the common
soil of the fatherland from being usurped and used
for purposes of private aggrandisement by the few. In
his account of the foundation of Eome an ancient writer
tells us that two jugers of land were allotted to each
citizen. Now, though no man who has any critical
knowledge of history would accept this statement with
regard to these early times as a literal historical fact,
it may certainly be taken as representing an almost
universal notion entertained by the ancients that, if not
an absolute equality, certainly a very free distribution
of landed property among the citizens, was an essential
condition-precedent of a Constitutional State. Aristotle,
accordingly, in his Polities'^ (a book which ought to
be the vacle mecum of every practical politician), while
he disapproves of certain laws proposed by theoretical
speculators in order to create and perpetuate a race of
absolutely equal proprietors, has no hesitation in con-
demning emphatically the later development of the
Spartan Constitution, according to which the land had
become concentrated in the hands of a few, and the

1 ii. 9.

160 LAY SERMONS.

many left in landless misery ; for this monopoly of the
land in the natural course of things led to the depopu-
lation of the country, and the diminution of the number
of free and independent Spartans ; whereas the State
requires not only a large population for public service,
but a population as much as possible founded on the
distribution of landed property among the citizens.
And, besides this, as he states again and again, great
inequality in this important adjunct, or rather founda-
tion, of citizenship, is apt to cause discontent, and to
set class against class in a constant fret of jealousy,
hatred, and strife. Indeed, his opinion on this subject
is only the unavoidable application of the great cosmi-
cal principle which he was the first to set forth cate-
gorically and to illustrate in detail, that all extremes are
wrong, a principle in every respect well worthy to be
sealed for ever with the name of an intellect at once
the most comprehensive, the most connnanding, and the
most practical, that the world has ever known. In
obedience to this maxim we may certainly start with
the postulate that in all agrarian questions very small
properties, and very large properties, as a rule, are
equally wrong ; and as for equality, we may say yet
further, that, at least as conceived by doctrinaire theo-
rists and communists, it is neither desirable nor pos-
sible. Not desirable, because monotony and an absolute
level of any kind is tiresome and stupid ; not possible,
because the all-wise and all-wealthy Creator has made
luxuriant variety, and not bald uniformity, the key-

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 161

note, so to speak, of tlie sublime hymn of his creative
energy which we call the world. Plant two seedlings
from the same nursery, upon the same hillside, on the
same soil, and under influences apparently identical,
yet they will not grow up exactly alike ; and, if this be
the case with two trees, it will be the case much more
with two hundred or two thousand trees ; with the
number planted and the space of ground covered, the
chances of variety in size and solidity, in leafy luxuri-
ance and in graceful symmetry, continually increase.
Absolute equality among men, as among trees, is a
dream. Let us suppose that a new colony is founded
by a company of exiles from their native country alto-
gether destitute of capital, having only brain and muscle
to subdue to the use of man the rich extent of the
uncultivated wilderness. Let it be taken as a just
arrangement (though for many reasons it might be both
unjust and inexpedient) that the occupied land shall be
divided among a hundred colonists equally, — in lots,
say, of twelve acres, — it is manifest that if, in order
to realise the speculative Paradise of a certain class of
doctrinaire thinkers, this arrangement were made b}
law perpetual, so that none of the original colonists
or their descendants could, by any possibility, be left
landless in the midst of their landed brethren, the
effect of this would be to stifle altogether the impulse
to exertion in the hands of the more industrious, and,
what is worse, to maintain the idle and worthless upon
the soil which they had neither the capacity nor the

162 LAY SERMONS.

desire to cultivate. Not that any of the colonists
should set his heart absolutely on the acquisition of
more territory at the expense of his neighbour, but
simply that when his neighbour fails to do his duty
to the soil, it is for the public weal that no hindrance
should be set in the way of its falling into the hands of
the man who knows how to use it. If a man will not
work, neither shall he eat. The State can have no in-
terest in keeping a man upon the land with the nominal
dignity of a citizen proprietor who lets his lot lie fallow,
cherishing a grand growth of rushes, dock, and rag-
weed, rather than salubrious corn and barley and rye.
It is far better that his prudent and industrious neigh-
bour should grow big at his expense than that he should
be protected in his indolence, as a cumberer of the
gi^ound, and the breeder, belike, of a spawn of children
more worthless and more profitless than himself Let
accumulation, therefore, as in other cases, have its
natural scope in land. The survival of the stronger
in its own province is a very proper law. A wise
forester increases the value of his forest by seasonably
tliinning the trees : no wise statesman will endeavour
artificially to prevent the natural thinning process of
Nature in society, which she achieves in favour of those
who have insight to discern, enterprise to start, and
resolution to follow forth, any fruitful scheme that
advances by grades of steady growth to the natural
climax of a well-merited accumulation.

But accumulation how far? Ay, there's the rub;

LANDLOEDS AND LAND LAWS. 163

for, if accumulation is to go on beyond a certain point,
more and ever more, we have Aristotle pulling the rein
immediately, — Aristotle, who never errs, and Nature at
his back, and the evangelical prophet Isaiah, too, as our
text seems most distinctly to assert. We must, there-
fore, set ourselves to inquire where and how, in the
wonderful remedial processes which, through much
tribulation occasionally, she is always instituting,
ISTature has provided some self-acting machinery by
which the great evil of land-monopoly in the social state
may be prevented. And here, happily, we have not far
to seek. When a man dies, his property, by the law of
N'ature, is either divided among his children, or, as be-
longing to nobody, it falls to the State ; or it may be
disposed of in any way that the laws of the State have
chosen to mark out. In other words, family claims and
laws of succession are the machinery provided by Nature
for the redistribution of lawfully accumulated property.
But this matter requires to be looked into more narrowly.
In the first place, it may be asked. Is a man, hy the laio
of Nature, entitled to make « testament, so as to have it
respected after his death ? Certainly not. The claims
of the family to the land of the deceased father no doubt
are natural ; and a father may, if he please, as in the
evangelical parable, give to each of his sons, during his
lifetime, the portion that falls to him ; but when he is
once gone, the stage is clear, and, whatever his wish and
preference while alive may have been, the survivors
have rights to assert above which the desire of a de-

164 LAY SERMONS.

parted person can have no call to despotise. On the
demise of a landowner there may be very valid reasons,
both economical and political, why the sons should take
the property rather than the daughters, or the eldest son
rather than the other sons, or the elder brother rather
than any of the sons ; in short, in many ways the suc-
cession to a landed estate may be so doubtful, and leave
room for so many disputes, that it will require an ex-
press enactment of the State to vest firmly any pro^^erty
in the act of passing from the dead to the living. Here,
therefore, the wisdom or the folly of legislators comes
in ; and here is the well-head of all the blessing or bane
that has followed to society from the legal right of
making a testament, and the laws of heritable succession
which rule the cases where a testament may not have
been made. Nature evidently, by the claims of the
children, which arise out of the natural social monad, —
the family, — as we have already said, — means distribu-
tion ; but how that distribution shall be managed she
leaves to man, as the natural agency by which she
carries out her purposes. Well, it is manifest, as
Aristotle also remarks, that the equal distribution of the
land, after the death of the owner, if the property be
small, tends to beggary ; of which exam^^les are easily
found beneath our eyes here, in the subdivision of
small farms in Ireland and in the Highlands, which
has turned certain districts of our country for a season,
to use MacCuUoch's favourite phrase, into a "rabbit

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 165

always does, at the best ; therefore the State, and the
landlords, as her servants, are bound to see to it that the
subdivision of very small properties, or small tenancies,
shall in no case be allowed ; that the eldest son, or some
efficient member of the family, according to a regulated
scale, shall succeed to the property, and that, as a com-
pensation to the other members of the family who have
no share in the land, a proportionate share of its fruits
shall be allotted to them as their legitimate portion. Of
course this is a matter in which consuetudinary law,
parental prudence, and good feeling among the claimants,
may, under favourable circumstances, often be much
more efficient than any formal legal prescription ; but
anyhow, the evil of excessive subdivision must be pro-
vided against, before the process of Nature for a wise
redistribution of large properties, by the death of the
proprietor, can be carried out. But, sure provision being
made against this perilous relapse into lots too small for
the maintenance of a substantial class of small pro-
prietors, the direct object of all wise legislation must be
to prevent, not to further, the massing of many properties
into one. That the adventurous cultivator should have
free scope, during his lifetime, to add field to field in the
way of legitimate growth, and also by special grace of
the State enjoy the privilege of leaving his accumula-
tions safe in the hands of his family when he dies, is all
that a sound policy demands, with the view of giving
free sweep to the natural instinct of acquisition. Beyond
this, much accumulation tends to evil, and ought to be

166 LAY SERMONS.

watclied with a jealous eye by the law, whose business
it is not to pamper the few but to protect the many. In
the general case, therefore, we must say, if we are to
carry out the process of redistribution after death, which
seems both natural and politic, such a law as the English
law of primogeniture is to be condemned. Leaving it
perfectly free to any large proprietor to leave his whole
landed property to his eldest son by testament, — not, of
course, because it is wise in every case, but because
testamentary freedom is desirable, — there is no reason
why, if he happen to die intestate, the property should
not be redistributed fairly among his sons and daughters,
for whom any special provision may not have been made.
To interfere here were directly to thwart Nature in her
beneficial tendencies towards restoring that equipoise of
social forces which is constantly being disturbed by the
existence of properties spreading beyond the proportions
of a manageable magnitude. Much less should any
considerations of family pride or aristocratic importance
be allowed to forge fetters for the land beyond the term
of its natural usage by the proprietor. As free as the
original holder received the land to dress it and to im-
prove it, so free ought every successive holder to receive
and to use it. Xature, in wishing redistribution, wishes
that the partition should be made for the sake of
use, not for tlie sake of possession ; and that the use
may be fruitful, it must be free. iVll entails and settle-
ments of land, beyond the actual living progeny of the
person who disposes of it, are to be looked upon as in-

LANDLOKDS AND LAND LAWS. 167

vasions of the rights of posterity, and monstrous usurpa-
tions by the fancies of the dead over the faculties of the
living. To perpetuate a property by entails and settle-
ments in favour of unborn parties is, by a stroke of
most unwarrantable intervention, at once to hinder those
who possess the land from making a free use of it, and
to prevent those from possessing it w^ho could make a
wise use of it. Such selfish and unfruitful exclusive-
ness is directly in the teeth of the grand liberality of
competing forces which is everywhere manifest in the
constitution of the universe.

But it will be said, no doubt, Why all this zeal
against large properties and old families ? If it can be
shown in fact that large properties, large farms, and old
families are the very staple of which English grandeur
and prosperity is made up, it will be vain to preach
against these things from a mere abstract text, even
with Aristotle's great maxim to back it — that all ex-
tremes arc lUTong. We have discovered many things
since Aristotle's days ; and modern States are managed
on principles of which the Stagirite, from the narrow
range of his old Greek experience, could form no con-
ception. Well, let us examine the action of large pro-
perties in detail. I am not a Eadical, and can have,
assuredly, no prejudice against them, because they are,
in this country, a notable adjunct of an aristocracy whom
I have every reason personally to love and publicly to
respect. It is plain, for one thing, that a large pro-
prietor is possessed of a leverage which can belong to

168 LAY SERMONS.

no small one, in the free range of action which is open
to him in any course of improvement which may seem
expedient. He is an absolute monarch in his own
domain ; and, if his resources are only equal to his
power, he can drain more bogs and plough more waste
land in a year, sometimes, than a colony of half-starved
dwarf proprietors could do in a century. Of this we
have a notable example in the improvements made in
the Sutherland property at the commencement of the
present century, of which an account was placed before
the world by Mr. Commissioner Loch,-^ and in the yet
more gigantic operations of the present Duke with the
steam plough on his land, whose praise is in all the
churches. A similar halo of economic glory enriches
the name of the noble family of Bedford, connected
as it is with the famous works in the Fen District
of East England for redeeming vast tracts of morass
from water, and vast tracts of land from the incur-
sions of the sea. The princely house of Torlonia stands
wedded in the same way to the drainage of the
Lago di Lucino on the Abruzzi side of the Apen-
nines. But it is the special boast of England that,
more than any other country with a powerful aristo-
cracy, she can connect the most illustrious names in
the blazoned roll of her nobility with the peaceful
exploits of agricultural improvement, and the kindly

^ All Account of the Improvements of the Estates of tlie Marquis of
Stafford in England and Ireland. By James Loch, Esq. London,
1820.

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 169

amenities of the ancestral manor-liouse and the resident
squire.^ But the large landlord is not only, in his best
Avatar, the most liberal in expenditure for agricultural
improvement, and the most rapid in the march of eco-
nomic progress ; he may also, if he chooses, and in this
country he generally does, add the charm of luxuriant
decoration to the profit of a bald utility with which the
small proprietor must perforce have stood contented.
It is only the large proprietor who can conceive the
idea of what is technically called landscape gardening :
even our biggest farmers are mostly Utilitarians ; and
a country cut out into thousands of five or ten acred
separate allotments, whatever riches it may possess,
when well managed in respect of productiveness, cer-
tainly never can compete with the large property system
in the matter of beauty. And, when we consider with
what a large-hearted generosity so many of our great
British proprietors open their beautiful grounds, not
only to the neighbouring residents, but to the general
company of tourists, who are not ahvays innocuous in
their traces or gentlemanly in their freedoms, we shall
not be disposed to grumble very grimly at the tradition
which has kept Dunolly Castle in the hand of the
M'Dougalls, or Taymouth in the hand of the Campbells.
The remarks here made on the benefits resulting from
large properties, with the exception of the sesthetical
adjuncts, apply naturally to large farmers, as opposed to

^ See the account of Lord DuflFerin's improvements on liis Irish
estates in Godkin's Land War in Ireland, p. 182. London, 1870.

170 LAY SERMONS.

small farmers. The large farmer is a man of some capital ;
and capital means power ; he lives not, like the small
farmer, for a subsistence on the soil, or a mere trifle
more ; but he boasts a liberal profession, to the prac-
tice of which he brings all the concentrated action of
well-directed labour, and all the subtle appliances of
science, and is thus in a condition to draw the greatest
material product from the soil with the least propor-
tionate outlay. This process, in which his transforming
energy triumphs gloriously over the inform domain of
the unfruitful clod, is called " high farming," — a pro-
cess, of course, in which the Highland crofter will find
it impossible, and the Westphalian peasant proprietor
extremely difficult, to be his competitor.

So much for what may be said in favour of what
may be called the greatest possible accumulation prin-
ciple in the matter of landed property, — a principle
which, of all countries in Europe, has found its greatest
exemplification in Britain, and particularly in Scotland.
Nevertheless, Aristotle is not wrong. For, in the first
place, we must remark that in all questions of magni-
tude there are degrees : and what is true and beneficially
true of large properties, — that is, properties of a size con-
siderably above the largest of the small, — may not be
true of very large properties. There are diseases pro-
duced by high feeding similar in type and identical in
results with those produced by low feeding ; and so it
may be, if Aristotle's doctrine of the mean is universally
valid, in rural economy. As to the esthetic part of

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 171

the business, to take this first, any person who travels
the country with his eyes open may observe that men
of moderate property, — say with a rental of from £2000
to £4000 a year, or even less, — have done as much to
improve the look of the country as mightiest million-
aires and thanes with some £20,000 or £50,000. Of
this there are various causes. Your very big proprietor,
whose domain may stretch from twenty to thirty miles
across the country, cannot be everywhere present ; he
can use personally only a small part of what he pos-
sesses ; and he may content himself with environing
with a special girth of beauty the favoured spot of his
own residence, while all the rest of his domain, especi-
ally the more remote districts, lie in comparative neglect
or rot in utter squalor. Let this not be thought strange.
Your lord with £50,000 a year can afford to lose, or not
to gain, a thousand or two annually, without notice ;
but the small proprietor must turn every clod : hence
his industry and thrift, and fruitful triumph over ad-
verse circumstances, as in France and Elanders, and
many parts of Germany, are not less notable in their
way than the steam-plough achievements of his Grace
of Sutherland, or the well-registered profits of Mechi
and the high farmers. Nay, it is certain that the small
peasant proprietors of the Continent, and even the
much-abused and often most inhumanly treated High-
land crofter, under wise superintendence, will by per-
severance and diligence turn a waste into a garden where
neither mighty lord nor rich high farmer would conde-

172 " LAY SERMONS.

scencl to turn a sod. High farmers are like high-bred
race-horses ; they will not be found dragging dray-carts.
To ffisthetical decoration of course your peasant pro-
prietor can pay little attention ; but even in point of
neatness, and a look of substantial comfort, he will often
be found outshining the large proprietor in those parts
of his domain which do not lie immediately beneath the
master's eye. But this is not all, nor the worst. Your
large proprietor, even when a good man, and with social
sympathies, is by the necessity of his position an enemy
to the growth of a numerous and influential local gentry ;
he needs but one manor-house ; and, whatever amenities
and utilities are wont to grow out of the manor-house,
as a centre of local culture and a nucleus of local pros-
perity, are found at only one point, — it may be a remote
corner of a widely extended district. In the economic
distribution of the soil, the families of the gentry scat-
tered through a county are, like the ganglions in the
nervous system of the human body, centres of potential
local action — little subordinate brains, so to speak —
whence the motive and sensitive apparatus of the differ-
ent organs is supplied. In all such cases, of course,
distance from the centre implies feebleness of the con-
veyed force. As in a large hall, the light of a candle
in one corner radiates feebly and more feebly, till in
the most distant parts of the room utter darkness
prevails, to be prevented only by the introduction
of other lights, with establishment of new centres of
radiation, so a number of comparatively small pro-

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 173

prietors, in respect of what we may call social radiation,
act more beneficially than one large proprietor. Take
an actual case. The Island of Mull, west of Oban,
with which I happen to be intimately acquainted, is
possessed at present by some sixteen or seventeen pro-
prietors of considerable importance. ISTow imagine the
whole of this beautiful island to be bought up, or to fall
by succession into the hands of any of our great terri-
torial nobility, or any of those cotton, iron, or coal lords
who have made their phylacteries so broad in these
last days of John Bull's transcendental prosperity, — does
any person imagine that the Island of Mull would, in
any respect, be the better for this consolidation of many
small into one large property ? Certainly, in respect of
population and society it would be a great deal worse ;
in respect of produce it would, in all likelihood, not be
better ; nay, it is quite possible that the big man who
bought it might buy it for the express purpose of turn-
ing it into a deer-forest ; and a very nice deer forest it
would no doubt make, thirty-eight miles long by twenty
broad, and with the sea all round it, to save the expense
of a fence. N'or would this be all. AVithout exactly
turning the whole island into a deer forest, he might do
on a large scale, what I much fear has already been
done by selfish proprietors on a small scale, — turn all the
peasantry out of their rural holdings, that they may
settle in the neighbouring boroughs, and save the land-
lord, by one bold stroke, at once from poachers and
poor-rates. All this, according to British notions, Brit-

174 LAY SERMONS.

isli law, and British practice, might be quite correct, and
would find advocates, no doubt, in quarterly reviews and
daily leaders, sufficiently eloquent, with a whole store-
house of phrases from authoritative books on political
economy, to prove that it was all quite right ; that
every Englishman is entitled to do what he likes \vith
his own; and that Mull,

" Tlie fairest isle that spreads
Its bright green mantle to the Celtic Seas,"

has every reason to be congratulated on the change.
But social instincts, I imagine, in this instance, and
that rude confronter of inexorable logic called common
sense, might prevail at once over political economy and
the deer-stalking proclivities of our sporting aristocracy.
People might begin to say that property in the soil of a
country is a somewhat different thing from property at
a fireside in a cosy chair, or in a well-buttoned pocket;
that in a civilised state of society absolute property,
even in movables, may not exist, inasmuch as by taxa-
tion, laws of succession, and otherwise, even movables
may be forced to pay their tribute to the common good ;
but that the owners of land are in a peculiar sense the
holders of property, not for their own pleasure or profit
only, but for the general protection, cherishing, and
furtherance of the local population. Landed proprietors
in fact, are, in some sense, trustees for the public good ;
and, as a matter of history, the great lords of the soil
received their privileges from the Crown on the condi-
tion of certain prestations for the public service ; and,

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 175

though it is quite true that these special services, from
changes in the social machinery, are no longer required
to be performed, the absolute disposal of large tracts of
national property is of a kind which involves too many
grave social issues to be tolerated by any wise Govern-
ment ; and the principle remains that a man, for in-
stance, cannot be allowed to fence round Ben Muicduibh
exactly as he fences his private garden ; or to obstruct
the passage from the sources of the Dee in Braemar to
the floods of the Spey, as he might close a lane leading
from one field of his ancestral manor to another. Landed
property, as has been well said, has its duties as well as
its rights ; but the duties, however obvious, have not
seldom been neglected without social discredit ; while
the rights, however impolitic, have been enforced by
legal authority, and sanctioned by that usage of cen-
turies which passes for right with the unthinking.

But I have yet a worse charge to bring against large
properties : they necessitate vicarious administration,
and readily become the fertile mother of one of the
worst of all social sins which a landed proprietor can
commit, habitual absenteeism. If a landlord be, as it
appears, a proprietor of a peculiar kind, entrusted with
a special sort of property, on which the local prosperity
of the country in a great measure depends, it is plain
that, as in other cases, the duty of overseership will be
best performed by persons who do not live at the end
of the world, but rather at home with their eye directly
over the district of which they are the guardians. Now,

176 LAY SERMONS.

the QTeater the district, of course, the more difficult,
even in this age of ready locomotion, the duty of per-
sonal presence and personal inspection, and the stronger
will be the temptation — or, may we not rather say, the
necessity ? — to the proprietor to hand over his overseer-
ship wholesale to a resident factor or factors. In this
case, while the maxim Qici facit 'per alium facit per se
will satisfy all legal claims on the lord of the soil, the
conscience of the community may justly think itself
entitled to pronounce a verdict not in anywise so
favourable to this practical assignation of proprietary
duties into the hands of a third party. Government by
commissioners and factors is not, and never can be, so
considerate, so equitable, and so kindly, as the direct
administration of the proprietor. A factor on a large
property is, in fact, very often in the position of a
trustee on a bankrupt estate ; his principal, though not
formally bankrupt, wants money, and it is his duty to
get it as quickly as possible, no matter 'how harshly and
how unceremoniously. This is the secret of what has
taken place to our knowledge not unfrequently in the
Highlands ; the factor has been guilty of acts of social
severity, which were forthwith disallowed by the great
proprietor as soon as they came to his knowledge. A
good factor, — that is, a kindly and humane -hearted
factor, — once said to me that half the bad things that had
been done in the Highlands were done by the factors.
It can scarcely be otherwise. The factor has not the
parental feeling towards the people that belongs to a

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 177

good resident proprietor ; moreover, lie lias often a great
deal more to do than a man can manage conscientiously
in detail ; so he applies an unbending general law to all
cases ; and then, like other mortals, anxious to save
himself trouble, he is no friend of a numerous popula-
tion, and prefers, from reasons of personal convenience
rather than of public utility, getting £1000 yearly from
one big absentee owner, resident perhaps a thousand
miles away, to the same sum paid in parts by ten small
resident farmers. And thus large estates, large farms,
and factorial management have formed together an
unholy alliance, by which the absentee lord of the soil
has been acquitted of all social duty, and the people
who lived under his protection sacrificed, in a manner
equally impolitic and inhuman, to the convenience of
a practically irresponsible mandatory, the crotchet of
a doctrinaire economist, or the greed of an intrusive
speculator.

Among the many acts of baseness branding the
English character in their blundering pretence of
governing Ireland, not the least was the practice of
confiscating the land, which, by Brehon law, belonged
to the people, and giving it not to honest resident cul-
tivators (which might have been a politic sort of theft),
but to cliques of greedy and grasping oligarchs, who
did nothing for the country which they had appro-
priated but suck its blood in the name of rent, and
squander its resources, under the name of pleasure, and
fashion, and courtliness, in London. Now, this takes

N

178 LAY SERMONS.

place in Scotland also, tliougli not to the same extent.
Some of our biggest landliolders, thank heaven, are our
best landlords, and never more pleased than when they
are amongst their own people ; but generally we must
say that small proprietors are more likely to be resident
proprietors, because they cannot afford to spend eight
months of the year in London or Paris ; and it would be
in vain to deny that there are large landed proprietors
who are seldom seen on their properties except in the
shooting season, and who, from their general style of
administration, are suspected of being much more
anxious to preserve the game than the human popu-
lation on their estate. These are bad landlords and
worthless citizens, and only a shade better sometimes
than the unconscientious nobles and tlie grasping
graziers who have, at different epochs and under
different circumstances, juggled the Irish people out
of their natural inheritance in the soil.

There remains one other count in the indictment,
which, in Great Britain particularly, demands to be
brought into special prominence : I mean the social,
political, and juridical power, which our law, consuetu-
dinary and statutory, has vested in the owners of the
soil. In Scotland, not only are the large proprietors,
and those who hang by their skirts, absolute lords of
districts much larger than many a German principality
sometimes, but they are the actual makers of the laws
which regulate the relations of the gi^eat lords to the
small people on the soil ; and the makers of these laws

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 179

would have been miracles of human virtue indeed, if,
under such influences, they had made them otherwise
than with a special kindly regard to the interest of
their own class. No man, speaking from the platform
of common worldly morality, can blame them for this ;
they are men ; they have been entrusted with absolute
authority over the lives and properties of thousands of
their fellow-men ; and being so entrusted, they will
surely use it as the instinct of their class directs, and
abuse it too ; and unless the old Greek adage — ol ttoWoI
KaKoL — be altogether false, the majority will always be
found to have been in favour of the abuse. Nay ; has
it not been well said that power, pleasure, and pence,
are the three baits of the devil ? and the greatest of
these three is power. Now, I believe, no person, not
living in the country and in a dependent position, has
the slightest idea of the tyrannical character, and
essentially oppressive, or if not positively oppressive,
certainly repressive operation of the existing landlord-
made laws, under the shield of which our large pro-
prietors of this country legally override the natural
rights and equitable social claims of the people under
their jurisdiction. Our laws of tenant-right, or rather
of no-right, were evidently devised for the express pur-
pose of keeping the class of people who cultivate the
soil as much as possible under the thumb and at the
mercy of the great man of the district ; and the well-
known servility with which it is expected that agricul-
tural tenants shall vote with their local lord on political

180 LAY SERMONS.

matters — and sometimes on ecclesiastical matters too —
is of itself a public proclamation of the great economic
truth, that large landed properties, when combined with
land laws made by the landlords of these properties,
have a direct tendency to crush personal liberty, and to
prevent the growth of any sturdy manhood that may
come under the upas influence of their monopoly. If
the greatest manhood of the greatest possible number
be the highest ideal which a wise polity can strive to
attain, very large properties and very oligarchic laws
are certainly not the best machinery for attaining that
object.

Let me now sum up what has just been said in a
single proposition. While large properties, under wise
administration, certainly possess their own peculiar
vantage-ground, which renders them tolerable, enjoyable,
and even profitable as a variety, their general influence
on the social state of a country is not such that any
wise Government should feel justified in giving them
encouragement, much less in upholding special laws
tending to prevent them breaking down into smaller
properties, when, in the course of nature, such a redis-
tribution of property in the soil may normally take
place ; and, as in other matters, with regard to the dis-
tribution of land, all one-sidedness is to be avoided, and
that state of possession is to be regarded as normally
the best where large, small, and medium properties are
found through the country, with a wise regard to the
circumstances of the district and tlie capacities of the

LANDLOKDS AND LAND LAWS. 181

cultivator. On this basis I shall now proceed to state,
shortly, the duties of landed properties, so far as the
size of estates is concerned ; and what changes in our
British land laws ought to be made, in order to give
effect to the principles of natural equity and social
position in this matter. Let us suppose — a very
common case in this country — one who, by diligent
attention to a profitable business, combined with some
lucky chances, has some fifty or sixty thousand pounds
at his credit in the bank more than he knows what to
do with. Being of a cautious temperament, and not
liking to cast his anchor in distant waters — eschewing
foreign bonds and foreign mines — he buys an estate of
a moderate magnitude, yielding a rental of say about
£2000 a year. Though, as is well known, landed pro-
perty yields only a small return for the purchase -
money, no person will consider this an unwise invest-
ment, being, in the first place, more surely rooted and
more permanent than any other, and conveying with it
not only certain graceful amenities of rural life, but a
social position, a dignity, and an influence which, to
most men, is more valuable than any percentage, how-
ever high, obtained from floating capital. Well, the man
who buys land, buys it, not merely to possess, but to
use and to improve it ; at least, this is the only natural
and legitimate motive for the purchase of land ; just as
a scholar buys books, not to fill his benches, but to read
and to consult. We shall suppose, therefore, that our
prosperous trader has retired from business, or holds to

182 LAY SERMONS.

it only as a sleeping partner, with the view of possess-
ing land for the purpose of improving it, and of causing
blades of grass to grow and blossom of trees to flourish
where only waste and barrenness had been before.
We shall suppose, further, that the superintendence of
this portion of the soil, and his sphere of action as a
land improver and the bishop of his people in secular
matters, give him full, healthy, and pleasant employ-
ment, and then ask what motive may he legitimately
have for further acquisition of territory? Not the
mere boast of possession, certainly, or the vainglory of
being called the lord of many leagues ; for this is an
illegitimate motive as much in the court of social
utility as on the platform of pure reason. But if, on
the other hand, the property of an idle or worthless
neighbour comes naturally into the market, he is quite
entitled to buy that, if he thinks he can superintend it
to good purpose, and perhaps, at the same time, round
off the corners of his estate, and make a scientific
frontier to his domain. To prevent an enlargement of
this kind would be to declare war against the instinct
of acquisition, which God, for the wisest purposes, has
implanted in every human heart, and which cannot be
barred off without cramping the energy and limiting the
productive powers of the community. A man also may
legitimately enlarge his property in order to make a
provision for his family — that is to say, he may pur-
chase as much property as, when divided, will suffice
for a portion to his sons and daughters ; but he is not

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 183

entitled to add acre to acre and field to field for the
purpose of building up his eldest son into the dimen-
sions of a county magnate, and founding, as the phrase
goes, a family. This is a vanity, and a peculiarly British
one : a vanity not merely empty in its conception, but
unjust in its principle and pernicious in its operation ;
pernicious in many ways, but specially, so far as con-
cerns our present purpose, in this — that it encourages
the growth of enormous properties, and prevents the
action of that redistributive process which, as we have
seen, Nature wishes for the proper balance and equi-
poise of landed property in the community. No doubt
there may be cases in which it is right and proper that
a man's landed property should be left to his eldest son
after his death ; the liberty of testing, therefore, in this
respect, should remain free. But what we say is, — and
the moral law, whether proclaimed by the wise Greek,
or the most Evangelical of the inspired Hebrews,
imperatively commands us to say it, — that the founding
of a family, and the locking up of the land for a suc-
cession of generations, is an excess and an abuse,
which, like the Scottish thirst for much whisky, or the
Turkish lust for many women, does not tend either to
the real profit of the individual or the general good of
the community. For, to omit all other considerations,
it is manifest that a law or practice which at once
hampers the worthy possessor of land in the use of it,
and props up the unworthy users in the possession of
it, claims no countenance and deserves no encourage-

184 LAY SERMONS.

ment ou the ground either of public policy or of personal
virtue. The two great duties which a landed proprie-
tor has to perform to society are to improve the ground
and to cherish the population. If it can be proved
that the so-called founding of families, and creation of
very large properties in an uninterrupted succession of
eldest sons, is favourable to the exercise of those two
main functions of a landed aristocracy, let this practice
be favoured ; if, as I believe, no such proof can be
adduced, but rather some pretty strong indications to
the contrary, let it be discouraged, and all laws which
give artificial support to such unreasonable and unpro-
fitable practices be swept from the Statute Book,
without mercy.

From the tenor of the above remarks it will be suffi-
ciently obvious what changes in our land laws are
necessary, in order, with the least possible disturbance
of existing interests, to restore the lost balance of pro-
perty in the soil, so necessary to a well-constituted civil
polity. In the first place, all laws of entail, and
practices of settlement going beyond the life of the
direct inheritor, must be disallowed. In the second
place, all feudal formulas, or other cumbrous machin-
ery of legal verbalism, making the transfer of landed
property difficult, slippery, and expensive, must be
abolished, and a public compulsory register established,
by means of which it may be possible in England, as
in the Colonies, to transfer a lot of land, by a single
registered writ of assignation, as easily as a ship. In

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 185

the third place, while the freedom of testing, which we
derive from the law of the Twelve Tables, shall not be
interfered with, so as to prevent any proprietor, if he
pleases, from bequeathing all his land to an eldest son,
at the same time, when a man dies intestate, the pre-
sumption of law shall be that he meant his pro-
perty to be divided equally among his heirs, and
such division accordingly shall be made. In the
fourth place, a law might be made, that when a
landed proprietor marries an heiress, the property that
she brings into the connubial estate shall in nowise,
after death, go to the same son of the marriage who
succeeds to the paternal property, but shall always
devolve either to the second son or daughter, or to
some other issue of the marriage, as the heiress by
testament may direct. In the fifth place, the whole
law of landlord and tenant ought to be so revised as
to give to the tenant a position as independent as
possible in his social relation to the proprietor, and,
as far as law^ can do it, prevent the proprietor from the
exercise of the unconditional supremacy which at pre-
sent may often make him the absolute monarch rather
than the limited sovereign of his domain. Of course,
before all these changes can be effected, there will be
hard work to be gone through, and loud outcry among
large classes of people whose ideal of life is sitting on
easy chairs and doing as their fathers did before them.
But the difficulties, as in many matters of social reform,
will consist rather in the want of will to do than in the

186 LAY SERMONS.

toughness of the work to be done. Such changes will
be opposed, first of all, by the landed proprietors who
have been bred on false principles of artificial privilege,
selfish monopoly, family vanity, and monstrous accumu-
lation. Fed upon bad food for many generations, the
blood of any animal will be poisoned and the race de-
generated ; and so, from hugging narrow and exclusive
notions century after century, with mutual admiration,
and no strong signs of public disapprobation, it is no
wonder that a class of people should have grown up
who believe that the prosperity of the commonwealth
depends upon the wideness of the gap which shows
itself between themselves and the mass of the com-
munity. Closely allied with the landed proprietors are
the lawyers, not a few of whom, whether as convey-
ancers or as factors, contrive to exercise more real power
over the estate than the actual owners. In no country
are the abuses of the law, specially the laws relating to
land, more monstrous and more clamant than in Eng-
land ; and the statesman has yet to make his epiphany
who shall "ain a more unsullied and more durable

o

reputation by the codification and simplification of the
English laws, than can be achieved by a long procession
of democratic Reform Bills, or pandering to the sec-
tarian lust of pulling down Established Churches. But
neither lawyers nor landlords would have any power to
keep entire the vexed tissue of perversities and mon-
strosities which we call our land laws, were it not for
the third great difiiculty of the case — viz. the indiffer-

LANDLORDS AND LAND LAWS. 187

ence of the great mass of the people. Occupied as they
are with fruitful industries in the great towns, and
having their whole social energy exhausted in the
accumulation of cent per cent returns on mercantile
speculations stretching from the rising to the setting
sun, they allow the lawyers and the landlords to take
their own way in country matters, and play the local
despot, or the local fool, as the case may be, with im-
punity. Besides, the very rich among our urban middle
classes not unfrequently become infected with the virus
of oligarchic exclusiveness, eager to imagine themselves
somebody by walking over some thousands of acres
they can call their own ; and this mercantile plutocracy
and the aristocracy of birth combine in an unholy alli-
ance to fence off the land in huge untenanted solitudes
from distribution amongst the people who could occupy
and improve it ; while the poorer class of shopkeepers,
artisans, and professional men of various kinds, looking
on the land as a thing altogether out of their reach,
leave the plutocracy, and the aristocracy, with only an
occasional growl, to manage or mismanage it at their
pleasure. This I confess to be the great difficulty that
besets the path both of land and of law reform in this
country. If the great mass of the urban population
were as intelligently interested in the reform of the
land laws, and of the law, as they are feverishly ex-
cited in the political contentions of the hour, there
would be a clean sweep of entail laws and long settle-
ments by the first strong ministry that might get into

188 LAY SERMONS.

power ; and even the encouragement of the growth of a
race of peasant proprietors — the favourite butt of con-
tempt in the vulgar English mind — might be looked
upon as a most safe and conservative measure of social
policy by the wisest men of all parties. For the real
fact unquestionably is, that measures tending to a large
redistribution of the landed property of this country,
now locked up in the hands of a few, though generally
looked on as Eadical, and somewhat of a Eed hue, are
in their nature essentially Conservative, and are con-
ceived by all sober thinkers in this country not more in
the interest of the landless many than of the landed
few. If it be a good thing for the now excluded many
to have some real stake, however small, in the soil of
the fatherland, and if it be a good and a wise tiling for
persons of moderate fortune in this country to have the
opportunity of investing their savings rather in the safe
ground of home soil than in the slippery quicksands of
Egyptian bonds and Peruvian mines, it is no less a good
and a wise thing that the living aristocracy of this
country should not be hampered in the management
of their property, by enthralment to the capricious re-
strictions of the dead, and that the influence of substan-
tial noble families should be increased by two centres of
social influence instead of one in the vast district over
which their present lordsliip extends. The wisest thing
that many a Avdde-acred duke or earl in this country
could do in the way of increasing his family influence
would be to divide his immense property into two

. LANDLORDS AND LAND LAAVS. 189

halves, keeping the one half to himself as sufficient
for all practical purposes, and dividing the other half,
as independent properties, among his sons and daughters.
The present lack of popularity in some local magnates,
of whose excellent character no man doubts, is caused
partly by the fact that the magnate is so very mighty,
and by virtue of this very mightiness contributes nothing
to the social life of the district of which he ought to be
the soul. Let our great local thanes rather extend
themselves amongst the people as strawberries do along
the ground, by throwing out rootlets forthwith to estab-
lish themselves as separate plants, and their popularity
will become as wide as the wise multiplication of their
roots. In this natural system of expansion, I believe,
lay the wonderful strength of the Highland chieftains
before the commercial system made its cold invasion,
substituting money for men in all the glens. The tacks-
men in those days were the near kinsmen of the gTcat
lord, stout social centres of a numerous lusty popula-
tion, where an absentee Dumfries farmer now hires a
solitary shepherd to watch the browsing of a few
melancholy sheep on the braes. And if at any time
to take their stand on a monstrous extension of exclu-
sive domain, a legal claim of absolute lordship, and a
bristling fence of class privileges, is a most impolitic
procedure for a landed aristocracy, it is specially so
in this democratic age, and in this country of decidedly
popular institutions. In such an age and in such a
country, the social isolation of the aristocracy, whether

190 LAY SERMONS.

by virtue of land laws, or by any other cause, fraught
as it is with frequent occasions of recurrent irritation,
has a tendency to alienate the hearts of the people from
their natural social lords, and to generate hatred, as
Aristotle remarked long ago, betwixt class and class,
instead of the mutual love, confidence, and respect,
which is the only sure cement of society. Let them,
therefore, bethink themselves in time, and concede to
the people spontaneously what they may not be able to
maintain against them in the long run. But even if
they should ultimately succeed in that unhappy policy,
by which they have already contrived, in some districts,
to rob the British army of its best soldiers, our soil of
its most effective labourers, and our country of its most
trustworthy citizens, it will be a poor tribute to their
memory if a future historian shall sum up their ex-
ploits in a curt repetition of the sad sentence of Pliny,
L/VTiFUNDiA PERDiDERE Italiam,'^ — Large properties have
ruined Britain !

1 " Modum agri in primis servandiim antiqiii putavere ; veruriKpie
confitentibus, latifundia perdidere Italiam, jam vero et provincias." —
Kat. Hist, xviii. 6.

VI.
THE POLITICS OF CHEISTIANITY.

"Dreamers who despise dominion and speak evil of dignities. "
JUDE 8.

The Eeverend Samuel "Wehrenfels, Doctor and Professor
of Theology in the University of Basle some century
and a half ago, and who, in addition to profound
theological learning, possessed the happy knack of
inditing pleasant and significant epigrams, among
others interesting to readers of the Christian Scriptures
has this on the Bible —

Hie liber est in quo sua qucerit dogmata quisque,
Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua.^

" The Bible is a wondrous book ;
For men of every kind
Seek there, and, seeking, find with ease
The dogma to their mind."

A sentence of most excellent significance, whether
taken in the sense meant by the writer, as a reproof to
men of his craft who quote the Scriptures with a ready
sophistry only to confirm them in their party prejudices,

^ Werenfelsii 0/)era .- Lausanne, 1739, vol. ii. p. 509.

192 ' LAY SERMONS.

or as a compliment to the sacred book, which, like the
hook of Nature, from its infinite wealth and variety,
may seem to favour either party who subjects it to a
partial interrogation, because it favours both. How
true the couplet of the learned doctor is it requires no
very profound knowledge of ecclesiastical and political
history to perceive. In affairs of State absolutists like
the Anglican doctors of the Eestoration, and revolu-
tionary Eadicals like Mazzini, have been equally for-
ward to quote the Bible as their warrant, and have both
done so with a certain measure of truth, though not
without a large qualification of error. In the Christian
Churches, as at present constituted, I cannot be very
far from the truth when I say that the teaching of the
theological professors consists mainly in a systematic
course of unconscious sophistry, by which the students
are trained to use the Scriptures as a repository of
fencing tools to ward away any attacks that may be
made on the traditional dogma, popularly accepted as
infallible, — a process by wdiich the Catechism un-
observedly creeps into the place of the Bible, and the
symbolical books of the Church, even in Protestant
countries, quietly usurp the throne of the doctrine of
which they profess themselves the interpreters. In
the present discourse, leaving the theologians to ex-
plain away, as they so often do, the obvious meaning of
Scripture, that it may subserve the glorification of their
creed, I shall confine myself to the use and abuse of the
Bible as an inspirer of political motives and a director

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 193

of political conduct. For either in political, as in all
social matters, the divine law of a reasonable and
immntable morality must inspire all the impulses and
govern all the proceedings of political agents ; or in
politics man must be considered as descending into an
arena of intellectual tigerhood and foxhood, and present-
ing himself, denuded of all moral motives, as a monster
in creation. This theory, no doubt, has been carried
out with sanguinary consistency in the practice of not a
few politicians, whose names note far-sounded periods
of history — as by the Turks in Greece, by the English in
Ireland, and by the Episcopising Stuarts in Scotland;
but only a few brazen -fronted sophists, — represented
by Thrasymachus in Plato's polity, or hard and harsh
thinkers, as Hobbes amongst ourselves, — have ventured
to present civil polity to the world in a garb of such
unveiled and unlovely selfishness. We shall therefore
not concern ourselves, as indeed the Bible cannot con-
cern itself, with such ethical monstrosities, and proceed
on the postulate that government is only morality
applied to great masses of men, and that morality is
divine reason and divine love panoplied in action.

More in detail, the postulate of our inquiry runs
thus : — Government is the art of regulating and con-
trolling the energies of an aggregate of human beings
according to a law of harmony and unity, i.e. of making
any number of human beings act harmoniously together
under a common influence and for a common end, in
such fashion that the multiplicity, of which the aggre-

0

194 LAY SERMONS.

gate is composed, under the abiding action of that
influence, and with the constant tendency towards that
end, becomes a unity : in other words, it is the business
of government, wdth the view of evoking and regulat-
ing the social instincts and tendencies, in the culture
of which the chief end of a social being consists, to
prevent, by a strong unifying force, that process of
severance and disintegration to which the unfettered
individualism of the units of an independent aggregate
naturally tends. And in order to achieve this unity —
by no means an easy affair, as many pages of sweatful
and blood-bedraggled history amply show — three things
are necessary : common interests to move, common ideas
to inspire, and a common authority to control. What,
then, is rjood government ? Good government is when
the individuals composing the social aggregate are so
stimulated and so directed and controlled in their
action, that each individual puts forth his energies
under such conditions that by the natural laws of
action and counteraction he achieves both for himself
as an individual, and for the community of which he is
a member, the most perfect life of which the individual
and the community is capable.

Now, observe, this implies that the individual shall
be free to put forth his personal energies in such
fashion and to such an extent as to make the whole
consist of the greatest possible number of healthy, vigor-
ous, and effective units; in other words, good govern-
ment implies Liberty. A government without liberty

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 195

is not a government of reasonable beings, but, even in
its most perfect form, — as in the intellectual absolutism
of Plato's polity, or the sacerdotal absolutism of the
Paj)al Church, — a government of a reasonable machine ;
for it can exist only by annihilating the very moral
character of the units which it is instituted to evoke.
On the other hand, the idea of good government involves
no less essentially that this freedom shall be exercised
always under such direction, control, limitation, and
restriction, i.e. Law, as the existence of a social or-
ganism necessarily implies, — that is to say, the liberty
which good government secures implies the sacrifice of
that absolute independence which is inconsistent with
common action, and the submission to that authority
which is necessary to enforce all laws of common action.
A good government, therefore, must be a firm govern-
ment and a strong government ; the man who sits
in the coach-box must have full command of the whij)
and the rein as occasion may require ; and whosoever
would not be the trembling slave of usurping violence,
must hire himself as the willing servant of legiti-
mate authority. This is the most important and the
most difficult of all practical problems to learn in the
social life ; for liberty is like wine and like fire ; it
tends constantly to an excess ; it is a word the very
sound of which intoxicates the soul of many a hearer, —
justly enough, perhaps, if the hearer has lived for long
years like a caged bird within the iron restraints of some
cruel masterdom. But after all liberty is only the start-

196 LAY SERMONS.

ing-point, not the goal, of a great career of civilisation ;
not the enjoyment of an unshackled liberty, but the
recognition of a reasonable limitation, makes a man
characteristically a man, as the singer sings —

" The beasts of the forest are free ;
The wild tornadoes that sweep the sky,
The tempests that harrow the sea ;
But man is a thing more divine ;
With reasoned subjection
He makes his election,
And bends with awe
To sovereign Law
And limits that wisely confine."

Let us therefore here, as in all other matters, beware
of the extreme of excess on the right hand, as much as
of the extreme of defect on the left. All health,
all strength, all excellence, all most effective energy,
lies in the mean ; and Good Goveenment may thus
safely be defined as the just balance of natural liberty
and reasonable authority in a social organism.

Would we set before our eyes a perfect type of that
wonderful action and counteraction of opposite forces to
a common end, in which a well-ordered society exists,
we shall seek in vain perhaps among constitutions and
politics, the works of men ; but in the field of divine
workmanship St. Paul has placed vividly before us an
ideal, in that which of all things in the w^orld is dearest
to each man's self. Hear how he speaks with regard to
the unity of the Church, of which each member is sub-

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 197

ject to the head, and yet rejoices in the liberty where-
with Christ hath set us free : —

" For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all
the members of that one body, being many, are one body : so
also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one
body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or
free ; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For
the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say,
Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body ; is it there-
fore not of the body? And if the ear shall say. Because I am
not the eye, I am not of the body ; is it therefore not of the
body ? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing ?
If the whole were hearing, where were the smelhng ? But now
hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it
hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where
were the body ? But now are they many members, yet but one
body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need
of thee : nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.
Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to
be more feeble, are necessary : and those members of the body,
which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow
more abundant honour ; and our uncomely parts have more
abundant comeliness. For our comely parts have no need : but
God hath tempered the body together, having given more
abundant honour to that part which lacked : that there should
be no schism in the body ; but that the members should have
the same care one for another. And whether one member
suffer, all the members suffer with it ; or one member be
honoured, all the members rejoice with it." — 1 Cor. xii. 12-26.

Here we see plainly that, while each limb of the
wonderful organism called the human body must have
its proper place and its free action, it claims that place

198 LAY SERMONS.

and asserts that freedom always so that no member
shall seek to be independent of the other, and that all
the members shall constantly perform their part, not
for themselves, but as members of the body to which
they belong. In other words, the parts exist, as Aris-
totle teaches, for the sake of the whole, not the whole
for the sake of the parts ; -^ while the unifying power
which controls the whole must so control it as to
respect the free untrammelled function of each of
the parts.

One observation more and we shall proceed directly
to the examination of the Scripture texts and Christian
tendencies which bear upon this important subject. As
nothing human is perfect, and as a just balance of two
antagonistic principles is of all things the most difficult,
we must expect to find in history a constant swaying
between the two contrary tendencies of which good
government is made up. And, in fact, whether we con
the pages of old Eoman, or of modern British history,
whether in the graceful concinnity of Livy, or in the bril-
liant luxuriance of Macaulay, we find the most interest-
ing and at once the most significant part of the picture
made up of the struggles, and more or less successfully
achieved balance, of two antagonistic parties. The
names by which these parties are known are as various
as the diversities of circumstance or the accidents of
language may dictate ; but the struggle is ever the same.

^ Politics, I. 2, TTpbrepov ok ry (pvaei (i.e. in tlie scheme of Nature,
in the divine purpose) 7r6\is ij olKia kuI ^Kaaros rjfxuv iariv.

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 199

Call it a struggle between Power and Subjection, be-
tween Absolutism and Liberalism, between the party
conservative of the past, and the party prophetic of the
future, between patrician and plebeian, between Tory
and Whig, between Church and Dissent, between Popery
and Protestantism, — under various masks you easily
discover the same contrast in the body social, which in
the physical body is represented by the bones and the
blood, implying the one the other as necessarily as, in
St. Paul's illustration, the head requires the hand to
carry out its conceptions, and the hand requires the
head to have any conception to carry out. If blood be
necessary to give the fervour of vitality to the body,
bones are no less necessary to impart to it that firm-
ness without which concentrated force and well-impacted
blows are impossible. Give the blood unreined swing,
and the excited vital force will swell into fever and
flame into dissolution ; let the bones appropriate more
than their share, and a creeping ossification will stiffen
the joints and block the valves of that most wonderful of
all machines which we call the human body. So in the
social world the two parties must exist — the party of
motion and the party of stability ; ever antagonising
each other, and yet never extinguishing. It is not given
to either party in the State, — whatever the hot conceit of
faction may dream, — like Moses's rod, to eat up the
other party. Conservatives and Progressives must tilt
against one another with opposing lances, ever resuming
the fight with various fortune, but never achieving an

200 LAY SERMONS.

absolute victory ; for the moment that one dies, the other
dies with it ; the liberty which both enjoyed lies bleed-
ing on the ground, and despotism walks into the chair.
We are now ready for the great question, What
part does Christianity play in this grave drama ? How
has the bright angel and the messenger of goodwill to
men succeeded in controlling forces naturally so wild,
and in reconciling contraries naturally so extreme ? Or
say, rather, How does she plant herself to succeed?
What is her attitude, her method, her discipline,
her medicaments? For though she has now reigned
nearly two thousand years supreme over all peoples and
potentates, the number of those who profess her alle-
giance is no true index to the strength of those who
wear the badges of the cause, with a loyal acceptance
of what the badge means. Let us see. It is plain, in
the first place, that, if Christianity were a vulgar super-
stition, as some religions are, or are conceived to be, it
could have nothing whatever to do with good govern-
ment, because foolish opinions about the gods, and silly
methods of conciliating their favour, have nothing in
common with wise administration ; but Christianity
means morality, and morality growing out of the
strongest cement of the social architecture, viz.
brotherly Love ; and this morality, applied to the
guidance of life, means wisdom ; wisdom being, in fact,
truth and love applied to practice. So constituted, the
function of Christianity in the political world must
simply be to inculcate such truths and to inspire such

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 201

emotions as in the intercourse of man with man tend
to produce that proper balance of liberty and authority
in which good government consists. But how ?

At the first blush, and in the main, it seems quite
certain that the religion of Christ pronounces itself
strongly on the side of authority, order, subordination,
and obedience to existing law ; and this not only rela-
tively in reference to the time and place when it ap-
peared, but absolutely and on grounds springing out
of its essential character and predominant tendency,
for, to cite the most familiar passages, the Apostles
(Eom. xiii. 1-7; 1 Pet. ii. 13-19) give express injunc-
tions with regard to the duty of obedience to the powers
that be, without any qualification, and that at a time
when some of the laws were unquestionably bad, and
some of the Emperors not only bad, but sensual, beastly,
devilish, and in every way abominable. To set against
this there is not the slightest tincture of sympathy with
the language of murmuring, fret, discontent, bitterness,
violence, revolt, and insurrection, which is characteristic
of our extreme prophets of liberty, — Eadicals, Socialists,
Nihilists, and such like, — a class of men, accordingly,
who show for the most part not only no sympathy with
Christianity, but pronounce themselves emphatically
against religion in every shape. Of course, no person
will suppose that I mean here to identify the so-called
Liberal party in our modern political movements with
the wild men who think it a virtue to shoot the King of
Prussia, blow up the palace of the Czar, or who not

202 LAY SERMONS.

very long ago let tlie fire of Gehenna loose on tlie mag-
nificent metropolis of France. But what I say is, that
the colour and tendency of the ISTew Testament teach-
ing in its main lines is such that the advocates of
divine right of kings and absolute obedience of subjects,
according to the doctrine of King James VI. in his
book on Free Monarchies, would find it much more
easy to lay a finger on a score of texts that might
seem to favour their doctrine than the apostles of
the sacred right of insurrection could find it to pro-
duce one. Certainly, from the point of view of order
and recognition of existing authority generally, nothing
could be stronger than the terms in which St. Jude, in
the chapter from which our text is taken, denounces
-the apostles of extreme and unchastened individualism.
They are dreamers, slanderers, murmurers, discontented
persons, walking after their own lusts, and with a mouth
speaking mighty things, wandering stars, clouds with-
out water, trees without fruit, wild waves of the sea
foaming out their own shame. But further, —

The Author of Christianity, when, on several occa-
sions, tempted and provoked to take the part of those
who were inclined to rise against the established autho-
rities in Palestine, answered most distinctly and most
emphatically, — My kingdom is not of this world, and

EeNDER unto CyESAR THE THINGS THAT ARE C.ESAR's,

AND UNTO God the things that are God's. These words
point to Christianity as occupying an altogether different
field from civil izovernment — a field which makes collision

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 203

impossible, so long as the religious teacher and the civil
magistrate keep each to his own business. Eeligion fur-
nishes the sources of action : government directs the de-
tails. Eeligion supplies the steam : government manages
the engine. Eeligion embraces the whole range of social
action, because no action of moral beings can be made
independent of moral motives : government covers only
that narrow field of social action which admits of being
regulated by prescribed rule and enforced by compul-
sory penalties. But more than this, it is specially
notable that even in so far as Christianity, in certain cir-
cumstances, might not be willing to hold itself altogether
aloof from political struggles, the virtues which it de-
lights to put forward in the van of its moral scheme, —
viz. meekness, gentleness, moderation, humility, and
such like, — are not the qualities that go to breed a class
of people forward to defy authority, and eager to stir up
opposition. Let any man seriously consider the Nine
Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, which seem to
me to stand significantly in the front of the Gospels, as
the ten commandments do on the threshold of the
Mosaic legislation, and he will not be able to imagine
that any one of them supplies the least possible hint of
a stimulant to that spirit of impatience, fretfulness, rest-
lessness, wilfulness, and overbearing individualism of
all kinds, which furnishes the natural fuel to Liberal-
ism, and the spur to resistance in any country where
an opposition party has been able to establish itself.
Eather, taken in their literal sense, and in their main

204 LAY SERMONS.

scope, the despised virtues of the Beatitudes, instead of
a race of sturdy protestors against existing authorities,
would tend to create a nation of Quakers, — a class of
most excellent people, gifted with a surplusage of the
most sweet-blooded philanthropy, but considerably de-
ficient in the natural instinct of self-assertion, and
altogether unfitted for the government of a world which
they have, nevertheless, done not a little to improve.

Yet again : Even supposing that Christianity, when
largely imbibed, had a tendency to infuse a spirit of
opposition to constituted authority, common prudence
and a fair amount of sagacity would deter its mission-
aries from mixing themselves up with what we may call
the advanced or opposition or Liberal side of politics, or
entering on any course of conduct that would lead it to
plant itself in an attitude of direct hostility to the
powers that be.

The apostles of a new and a high-toned religion
have always enough to do to maintain their ground
against natural and unavoidable enemies, without going
out of their way to make them. To have intermeddled
with revolutionary or democratic politics of any kind,
in the state of the world when the Gospel was first
promulgated, would have j)roved to the infant religion
absolutely suicidal. And God did not choose fools but
men of extraordinary sagacity and common sense to
preach his gospel of moral regeneration to a corrupt
world. But this is not all. As a political postulate, it
is quite certain that authority, stability, and order are

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 205

more essential to the existence of society than liberty,
self-assertion, and individual independence. It is better
for men to walk about and transact their business on a
sure platform, though not without chinks and crazy
planks here and there, than to be tossed about on waves
of continual commotion and incalculable change.
Christianity declares itself in favour of the more indis-
pensable and the more comfortable alternative.

Lastly, the religion of the Cross, by placing our pre-
sent earthly life in the position of a preparatory school
to a higher state of existence (Philip, iii. 20 ; Col. iii.
1), teaches its disciples at once to bear the actual evils
of a bad form of government with greater patience, and
to look on the possible blessings supposed to proceed
from any other form of government with comparative
indifference. The Christian, like the philosopher and
the poet, knows better than other men that the best
blessings which human association confers can neither
be given nor taken away by any form of government
that human ingenuity can devise.

So much for the conservative aspect of Christian
political etliics. But this is only the obverse of the
coin : there is a reverse of course ; and the other
face in so significant a coin of the currency of the
moral world is not likely to be a blank. In entering
upon this part of our inquiry, we must, before all
things, beware of confounding — what has been fre-
quently done — the historical accidents of the natural
attitude, and, in some points, the necessary position of

206 LAY SERMONS.

the Christian Church at its first start, with what we may
call its seminal principles and its innate tendencies.
In not a few fertile fields of theological discussion, the
honest student of Scripture will observe a certain inca-
pacity or unwillingness to discriminate between what is
incidentally mentioned as existing in the primitive
Church, under the then exceptive circumstances, and
what must exist as an element of a Christian Church
under all circumstances. The Sandemanians, for in-
stance, who take no hare soup, and the Presbyterians
of the Covenanting times, who drew their swords con-
scientiously on the faith that the constitution of the
Genevan Churches was of divine institution, laboured
under this error. It was expedient to abstain from
blood at a period when the Christian Church was more
than half composed of Jews, wiiose conscientious scruples
on indifferent points demanded a kindly consideration
from those who, like St. Paul, could assert the full
range of evangelic liberty wdthout fear. It was neces-
sary that the early polity of the Church should be
democratic, presbyterian, or, in not a few" cases entirely
what we now call independent, because churches so
widely scattered could not, in the nature of things, be
subject to any system of organised episcopal supervision.
In the same way, it may have been expedient, — nay,
rather, as we have just stated, it was absolutely neces-
sary,— that the early Christian Church should, with the
most scrupulous care, and a certahi holy anxiety, avoid
mixing itself up with any social movements that might

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 207

be interpreted as rebellion, or what our Scottish lawyers
in the days of the Stuarts used to call constructive
treason, against the authority of the Eoman Emperors.
But we are not, therefore, to conclude with King James
and the Eoyalist theologians of the Jacobite times, that
the Christian Church hurls its ban of excommunication
against all and sundry who at any time may have
occasion to assert the natural rights of oppressed sub-
jects against the violence of a usurping government, or
the corrupting influence of immoral laws. This were
to assert that if the Evil One once got himself firmly
seated on the throne of the civil magistrate, and used
his authority systematically for the propagation of all
evil and the uprooting of all good, in this case there is
no remedy for poor mortals — at least not from Christians
— who are meekly to submit to slavery as to an absolute
duty, and rejoice in oppression as a blessed pledge of
the restitution of all things some day in heaven. Under
the inspiration of a Christian Church holding such
principles, no Eobert Bruce could have drawn his sword
for political freedom at Bannockburn, no Gustavus
Adolphus could have worked out the principle of re-
ligious toleration by a thirty years' struggle in Germany.
But Christianity was not a religion to plant itself in
antagonism to the great instincts of natural justice and
the dictates of common sense. It was neither Bud-
dhism nor Quakerism, but with all its peaceful ten-
dencies could assert itself, sword in hand, when the
sword was, in the circumstances, the one effective in-

208 LAY SERMONS.

strument to establish a reign of justice upon the earth.
Let us see how this appears.

In its method of attacking the human soul, the most
characteristic trait in the religion of Christ is its power-
ful rousing of the personal conscience, and its direct
appeal to the moral dignity of the individual, — a feeling
which, when once evoked from the lethargic torpor in
which it had long lain, acts in its own sphere, — that is,
not only in the Church, but in society, — as an active
ferment of liberty, within the safe bounds of secular
authority and order; and may, so limited, in strong
contrast to the one-sided intellectual absolutism of
Plato, and the secular absolutism of the ancient Asiatic
and African monarchies, justly be regarded as the nurse,
in a certain sense, of democratic feeling, the bosom
friend of political justice, and the declared enemy of all
civil wrong and governmental oppression. In this view
the Christian Church must historically be looked on as
the cradle of political liberty, a virtue which belongs
to it by direct descent from the Hebrew prophets, who
were all fervid patriots, staunch assertors of all civil
rights, liberties, and obligations, and specially on all
occasions the advocates of the poor and oppressed
against the rich and the lawless.^ The contradiction
between this aspect of the gospel and the submissive
attitude above presented is only apparent. Christian-
ity accepted the absolute government of the Koman

^ See the Old Testament xx^ssiin ; and Stanley's Jewish Church,
vol. i. p. 396.

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 209

imperialism just as it accepted slavery ; the then basis
of society was accepted as the necessary condition of
social action, not approved of as an immutable arrange-
ment. Christianity, as a religion not of social regula-
tions, but of moral motives, could lay down no rule
about forms of civil government any more than about
forms of Church government. As little could it say
anything about the social rights of different parties
within any established order of civil or ecclesiastical
polity. It only said generally, Let all things he done
decently and in order; and, as a general maxim in
ordinary circumstances. Obey the authorities, to whom
the maintenance of order belongs. It said, Honour the
king ; but it said also. Honour all men ; and the king
or the magistrate was as much bound to respect the
rights of the people as the people were bound to respect
the rights of the king. In the same manner, therefore,
that slavery was abolished gradually in Christendom,
by the good seed of responsible personality bearing its
natural fruit in the development of Christian society,
so the imperial absolutism of Eome, however uncon-
ditionally submitted to by the early Christian Church,
might be thrown aside as an effete form of polity,
wherever the personal liberty which belonged to each
member of a Christian Church had spread its noble
contagion so widely through society as to render the
continuance of an absolute and irresponsible monarchy
inexpedient and impracticable. There was nothing
in the essential nature of Christianity, however mild

p

210 LAY SERMONS.

and meek-faced at its start, to prevent its professors
from standing up, in times of transition, as the cham-
pions of political change, and the ringleaders of an
organised opposition to the so-called stationary or
conservative politics. Nay more ; if we suppose any
form of government, say Democracy, or government by
mere numerical majorities, to be theoretically the best,
— which it can actually be, of course, when in any
society the majority is wiser in the art of govern-
ment than any minority that can be found, — in this
case Christianity can not only not object, but it must
work strongly towards such a consummation, inasmuch
as its own principles in its own sphere are essen-
tially democratic, every member of a Christian Church
being equal before God ; and not only so, but because,
whether divinely enjoined or not, the constitution of
the early Christian Church as a moral association was,
in its main features, essentially democratic ; the aris-
tocracy of the Bishops and the monarchy of the Pope,
whether expedient or inexpedient in the then social
state of Europe, being, in the order of historical
fact, unquestionably a posterior development. Nay
more; Christianity is not merely democratic in its
form and in its action within its own range, but it
clothes all and each of its members with such a high
moral dignity that the tendency of human nature to
bow down before powerful and imposing oligarchies is
met by a strongly antagonistic instinct of moral self-
assertion ; while at the same time the feeling of equality

THE POLITICS OF CHEISTIANITY. 211

and the sense of justice wliicli belongs to an ethical
brotherhood leads directly to an emphatic protest against
those artificial and conventional claims of superiority,
on the basis of which certain favoured minorities in the
social body delighted to lord it over, and sometimes
harshly to oppress, the less favoured majority. Gener-
ally, we may say that, as an essentially ethical religion,
inspired by Love, Christianity must strive after the
realisation of a reign of justice upon the earth ; and as
such must warmly sympathise, and as occasion offers,
energetically co-operate, with all political measures
tending to restrain the natural selfishness of parties in
the possession of power, and to protect — which, indeed,
is a special function of all good government — the w^eak
against the strong. And forasmuch as society at its
best is a very imperfect machine, and in need of constant
repairs and improvements, Christianity will naturally
be on the side of all reforms and improvements which
tend to lift the relations of the different classes of society
into an atmosphere less dominated by the selfish inter-
ests of the privileged few, than is wont to be the case
even in the best oligarchies. In opposition to all narrow
and selfish policies, it will adopt to the full the famous
democratic maxim of Bentham — of which, indeed,
Christianity, not Bentham, may be regarded as the pro-
per parent — the greatest happiness of the greatest
NUMBER, and sing in full chorus with Burns that, what-
ever significance stars and garters and crosses and
high-sounding titles may possess in the outward blazonry

212 LAY SERMONS.

of the social organism, always and under the mask of
all social forms,

" The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that."

Only one difficulty remains. Some one may say —
Well, we grant that Christianity, though presenting
historically a quiet and submissive face to all consti-
tuted authorities, and slow even to strike the first blow
against red-hand usurpers, does nevertheless contain
within itself the seeds of a sturdy individualism, which,
wdth time and favouring circumstances, will naturally
blossom out into democracy. But is a Christian man,
though he may accept democracy when it comes, and
even quietly work for it as the ripe fruit of a Church
essentially democratic, entitled to take the sword in his
hand and violently overturn an existing government —
the corner-stone of the existing social order, the key-
stone rather of every possible social order ? The answer
to this is twofold: Whatever rights a man has as a man,
he niust continue to have as a religious man, unless the
religion which he professes expressly interdicts him from
the exercise of any human function ; as the Moham-
medan faith, for instance, prohibits wine, and the Popish
religion, with the Essenes and old Egyptian ascetics,
forbids marriage in the person at least of its officiating
ministers. Now, Christianity does not prohibit self-
defence, or tlie repulsion of force by force as a general
law ; the fact that our Saviour on a notable occasion

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 213

forbade the use of the sword is only a fact valid, like so
many other facts, for the time, place, and person to whom
it refers, and no more near to a general restrictive law
than the negation which the wise Minerva in the Iliad
puts upon the hasty hand of Achilles, when she appears
behind him and seizes his yellow hair, and checks his
unseemly stroke of violence in the bud. Christianity
does not forbid war, any more than it forbids marriage ;
but it may dissuade from war, as from a perilous, a sor-
rowful, and an expensive game, whenever it can pos-
sibly be avoided, and it may dissuade from marriage as
in certain circumstances cumbersome and inexpedient.
Wars of wanton aggression and vainglorious conquest, —
as in the case of Csesar's invasion of Britain, or the great
Napoleon's overriding of Europe with French sove-
reignty,— as springing out of pure selfishness, can, of
course, find no place in a religion, one of whose most
distinctive precepts is to respect your neighbour's rights
as you respect your own. But if the use of armed vio-
lence in favour of selfish aoj^Tandisement is forbidden, no
less is that tame and cowardly temper discouraged which
holds out a bribe to every kind of rapacity, and feeds the
flame of overbearing insolence. In matters of consci-
entious conviction, particularly, there is that in the
bosom of every Christian, as a member of a higher citi-
zenship, which instinctively revolts against all intrusion
by secular force into a properly spiritual domain, and
makes him on every such occasion boldly launch forth
his sacred protest in the language of the Apostle Peter

214 LAY SERMONS.

(Acts V. 29), We must obey God rather than men.
This right of moral protest was exercised on the grandest
scale by the Hebrew prophets, who could walk up fear-
lessly before the throne of a guilty potentate and say,
Thou art the man ! And tliough, when his .spiritual
domain is invaded, a w^itness of Christian truth may
oftentimes judge it wise, for the sake of peace, to retreat
from the field and occupy less disputable ground, yet
there are occasions on which such a retreat is either
morally base or locally impossible. And on such occa-
sions, as when large permanently localised bodies of
men are threatened with moral slavery or annihilation
by the intrusion of an extraneous force, then of course
the alarm bell of revolt may righteously ring, and the
sacred right of insurrection be, with all most pious de-
votedness, asserted. It never can be the duty of any
Christian man, whether in civil or religious matters, to
allow wrong to riot reinless over the world, and to look
on Justice bleeding at the foot of Violence without a
stroke.

The conclusion which we have now come to with
regard to the political attitude of Christianity is simply
this : In its social action the religion of Christ is neither
Whig nor Tory, neither Conservative nor Liberal, aris-
tocratic nor democratic, in the common sense in which
these words are used as representing antagonistic poli-
tical forces. But, like the philosophy of Aristotle, it
strives always after a golden mean in asserting the
proper balance of liberty and authority according to the

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 215

needs of time and place, and in thus establishing a reigu
of justice in the social organism, where joint shall work
into joint smoothly by the motive power of mutual love
and esteem among all classes — always, however, in
doubtful cases with a decided leaning towards the
party of authority, order, and subordination, rather than
to the party of restlessness and discontent, the self-
assertiveness which scorns conciliation, and the lust of
liberty which frets against the restrictions of necessary
law.

The application of the principles of Christian politics
to the great questions of national establishments, toler-
ation. Sabbath observance, and such like, where the
Church and State, generally moving on distinct lines,
are forced for mutual convenience to co-operate, or for
mutual annoyance to collide, are of too wide a sweep
and too serious a significance to be discussed here. Only
two general cautions may wisely be given to all persons
who are ambitious to pass a true judgment on the action
of Christianity in the political world. The Church
must in no wise be confounded with the clergy ; nor
the social tone of Christianity judged by the temper of
parties as it is displayed in the struggles of political
partisanship. In some countries, no doubt, as in Eome,
it may almost be said that the clergy are the Church ; they
have assumed to themselves, and by the connivance of
centuries have been allowed to assume for themselves, the
character of special vessels or conducting wires, through
which the vivifying influences of divine grace are dis-

216 LAY SERMONS.

tributed to men ; and in such cases those free inde-
pendent spirits, who do not accept the priesthood as the
representative and guiding organ in the Church, gener-
ally desert the Church altogether, and, as their temper
may be, stand to it in an attitude of indifference, or
half-sincere acquiescence, or declared hostility. In all
Protestant countries, however, the clergy are merely
members of a profession, like other professions ; and,
like members of other professions, they are liable to be
seduced into that " idolatry of the tribe " to which
Bacon has given so prominent a place in his Temple
of Fallacies ; and which must in nowise be confounded
with the Christian spirit of which the profession in
such case is the exaggeration or the caricature. A potent
thing, beyond all question, is this professional idolatry,
from which no profession that I know is altogether free ;
and the more a man keeps himself free from it, the
more completely does he represent the normal type of
manhood, gentlemanship, philosophy, culture, and true
religion. Partly this professional type, as a stunted
exhibition of the grand human type, arises from the
exclusive exercise of functions necessary to the profes-
sion, or the exclusive habit of looking at things only
from the professional point of view ; as when Vulcan,
in Homer, has thin shanks, great athletes small brains,
and great diplomatists little truthfulness ; partly, also,
from a pecuniary interest, which the professors of all arts
may often have while acting in a direction exactly con-
trary to the public good ; as when lawyers make more

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 217

money by cumbrous forms of pleading, and prolonged
stages of process, when physicians, acting as their own
apothecaries, become rich by administering many drugs,
and keeping their patients as long as possible under
their action, and when professors in universities keep
their teaching at as low a level as decency may allow,
because there are more students to pay fees for low
teaching than for high. Similarly in the church : the
shibboleth of an unintelligible creed, which the practice
of his ministerial function teaches him constantly to
repeat, may become more dear to a man than the most
vital principles of gospel morality ; and the body on
whom an evangelist is dependent for his living and for
his social position — whether the State, as in the Estab-
lished Church, or the congregation, as among dissenters
— may easily cause his moral compass to vary by a
noticeable aberration from its true pointing towards that
star which guided the footsteps of the pious Magi from
the East. All these disturbing influences of course
must be discounted before saddling Christianity with
any exhibition of narrow-mindedness, bitterness, jealousy,
ill- temper, or unsanctified utterance in any shape, of
which Church courts have not unfrequently been the
scene. The attitude of Christianity in all matters of
political and social significance is always the attitude
of the clergy, less that amount of uncharitableness,
bigotry, petty jealousy, spite, dogmatism, insolence, and
pride, which the practice of the clerical profession so
often induces in its members. Then, again, as to

218 LAY SERMONS.

party politics, apart from their accidental connection
with Churches, they represent a sort of internal war
between antagonistic forces in the social body, and are
to be judged from a Christian point of view on the same
principles that guided our judgment with regard to war
generally. Christianity, as it denounces aggressive
conquest and wanton war betwixt nation and nation,
so it must nip in the bud all those bitter rivalries,
fierce contentions, and fretful struggles between dif-
ferent classes in the body politic, which proceed from
a love of power and place, and which form no
small part often of what, in modern political lan-
guage, is called the history of party. The devil,
in fact, always and everywhere, has three great
baits, — power, pleasure, and pence ; and the greatest of
these three is power, partly because whosoever pos-
sesses this commands the other two, partly because it
affords the largest scope, and calls forth the most
powerful energies, of the strongest minds. Of course
there is a legitimate antagonism of parties within the
State, as much as a legitimate antagonism of one State
to another; but even when the antagonism which
begets parties in the State is natural and salutary, the
spirit in which it is conducted is too apt to degenerate
into that combination of variance, selfish rivalries, wrath,
and strife, and divisions, which St. Paul (Gal. v. 20)
enumerates among the works of the flesh. The mere
love of power as a motive of action is in its root
essentially selfish, and, as such, is condemned as severely

THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY. 219

by Aristotle and Plato as by St. Peter and St. Paul.-^
And whosoever looks impartially into the elements of
social struggle as they are worked up into a chronic
ferment by the violence of political parties in a free
State, will be bound to confess that, whatever freedom
may do for the organism of society, it too often fails either
to inspire patriotism or to inculcate moderation. The
unscrupulousness of men engaged in a hot political
contest, leading to the creation of what are called faggot
votes, and other the like questionable devices, is pro-
verbial. In democratic countries, where the struggle for
power and place at short intervals is constantly recur-
ring, the moral tone of public men is often so lowered,
that persons of independent character and pure heart
are forced to withdraw themselves altogether from the
service of the State ; and the atmosphere which the
opposition party, w^hether Liberal or Conservative, in
constitutional governments frequently breathes is so
strongly impregnated with bitterness, exaggeration,
misrepresentation, and all sorts of unreasonableness,
ungenerousness, and uncharitableness, that a man of
lofty thought and pure evangelical sentiment must
turn from it as from a hot tropical swamp and thick
floating tissue of rank vegetation, reeking with malaria
and fever. Certainly the daily outflow of our periodical
pens that write in the service of party, and whose great
principle seems to be that their party is always in the

^ Hence the bad sense of ^CKoTLixla — literally love of honour — which
at first sounds so strange in the chapters of the great Greek moralists.

220 LAY SERMONS.

right, and the other party always in the wrong, must be
pure gall and bitterness to tlie man who has sucked the
milk of divine love from the Gospel of St. John, and
whose heart has grown warm with deep draughts of the
mellow wine of human cliarity, which St. Paul has
stored up for all good Christians in the thirteenth chapter
of the First Epistle to the Corinthians.

VIL
THE DIGNITY OF LABOUE.

" My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," — John v. 17.

In this age of multifarious movement, when everything
is talked about, discussed, debated, disputed, and denied,
some persons have been found curiously to ask the ques-
tion, "What is the meaning of life?" and others, of a
more negative character, have even written discussions
with the title, " Is life worth living ?" This last ques-
tion need not be answered ; life is certainly not worth
living to those who, in all seriousness, propound this
question. But the other question may be answered
simply by saying that the meaning of life is Work —
reasonable, calculated, vigorous, dexterous, and effect-
ive work, — work also which, while complete within its
own sphere, at the same time plays concentuously into
the great harmony of that miraculous product of divine
w^orkmanship which we call the universe. This is the
work the contemplation of which filled the soul of tlie
large-hearted Hebrew psalmist with ever-increasing
admiration, and made him compare the most glorious
factor in the energising drama of creation, the Sun, to a

222 LAY SERMONS.

giant that rejoicetli as a strong man to run a race. A
similar reverent contemplation of the same great work
led those stoutest apostles of the manliest manhood, the
Stoics, to declare that the end of man is " contemplari
atque imitari mimdum," to contemplate and to imitate
the universe, to feel the power of the mighty working of
God in the grand whole of things, and then to make
some feeble approximate imitation of it in our own
small sphere, as a burning-glass repeats the sun. And
Aristotle, at once the most comprehensive and the most
sagacious of all the wise men who, in wise Greece, dis-
coursed on human duty and destiny, assumes, as a
matter of course, that the excellence of everything
that exists is to be measured by its work (epyov), and
the virtue of man by his excellence in that kind of
work which specially belongs to him as a reasonable soul.
Thus the virtue of a dog consists in running well, of
a fish in swimming well, of a bird in flying well ; and
in the case of men, the virtue of a soldier consists in
fighting well, of a ploughman in ploughing well, of a
ditcher in delving well ; a ^lazzini shows his patriotic
virtue by prophesying well, a Garibaldi by risking well,
and a Cavour by managing well ; but always, and under
every phasis, by some kind of work. There is neither
excellence, nor praise, nor virtue, nor any such thing in
the universe without work.

The divine workmanship, we have just said, is the
world, a piece of work Avhicli, in this mechanical
country, some persons have been willing to look upon

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR. 223

as a manufacture, taking up, literally perhaps, Dr.
Paley's well-known simile of a watch ; but the Doctor's
simile was only a simile, not a proposition, and used
by him only for his immediate purpose, and so far only
as it applied. He saw reason and calculation and de-
sign in the watch and in the world, and he saw with
discerning eyes. But the work of God in creation is
not a manufacture, but a growth ; both are products of
reason; the one the product of the secondary human
reason, and dead ; the other the manifestation of the
primary divine reason — the \6yo^ of St. John — and
alive. As like as a portrait by a great master is to the
original, so like is a piece of dead machinery made by
Ark Wright or Watt to the great living machinery of the
universe, the perpetual glorious manifestation of the
Divine Architect of all things. That grand piece of
dead machinery called a steam-engine, with all its
cunning, can do no work of any kind without calling in
the aid of steam, or water, or some other of the moving
forces of the world, which come directly from the
primary unexhausted fountain of all motion, and the
source of all working power, which we justly call God ;
but the machinery of the biggest star that wheels or
the smallest flower that grows is essentially vital and
essentially divine. I have often stood before a steam-
engine in wonder at the quiet and easy sway of the
ponderous beam which, with no apparent exertion, not
so much as a child would require to lift a pebble, sets
in motion so many hundreds of whirrin^^ looms and so

224 LAY SERMONS.

many thousands of busy hands ; but there is a divine
secret in the living tissue of the universe which makes
the biggest work of British engineers or Egyptian
temple-builders appear small before the meanest lichen
on the crag. These things were made, but this thing
grows ; these were the product of human reason, this of
divine. Wisely, indeed, did Emmanuel Kant, the great
German philosopher, say — condensing into a sentence
the fourteen verses of the sublime Nineteenth Psalm
— " Two things fill me with never-ceasing wonder and
with ever-increasing worship, the starry heavens above
and the moral law within ! " In this moral law we
behold the second great field of the divine workman-
ship, less measurable, no doubt, to our finite faculties,
but not less certainly a work of definite object and
measurable proportions than the smallest yellow starlet
that peeps out from a grassy carpet in the spring, or
the lightest feather of a fern that looks forth timidly
into day from the hard embrace of the rock. This
wonderful work of God in the evolution of the moral
law tlirough the long process of the ages is doubtless
what the Great Teacher alludes to more particularly in
the words of our text, " My Father worketh hitherto,
and I work" — that is, in the succession of dispensa-
tions, or oeconomies, as our theologians have been used
to call them, by which man, in the stages of reasonable
moral growth called history, is educated up from step
to step of social advancement till his greatest possible
excellence as the elect orcjan of God's moral work shall

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR 225

have been achieved. To seek out reverently, and
modestly to expatiate on the ages of this great life
of God, so to speak, in the soul of society, is a theme
the most worthy on which divine philosophy can ex-
pend its energies ; but this demands the compass of a
history like Livy's, or of an epic poem when a greater
Milton shall one day arise ; so, for our present profit, I
shall content myself with setting down in order some of
those significant hints which the contemplation of the
great process of divine work in the macrocosm supplies
to us for the right conduct of our human work, each in
his own proper microcosm.

First, then, let us fling overboard the sickly idea —
more like the lazy dream of a water-lily at mid-day in
a sHmy pool than the thought of a human being — the
notion that there is any absolute bliss in rest. The
world is a working world, and man is a working crea-
ture ; and he who does not understand this is plainly
out of place here. Epicurus, no doubt, sitting in his
leafy Attic garden, with fragrant honey-laden breezes
from Hymettus fanning him on a summer's day, might
fancy his Olympian gods doing nothing through all
eternity but drinking nectar, and sipping ambrosia, and
laughing at lame Vulcan ; but this certainly was not liis
serious thought ; he was merely shunting the Celestials
of that day off into a corner, like an easy David Hume,
not to be bothered in any wise with what he could
not altogether comprehend; and he was busy himself
all the while writing books, in which sort of work he

Q

226 LAY SERMONS.

was extremely prolific, having written not less than
three hundred volumes in his day. Buddha, like-
wise, the great Oriental Quietist, if all that is written of
his " Mrvana " be true, is the prophet of an extreme
kind of stupid holy life, which never can be a model for
a healthy Occidental man. Historians and travellers
prove most abundantly that at all times and in all
places a man is most a man when he has most to do.
The savage in a hot tropical climate works little, works
violently, and works by starts ; our civilisation in this
temperate western zone is all built up of a higher
potency, a more cunning division, and a more per-
sistent continuity of work. We are all working men,
those who work with the brain often a great deal more
so than those who work with their hands. Who
more assiduous in work than a well-employed bar-
rister ? Who more the minister of another man's needs
than a skilful country surgeon? Who more hardly
worked than a conscientious clergyman in the most
populous and least prosperous districts of one of our
large towns ? Let no man, therefore, sit down and
fret over his work because it is work, and envy the
rich who have nothing to do. The richest men are
often those who have worked, and who do work, the
hardest ; and if there be rich men, as not a few there
are in this country, who live upon the inherited pro-
duce of other persons' work, with nothing specially to
do for themselves, they are a class of men to be pitied
rather than to be envied. Work enough there is for

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR. 227

them, no doubt. Plato would not have tolerated them
in his well-ordered republic, nor Alexander Severus in
his palace ;^ but they have, unfortunately, no spur for
action ; and being inspired by no high feeling of the
dignity of work in the universe, they will be found too
frequently sitting down and rotting their lives away,
living on their rents, or filling up the vacuity of their
hours with degrading pleasures and unfruitful excite-
ments. For such we must be heartily sorry ; and, if
they can be of no other use in the world, they may at
least teach us not to fret over our daily task, but rather
to rejoice in it. The yoke at times may press rather
heavily on our necks, but we have always in our hearts
the consolation that we are fellow-workers with God in
a working world ; that we see some fruit of our good
work growing up around us daily ; and that the great
Master of the vineyard could not come down upon us,
as he might upon the class of idle gentlemen, saying,
'' Pluck them up, for they are cumherers of the ground."

How then are we to work, and what are we to do ?
This is the great question which meets every one on
the very threshold of active life ; and every one should
set himself with all seriousness to find an answer to it.
In the best circumstances the answer will find itself;
and the best circumstances are when a man of strong
character, lofty purpose, and encouraging opportunities,
after having had time to look about, consecrates his life

1 Nee quemquam passus est in palatiuis nisi necessarium liominem. "
— Lamprid. Vit. Sever. 15.

228 LAY SERMONS.

to a single great object, to which his whole nature
points, and from which he would sooner die than
swerve. An illustrious example of this kind of noblest
life-work we have in the well-known German states-
man, theologian, and scholar, the late Baron Bunsen,^
not many years ago Prussian Minister at the English
Court. Known to the English reading public princi-
pally as an Egyptologist of speculation sometimes more
daring than wise, this man, of " kingly and all-ruling
spirit," as the poet Schulze calls him, had started on
the various and rich career of his noble life with the
firm resolution " to bring into his own knowledge and
into his own fatherland the language and the spirit of
the solemn and distant East ;" and from this resolution,
whether amid the seductive solicitations of archaeolo-
gical study in Eome, or the distractions of political
and social duties in London, he never relaxed, till it
ripened into that grand combination of learning, philo-
sophy, piety, and patriotism, the far-famed Bibelwerh,
or translation and commentary on the Christian Scrip-
tures,— the noblest offering perhaps ever laid by a lay-
man at the foot ot the Christian altar. But it is not
every one that knows his work in the world so well as
Bunsen did, and fewer still who have the strength and
the firmness to carry it to a triumphant realisation.
In this case a man must be content to turn his hand to
what he can get to do ; and there is happily an adapta-
bility in human nature, which from the most unfriendly

^ Life of Bunsen. 1868. Vol. i. p. 5L

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR 229

work will witch a pleasantness, if the witchcraft be plied
in right earnest. Occupations, moreover, are like other
things ; they are not to be judged by their outside ; the
pleasure and the pain which cleave to them can be
known only when they are tried. It is the fault of
the man in most cases, and not of the business, if
assiduous culture shall not cause sweet flowers to grow
in what appeared to him a barren wilderness. Barring
the choice of a favourite profession, and the gratification
of some delicate fancy, the only rule for a fair start in
life is to grasp with a firm hand the task that lies
nearest to us, and to work at our cottage garden, or our
little strawberry bed, with as much devotedness as if it
were a botanic garden of all rarities. No half-purpose
ever produced a whole deed ; and only a whole deed can
produce that complete satisfaction in the act of doing
which it is the meed of victorious energy to achieve.

And this brings me to the second great practical
rule of all life-work. Whatever you do, do it well ;
and if you wish to do it well, do it honestly. Let it
be true work. Learn to consider what that means,
TTOLetv rrjv aXydecav, to do the truth, not merely to
speak the truth.^ Many a man does bad work in
his trade, who would sooner cut off his right hand
than tell a lie. But all bad work is a lie. Why ?
In two respects : first for the worker, because he is
not doing what he pretends to do, or only does it
half ; second, and more seriously, for those who may

1 1 John i. 6.

230 LAY SERMONS.

have to do with his work, in the way of exchange or
otherwise. In the first case the worker is an incon-
gruity, a discord, a thing altogether out of place in
this world of realities ; in the second place he is
an impostor and a swindler ; for no more reputahle
epithet may suit the falsity of his pretensions and
the hollowness of his productions. You come to weed
my garden ; and instead of pulling the weeds up by
the roots, you content yourself by snipping off their
heads. What right have you in this case to your half-
crown, or whatever the wage be which I have paid you
for your work ? Strictly speaking, the wage is not due,
because the work is not done ; and if your performance
is flagrantly and flaringly behind your contract, 'tis like
enough you may find a contractor some day who under-
stands his rights, and will teach you to expect nothing
in exchange for work that amounts to nothing. But in
only too many cases it happens that work insufficiently
done is so varnished over with a fair show of sufficiency,
that the sin is not discovered till it is too late. That
this is a case of gross falsehood and swindle there can
be no doubt. But worse than swindle, it may be mur-
der, or to speak more gently, homicide ; for how many
men may lose honest lives because you put in a dis-
honest plank on a platform, or a dishonest mast in a
ship ? If ever tliere was an age and a country in the
world where this doctrine of the truthfulness of labour
requires to be preached, it is here in England, at this
j)lace and in this hour. Thomas Carlyle now is not the

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR. 231

only prophet who, with a cry of grim reproach, setting
the mediaeval past in the face of the modern present,
insists upon telling us that with all our boasted en-
lightenment, and all our flaunting Liberalism and
loudly-trumpeted progress, we are not so very much
brighter than " the dark ages " in all respects as we
are apt to conceit ourselves. I read in London news-
papers sometimes startling revelations to the effect that
English wares are not now greedily sought after in all
parts of the world as the most substantial wares, as the
wares that for an honest price may be relied on to give
the most honest piece of work. Our tissues, they say,
have no fibre, our masonry no firmness, our steel is not
true. So far as these things are said not without cause,
it is in vain to talk of the dignity of labour or the
social value of the so-called working man. There
can be no dignity of labour where there is no truth-
fulness of work. Dignity does not consist in hollow-
ness and in light-handedness, but in substantiality and
in strength. If there be flimsiness and superficiality of
all kinds apparent in the work of the present day, more
than in that of our forefathers, whence comes it ? From
eagerness and competition, and the haste to be rich.
Hasty work can never be good work ; nay, even slow
work, done from any less true motive than doing the
best work possible, never can be good work. A man of
genius no doubt will not seldom dash off a brilliant
song or ballad at a heat, as Burns did " Tam O'Shanter ;"
but that dash was possible only as the bursting of a

232 LAY SERMONS.

blossom prepared by long years of moral growth. For
the common work of talent in the world, deliberation
and calculation and cool survey and the sober advance
of unspurred forces are essential conditions ; whoso
does otherwise must drug his conscience with a posset,
sell his intellect for a silver penny, and hand over this
fair marshalled world, so far as his work is concerned,
to Chaos and old Night and blank nonentity — a con-
summation in which only Llephistopheles and his
minions will rejoice.

Again, whoso would do work that may help him to
feel the dignity of labour, must do his work not only
vigorously and honestty for the hour, but systematically
and persistently for the day, and for the week, and for
the year, and while breath remains in his body. The man
who plunges into work by random fits has no concep-
tion of the permanency of the quiet enjoyment which an
active mind may achieve by the continuity of systematic
work directed to a noble end. Under such wisely
regulated activity the barren desert shall become a
Paradise, and the air of the dullest town impregnated
with the most lively interest.

No person would go to Kirkcaldy, I presume,
in order to achieve a perfectly happy and enjoy-
able existence. Under the real or imagined did-
ness of such a small provincial town many a person
of mighty conceit would fret his hours away like a
caged eagle ; but one of the greatest and wisest of
Scottish men spent his days for ten years in this

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUE. 233

little Kirkcaldy, more happy tlian lie had been in
tlie most brilliant circles of rank and fashion in the
great French metropolis. This was Adam Smith, who,
in a letter to David Hume, written in the year 1767,
has left on record these remarkable words: — "My
business here is study, in which I have been deeply
engaged for about a month past. My amusements are
long and solitary walks by the seaside. You may judge
how I spend my time. I feel myself, however, ex-
tremely happy, comfortable, and contented. I never
was, perhaps, more so in my life."^ Occupation —
regular and systematic and persistent occupation — is
the one vital magic that gives enjoyment to all existence,
the one power that gives permanency to all work and
dignity to all labour, and seasons dignity likewise with
that pleasantness which is not wont always to follow in
its train.

Finally, if your labour is to be with fruit, and your
work with permanence, and the putting forth of your
strength not without dignity, you must not only be per-
sistent in all you undertake, but moderate ; you must
not only be without rest, but, according to Goethe's
famous motto, at the same time without haste. If you
cast your eye round about you on that marvellous action
and counteraction of divine forces which we call the
world, you will see plainly enough that those forces
which exhibit their presence in incalculable outbursts

^ Life of AdaTn Smith. By Horatio Macculloch. Edinburgh, 1855.
Privately printed. P. 20.

234 LAY SERMONS.

of sudden, turbulent, and explosive energy — earthquakes,
volcanoes, storms, tornadoes, inundations, conflagrations,
and such like — are not plastic powers in any sense,
but rather powers of destruction ; not creative, vital,
and organic, but at best only the preparers of a soil and
an atmosphere in which organic vitality may flourish.
In contrast with these wild forces, all organic growth is
moderate, calculated, noiseless, and scarcely perceptible.
There is a thing in these days much talked about which
is called law. Law is not a force or a power, much less
a god ; it is only a steady, wisely-moderated method of
operation ; not a deed, much less the cause of a deed,
but only a way of doing ; the sure procedure of the self-
existent, self - consistent, and self-persistent working
Eeason which shapes forth tlie universe ; a method of
operation to which we willingly pay all reasonable
homage, addressing it in the words of the poet —

" Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and

strong."

And what the omnipresent, ever- working reason of God
does in the universe by the calm process of regulated
work which we call law, even this thing it is the problem
of our human life to achieve, by the formation of what
we call character. Character, said Novalis, is a per-
fectly trained will ; and a perfectly trained will is only
a well-calculated and a Avell-regulated working power.
The excessive energy put forth to-day, as it is gener-
ally the offspring of laziness yesterday, so it is sure to

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR. 235

end in languor to-morrow. " My Father worketh
hitherto, and I work." But how ? I^ot with much ob-
servation and blare of trumpets, but like the seed which
swells beneath the soil, with an increase which no eye
can measure when it is doing, but all must admire when
it is done.

VIIL
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS.

" Otliers had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, more-
over, of bonds and imprisonment : they were stoned, they were
sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword : they wan-
dered about in sheep-skins and goat-skins ; being destitute, afflicted,
tormented ; (of whom the world was not worthy :) they wandered in
deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth." —
Hebrews xi. 36-38.

" Put not your trust in princes." — Psalm cxlvi. 3.

" Happy is the people whose annals are blank/' said
some one : happy, I should rather say, is the people
whose history is full of heroes. The man who ex-
pressed that sentiment was thinking no doubt of a
certain fashion of chronicles rich in the records of
strife, and in whose gaunt columns one year differs
from another only in the greater or less atrocity of the
battles by which it is signalised ; the less of that, of
course, in one view the better ; it is no pleasant
spectacle to behold large communities of rational
beings turning themselves periodically into tigers, and
devouring one another with fierce greed, and calling
it great glory to do so. But this is only the dark
side of the picture ; war is not always or only a theatre

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 237

of mere fierceness and ferocity and human tigerhood ;
it is a school of mettle and of manhood, the nursery of
heroism, and the cradle of nationality. Peace is, we
all know, a good thing, and a very good thing ; so is
rest; but as rest is certainly fully enjoyable only after
labour, so it may be that the blessings of peace can
be reaped largely only by a people who were bred in
the school of war. The world is agreed in worshipping
heroes ; and no hero that we read of, from Theseus and
Eomulus to Bruce and Wallace and John Knox, was
the product of peaceful times ; they grew strong in the
element of strife ; even as the mountain pine that rises
in the face of the rough blast is stronger than his
brother that adds a gentle grace to the luxuriance
of a sheltered garden. Peace can cover the land
with portly landlords, astute lawyers, fat farmers,
enterprising merchants, and thrifty shopkeepers ; but
heroes are always the product of struggle and of anta-
gonism— come to the foreground only when there is
something to be done that will not be done peacefully ;
for without resistance to overcome, struggles to make,
and victories to achieve, how could they become heroes?
We shall not expect, therefore, to find the Scottish
Covenanters, of whom we are now to say a few words,
made of any softer stuff ; they were all warriors ; and
to them, as trained in the great school of stout struggle
for liberty of conscience against a perjured monarch, a
pretentious clergy, and a venal ministry, we owe the
greater part of that moral inheritance which makes the

238 LAY SEKMONS.

Scot a notable type of sturdy manhood and vigorous
achievement among the most advanced men of this
nineteenth century.

In order that the champions of the right may have
a field on which to display their prowess, it is necessary
that a great wrong should first be done, and that mighty
Mmrods of evil-doing should begin to perform their
hunting before the Lord in some notable fashion. The
mighty Nimrods of misgovernment who brought the
Covenanters on the scene were the Stuarts ; and the
special Stuart who was destined to bring about this
result by a continuous process of force and fraud and
sheer brutality, of rare example in history, was Charles
II. We must go farther back, by a century, however,
before we can get hold of the germ of insolence, self-
will, and vain conceit, out of which that crop of bloody
blossoms so luxuriantly grew. That a people has a right
to have a conscience in matters of religious conviction,
and that no civil governor, however absolute he may be
in other matters, has a right to impose his personal
faith forcibly on an unwilling people, is a proposition
that ought never to have been doubted by any Euro-
pean sovereign sitting on a Christian throne. For
though man as man, contradistinguished from the
brute, always has boasted of his conscience or his point
of honour in some sort, it was not till Christianity
appeared that a moral association called the Church,
springing out of the absolute self-assertion of the in-
dividual conscience, planted itself cognisably in the

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 239

face of the secular power, and publicly disowned all
right of State interference or coercion. " My kingdom
is not of this world," was the watchword which at once
described the character of the new religion, and ensured
its progress. The Eoman governors generally were
too wise to interfere with the assertion of religious con-
victions, so long as they did not in any way impede
the action of the regular machinery of the State ; ^ and
when ultimately they did sanction systematic persecu-
tions aojainst the rising strenojth of the sect of the
Nazarenes, it was only because Church and State in
Greece and Eome were, from the earliest tradition, so
intertwined, and radically, indeed, in some of their most
important functions so identical, that the profession of
a different religion, — at least of a religion so peculiar as
Christianity, — necessarily implied an abstention from
some of the recognised functions and services of good
citizenship. The Caesars flung the Christians into the
jaws of wild beasts not because they were heretical
religionists, but because, by their usages, they were bad
citizens ; the Stuarts gibbeted the Covenanters because
they denied the right of a civil sovereign to frame
liturgies, and to impose constitutions on a spiritual
association. The Eoman [N'ero or Antoninus, who
persecuted the Christians because, when serving in the
army, they would not perform homage to the statue of
the Emperor as to a god, was justified, according to the
then notions of policy, in treating the recusant as a rebel ;

1 Acts xviii. 14 : xxvi. 31.

240 LAY SERMONS.

the first and second Charles, when they persisted in
forcing a hated form of Church government and Church
ceremonial down the throat of the Scottish people, were
walking altogether out of their proper domain, and
usurping a jurisdiction in a matter with which they
had as little in common as police regulations have with
the propositions of philosophy. That the Scottish
people, body and soul of them, from the lowest to the
topmost classes, were in the main a Presbyterian people,
and that of a very distinct and emphatic type, had been
sufficiently declared to all the world by the Act of the
General Assembly of the Church, 1560 ; and, had there
been wisdom upon the throne in the period interven-
ing between that date and the Eevolution Settlement
of more than a hundred years afterwards, the whole of
that blind tussle of blunders which we call our great
civil war would have been spared to history ; but of
course we should have lost our heroes also ; and therein
lies the comfort. As it was, the Stuarts had conspired,
in England in the main, against the political rights
of their subjects, and in Scotland more prominently
against the rights of conscience : in either case they
were traitors, and guilty of high treason against their
people, and had no right to complain when they suffered
the natural penalties of disownment and decapitation.
The loss of a single crowned head, indeed, was a very
small matter in comparison of the mountains of misery
which, in their foolhardy insolence, they had persist-
ently heaped on hundreds and thousands of the most

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 241

innocent and the most noble-minded of their subjects.
One cannot, indeed, say that they were wicked men, or
generally much worse than their neighbours ; individu-
ally, only one was utterly worthless — Charles II. — and
employed the most wicked and imscrupulous men to
carry out his purposes ; but they started and pushed on
the most wicked projects, for which, according to the
necessary course of human affairs, they must expect to
pay the penalty, A man cannot raise a fire about my
ears in my house, and say that he only meant to clear
the chimney ; he must suffer for fire-raising, whatever
the motive was.

It has been written that Charles the First was " the
most unfortunate of men." I am willing, for charity's
sake, to pass no more severe judgment upon him. That
he was perfectly honest and honourable in his inten-
tions, though perhaps somewhat shuffling and unreliable
in his manoeuvres, I willingly grant ; and it is not at
all difficult, and not a little instructive, to observe what
the sources were from which he got his. head infected
with that pernicious crotchet of royal absolutism which
drove him blindly to his ruin. Even in private a man
with a fixed idea in his head is an uncomfortable in-
mate and an unpleasant acquaintance — what we call a
bore ; but on a throne, or at the pilot's station in the
ship, he is perilous, and under critical circumstances
may lead to utter ruin. He does not see the beacon-
light ahead, where the hidden reefs are ; he sees only
the phantom-star in his own conceit, and foUows that

242 LAY SERMONS.

for a guidance. Poor Charles! lie had a sad inheritance of
false doctrine to deal with ; his father was a fool before
him, and that is a great misfortune to anybody, speci-
ally to a king. King James was a writer of books, —
a much easier matter than the government of human
beings, — and in one of the most notable of his discourses,
the True Law of Free Monarchies, he announces his
views as to the absolute right of kings in the exact
letter and spirit of the old Eoman law with regard to
the patria potestas. The monarch, as the father of the
State family, has an absolute right over his children,
but his children are absolutely devoid of all right as
respects the father. If the monarch, as the State father,
abuses his powers, and becomes a sanguinary tyrant, he
is answerable to God ; but his children have no remedy,
and must content themselves, like the Church in the days
of the Eoman persecutions, with 2^'i^cces et laclirymoi, —
prayers and tears.-^ With this milk of autocratic ortho-
doxy young Charles, the future framer of State -sanc-
tioned liturgies, was doubtless largely nourished. But
there w^as something more potent than that. The Pro-
testant divines of that age, in their rage for Scripture
authority for all things, w4th a certain Bibliolatry, or
worship of the letter, of which the operation is even now
distinctly visible, were accustomed to quote the whole
sacred volume at random, as if it had been a collection
of statutes codified into a homogeneous body of divine
law ; whereas the Bible is really not a book, but a

^ Works of King Jai7us VI. of Scotland. London, 1616, p. 205.

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES. 243

literature, and contains a law obligatory in its final
conclusions, but not in its initiatory and progressive
stages. In obedience to this vicious style of herme-
neutics we find James in that same treatise, — and no
doubt the whole army of prelatic theologians with him,
— claiming to himself, as of divine right, whatsoever
power, civil or ecclesiastical, was vested by Samuel in
Saul at the constitution of the Hebrew monarchy.^
This was no trivial mistake. As far as Asia is distant
from Europe geographically, so far do the fundamental
principles of civil government applicable to the East
stand apart from those which are the natural growth of
the West. The Greeks, who are the earliest and the
most illustrious representatives of European as opposed
to Asiatic civilisation, were in the spirit of their
institutions essentially popular and democratic; so
thoroughly, indeed, that Aristotle, in his philosophic
review of the forms of civil polity,- sets down monarchy
— that is, the absolute monarchy of ancient States — as
a thing of the past, and fit only for the inferior
civilisation of the barbarian East. And most unques-
tionably here, as in other matters, " the great master of
those who know " was right. Monarchy has never led to
any great results on European ground, except when tem-
pered by a democratic atmosphere, and limited by popular
institutions. This we see plainly enough now, looking
back on the great volume of the history of the last two

1 1 Sam. viii. 10-22.
2 Polities, 1. iii. cc. 16, 17. See Congreve's note 17. 18.

244 LAY SERMONS.

thousand years, as it has unrolled itself grandly before
us ; but however gross the anachronism and the incon-
gruity may appear of an Egyptian, Babylonian, or
Palsestinian type of autocracy at Edinburgh or London,
as we see it now, there were many things two hundred
years ago all over Europe which blinded the eyes of men
to so obvious a political difference. The social atmo-
sphere was poisoned by an element derived partly from
the precepts of media3val Popery, tending in all things
towards slavish submission, and partly from the maxims
of Eoman law, which had been built up in times Avhen
the power of the emperors assumed Titanic proportions
over the ruins of popular liberty all over the world.
Eome was the mother and the type of policy to all gov-
ernors; the emperors at Eome and Constantinople had
exercised without question, during the long period which
elapsed between the fall of the ancient and the rise of the
modern kingdoms, a power almost unlimited in eccle-
siastical as w^ell as in civil matters ; and what a Trajan
and an Antonine, as mighty masters of polity, did in
their day for the good government of the whole worlds
surely Charles in little England, and James in half-
savage Scotland, might be allowed to do without blame.
And there were modern examples too, and prosper-
ous types apparent!}^, of European autocracy quite
close at hand. Louis the XIII. in France, with his
great minister Eichelieu, had commenced, under ap-
parently the most favourable aus^^ices, that grand ex-
periment of governing one of the most forward States

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 245

of free Europe on the autocratic principle of VEtat
cest moi, whicli was destined to attain speedy per-
fection in the brilliant epiphany of his magnificent
son — a principle useful indeed in the early stages of
the unification of an ill-compacted aggregate of social
units, but in its after stages pernicious, as stunting
the growth of the outer limbs and smothering the
soul of manhood throughout the whole body of the
community. It was the natural ambition of our
English sovereigns of the seventeenth century to follow
in the same brilliant track of self-aggrandisement ; but
they had to do with more tough materials ; and in the
attempt, with the spur of privilege and the bit of raw
authority, to ride triumphantly on the back of the stout
steed of British liberty, found themselves unhorsed
shamefully, and, after a prolonged period of uncom-
fortable kicking and snorting, were left to die in the
mud. The whole history of this ill-starred mimicry of
Continental Absolutism it is not my business here to
tell. We have only to mention in a preparatory way
that James VI., though he held personally the divine
right of kings with as fixed a persuasion as any of his
most thorough-going successors, had Scottish caution and
practical sagacity enough to see that theoretical ideas
of the sacrosanct rights of crowned gentlemen on a
throne had to be stripped of their pretensions consider-
ably as soon as they were applied to practice ; and
guided safely by this instinct, he contrived to keep his
head on his shoulders, though no doubt plotting secretly

246 LAY SERMONS.

in his heart, and in various curiously tentative ways, no
less than his unfortunate son, against the liberties of the
Scottish Church. Nothing is more safe for a one-sided
thinker in practical matters than a little inconsistency.
Perfect consistency achieves great things only with
great men and on great occasions ; in small men, the
natural narrowness of sympathy in which it originates
is sure to generate an utter incapacity of dealing with
the contending claims of antagonistic parties, which, as
the natural process of social growth at certain recurrent
periods, are sure to come to the foreground. What
James said of Laud in this regard is highly interesting.
"I keep him back because he hath a restless spirit.
Not content with the five articles of order and decency
which I had obtained from the Assembly of Perth, he
assaulted me again with another ill-fangled platform to
make the stubborn kirk stoop more to the English
pattern. But I durst not j)lay fast and loose with my
soul. He knovjs not the stomach of this people. But I
ken the story of my grandmother, who, after she was
inveigled to break her promise to some mutineers at
Perth, never saw good day after that."^ Laud certainly,
as history shows him, was one of those men of small
notions, meagre sympathy, and strong volition, who,
wlien perched misfortunately on high places, are always
found driving right ahead to some terrible catastrophe ;
in theory full of sublime conceptions, but in practice an

1 Hachtel's Williams, page 14, in Stanley's Church of Scotland
London. 1872.

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 247

impertinent intermeddler and a stickler for buttons and
buttonholes, and a particular cut of sacerdotal millinery,
at a time when the cry was for warm clothing at any
price, and a ready protection from the cold weather, ac-
cording to the fashion of the country. With a pedant
of such magnitude, who would stake a kingdom for the
cut of a Churchman's cope, and goad a whole nation
into rebellion by standing out for the proper angle of a
genuflexion or the orthodox intonation of an Amen, it
was the evil fortune or the innocent unsuspicious choice
of poor Charles to be associated, when he entered upon
the perilous task of carrying out his father's Episcopising
schemes and theories in a more thorough-going way ;
and with such a comrade at home, a far-reaching Eichelieu
on the banks of the Seine, and the Pope in Eome, with
his army of Jesuits all over Europe, sowing the soil with
conspiracies for the recovery of his lost spiritual domi-
nation, it required a more cool understanding and a
more sound training than a royal Stuart could have in
those days, to keep himself free from that intoxication
of power which is the besetting sin of the head that
wears a crown. The atmosphere everywhere — in France,
in Germany, in Italy, and Spain — was either raging with
social fever or sowing the seeds for its speedy eruption.
Under such lowering clouds of social electricity, England
could not hope to escape the contagion ; and where the
gunpowder that might lead to an explosion in the in-
flammable stuff of Scotch hearts was largely spread, two
such pertinacious and persistent theorists as King

248 LAY SERMONS.

Charles and Priest Laud were just the men to apply
the spark.

It does not belong to the drift of the present dis-
course to give any detailed account of the progress of
the great civil war which ran its natural course in
England, without any exceptional amount of sanguinary
surgery, during the ten years that elapsed from tlie
solemn swearing of the Covenant by the representatives
of the Scottish people in 1638, to the judicial decapita-
tion of the royal originator of the fray in 1649. All
that our subject requires for the clear understanding of
the strictly Covenanting period is distinctly to mark at
the outset the starting-point and the issue of the great
struggle ; and the consequent condition of the hostile
parties, at the commencement of the great persecution
which was carried on with more or less continuous
atrocity from the unhappy epoch of the Eestoration in
1660, to the settlement of contending claims by the
glorious Eevolution of 1688. The solemn swearing of
the Covenant in Grey friars Churchyard on the first day
of March 1638, — one of the grandest acts of national
self-assertion recorded in history, — was the direct result
of the determination displayed by Charles from the
moment of his succession to force Episcopacy, with the
whole weight of its lordly pretensions and rigid cere-
monial, upon the conscience of the people. On his first
visit to Scotland in the year 1633, instead of paying
respect to the religious convictions and even prejudices
of his subjects, which a king is bound to do, he made

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 249

an offensive display at Holyrood of white rochets and
white sleeves and copes of gold, and other articles of
sacerdotal frippery, calculated to remind his Presby-
terian subjects of Popish mummeries happily cast off,
and even of the procession of the priests of Isis on the
banks of heathen Mle. This folly took a more serious
shape in the summer of 1637, when the monarch, with
his pedantic adviser, actually took upon himself to
manufacture a prayer-book for the Church, and to make
it treason for a pious Presbyterian to pray to God
otherwise than in the words of a formula dictated by a
clique of semi-Popish priests in London. What might
have been expected as the result of such impertinent
intermeddling in sacred matters actually took place.
The congregation in the High Church on w^hom this
king -made liturgy was pompously imposed rose in
revolt ; and the perpetrators of such an act of rude
insult to the conscience of a godly people were driven
shamefully out of their usurped ministrations by a
rattling tempest of the stools on which the indignant
people had been sitting ; and the lady who threw the first
stool at the head of the officiating Dean, no matter
whether Geddes or Main — the name is of no conse-
quence— became thenceforward a person as notable in
the history of Scottish independence as the she-w^olf
that suckled young Ptomulus when his watery cradle
had been stranded at the base of the Palatine Hill. A
popular riot of this kind is a revenge of nature, instan-
taneously striving to liberate herself from the bonds

250 LAY SERMONS.

with which a junto of Lilliputian politicians had assayed
to hind her. But the warnin^j was myen in vain. Laud
was not the man to understand a hint which implied
retrogression from the mouth of a volcano, or confession
that in any the minutest point of petty ecclesiastical
formalism he could possibly have been wrong. He was
a perfect type of that class of whom the proverb has
been spoken : IVJiom God wishes to destroy, Mm he first
makes mad. The hint was not taken ; and so the riot
ripened suddenly to a civil war ; and the rashness with
which the priest-ridden monarch had provoked an
internecine war with his people was equalled only by
the inadequacy of the means at his disposal for carry-
ing it on. His splendid phrases and his cunning shifts
were equally in vain against a people who had sworn
solemnly not to be juggled out of God's greatest gift to
man — a personal conscience. The civil war, on the part
of the unhappy monarch, turned out to be, even in
England, an affair of attitudinising, without backbone,
and ended, as affairs so got up always do, in complete
discomfiture. After the bitterness of defeat, and the
bursting of all those bubbles of hieratico-monarchical
absolutism with which his youthful fancy had been
fed, he delivered himself a captive into the hands of
his people, and met with the natural fate which his
high-handed conspiracy against the civil and religious
liberties of the country deserved. It may well be that
tears of pity were shed over his fall by the recording
angels, but they shed tears also over many thousands

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 251

of uncrowned traitors. It was a just judgment never-
theless,— whether politic or not in the circumstances
is a different question, — unless, indeed, we are prepared
to maintain in the face of all conscience that kings
have no duties and people no rights ; and that, while
for the grossest violation of what are commonly
esteemed kingly duties, no punishment can follow,
the slightest assertion of right on the part of the
people incurs the penalty of high treason against the
monarch. But this is a doctrine which cannot be
preached in the atmosphere of these islands, nor
indeed anywhere now, except at Constantinople. In
the English Prayer-book, among not a few formulas
utterly destitute of any moral significance, Charles I.
is called a martyr. This, of course, is the language of
pure partisanship. He was a martyr only as the
drunkard is to his drink ; a martyr to the intoxicating
virtue of the Circean cup of absolutism prepared for
him by his foolish father, and cunningly mingled with
sacerdotal drugs by the arch-pedant Laud ; he was a
martyr as Alexander the Great was when he became a
murderer, and, heated with wine, pierced his dearest
friend through the heart with a spear ; — only the Mace-
donian, we read, was afterwards pierced with many a
pang of sorrow for his offence : Charles, I fear, never
was. He died a martyr in his own conceit, as many a
fool has done before him. This pious imagination in
the circumstances was his only possible consolation.
The execution of Charles I., though an act of the

252 LAY SERMONS.

most manifest political justice, might, as we have said,
have been an act of bad policy ; at all events, so far as
Scotland was concerned, it was followed by one very
bad consequence. The Scotch, though a sturdy and an
independent, were a pre-eminently loyal people ; they
had inherited from a long train of ancestors, what might
be called even a superstitious reverence for their kings
and the blood royal ; so, whether they did or did not
approve of the penalty paid in England by the great
disturber of the peace for his usurpation of religious
rights in Scotland, they could not see their way to a
government without a throne, or to a throne without a
king's son upon it. With these principles of loyal
devotion to the Stuart family, considerations of human
pity and human kindness in the breasts of the mass of
the people were no doubt largely mingled. The people
in general feel much more kindly to their royal masters
in misfortune, than their royal masters in prosperity
generally feel for them. It seemed a hard thing to
disown and disinherit the son because the father had
done a foolish thing, and paid for his folly with his life ;
and this Scottish loyalty and human pity, acting to-
gether, brought Charles II. to Scone in the year 1649,
and crowned him there the sworn head of a free and a
Presbyterian people. Never was the generosity of a
noble nation more vilely thrown away than on this
crowned reprobate, — a wretch to whom honour was a
word without meaning, and with whom the most shame-
lessly paraded lies were looked on only as stepping-

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 253

stones to a throne on wliich he miMit sit, indulgino- in
any amount of frivolity, baseness, and swinish sensuality
on which a diseased imagination might feed. He swore
to the Covenant, and accepted the crown from the
hands of the acknowledged chief of his Presbyterian
subjects, with the reservation in his mind that, on the
first convenient occasion, the head of that chief should
be demanded as a sacrifice to his father's treasonable
schemes, still closely hugged in the bosom of the son ;
a combination of ingratitude and falsehood happily rare
even among that class of men — kings and politicians
— in whom the noblest feelings of humanity are most
readily frozen in the chill atmosphere of selfish ambi-
tion, or strangled in the meshes of a base expediency.

Charles left Scotland very soon, with a croAvn on
his head and a lie in his breast ; but he had few
friends in England ; and a strong man was there,
against whom a bolstered-up composition of rotten-
ness and lies like this second Charles could no more
stand than an army of straw against a phalanx of flesh
and blood, Cromwell was now in the field, and Crom-
well was master of the ground. How did this affect
our Presbyterians? — just as weakness and division
always are affected where decision and unity seize the
helm. The death of the king and the pitiful sym-
pathy with treacherous loyalty had split the free
people of Scotland into two parties : one more mode-
rate, willing to come to terms with the existing govern-
ment ; the other, though still clinging to the form of

254 LAY SERMONS.

kingship, distrustful of royal promises, and deter-
mined to stand out more stiffly for the original prin-
ciples of the Solemn League and Covenant in all their
consistency. Moderation and compromise are very
good things in peaceful times ; but in critical moments
of great and perilous antagonism, by sowing divisions,
they create weakness and lead to defeat. This is the
explanation of the part played by Cromwell in the
important decade of years between the decapitation of
the traitor father and the restoration of the perjured
son. In these times of violent commotion and general
confusion, it was necessary that a strong hand should
seize the reins and deal with incipient anarchy in
somewhat of an arbitrary fashion, till order should be
restored. This was Cromwell's mission ; and in the
year 1653 he drove the General Assembly of the
Church out of its session, at point of pike, — a rough
procedure, for which the circumstances and the ideas
of the age must form his excuse. In the main, as
Burton has it, he performed the function of public con-
stable, keeping the peace in Scotland very creditably;
only his character as keeper of the peace not having
any sentimental halo about it, and not being free from
a few sharp memories, tended rather to nourish the
smothered flame of loyalty in Scottish hearts than to
starve it out. The severe regimen of the Protector un-
questionably favoured the growth of that reaction in
favour of the exiled Stuarts, which allowed the Scottish
nation, at the Restoration in lOGO, to throw itself on

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 255

the faith of a worthless monarch with a facility equally
unwarranted by the experience of a very recent past, and
the dictates of a reasonable expectation for the future.

The restoration of an overthrown Government or an
exiled dynasty is, in • the nature of the case, always a
reaction, and not only a reaction, but, as human affairs
go, generally also a revenge, — the restored party, how-
ever guilty in the eye of the impartial spectator,
always considering themselves as the injured party,
and interpreting the act of restoration to mean a
public confession that they had from the beginning
been in the right. Nobody, therefore, will be sur-
prised to find that the restoration of Charles II.,
however from various causes published through the
length and breadth of the land with loud bells of
rejoicing, was interpreted by the wise and thoughtful
to be the knell of some of the most valuable results
gained by the struggle of the great patriotic party
during the last twenty years. The danger of losing
their dearly-bought liberties was peculiarly great in
Scotland, remote as it was from the central seat of
government, exhausted by the magnitude of a struggle
in which it had played a part beyond its natural
strength, and weakened yet more by the division in
its own ranks, the fruit of its own excessive loyalty.
The Scots, however, did not rush altogether blindly
into the arms of a monarch who^ they had the best
reason to know, had, as has recently been said of the
Bourbons, forgot nothing in the dark days of his ad-

256 LAY SERMONS.

versity, and learned nothing, and — what was not said of
the Bourbons — was ready to swear anything. Accord-
ingly they sent up to London one of the most accredited
of their number to negotiate with the restored monarch
with reorard to the liberties of the Scottish Kirk. This
accredited negotiator was the notorious James Sharp,
who sold his conscience, his country, and his cause, for
an archbishop's mitre, and sits to all eternity in a
special niche of the Scottish historical gallery as the
manifest type of a traitor.^ How many murders of
sainted men and noble patriots this mitred poltroon
was the cause of by this gross act of betrayal of trust
we shall see immediately. In the meantime the care-
less Charles, having shuffled off this disagTeeable business
from his shoulders, or rather alloAved it to be shuffled
off by the violent Episcopalian councillors who pos-
sessed his ear — for himself was a poor creature of straw,
as Macaulay well remarks, equally incapable of great
revenge as of small gratitude — proceeded to deal with
Scotland in the way that in a few years afterwards he
dealt with the glory of the British arms and the honour
of the English people. Plunging himself in his palace,
into a whirl of frivolities and sensualities, enringed with

1 Burton, by no means a fervid friend of the Covenanters, admits
this designation to the full {Hist. Scot., chap. 77). A Aniter in the
North British Quarterly lieviexo (vii. 45) says that he was not properly a
traitor, but only ' ' a self-seeking man who took the winning side when
it was offered to him," flinging his friends overboard at the same time,
he ought to have added. The distinction between this and traitor is
like the distinction between red heat and white heat — both burn.

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 257

a base chorus of buffoons, courtesans, hollow witlings and
greedy place-hunters, totally absorbed in that succession
of carnal stimulants which men of his kidney call plea-
se re, he allowed the conduct of Scotch business to drift
into the hands of the most worthless, unprincipled, and
unscrupulous persons, who showed themselves the most
eager to seize the reins. In Scotland, under the then
electoral qualification — an inadequate inheritance from
the Middle Ages — nothing was more easy than to pack a
Parliament, that is, to bring together a conclave of slaves
with sounding titles, ready to perpetrate any iniquity or
commit any absurdity which a royal nod or a ministerial
menace might enjoin. But easy as this was, the Epis-
copising zealots and recreant time-servers into whose
hands Charles had allowed the administration of Scottish
affairs to fall, were not content with the concurrence of
fair chances in their favour. Some of them knew well
"the stomach of this people ;" and, though the risk of
anything like a national uprising as in 1643 was now
very small, nevertheless the renewed attempt to thrust
Episcopacy violently down the throats of a Presbyterian
people required to be made with all precaution against
possible serious consequences. The way to make sure
here was by intimidation. First cut off one or
two heads of the principal ringleaders, and beneath a
bleeding scaffold very few men would be willing to
enter as deputy to a Parliament where consistent adher-
ence to patriotic and Presbyterian principles was already
proscribed as high treason. The victims selected were,

s

258 LAY SERMONS.

among the laity, the Marquis of Argyll, and among the
Churchmen, James Guthrie. These men had committed
no crime except that they submitted to the Government
of Cromwell when submission was a social necessity,
and that they had consistently protested against the
usurpation by the civil magistrate of the inalienable
rights of conscience, and the sacred functions of the
Church. Argyll, as the most prominent name of the
patriotic and Presbyterian party from the signing of
the ISTational Covenant in the Greyfriars Churchyard
downwards, was the first person singled out for a dis-
play of royal ingratitude and ministerial perfidy, the
best calculated to forewarn the nation of the twenty-
seven years of iron oppression and sanguinary atrocity
that an unprincipled Government was now preparing
for them. Of course a political massacre of this kind
would find apologists and laudators among the partisan
politicians of the time, — the scutcheon of a restoration is
always blazoned on a ground of blood ; but it is strange
to see how, even two hundred years after the passions of
partizans have cooled down, it is still a favourite fashion,
with a certain school of historical writers, to hold up
this great man and consistent patriot as a vulgar com-
pound of ambition and cowardice, while, on the other
hand, his great opponent, IMontrose, is held up as the
model of chivalrous sentiment, brilliant soldiership, and
self-devoted loyalty. The " master-fiend Argyll " may
be a very proper phrase for the background of a his-
torical ballad artistically conceived for the glorification

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 259

of his brilliant antagonist and unfortunate fellow-
martyr ; but in plain prose Argyll was simply a man
of policy, and a very wise and consistent one ; and,
what is better, he exercised his practical wisdom in
defending the political and ecclesiastical liberties of his
country, which Montrose, in his brilliant way, did his
best to destroy. The character of a dashing soldier is
always popular ; but when the dazzling effect of the
hour is over, the sober judgment of history must pro-
nounce that it is better in j)olitical matters to have
policy without sentiment than to have sentiment with-
out sense. The Marquis of Argyll was executed at the
Cross of Edinburgh on the 27th day of May 1661,
the proto-martyr of the Covenanters, the sop which
did not satisfy but only stimulate the sanguinary
Cerberus of restored Episcopacy. In the next month
followed the clerical victim, ejames Guthrie, first at
Lauder and then at Stirling, one of the far-sighted of
Presbyterian prophets, who had seen from the first how
hopeless was the expedient to deal in compromise and
half measures with such incurable crotchet-mongers,
slippery intriguers, and self-willed absolutists as the
Stuarts. His high moral worth, of course, was the star
on his breast which marked him out as a victim for the
band of executioners whom Charles had sent north to
butcher his loyal Scottish subjects into a sanguinary
submission ; and his fidelity to his country and to his
Church were the unpardonable offences which the
lordly despots of the law construed into high treason.

260 LAY SERMONS.

The treason was all on the other side ; and the true
character of the bloody exhibition of the wrath of man in
this case shines now emphatically forth for all times in
the pictured page of the stout bard of the Covenanters.

THE DEATH OF JAMES GUTHRIE.

Slowly, slowly tolls the death-note, at the Cross the scaffold

stands :
Freedom, law, and life are playthings where the TjTant's voice

commands :
Found in blood your throne and temple ! foretaste of a glorious

reign ;
Though the heavens were hung in sackcloth, let the Witnesses

be slain !

'Tis the merriest month of summer, 'tis the sweetest day in

June,
And the sun breathes joy in all things, riding at his highest

noon ;
Yet a silence, deep and boding, broods on all the city round,
And a fear is on the people, as an earthquake rocked the

ground.

Slowly, slowly tolls the death-note, at the Cross the scaffold

stands ;
And the Guardsmen prance and circle, marshalled in their

savage bands ;
And the people swell and gather, hea^dng darkly like the deep.
When, in fitful gusts, the north winds o'er its troubled bosom

sweep.

Now the grim Tolbooth is opened, and the death-procession

forms,
With the tinsel pomps of office, with the vain parade of arms ;

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES. 261

Lowly in the midst, and leaning on his staff, in humble guise,
Guthrie comes, the Proto-martyr ! ready for the sacrifice ;
Guthrie comes, the Proto-martyr ! and a stern and stifled groan
Travels through the eager throng ; but patiently he passeth on ;
And the people stand uncovered, and they gaze with streaming

eyes,
As when of old the fiery chariot rapt Elijah to the skies.

On his staff in meekness leaning, see him bend infirm and

weak ;
Man in youth, and old in manhood, pale and sunken is his

cheek ;
And adown his shoulders flowing, locks grown prematurely

gray,
Yet the spirit, strong in weakness, feels not languor nor decay ;
And a loftiness is on him, such as fits a noble mind,
Like the oak m grandeur rising, howsoever blows the wind ;
On his lips, though blanched with vigils, sits the will to dare

or die.
And the fires of grace and genius sparkle in his cloudless eye.^

The people being now cowed, and all things prepared
for the second grand crusade of the Stuart conspirators
against the conscience of the Scottish people, execution
in sweeping style commenced. The royal commissioner
who called the two first Parliaments of Charles II.,
was John, Earl of Middleton, a soldier more than a
statesman, and like not a few of the other more pro-
minent instruments of Episcopalian oppression, an
apostate from the Presbyterian faith. But the remark-
able thing about this man and his Parliamentary

^ Lays of the Covenanters. By James Dodds. Edinburgli, 1880.

262 LAY SERMONS.

fellow-workers was that they had so little regard for
common decency and propriety of conduct, that when
they were j)erforming the public business they were
generally in a state of intoxication, so as to get the
accredited name of "The Drunken Parliament." Drunk
indeed they certainly were, in a double sense, — drunk
with wine to cloud their understandings, and with
blood to infuriate their hearts. Their performances
were principally three — among the most foolish and
ill-advised ordinances of a blind reactionary impulse
that ever appeared in a statute-book of men calling
themselves civilised. Their first act was the formal
restoration of Episcopacy — an act deliberately ignoring
the well-known convictions of the Scottish people, and
directly calculated to smother every spark of manhood
in their bosoms. Then there came what are called the
Acts rescissory ; that is, Acts declaring null and void all
that the best men of the nation had thought, felt, and
solemnly declared, from the moment they had got quit
of the crowned conspirator and his minions, up to
1662. There is something ludicrously sublime in the
wholesale style in which these bibulous statute-mongers
went about their work. They must make a tabula rasa
of all previous rational legislation, before their own un-
tempered folly could parade itself in full livery, before
they could be free to play the Episcopal fox, the Epis-
copal tiger, and the Episcopal fool again, without even
the ghost of an old parliamentary paper to trouble their
blood -bolted consciences. So far apparently well —

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES. 263

at least from Middleton's point of view. But it is
seldom that men who swill the wine of faction largely,
and taste the blood of persecution, know when to stop.
Middleton was determined to fool it to the top of his
bent ; so, going to Glasgow, in which region the most
zealous Covenanters were wont to congregate, and in-
sisting on the instant literal execution of his despotic
decrees against the reKgion of the people, he found, to
his no small astonishment no doubt, — for the men who
have no honour in themselves are ever slow to believe
its existence in others, — that, instead of violating their
consciences by submission to a usurped authority, four
hundred honest men were prepared to leave all their
worldly emoluments, to sacrifice their social position,
and walk out into the wilderness !

And they did walk out — a sight worth seeing, and
compensating to our human feeling, in no small
degree, for the dismal sequence of blood and blunders
which this sad epoch of our history records. Middle-
ton, soon after this hasty provocation of the stout old
Scottish stomach, fell into discredit, went abroad, and
died soon afterwards in a manner worthy of his exploits,
by falling down a stair, drunk. At home the rudder of
Scotch affairs was seized by a man of rather more sense,
perhaps, but considerably more brutality than himself ;
and, at the head of an irresponsible Privy Council, and
with a chosen band of servile politicians, worldly
Churchmen, and rude soldiers at his command, Lauder-
dale managed to carry on the public business of the

264 LAY SERMONS.

country with a reasonable amount of persecution, and
without the encumbrance of a Parliament, till more
serious symptoms of the eruption of the suppressed
disease of Presbytery called for a new exhibition of
sanguinary authority. To dispense with Parliament
after the Continental fashion inaugin^ated by Ptichelieu
and Mazarin was always the ideal of the Stuarts ; and
the man who could dispense with them altogether for
a season, or twirl them round his little finger with lies
and cajolery, was esteemed the most accomplished
statesman.

In the year 1666 occurred the futile insurrectionary
movement commonly known as the Pentland Eising.
Futile it was, for the present at least, and for a long
space afterwards ; because it is only in very rare cases
that an ill-concerted insurrectionary revolt, suddenly
bursting out, produces any other result than only
more firmly to rivet the chains of the oppressed.
It is not necessary for our purpose to follow out
the details of this unpremeditated encounter. Ori-
ginating in the west country, where the inflammable
material of the Presbyterian party was most abun-
dant, it gathered to a point at a spot called Eullion
Green on the south slope of the Pentlands, some ten or
twelve miles from Edinburgh. Here, as was to have
been expected, the hastily-got-up band of self-sacrificing
patriots was, notwithstanding a fair display of military
courage, with little difficulty scattered and blown to the
winds by the power of the Government and the arm of

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 265

an experienced old soldier whom they employed as a fit
instrument for the savage sort of work which their
oppressive system demanded. This was Dalziel of
Binns, a famous Eoyalist, and a rough campaigner, who
had learned in barbarous combats with Turks and
Tartars those arts of atrocious cruelty which he was
soon to practise on his own countrymen.^ He acted
the Muscovite, Burnet says, a little too grossly ; but
this was only in Burnet's estimation : no grossness
could be too great for the service of Lauderdale and his
accomplices in the shedding of innocent blood. The
necessary consequence of the fatal issue of the Pent-
land rising was the execution of a select lot of the
most eminent men of the patriotic party; they had
been recusants before, and liable to fines and other
petty oppressions ; now they were rebels in the eye of
that Devil's law which in Scotland at that time had
usurped the throne of Justice ; and there was no help
for it, so long as the Episcopising conspirators sat in the
chair where kings faithful to the religion of the people
only had a right to sit. Where wolves are both judge
and jury, for the poor innocent lambs there could be no
hope. The most distinguished victim brought forward
at this period to glut the appetite for blood of that
infuriate Government, was a young man, dear to all
Scotsmen, called Hugh MacKail. It is one of the
saddest things connected with all insurrectional upris-
ings against usurped authority, such as the revolt of

^ Dodds's History of the Covenanters, chap. iv.

266 LAY SERMONS.

the Milanese against the Austrians, that the noblest
and best of the land, the choicest and most select
spirits, are most sure to fall the first victims to the
revindicated yoke of the oppressor. Young MacKail,
when yet fresh from the University, and not more than
twenty-two years of age, had preached a sermon in Edin-
burgh, in which, with the fearless instinct that leads
the best young men to harbour no sentiments in their
breast which they are afraid to confess with their mouth,
he had lamented the then sorrowful estate of the
Church of God in Scotland, with a Pharaoh for a king,
a Haman at the helm, and a Judas in the Church.-^
From that moment he was a marked man ; and having
been drawn from mere local connection accidentally
into the Pentland fray, he was suspected of being one
of the ringleaders of the insurrection, and, despite of
the failure of the boot to extract anything further out
of him, by the insatiate bloodthirstiness of Sharp, and
other traitors to their old Presbyterian faith, he was
condemned to undergo the last penalty of the law, and
was accordingly executed on the market cross of Edin-
burgh on the 22d December 1666. The details of his
last hours, x^reserved in that noble Scottish Plutarch,
the Scots Worthies, are not to be read without tears, and
some of them are signally significant of the fine tissue
of the youth's mind, — a mind gentle, liberal, and refined,
and altogether in keeping with the grace of his manners
and beauty of his person. The last words he spoke at

^ Scots Worthies. By John Howie, of Locligoin. Edinburgh, 1870.

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES. 267

supper on the evening before liis execution, showed his
true estimate of the superior value of the moral to the
intellectual qualities in all that constitutes the nobility
of human nature. "Notions of Jcnoidedge" said he,
" loithoid love are of small vjorth, evanishing in nothing,
and very dangerous!' His last words — words of holy
triumph and exultation — on the scaffold, were : " Fare-
well, father and mother, friends and relations ; farewell,
the world and all its delights ; farewell, meat and drink ;
farewell, sun, moon, and stars ; welcome, God and
Father ; welcome, sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of
the ISTew Covenant ; welcome, blessed Spirit of grace,
and God of all consolation ; welcome glory; welcome
eternal life ; welcome death !"

The Episcopal thirst for blood having been now
satiated for a season, Lauderdale, who was not a tiger
altogether, but only a coarse compound of a fox and a
bear, perhaps not without a hint from above, bethought
himself of trying the effect of more moderate counsels.
There was, in fact, a change of Ministry in England, of
which the chief feature was a public separation of the
king from the Anglican, or what we would now call the
High Church party, and an adoption of apparently a
more conciliating policy towards dissenters, with a view
no doubt of favouring the Eomanists, to whom Charles
and all the Stuarts had a secret predilection. Clarendon,
a High Churchman, was discarded ; and a new conclave,
composed of five such worthless and slippery men as
suited the genius of the monarch, stepped into his shoes

268 LAY SERMONS.

under the name of the Cabal. Of these five, says
Macaulay, only one had the slightest pretensions to be
called an honest man, and the worst of the bad was
Lauderdale. Worthless as the men were, however, their
want of principle in the meantime tended decidedly to
relax the strictness of Episcopalian persecution in Scot-
land. Sharp, the arch-Pharisee of those times, was no
longer allowed full swing for his sacred rancour and
sacerdotal spite ; and men were taken into counsel who
even went so far as to call to severe account the blood-
stained underlings of the late outrageous persecutions.^
1^0 stretch of charity, however, can induce the impartial
student of those times to attribute to Lauderdale's per-
sonal influence any temporary relaxation of the general
harshness which characterised his Scottish administra-
tion. His future conduct amply testified to the perma-
nence of the inhuman and savage element in his con-
stitution. Out of the same fountain flow not bitter
waters and sweet. His portrait, as sketched by the
men of the time, presents no redeeming feature but that
of a well-stored brain-chamber, hung round, according to
the fashion of the age, with all sorts of Greek and Latin
and even Hebrew trappings, which indeed saved him
from the shame of intellectual nakedness, but could not
teach him to think soundly, to act wisely, or even to
behave with common decency in a drawing-room. " I
knew him very particularly," says Burnet ; " he made a
very ill appearance : he was very big, his hair red,

^ See the details in Dodds, cliap. vi.

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 269

hanging oddly about him; his tongue was too big for his
mouth, which made him bedew all that he talked to ; and
his whole manner was rough and boisterous, and very
unfit for a court." The hint here given is taken up by
Dodds, who, in the pages of his noble vindication of
our Covenanting heroes, gives the following full-length
portrait of their great persistent persecutor : — " His
portrait, though touched up by the refining fingers of
Sir Peter Lely, attests to this day the accuracy and the
pungency of the traits by which he is described in the
political ballads of the time. The low brazen forehead,
the loose baggy cheeks, the thick insatiable lips, the
satyr's eye, the huge brutish person, bring before us in
their combination as gruesome a carle as can well be
fancied. He was a man of immense erudition, but not
a man of thought, or of any fine natural ability. Buck-
ingham, who was a wit, and had the wit's felicity in
hitting off a character, called him a man of a blunder-
ing understanding. He was always setting out with a
^vrong idea, or getting upon a wrong track, or doing
even right things in a wrong way. And it was in vain
to correct him ; this only drove him into further freaks
of folly. But it was not his intellectual, it was his
moral, or rather, his immoral, qualities which gave him
his high place in the confidence of the king, and conse-
quently in the counsels of the nation. As to the utter
rottenness of his character, there is not one dissentient
voice. Amidst the accumulation of vices charged on
his memory we can trace the one single type to which

270 LAY SERMONS.

all of them may be reduced — unredeemed selfishness,
total want of principle, corruption insatiable as the
horse leech with her two daughters crying eternally,
Give, Give ! Even in that age of bold bad men, he was
pre-eminently vile. He was swelled out with ambition,
not from the grand impulse of a noble mind, not to
realise some lofty conception of government, but for the
low paltry gratification of being what is styled the great
man of the country. He sought to conceal his treachery
and his cunning under a roaring noisy bluntness. To
his inferiors, and even his peers, he was haughty beyond
expression ; to those above him or who could serve him,
an abject loathsome flatterer. His friendships were
squared to his interest; his enmities were deep, burn-
ing, and unappeasable. His paroxysms of rage were
terrific — Satanic — the madness of a foul distempered
soul. At first he affected a kind of austerity of manners,
and pretended to despise all worldly grandeur ; but anon
he plunged headlong into the flood of iniquity which
set in with the Eestoration. His sensuality was that of
the sow wallowing in the mire, unaccompanied by any
of that refinement which half veils its grossness. He
rushed into a course of the wildest extravagance, and
would be guilty of any baseness to wring out money for
the support of liis magnificence. Enriched by the bribes
of Louis, a panderer to the lowest vices of Charles,
grovelling at the feet of his mistresses and blubbering for
their favour, drawing his strength from every species of
wickedness, — he turned round and defied all the assaults

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 271

of those who sought to overthrow him, whether from
envy or from patriotism. In the earlier part of his life
he seemed under religious convictions, and courted the
friendship of such men as Eichard Baxter; but after
these impressions wore off he was capable of the most
awful falsehoods and blasphemous appeals to God, and
the favourite exercise of his coarse humour was to pun
upon texts of Scripture, and mimic his old doings
amongst the Covenanters. For his mess of pottage he
sold himself, soul and body, to all the monstrous pro-
jects of the Court." ^

Such is the man who, by a strange freak of fortune,
for a moment stands prominent as the introducer of more
moderate counsels for the management of the Scottish
recusants. In 1669 an Act of Indulgence was put forth,
bearing grace and kindness on its front; but it was not
the benignity of an angel, but the fair-faced calculation
of a fox, from which it proceeded. The indulgence was
an act of concession, granting to the Presbyterians a
certain limited freedom under royal superintendence ;
meaning something like this : — I will not throw you
into prison, nor confine you on the Bass Eock, nor
banish you from the country, nor treat you as a traitor,
provided you walk quietly, and do a permitted part of
your work within certain prescribed bounds. In other
words, I keep you stiU as my servants, and sworn to
my system, but remove certain restrictions so as to

1 Tfie Scottish Covenanters. By James Dodds. Edinburgh, 1860.
Pp. 191-194.

272 LAY SERMONS.

make your service more easy, and your burden more
light. The acceptance of such a concession could be a
matter of course only with those who had been half-
hearted in the great struggle between the country and
the king for liberty of conscience, and who were more
concerned for their own personal comfort than for the
assertion of a great public principle. To serve in any
shape under an Episcopal establishment was to admit
the right of the State to dictate in religious matters, and
practically to take all virtue from the noble national
protest made in the Greyfriars Churchyard by the heads
of the people in the year 1638. The men of mark and
manhood, accordingly, the leaders and typical men of
Scotch nationality at the time, rejected the Indulgence.
The measure, however, did not fail of its calculated
effect. The effect was twofold : First, To cause division
in the ranks of the recusants, and by division to intro-
duce weakness ; and Second, To give a new stimulus to
the suppression of what were called conventicles ; that
is, gatherings of pious people on the hills and in the
glens of their native country for the purpose of worship-
ping their Maker freely in the fashion that commended
itself to their consciences as most aGjreeable to the
divine will ; for in the mouth of the persecuting party
it seemed only reasonable to say, that if greater liber-
ties had been permitted with regard to worshipping
within doorS; so much the more unreasonable was it
to persevere in the rebellious practice of praising God
outside. And so, in spite of all the fair grace of this

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 273

Episcopalian concession, the royal practice was still
continued of scouring the whole country with dragoons,
in order to fill the pockets of their unlicensed ma-
rauders with fines imposed on persons who refused
to worship according to the recognised limitations of
royal absolutism. Add to this, that shortly after the
grantiug of the Indulgence by the influence chiefly of
the Countess of Dysart, who ruled Lauderdale, the men
of moderate counsels who had been associated with
him after the affair of Eullion Green were dismissed,
and the old system of systematic exhaustion of the
severely bled patient resumed in full vigour. Where
imprisonment and punishment could not be practised,
fines did the work, with scarcely less severity, all over
the country. In one small county alone — Eenfrew —
the fines imposed upon proprietors for various acts of
sympathy or connivance with the people in their en-
deavours to escape the scent of the omnipresent heresy-
hunter, amounted to little short of £90,000, according
to the present value of money ; and the Marquis of
Athole, a creature of Lauderdale, who had a gift of
certain fines, made by them in one week upwards of
£5000.^ This state of matters was not made better
but rather worse by the fall of the Cabal, and the return
of the Anglican party to power in the year 1673. Under
any ministry Lauderdale knew how to care for himself;
and Sharp, for a season in the background, was again
in a condition to pursue his old policy against the

1 Dodds.
T

274 LAY SERMONS.

faithful of the hand — a policy founded literally on the
model of St. Paul, before his conversion, when, to use
his own words (Acts xxii. 4), he persecuted the
Christians " unto the death, binding and delivering into
prisons both men and women." Every pious and
patriotic Presbyterian man was now put under ban ;
to harbour such an interdicted person, to give him a
morsel of bread when hungry, or a glass of water when
tliirsty, or a night's shelter from the wintry storm, was
a crime which, according to the various hue of its
fictitious enormity, might lead to the Tolbooth, to
Barbadoes, or to the Bass. Under this system of
sucking out the strength and stamping out the manhood
of the nation, a state of utter enfeeblement and prostra-
tion ensued, which sought to relieve itself — but alas !
for the time ineffectually — by desperate plunges of spas-
modic revolt. Of these wild plunges the violent death
of the arch-traitor Sharp, which took place at Magus
Muir, not far from St. Andrews, on the 3d day of May
1679, was the first, and forms a notable turning-point
in the further development of this sanguinary drama.
With regard to the violent thrusting aside of Sharp, I
am sorry to see that even sensible writers at the present
day seem to feel themselves bound either to make
apologies for the act, or, as their leanings may be, to
declare that neither apology nor palliation is possible.-^

^ " Surely it may be confidently hoped — let us say it may be at once
believed — that at this day, no man sane and intelligent, making him-
self acquainted with the nature of the deed, would have a word to say
in vindication or even in palliation of it." — Buhton.

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 275

But a little consideration will convince any impartial
thinker that these judgments proceed either from an
incapacity of all historical aj^pre elation, or from an
amount of prejudice which renders all appreciation im-
possible. It is the word assassination, I imagine, that
is the bugbear here. But assassination is a word that
may cover acts as different in character as lust is from
love, or superstition from religion. No doubt, in quiet
times of regulated life, when the rulers of the world
perform their normal functions tolerably well, and
know to reign by the one only right of divine wisdom,
and to send forth their decrees in conformity with the
immutable law of eternal justice (Pro v. viii. 15), nothing
can be more uncalled for, and few things more repre-
hensible, than an act of vulgar assassination. Such an
act, by taking the law into the hand of the individual,
actually abolishes all law, and brings society back into
the most savage and unsocial state, when every man
for every crime was his own judge and his own avenger,
when justice was done, if done at all, in an extravagant
and unwarrantable way, not by the cool award of an
impartial arbiter, but under the spur of momentary
passion or deep - seated rancour ; and this too, often
under circumstances of secresy and of helplessness, of
which an honourable man would scorn to take advan-
tage. The assassin stabs his enemy, defenceless, in the
dark and on the back, because he dares not face him by
daylight with an open challenge. King David refused
to make away with King Saul in the cave, because, had

276 LAY SERMONS.

he done so, he would have disgraced his nobility by
manifesting the spirit of an assassin and a poltroon.
But there are occasions on which the individual may
justly take the law into his own hand ; and among
such occasions may most certainly be numbered those
abnormal and monstrous conditions of society, when
law is not only the inadequate expression of justice,
as frequently will happen with the imperfection of all
human arrangements, but when these two regulators
of all common action amongst reasonable beings are
systematically opposed ; when the poles of the moral
law are inverted ; when the magistrate sits on his seat
literally as a terror to good men, and a praise and a pro-
tection to those who do evil ; and when the existence
of government in the country is known to the people
principally by a sequence of legalised robberies under
the name of confiscations, and a system of legalised
murders under the name of treason. In such circum-
stances every lover of his kind, — every man who has
faith in God and in the moral government of the world,
in opposition to the crouching and cowardly submission
preached by the Stuarts and their priestly satellites, — is
bound to maintain the sacred right of insurrection ; and
in cases where a general insurrection is not possible, a
special dealing with a notoriously infamous individual,
in the shape of what may be called assassination, may
become perfectly justifiable. Sharp was not only a man
whose head might at any time, by an impartial jury (had
any such then been possible), have justly been held up

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 277

to public execration, with the phrase, Behold the head
of a traitor I — but he was a systematic persecutor, a
priest who had abused his sacred function to salve the
civil oppressor with holy phrases to mask his atrocities ;
and who had w^aded knee-deep, for nearly a generation,
in the blood of Scotland's most heroic and most sainted
sons. How it should be accounted a crime to give such
a man a taste of the bloody justice which he had dealt
so plentifully to others, I find it difficult to understand.
Law and legality are not words which possess any vir-
tue to hide from me the radical instincts and the in-
alienable rights of nature, — rights which these specious
names have so often served to overlay and to smother
for a season. There is no iniquity of the most out-
rageous kind, as the pages of history largely declare,
which has not been perpetrated under the fair name
and with the authority of law. When, therefore, the
moral life of a nation has been cramped, and its breath-
ing stifled, by a tissue of those artificial sanctions to
villany which a conclave of robbers and conspirators
call laws. Nature, who will not allow herself to be
choked or stamped out by any conclaves, however pre-
tentious, bursts these invasive fetters some fine morning
volcanically, where she can best find vent ; and the
eruption may be in the form of what smooth and
respectable people, living in quiet times, shudder at,
and call assassination. It is another question, of course,
whether either a popular insuiTection against a tyran-
nical government, or a popular assassination against an

278 LAY SERMONS.

infamous individual, at any time, and under any given
circumstances, is politic or not. Of the riglit of Nature
to avenge herself in both cases, in my opinion, there can
be no question. I have the most perfect sympathy with
the godly sincerity of the men who went to that bloody
work with a prayer on their tongue and a sacred sanction
in their breast. It was a work which was forced upon
them by the gross offence of the times, and for which
they were not answerable ; but whether the blow
which descended judicially with full right on the head
of the traitor was dealt wisely, with a view to immediate
results and future consequences, I do not decide. The
general law reigns, as stated above in reference to the
affair of the Pentlands, that the failure of an insurrec-
tion will always be the signal for an increased severity
of oppression, and always supplies the existing authori-
ties with a fair excuse for those severities. That this
may have been the case with the bloody taking off of
that mitred offender, on the roadside between Ceres and
St. Andrews, I have little doubt ; still my sympathies
beat warmly with the assassins. It seems most un-
reasonable to expect calm policy from a people smart-
ing for years under such an intolerable combination of
civil and sacerdotal violence ; and therefore I insert
here some verses which I wrote on the subject full
thirty years ago, while standing on the very ground
where that deed of red retribution was committed, and
which, I feel convinced, express my deliberate convic-
tions on the subject more firmly and more effectively

THE SCOTTISH COA^ENANTERS. 279

than I have now endeavoured to do it in the more loose
medium of prose.

LINES WRITTEN AT MAGUS MUIR.

Lament wlio will the surplice rent,

And mitre trampled low,
I cannot think the blow misspent,

That felled our priestly foe.

Who sent him here ? — A perjured king.

His work ? — With Churchman's art
To bind young Freedom's mounting wing.

And crush a people's heart.

Ill-omened priest ! for courtly j^lace

Well made, and cold propriety ;
But here thou found'st a fervid race,

Whose sternly-glowing piety

Scorned paper laws. Their free-bred soul

Went not with priests to school,
To trim the tippet and the stole.

And pray by printed rule ;

But they would cast the eager word

From their heart's fiery core,
Smoking and red, as God had stirred

The Hebrew men of yore.

And thou didst come, a cassocked slave,

With windy proclamation.
Parchment and ink, and wax, to brave

The spirit of a nation ;

280 LAY SERMONS.

And witli rasli plume didst brush the flame,

And wert consumed, poor fly ! —
So perish all who join the name

Of Christ with tyranny !

Prate not of law and lawyer's art !

When kingly sin is rife.
The law is in a people's heart

That whets the needful knife.

0 Scotland ! 0 my country ! thou

Through blood hast waded w^ell ;
From glorious Bannockburn till now

The tyrant hears his knell

Rung from thy iron heart. And we,

In lone rock-girdled glen,
Or purple heath, erect and free.

From harsh, knife-bearing men

Inherit peace. Lament who will

The mitre trampled low ;
Not all are murderers who kill ;

The cause commends the blow.

The blood of the mitred time-server had scarcely
dried when the long -suppressed popular indignation
suddenly broke out among the gray moors and black peat
bogs that lie thickly in the hilly ground between Ayrshire
and Lanarkshire. This was the strong ground of the
Covenanters, who, in spite of constant dragooning and
terrible declarations of treason and its red consequences,
persisted in praising God in their own way and causing
the heather braes to resound with the billows of a manly

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 281

and free-breasted psalmody. As field worship was a
capital crime in the eyes of a sacerdotal Government,
who believed the worship of God was acceptable only
when conducted within certain walls of stone and lime,
and by persons bearing certain arbitrary titles, and
dressed in certain prescribed robes, those sturdy wor-
shippers were obliged to fence their meetings round
with armed watchers, ready for a surprise. At one of
these armed conventicles, as they were called, a young
rising soldier, of less brutal character than the Turners
and Dalziels who had preceded him — John Graham of
Claverhouse — suddenly came upon the Covenanters as
they were celebrating worship beneath the shade of
Loudon Hill near the sources of the Avon, with the
thought that he could easily disperse them. But it
turned out otherwise. They were singing the seventy-
sixth psalm — a psalm full of war and judgment and
victory ; and the striking words of the verse —

" When thy rebuke, 0 Jacob's God,
Had forth against them pass'd,
Their horses and their chariots both
Were in a dead sleep cast "

seemed to have inspired them with a strength to which
even the tried tactics of a gallant young soldier, trained
in the schools of France and Holland, proved unequal.
Claverhouse was routed; and the little remnant of
patriots, saved from the discouragement and demorali-
sation of a twenty years' persecution, had at last achieved

282 LAY SEEMONS.

a memorable success. But the success was momentary.
In a few weeks Drumclog was followed by Bothwell
Brig. There the natural strength of an established gov-
ernment against a sudden insurrectionary force was aided
by most unwise division among the spiritual leaders
of the patriotic army, with an utter want of that general-
ship which alone can in war lead to permanent results.
The Covenanting strength was a second time completely
broken ; Bothwell Brig was even a more complete
failure than Bullion Green. The last desperate struggle
to shake off the oppressive yoke of civil and sacerdotal
absolutism had been made in vain. Prostration was
now complete, hope extinguished, and the reign of
blood inaugurated anew.

I will not enter upon the disgusting and dishearten-
ing details of coarse, spiteful triumph, and malignant,
crushing revenge, that followed on this defeat. The
horrors of an African slave ship and the life in death
of a Calcutta Black Hole were enacted here on the bodies
of the only people in whom a spark of manhood had
been left strong enough to resist the smothering in-
fluence of pervasive tyranny in the land. But though
Scotland now lay bleeding under the mitred insolence
of the Stuarts, as Greece did under the iron hoof of
the ^Macedonian, the same God who raised up a Demos-
thenes to fight the battle of national independence in
the midst of general prostration and corruption, raised
up a prophet and a protector for Scotland in the hour
of her utmost need — and that prophet was Eiciiard

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 283

Cameron. On the 22d day of June 1680, — the very day
of the anniversary of the Bothwell Brig prostration, — the
gray old burgh of Sanquhar, with its picturesque castle
and winding water amid the ridges of wild heathy hills
tow^ards the sources of the Nith in Dumfriesshire, was
startled by the sudden tramp of a body of horsemen,
who rode straight up to the market-place, and there,
after singing a psalm and offering up a prayer, two of
them dismounted, and amidst the holy hush of the
multitude read forth the following declaration : — " We

DO BY THESE PRESENTS DISOWN CHARLES StUART, THAT
HAS BEEN REIGNING, OR RATHER TYRANNISING, ON THE
THRONE OF BRITAIN THESE TWENTY YEARS BYGONE, AS
HAVING ANY RIGHT, TITLE TO, OR INTEREST IN THE CrOWN

OF Scotland for government, as forfeited many years
since by his perjury and breach of covenant, both to
God and the Church, and by his tyranny and breach
OF the leges regnandi — the very essential conditions
of government in matters civil. We do declare

WAR against such A TYRANT AND USURPER, AND ALL THE
MEN OF HIS PRACTICES. AnD WE HOPE NONE WILL BLAME
US, OR BE OFFENDED AT OUR REWARDING THOSE THAT ARE
AGAINST US, AS THEY HAVE DONE TO US, AS THE LORD

MAY GIVE US OPPORTUNITY." This is One of the most
manly, stout-hearted, noble-minded, and courageous
protests in the name of civil and religious liberty that
ever was made on the blood-stained floors of history.
We all remember when, at no distant date, a strong
man marched over Europe, shaking the oldest and best

284 LAY SERMONS.

established thrones by the tread of his terrible foot, and
proclaiming by his mere word to the astonished nations
that this and the other mighty empire had ceased to
exist, and this and that famous crowned head was no
longer numbered among the princes of the earth. But
these were acts of mere violence. With some hundred
thousand men at his back, and no danger visible before,
such fiats could be largely fulminated without raising
any sentiment higher than vulgar fear and astonishment.
But the act of Eichard Cameron was an act not only of
grand prophetic instinct, but of courage and moral
nobility, not surpassed by the most celebrated acts of self-
sacrifice in the annals of Greek and Eoman patriotism ;
and if the name of this Scottish prophet is not as well
known in the annals of civil and religious liberty as that
of Socrates is in the records of moral progress, it is to
be attributed not to the inferior moral dignity of the act,
but to the less public stage on which the act wa^ ex-
hibited, and the want of classical recorders of his virtue.
Had the life and deeds of Demosthenes come to our ears
through Macedonian writers, as the life and deeds of
Cameron came to the general public in these islands
from the pen of Episcopalian and Eoyalist historians,
many people would have acknowledged the great Athe-
nian orator with as scanty and grudgeful a meed of praise
as they now may dole out to the great Scottish prophet
of the glorious English Settlement of 1688. Morally,
Cameron was as great a man as Socrates, and a greater
than Demosthenes. The Declaration of Sanquhar, it

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 285

may be said by those who would be blind to its heroism,
was the most foolish and futile of public protests that
was ever put forth by political or religious fanaticism.
Foolish it certainly was, if the preservation of their own
lives had been the object of the protesters ; futile it
certainly was not, as it served to sound through the
length and breadth of the land the important fact that,
in spite of all the innocent blood that had been shed,
and all the noble lives that had been sacrificed, the
spirit of Scotland was not yet crushed ; and there sur-
vived a soul in the pi aided prophets of the hills, before
which, at no distant period, the blood-bolted minions
of tyranny would flee in precipitate dismay, like the
myriads of Xerxes before the faithful little bands of
Marathon and Platasa. Foolish the Declaration of San-
quhar certainly was in a worldly sense, even as was also
the death of Socrates ; but if foolish in one estimate,
not the less noble and not the less wise in another.
Socrates might have escaped with his head on his
shoulders, if he had pleased ; that is a well-known
fact ; but he was more anxious to seal his mission
with his death than to save his life by some legal
subterfuge or some affected respect. Exactly so
Cameron ; he published the Magna Charta of the
Eevolution Settlement at the time when he knew that
such publication was death to all who took any part in
it. He chose to die as Patrick Hamilton and George
Wishart had died at the opening of the great struggle of
the Eeformation, because he knew that the germ of

286 LAY SEEMONS.

Scottish liberty, civil and religious, had grown up from
the watering of that blood, and could not be restored to
its ow^n greenness and sturdiness by any element less
precious. He lived the life of a patriot and a prophet ;
and he died the death of a patriot and a soldier on the
bloody field of Airds Moss, where his gray memorial
now stands. Blessed is the people that can bend a
loyal knee and breathe a pious prayer before the monu-
ment of such a man !

Eichard Cameron is gone to his rest ; and w^e must
now turn our eyes on a less pleasant spectacle than the
stage of a patriotic defiance, and the field of a devout
battle. Instead of the battle-field we now look aojain
at the scaffold ; and instead of something like a fair
fight, we must, for a few years longer, behold treachery
and butchery in league to exterminate, if it might be,
the small remnant of moral nobility in the land. The
most notable personage in the first scene of the last act
of this long-protracted bloody drama is Egbert Baillie
of Jerviswood. Here we are introduced to a new form
of atrocity, as if the infuriated despots of these times
had wished to exhaust every possible variation of
tigerhood in the guise of humanity. In Hugh MacKail
they had fleshed their teeth with the youngest and most
delicate and most gracious of Scottish youth ; Baillie of
Jerviswood, a frail old man on the verge of the grave,
and a gentleman of good social repute and the highest
respectability, was the victim whom they now picked
out to glut their ripe appetite. It is needless to state

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 287

with what crime he was charged, or to inquire curiously
what proofs were brought forward to support the charge.
His crime, of course, was that he was a Presbyterian,
and could not be expected to cherish any very warm
feelings of loyalty towards a perjured monarch, who fol-
lowed one consistent idea through his base life — to root
out all religious conscience and all moral dignity from
the land ; but Baillie had been moderate and discreet
in his utterances ; and, had not justice been equally
trampled out with liberty under the iron foot of
absolutism, the condemnation of such a man would have
been impossible. But in a land where law and prose-
cutor and judge and jury were one, and all leagued in
an infamous conspiracy to crush conscience and man-
hood out of the breasts of Scottish men, any slightest
shadow of a proof, or no proof at all, in the case of
involved persons, was sufl&cient to substantiate a charge
of what the lawyers of those days, in the slang
of their profession, called constructive treason. It
was a sight to move tears even in the eyes of the
most hardened of Claverhouse's dragoons, when that
venerable old gentleman was brought before the
Court wrapped in his dressing-gown as he had risen
from his sick bed, and attended by his sister-in-
law, daughter of the celebrated Warriston, who from
time to time administered cordials to keep up his
fainting strength. Mackenzie of Eosehaugh, the king's
advocate, commonly called "the bloody Mackenzie,"
pressed the charge with the usual violence characteristic

288 LAY SERMONS.

of the partisan prosecutors of those times ; but Jervis-
wood not only denied every charge in detail with the
utmost precision, but appealed in open Court to the
prosecutor with the startling question, how he could in
public so violently accuse him, when in private he had
confessed to him that he did not believe him guilty ?
To which the advocate, accustomed to act professionally
as a mere speaking-trumpet to the conclave of conspira-
tors by whom the country w^as ruled, pointing to the
Clerk of the Privy Council, then present, coolly replied :
" I spoke to you then as a private individual ; what I
say here I speak by special direction of the Privy
Council ; he — the clerk — knows my orders." " Well/'
replied Jerviswood, " if you have one conscience for
yourself and another for the Council, I pray God for-
give you ; I do."^ The law of course, as law was in
those days, took its course ; and one of the noblest of
Scottish gentlemen was forthwith beheaded and quar-
tered and mutilated, and hung up to public exposure
through the land like the vilest of malefactors.

Another notable figure that looms forth conspicu-
ously at various stages through the bloody mist of those
"killing times" was Alexander Peden, commonly
called Peden the Prophet, who, however, by some happy
chain of circumstances, had the singular luck in those
days to die in his bed. When the heady eagerness of
IMiddleton had caused the secession of the four hundred

^ Hetherington's History of the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh,
1841. Vol. ii. p. 493.

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES. 289

brave recusants, Peden was minister of Glenluce, in a
remote corner of Wigtonshire, and at once cliose his
portion with the party which expressed the manhood
and independence of the country. Alter preaching his
last sermon, on leaving the pulpit he shut the door
emphatically behind him, and giving it three stout raps
with his Bible, said — " I hereby arrest you, in the name
of my Master, and solemnly enjoin to allow no man to
preach here who does not enter by the authority of the
King of kings, freely and unconditionally, as I did!"
And from that time, history records, there never was a
preacher opened his mouth in the pulpit till the day of
the E evolution of 1688, when the servile curates and
glib venal talkers (whom Peden in his picturesque
phrase used to call the Devil's rattle-bags) gave place to
the free and independent evangelists of the National
Church. This well-known incident sufficiently indicates
the mixture of dramatic emphasis and moral divination
in his attitude which gained him the name of Peden the
Prophet, — a designation in reference to which, no doubt,
many exaggerated stories were told, and it may be also,
as Wodrow asserts, not a few manifest forgeries launched
into circulation,^ but which indicates, in the most ex-
pressive way, the presence of an original character of
great depth of feeling and vividness of imagination.
How a man who was always in the midst of the perse-
cuted, roaming often at large between " one bloody land
and another" — Ireland and Scotland, as he phrased it

1 Wodrow, book iii. chap. x.
U

290 LAY SERMONS.

— should have escaped so long the multitudinous spies
and scouts, informers and bloodhounds in human shape,
to whom so many less notorious actors in the same
bloody drama fell a victim, might look almost like one
of those special providential provisions to which the
godly men of those times were fond of attributing all
the chances of personal as of national life. He did not
escape the Bass, however, and w^as in fact sent up to
London in 1678 to be shipped off to Virginia, or any
other of the American plantations. But in London he
had the good fortune to meet with a ship captain of a
very different sort of conscience from that of the hard
lawyer who used his venal rhetoric to procure the exe-
cution of the Laird of Jerviswood. This honest seaman,
on being informed that, instead of a gang of thieves and
robbers and evildoers, he was expected to convey into
banishment a company of grave Christian men, exiled
for obeying God rather than man in matters of religious
faith, bluntly said " he would sail tlie sea with none
such ;" and there being no other ship there ready to sail,
and little money in the Government chest to pay the
expense of keeping them in London (there were sixty of
them in all), they were set at liberty without any impo-
sition of bonds or oaths ; and some good Christians in
London showed them great kindness.-^ Thus singularly
preserved for the land which he loved, and in whose
speedy redemption he potently believed, this faithful
servant of Christ contrived to wander in deserts and in

^ Life of Pcdcn. Loudon, 1774.

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 291

mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth, till, worn
out with many sorrows, he died in his native parish
among the hills of Sorn in Ayrshire, aged eighty-six years,
only two years before the glorious Eevolution Settle-
ment ; but not till he had the satisfaction of leaving his
blessing and his mission with the last of the sacred
band of Scottish Covenanting martyrs, the noble-minded
Eenwick. It ought to be mentioned, as a fact strikingly
characteristic of the brutality of that age, or rather of
the men who gloried to stamp the age with their atro-
cities, that the soldiers in the pay of the Episcopising
Government, disappointed that they had never been able
to strike their fangs into the body of the living man,
determined to wreak their vengeance on his corpse,
which they accordingly dug out from the grave beneath
his paternal plane trees, and hung it upon a gibbet on a
hill above Cumnock, where the common gallows stood.-^
James Eenwick, on whom the last stroke of the
Episcopal axe was destined to fall, but who, as Dodds
well remarks, ought rather to be known in history as
the Pre-martyr of the Eevolution Settlement, was
born in Minniehive, a beautiful village in the heart of the
Covenanting country, in the year 1662. He was con-
sequently a mere youth, not above three-and-twenty
years old, at the death of Charles II., when James VII.
came openly forward with his long-cherished scheme of
establishing Popery in these islands, which he intro-
duced in a very subtle way, by sending forth edicts

^ Dodds, chap, x., who is particularly good on Peden.

292 LAY SERMONS.

of general religions toleration. Toleration from the
Papists ! rather a strange sound ! Enter the devil
with a cup of holy water in his hands, but his hands
are black nevertheless, and his whole body smells of
blood. Eenwick was a young man of remarkable
capacity, of fine feelings, and of good education ; he
had studied both in Edinburgh and in Holland ; and
with the clear glance of an uncorrupted mind and
an unbribed conscience had seen clearly that all com-
promise with Episcopising and Eomanising Stuarts on
the throne was impossible. He accordingly joined
himself to the followers of the noble Cameron, who,
under the name of the " Society men," had formed
themselves into a widespread association, the watch-
word of which was the formal renunciation of James
VII. as lawful sovereign of the kingdom of Scotland.
Of course they were right in all this ; for James had
usurped absolute power in a free country, and conspired
to introduce Popery into a Protestant country. But in
the meantime he sat there ; and Eenwick knew very
weU what he was doing when he put himself at the
head of these patriotic and constitutional convocations ;
whatever he might be before God, and by Scottish
public -law, when public law was in the land, he was
now in the eye of the Popish Government a rebel and a
heretic of the extreme type ; and, as the Cameronian
Societies were specially exempted from the Toleration
Acts, he could expect no safety, except so long as he
might dweU with the wild birds on the bleak hills of

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 293

Glencairn. But skulking about in that way did not
suit his temper. So, after he had been preaching in
Fife, and, coming across to Edinburgh, happened to be
lodging with a friend on the Castlehill, the Harpies of
the law surprised him, and pursuing him down the
Castle Wynd to the head of the Cowgate, came upon
him, when he fell several times, and got him securely
in their fangs ; and shortly after, on the 8th February
1688, had him tried before the Justiciary. Of course,
though there might be pity in some eyes, there could be
no mercy. Not a few even of the persecuting party
wished to save the life of the handsome, high-spirited
youth who had thus thrown himself straight into the
arms of death. Even in their eye the bloody game was
being played too grossly. One word would have saved
him ; but, like Socrates, that one word he would not
speak. He would not admit the justice of his con-
demnation in order to gain what in his conviction
would have been a dishonourable acquittal. He could
as soon have sworn that the Evil One had a right to sit
upon the throne of God, as that James VII. could
lawfully sit upon the Protestant throne of this country;
He would as soon have said that the new-born babe
had no right to breathe, as that Scottish Presbyterians
had no right to worship God on their native hills
according to the dictates of their conscience. He
resisted all attempts to make him sign any shadow
of a recantation of his constitutional principles. He
would not swear fealty to a tyrant, a traitor to the

294 LAY SERMONS.

Scottish liberties, and a usurper of the divine rights of
the Christian Church. He was executed in the Grass-
market, as Socrates was in the Athenian prison, with
the w^ords of manhood and courage and consolation in
his mouth. The cruel drums of the sacrificers drowned
a great portion of the cheerful words of constancy
and hope and ultimate victory which he gave as his
last bequeathment to his country ; but they could not
stop the tears that flowed copiously from the eyes of the
surrounding multitude.

" Weep ! Scotland, weep ! but only for a day,
Frail stands the throne whose props are glued -with gore ;
For a short hour the godless man holds sway.
And Justice whets her knife at Murder's door.
Weep, Scotland ! but, let noble Pride this day
Gleam through tliine eye with sorrow streaming o'er ;
For why ? — thy Renwick's dead, whose noble crime
Gave Freedom's trumpet breath an hour before the Time ! "

What remains of this bloody history — the few
months from the murder of this noble boy to the
Eevolution Settlement — belongs to the British Empire
generally, not specially to Scotland. The open pro-
fession of Popery by James, and his pig-headed per-
sistency in running a-muck against all parties in the
State, crowned his isolation by its natural fruit, a
formal disownment; and the stamp of legality and
public right was now placed on the prophetic disclaimer
of the Cameronians. I have only one word to say in
conclusion. Thoudi the acerbities and soreness and

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 295

unwortliy jealousies which, as an inheritance from the
bloody times which we have been sketching, have long
ceased to be felt between Episcopalians and Presby-
terians in Scotland, it still remains a fact that our
society, in the matter of religious sentiment, exhibits
the spectacle of two distinct strata, which refuse at
various points to interflow. A considerable section of
the upper classes are Episcopalians by conviction and
by inheritance, while not a few latterly, whether from
marriage with English families, from peculiar aesthetic
sensibilities, or from mere fashion and vulgar notions of
worldly respectability, have joined the same body.
These classes, though not formidable in numbers — for
Presbyterianism is still unquestionably the backbone,
and Episcopacy only the dress-coat of Scotland — exer-
cise a social influence, and communicate a certain tone
to popular sentiment, which has acted most unfavour-
ably to the memory of our great Presbyterian heroes,
the Covenanters. The historic traditions of the Epis-
copalians also lead them to devote themselves with
special love to historical study ; and so it has happened
that the historical literature of Scotland has received a
strong tinge from men who, in common with our great
popular novelist, and our singers of Jacobite ballads,
were more disposed to see the ludicrous than the
heroic aspect of the plaided prophets of the hills. And
even among those whose sense of justice forced them
to confess that the stern men of the Covenant were
not only morally noble and constitutionally in the

296 LAY SERMONS.

right, but worthy in some sense of a niche in the
Pantheon of the select and the elect of the earth,
there is wont to be a qualification given, to the effect
that in point of principle the one party was not one
whit better than the other, and that the Covenanters
would have persecuted, and in some cases actually did
persecute, the Episcopalians, with no less intolerance,
where only they might find an opportunity. This
judgment is given without a proper historical discrimi-
nation. Neither the Covenanters, nor the Episcopalians,
nor, in fact, any people in Europe in the seventeenth
century, had acknowledged the doctrine of religious
toleration as it is now almost universally acknowledged.
It is by no means an easy matter to define in every
case where the action of the State should cease, and all
compulsory forces in moral matters be disallowed. It
is only the other day that religious tests in universities
were abolished ; and it was no fault of the Covenanting
theologians if, in the days of Cromwell, — when, by the
way, statutable intolerance was intensified by civil strife
and party hatred, — a zealous presbytery here and there
exacted fines from a pious Episcopalian lady for not
attending the parish church.^ The motives from which
this conduct proceeded were based on the general law
of Europe, and could not be eradicated from the clerical
mind till the hot blood of the great civil wUr had

^ See Tlie Abbey of Paisley from its Foundation to its Dissolution,
by Dr. J. Cameron Lees, Paisley, 1878. Chapter 24 ; The Abercorns
and tliu Kirk.

THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. 297

cooled down, and the world had time to consider anew
to what conclusions the great Protestant doctrine of
private judgment must necessarily lead. But what the
patriotic men who signed the Solemn League and Cove-
nant in the Greyfriars Churchyard in 1638 solemnly
declared, and what with no less solemnity, and with
much greater boldness, was solemnly declared after
them by the Cameronians at the Cross of Sanquhar,
was simply this : — Every distinct people has a right to
its national conscience, and no civil magistrate or foreign
ruler has a right to impose a creed, a liturgy, or a church
government on an unwilling people. The king, as
head of the social organism, according to the acknow-
ledged ideal of the century, is a representative man, who,
if he does not personally belong to the National Church
— which is the most fitting and natural thing in the
case — must at all events swear to its maintenance, and
do nothing that goes directly to undermine it. Against
this plain proposition of public right the Stuarts and
their prelatic advisers rebelled; and, after long-continued
attempts to trample on popular liberty and strangle the
national conscience, they were cast out of the stomach
of the country as an intolerable and indigestible morsel.
The Covenanters were the men in Scotland who main-
tained this internecine struggle in its darkest days, and
through its most hopeless stages ; their noble resistance
fought out for us the platform on which we now stand ;
maintained for us the erect attitude of freemen which
is our pride ; and left for us the noblest inheritance that

298 LAY SERMONS.

fathers can leave to their sons, a retrospect of courage,
consistency, and unspotted honour. From the glory
thus belonging to them, no secondary faults, arising
whether from the imperfection of human nature or the
necessarily slow growth of the social harmonies, can be
allowed to detract ; and on calm consideration of the
whole matter, every true Scot wdio loves his country will
give his full assent to the words of the great lyrical
exponent of our best feelings as Scotsmen —

" The Solemn League and Covenant
Cost Scotland blood, cost Scotland tears ;
But Faith sealed Freedom's sacred cause ;
If tliou'rt a slave, indulge thy sneers ! "

These words were written by a man, from his station
in society and his paternal traditions far better able to
take the true measure of the heroes of the Covenant
than either Walter Scott with his wonderful wealth
of chivalrous lore, or Professor Aytoun with the fervid
flash of his aristocratic fancy, or Burton with his rough
justice and hard political appreciation. History to be
understood must be written and read in the same spirit
in which it was acted. Unsympathetic record is always
untrue.

IX.

ON SYMBOLISM, CEEEMONIALISM,
FOEMALISM, AND THE NEW CEEATUEE.

" In Christ Jesus there is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision,
but a new creature." — Galatians vi, 15.

That vast and variously-massed army of speaking things
which we call the world and the universe, from its largest
manifestation in a sun-centre of revolving spheres to its
minutest in the scarcely visible insect that flits for a
moment in the summer beam and dies, falls everywhere
under the double category of foem and foece : foece,
an internal power, felt but not seen, which, Avith whatever
name it may be specialised, is at bottom that self-exist-
ent, self-energising, plastic reason which we justly call
God ; and FOEM, the outward expression or external
planting of that force which we are accustomed to call
Body or Matter. These two things, though in their
nature contrary and antagonistic, are not therefore ne-
cessarily separable ; on the contrary, it stands before our
eyes patently as part of the divine mystery of the uni-
verse that in some degree or other they always co-exist,

300 LAY SERMONS.

like show and substance/ and even in their extremes t
divergence cannot be divorced. The most solid form of
matter — the white quartz rock, or the close-grained
metal — is still drawn towards a centre, and powerfully
held together by the force called gravitation ; while, on
the other hand, the subtlest forms of energy which we
know — Light, Electricity, and Thought — either operate
through an extremely attenuated ether, or demand a
machinery to make their existence felt. There is no
motion without a moving medium ; no thinking without
brain ; no stroke without muscle. But though, so far
as our senses can testify, inseparable, these two con-
trasted elements of all existence are by no means of like
dignity and importance. Coeval they may be in the
absolute nature of things, but not coequal. The one
stands to the other manifestly in a relation of depend-
ence and subordination, as the clay does to the potter,
as the fuel does to the fire, as the word does to the
thought of which it is the exponent. The whole signifi-
cance and virtue of things, the magic of vitality, vhe
charm of beauty, the sovereignty of intellect, lies in the
force — a force which always strives after an embodi-
ment that may be more or less expressive of its highest
virtue, but which, in whatever degree, always lends to
the form the only value which gives it a place in the
great account of things. The value of things, whether
material or moral, in fact, always depends upon the

1 ' ' Der Schein was ist er dem das Wesen fehlt ?

Das Wesen war es, weiin es niclit erscluene." — Goethe.

ON SYMBOLISM, CEEEMONIALISM, ETC. 301

quality and quantity of the force which is in them ; or,
to use the language of religion, which is always the
most philosophical, on the quality and quantity of the
divine inspiration which breathes through them. The
form in itself is utterly worthless ; without the force a
mere ossification or fossil ; either absolute death, or
something that leads straightway down to death ; as
that well-known evangelic text plainly indicates, the

LETTER KILLETH, BUT THE SPIRIT MAKETH ALIVE.

In the moral world, with which alone we have to
do in this place, the domain of form, under various
aspects, is well known under the names of symbolism,
ceremonialism, formalism, and generally externalism, or
outwardness of different types. ISTow all these things,
of course, are necessary to the sensuous manifestation
of that kind of moral force, the action of which forms a
society or a church ; but of course, also, they derive all
th iir value only from the kind and amount of actually
energising force which they express ; and the moment
they are tempted to assert themselves as having an
indapendent value, oiJocics standi, as the lawyers say, in
the social world, that instant they lose their virtue ;
ossification of the heart commences ; the jewels are being
stolen out of the casket; the expression departs from
the fair face of the woman, and only the features of a
doll remain. The tendency towards this assertion of an
independent existence by the form is to be found in the
history of moral societies of all kinds, specially, how-
ever, in all Churches ; as plentifully everywhere, indeed,

302 LAY SERMONS.

as weeds are in neglected gardens, or rather worse ; for
where weeds grow in a garden the gardener loves to
pluck them np or to trench them down ; whereas, in the
garden of the moral world the spiritual gardener not
seldom makes a business of cultivating the rag-weed
and neglecting the rose. The reason of this strange
phenomenon seems to lie partly in the fact that the
symbol and the ceremonial are the things seen, and thus
act more potently on the senses than the unseen force
behind ; and partly in the weakness of human nature —
oT TToWol Ka/col — which makes it difficult for not a
few persons to feel and to think themselves back into
the deep inward wells of thoughtful sentiment out of
which the symbol sprang, and so they cling to the out-
ward ; by which act, indeed, they contrive to save
themselves from drowning in the seas of doubt and dis-
comfort where poor humanity is often tossed, but fail
to extract any true spiritual nourishment for their souls.
Hence the necessity of preachers, philosophers, prophets,
apostles, poets, orators, and men of all kinds, strong in
the original vitalities of Nature, to act upon the poor
starving dead-alive masses by strong moral stimulants,
direct from the divine Source of life, and the first foun-
tain of all excellence. Hence revolutions, reformations,
and revivals of all kinds, both in the political and in
the religious world. Hence Oliver Cromwell, Mira-
beau, and Bismarck ; hence the Apostle Paul and
Martin Luther, John Knox and John Wesley — men
all divinely missioned, though in the most diverse

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 303

ways, to give the sleeping world a shake, and to teach
politicians that no State can be well governed which
does not honestly strive to support the weak against
the strong, instead of making the strong stronger, and
that no Church can be called Christian which makes
itself known more by magnifying the privileges of the
office-bearers than by working out the salvation of the
people.

The text which we have chosen as a starting-point
to our present meditations, after casting a rapid glance
at the formalism of the Jews, against which St. Paul
had to carry on a life-long protest, leads us to point out
some of the more salient forms under which formalism
parades itself in the existing life of the Christian
Churches ; and then to consider what the apostle indi-
cates as the great restorative force by which life was
to be breathed into the dead bones of Hebrew Cere-
monialism and self-righteous Pharisaism in his days.
This form he makes intelligible under a simile well
known in Oriental theology, called the new birth or
the new creature, or, as our scholastic catechisms have
it, regeneration.

The special badge of distinction on which the Jew
of St. Paul's day based his claim of superiority before
God and man was circumcision. With this as a mere
fleshly peculiarity of hygienic or other significance,
acknowledged by the Egyptians and a few other eastern
nations,-^ but unknown to the Semitic neighbours of the

1 Heroclot. ii. 104.

304 LAY SERMONS.

Jews on the sea-coast, as well as to the Greeks and Eo-
mans, we have nothing here to do. It was not as an oper-
ation of any sanitary virtue or medical significance that
St. Paul found himself forced to stand in an attitude of
continual protest against the advocates of circumcision.
If circumcision, in the estimation of the Jew, placed him
on a high vantage ground of preference above the uncir-
cumcised Gentiles, it was because he inherited this
peculiarity as the descendant of Abraham, the father of
the faithful, and the elect head of the people wdiom God,
at an early period, had chosen as the repository of the
great truth of the divine unity, to be revealed in due
season to the whole world. This is just, in an old
Semitic dress, what we are only too familiar with in our
modern British life — that species of empty self-glorifica-
tion called the pride of pedigree. Now this, of course,
like all deeply-seated and widely-experienced feelings,
has its root in human nature ; and, as so rooted, un-
questionably has its justification as a beneficial force in
the organism of society. To be able to look back on a
noble ancestry, conspicuous from generation to genera-
tion for its practice of all those virtues that make the
good citizen and the eminent patriot, is one of the
greatest blessings that can belong to a human being
born into this world ; for persons so born are not only
launched into the great sea of life under the most favour-
able circumstances and Avith the most auspicious omens ;
but they must be altogether base, and of a clay inferior
to the great mass of humanity, if they do not feel the

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 305

honour of this descent acting within them as a constant
spur to a career that may not show itself as an open
degeneracy from the noble precedents out of which it
sprang. No sound-minded man likes to fall down in
public estimation from the point of his starting, but rather
to rise. And in accordance with this feeling in all the
great social struggles in which humanity has been en-
gaged,— from Moses to the Greeks and Eomans, and from
the Eomans to the most stout asserters of national inde-
pendence in modern times, — we find that no appeal has
been more potent to fire the blood and to nerve the
thews of a lofty patriotism than simply this, not to act
unworthily of our forefathers. But here, as in the case
of money and other external advantages, a good thing
misunderstood, or not wisely used, becomes not only a
bad thing, but one of the worst, as the proverb has it,
Corruptio opti7ni pessima ; and the corruption commences
here, as in other cases, the moment that the virtue of
which the external badge is only the bearer is forgot-
ten, and the badge is used either as a thing of value in
itself, or as a means of procuring things which are
utterly without value. Thus money is an effective sym-
bol, token, or tool, the possession of which may enable
a man to fling out stimulants to beneficent activity
in hundreds of ways from which a penniless man is
altogether barred ; but the moment this natural use
and significance is forgotten, it may be used as
a necromancer's wand for raising all sorts of evil
spirits, and selling the soul of the conjuror to the

X

306 LAY SERMONS.

Devil. Or, to speak more plainly, it may be used — as,
unfortunately, we see it used every day — to purchase
poison instead of food. Even so the pride of pedigree
becomes ridiculous and pernicious the moment it turns
the noble retrospect, which is the soul of it, into a vain
boast instead of an effective spur. To be born of a
noble father, and to live a shameful life, is a double
shame, and not an honour to the person who so drags
his paternal laurels through the mire. Properly
speaking, indeed, a man should not be proud of pedi-
gree at all, but only thankful for it — thankful to
Providence for having started him in life with a stock
of reputable memories, that, if well used, may lift
him to platforms of political importance and social
significance, of which otherwise, with ten times the
amount of talent, he could not have dreamed. The
place of pride in pedigree is not before, but after, the
use has been made of it. And it was because the Jews,
like some of our modern worshippers of rank and title,
prided themselves on their external descent from Abra-
ham, without being at all anxious to know and to
reproduce in their own lives the spirit and the character
of the great patriarch, that St. Paul, in the preaching of
the gospel, felt himself morally bound to encounter them
with the most aggressive hostility. There could be no
compromise between a gospel inspired and permeated
by the pure inwardness of moral motives, and a claim of
superiority before God, founded on external observances,
accidental advantages, or ancestral traditions of what-

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 307

ever kind. To advance such claims was to starve the
children by giving them the shell to feed on instead of
the kernel. It was worse than nothing ; it was making
a virtue of that which was devoid of all virtue ; and
not only so, but a formal barring of the door against
the entrance of all real excellence by the preoccupation
with an imaginary merit. An empty house might be
furnished with useful furniture, if the possessor of the
house only were not besotted in the habit of its empti-
ness ; but a house filled to the ceiling and crammed to
the door with the craziness and mouldiness of all sorts
of ancestral lumber, cannot be trimmed into a state of
comfortable equipment till the old rubbish be clean
swept away. So of circumcision, titles of honour, and
such outward badges of inherited distinction, there
must be a complete clearance in the soul before a
spiritual gospel can have room to come in. To the born
Jew, accordingly, who had circumcision to boast of, it
was plainly said that he is not a Jew who is one out-
wardly in the flesh, but inwardly in the spirit ; while to
the Christian who was not born a Jew, but who never-
theless wished to be circumcised — as we see from the
Epistle that the Galatians did — it was indignantly
answered that to seek for circumcision in his case was
to give plain evidence that the seed of an essentially
spiritual religion had never taken firm root in his
heart.

So much for the Jews. Our next and our more
proper business is to inquire against what manifesta-

308 LAY SERMONS.

tions of a soulless, unevangelical, and unfruitful ex-
ternalism, noticeable in the life of the Christian
Churches at the present clay, may the voice of St. Paul
in the text before us be considered as uttering a solemn
protest. And the most common type of formalism
which meets us here is undoubtedly what our preachers
call trust in ordinances. By ordinances are meant
certain symbolical acts or commemorative celebrations,
in which the faith of a nation rejoices to declare itself
and unfurl its banners solemnly before the world. Such
a great national act of religious symbolism we find in
various seats of polytheistic worship amongst the ancient
G-reeks, under the name of Mysteries, as at Eleusis,
Samothrace, and elsewhere ; and the virtue of these
sacred celebrations consisted simply in their revealing,
by a vivid presentation to the eye, and a serious exercise
of the soul, some pregnant phase of the action of divine
forces in the universe, tending to elevate the soul above
the grossness of mere sensual perception, and to ennoble
human life by the powerful stimulants of high memo-
ries and hopeful aspirations. Thus, at Eleusis, a
reverence for the divine mystery of life, whether, as
visibly displayed before us in the processes of vegeta-
tion and generation, or as prophetically indicated in
the solemn mystery of death, viewed as tlie passage
from a lower to a higher life, was worked into the soul
by the contemplation of the legendary liistory of
Demeter, mother Earth, or the divine Mother ; and this
reverence, in the case of a moral being like man, natur-

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 309

ally connected itself with the possession of a certain
moral purity, which rendered exclusion from the
Mysteries the natural penalty of an immoral and a
vicious life. In this way the hierophant at Eleusis, if
he was no mere worldling, but deeply conscious of the
divine significance of the rites which he administered,
might justly take into his mouth the words with which
the Hebrew Psalmist has expressed the character of a
worthy worshipper in the holy hill at Jerusalem : —
" Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord ? or who
shall stand in his holy place ? He that hath clean hands
and a pure heart, who hath not lifted up his soul unto
vanity, nor sworn deceitfully." Closely analogous to this
consummating act (reXerrj from riXofi) of old Hellenic
piety was the solemn Commemoration Supper of our Lord
with his disciples, of which the institution is told with
such pathetic simplicity in the Gospels — an analogy, in-
deed, so striking, that the word in common use for the
most sacred ceremony of Greek religion {[ivarripLov) was
by an instinctive feeling of the early Greek Church trans-
ferred to the memorial supper. For the outward symbols,
however different in the two cases, equally implied the
participation in a higher moral life by the partaker.
Without this participation the whole ceremony in both
cases became a vanity and a profanation, or, as St. Paul
more strongly expresses it, a condemnation to the un-
worthy participant. The sacrament, as a social act
performed by a body of Christians, was in itself simply
a badge : and, like other badges, valuable only in so far

310 LAY SERMONS.

as it truly expressed the sentiments, character, and
conduct of the person who wore it ; otherwise, it be-
came not only unmeaning, but a lie and a treachery
and a snare, insomuch as a false friend is always more
dangerous to any associated body than a declared enemy.
The condemnation which such a hollow profession natur-
ally brings with it has exercised through large sections
of the Church in Christian countries its proper and
purifying influence by causing a systematic abstinence
from the consummating rite of their religion by persons
of wavering faith or inconsistent conduct ; and though
in some sections of the Christian Church, as in the Scot-
tish Highlands, this abstinence may have been carried
too far by a sort of superstitious terror and tender
scrupulosity, there cannot be the slightest doubt that
this extreme is far more honest and far more healthy
than that trust in the magical operation of the ceremony
to which the Christian Church, on the whole, has rather
inclined. For in this matter the besetting sin of the
reKgious man to trust in rites, and of the priest to
magnify the virtue of his function, conspired out of a
single act of pious commemoration to develop a mys-
tery and a magic of sacred symbolism, which overtops
anything that the annals of religious absurdity contain.
The commemoration was turned into a mystification, of
which, in its extreme form, the greatest result seemed
rather the prostration of reason than the pacification of
the passions or the elevation of the soul. Anyhow,
whether with the unblushing nonsense of transubstantia-

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 311

tion, or the milder juggle of consubstantiation, or the
plain common sense of a symbolical commemoration,
the sacrament was often taken as a mere outward badge
of respectability, and people were encouraged to take a
certain pride, and to feel a certain comfort, in the per-
formance of this external act, as if Christianity were in
some sense a religion of magical operations, and not of
divine motives. To such sacramental formalists St.
Paul would certainly have said in his broad way : —
In Christ Jesus there is neither going to the supper nor
refusing to go, hut a neiv creature. No doubt, to go to
the sacrament is good ; but it is not the act of going to
it, nor of coming from it, that is good ; it is the spirit
in which the act is performed. If you go to the Lord's
table from a sincere desire to realise the person and the
power of Christ and his work in the moral world of
which you are a part, well ; if you go otherwise, better
is he who abstains from going altogether, like the good
Quaker from a crotchet of anti-symbolism, than you
who go. God will have a living soul always in his
worship, not a dead body ; a glowing manifestation of
spiritual life, not a painted mask.

As with the commemorative supper, so with the
symbolical water, the bias of the clergy and the weak-
ness of the people have conspired to change a simple
and significant rite into an outward act of magical opera-
tion, devoid equally of rational meaning and of moral
effect. The baptismal regeneration which the High
Church Anglican clergy have juggled out of the simple

312 LAY SERMONS.

symbolism of water as significant of moral purity, is in
its nature not a whit less repugnant to reason, or rather
to common sense, than the mumbo-jumbo of transub-
stantiation with which the Eomanists have so befooled
reliction and stransjled reason in the mass. That men
who never in common life or in literary interpretation
are so stupid as to translate a simile into a fact, should
perpetrate this stupidity where religion is concerned
can be accounted for from the simple fact that all ex-
treme passion for the moment to a certain extent blinds
reason ; and if it be the professional proclivity, as it
certainly is, of the j)riesthood not only to exaggerate such
passion, but to stamp it with permanence in liturgical
forms, there will result from this combined action those
monstrous dogmatisms of which our creeds and theo-
logical books make much parade, but which resolve them-
selves lightly, at the touch of reason, into the soulless
crystallisation of a simile, or the senseless misunderstand-
ing of a symbol. Here, as in all other matters, it is the
undue value f^iven to the external act that deo^rades the
spiritual into the sensual, and empties religion of all
reasonable contents. Whether it be the High Church-
man, wlio makes a mystery of a plain symbol by the
magic of a sacerdotal benediction, or the low Dissenter
who displays the hyperscrupulosity of a verbal conscience
by making curious inquiries whether the verb ySaTrro)
means to dip or to sprinldc or to ^9/i^?i/7e overhead in
water ; in both these cases, — the one at the extreme
pole of sacerdotalism, the other at the opposite pole of

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 313

what has not insignificantly been called bibliolatry,
or a cleaving to the literal letter of Scripture, — the
same tendency to magnify the external, and to idolise
the ordinance, is plainly operative ; and to all these
varieties of faith in the outward symbol, as a thing
apart from the virtue which it symbolises, St. Paul
would certainly have replied as to these Judaising Gala-
tians : In Christ Jesus there is neither haptismal regen-
eration, nor dipping, nor sprinkling, nor plunging, nor
any such fashion of outward purification, hut a new
creature.

Closely allied to the trust in ordinances or traditional
institutions is the trust in orthodoxy or traditional
creeds. What is orthodoxy ? I have called it a tradi-
tional creed ; but let us inquire a little more curiously.
EtymologicaUy, and on the face of it, orthodoxy signifies
a right opinion, and in theological language, — to which,
in the usage of the English tongue, it is confined, — a
right opinion concerning God and divine things. Now
this may mean either a right opinion absolutely, as
when we say God is the self-existent uncaused cause of
all things, which is a universally accepted truth among
all sane-minded thinking beings, as much as that two
and two make four ; or it may mean a right opinion
about some attributes of the Divine Being or the laws
of the divine administration not necessarily obvious to
every thinking creature, but either as entertained by
some thinking individual for himself, or, what is the
general acceptation of the term, as handed down through

314 LAY SEEMONS.

a train of generations from some primary tribunal
believed to have been in possession of insight in such
matters, what we have just called a traditional creed.
Now the primary tribunal from which the received
right opinion concerning God and divine things always
emanates in such cases is the Church, that is, the
clergy ; for, though the Christian Church in its original
character was no doubt a congregation, and as such,
justly designated by the democratic term of Athenian
origin i/cKXTjala, yet in point of fact it has always been the
case that the laity or the great mass of the congregation
who have made no special studies in philosophical or his-
torical theology, but are what the Greeks called IBtojraL
in such matters, have taken their traditional creed, with
absolute assent, from the professional expounders of
Church doctrine, just as they take their medical
opinions from their medical adviser, and their legal
opinions from counsel learned in the law. To trust in
orthodoxy, therefore, is to trust in a certain tabulated
form of opinion concerning God and divine things drawn
out by some school or council of theologians some hun-
dred or a thousand and more years ago, thinking and
speaking under the influence of whatever principles of
pious speculation might at the time be pervading the
atmosphere of the religious world. Now it is needless
to say, in reference to such orthodoxy, whether a general
orthodoxy representing a type of thought accepted by
the Universal Church, as the orthodoxy of the Nicene
Creed formulated in the year 325 after Christ, or the

1

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 315

narrower orthodoxy of a special time or place, like the
Calvinistic orthodoxy of the Dutch Church in the seven-
teenth century, which made itself so unhumanly con-
spicuous by the banishment and imprisonment of such
eminent theologians as Limborch, Grotius, Episcopius —
in reference to all such orthodoxies, I say, it is manifest
that even if Christian faith consisted mainly in right-
ness of intellectual conceptions rather than in the
nobility of a moral life, they are as a prop to lean on of
a very brittle and crazy character indeed. For, in the
first place, does it not imply an immense presumption
in the case of mortals compassed round with infirmity
such as we are, to dogmatise curiously on certain
attributes of the divine nature, or certain principles of
the divine procedure in the government of the world ?
" Who can hy searching find out God ? who can find out
the Almighty unto perfection ? " Enough for us that we
have evidence of self-existent and self-energising power
and goodness in a thousand shapes within us and with-
out us, to warrant our faith and to compel our obedience.
And again, what reason have we for thinking that the
men who formulated creeds at Nicsea, or Trent, or Dort,
or Westminster, in any given century, were in all points
the wisest and best Christian thinkers of their time ? or,
if they were, which in the main, I fancy, we are safe to
grant, who can guarantee that the type of theological
thought that, from any temporal or local causes,
dominated the minds of a certain majority of Church-
men at a certain numerous gathering of clerical notabili-

316 LAY SERMONS.

ties some centuries ago, and which gave, we shall
suppose, adequate expression to the religious needs of
the time, was such as that it might safely be accepted
for ever, in ages when other notions possessed the
brain, and other feelings stirred the hearts, of the more
earnest part of the religious communities ? Eeligious
creeds, however solemnly published, and with whatever
venerable memories connected, we may depend upon
it, fall under no other law than that which regulates the
formal assertion and the venerable tradition of opinion
in other matters. If in law and legislation, in politics, in
medicine, in scholarship and science, the movement of
opinion in many matters of difficult solution is often so
great that progress in the future can be secured only
by the complete overthrow of the most pretentious
architecture of the past, how much more in theology,
when what men assert is often of things the farthest
removed from the possibility of exact human cognition,
and concerning which they are often the wisest who,
like Simonides, the longer they ponder the more
piously they pause. We may say, therefore, with all
certainty, that to lean upon Nicene or Athanasian
Creeds, or upon the Five Articles of the Synod of Dort,
or upon the metaphysical Calvinism of the Scottish
Confession of Faith, is of all resources of intellectual
externalism the most slippery and the most deceptive
to which a poor bewildered religious thinker can recur.
Christian faith no doubt implies belief in those broad
and salient features of the divine nature and adniinis-

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 317

tration which are shortly indicated by St. Paul in the
sixth verse of the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to
the Hebrews, " He that cometh to God must believe that
he is, and that he is the rewarder of them that dili-
gently seek him." But it is not even this faith, broad
and simple as it is, taken intellectually, which is the
stuff out of which the heroes of the moral world are
made; for " the devils also believe and tremble ;" but it
is this faith carried out in a moral conviction, with
regard to the function of man in the system of things
under which we live, and a course of conduct in the
world of social action corresponding thereto. In con-
trast with this living faith of the heart and life all
merely intellectual or head orthodoxy, however perfect,
is in the eye of the Apostle Paul a piece of externalism
as vain as circumcision or any other outward sign,
divorced from the spiritual need which gives it signiti-
cance. To talk of salvation by belief in any such articles
is at bottom just as extrinsic to all saving faith as the
belief in any proposition of mathematics with regard to
the properties of curves, or any principle of physics with
regard to the statical or dynamical action of forces.
In Christ Jesus certainly, in this sense, there is neither
heterodoxy nor orthodoxy, but a new creature ; and
unless this new creature exist along with the intellec-
tual orthodoxy there is great danger that the very
orthodoxy of the head may lead to a heterodoxy of the
heart, which ossifies the fine fibres of human pity, and
poisons the flow of a healthy human blood in the veins.

318 LAY SEEMONS.

For a trust in curious points of intellectual orthodoxy,
as the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed, which
Eichard Baxter refused to sign, naturally leads to a
false self-satisfaction in the man who believes, and a
false contempt of his unbelieving brother ; nay more, it
may lead, and whole pages of Church history written in
blood prove that it often has led on a large scale, to
persecution and condemnation, and what we must call
the perpetration of murder under legal forms, and with
alleged divine sanction ; for murder is not the less
murder in the eye of Nature because it is committed
with the usurped sanction of a monstrous infallibility
and the unreasoned acceptance of an unreasoned tradi-
tion. And even without the possibility, as in those
times, of such a bloody outcome of a Christian faith
falsely so called, it is rare that a man laced tightly
in the stays of a stiff orthodoxy can be found who is
not more or less deficient in those graces that make
society sweet and humanity lovable.

A third form of Externalism which at certain epochs
in the history of the Church played a notable, and alas !
also, sometimes a tragic part, is the trust in forms of
Church government. On this a few words will suffice.
Of all forms of Externalism which the sense-bound in-
tellect of man has dreamed of substituting for a spiritual
religion and a noble life, this is at once the most un-
reasonable, and, from a Christian point of view, the most
unpardonable. It is, in fact, to assert that the frame-
work is a necessary part of the picture, the binding an

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 319

essential part of the book, and tlie particular kind of
hive which you happen to patronise in your garden
a necessary condition of the honey. The honey de-
pends upon the bees, and upon the season, and upon
the heather bloom, not upon your hive at all. And
yet the hive is necessary for you in a sense. Without
the hive you could not get the bees, nor manipulate the
honey ; but there are various kinds of hives, and each
will have its own special advantage ; so, if you are
a lawgiver, you will not think of making a law that all
honey-manipulators shall have one kind of hive, and
whosoever may not choose to use this kind of hive
shall not be allowed to have any honey. A form
of Church government belongs to a religion just as
a hive belongs to the bees, or a camp and its disposi-
tion to an army ; but the forms and furnishings of
hives and of camps are always matters of external
arrangement which depend upon circumstances, and
which, therefore, no wise man will prescribe by an
anticipatory regulation for all times and all places.
Accordingly we find — however ecclesiastical men in the
heat of controversy may have battled and blundered
on the point — that there is no form of government laid
down in the New Testament as a constituent element
of the Christian Church ; and whatever plausibility may
have been given to such a carnal conception of the
character of the early Christian Church arose from the
confounding of accidental circumstances belonging to
the orrowth of an infant institution with the essential

320 LAY SERMONS.

formative principles of the institution itself. There are
not a few things mentioned as facts in the New Testa-
ment records which are not to be construed as pre-
cedents ; and thus, though it may be quite true — as
I for one am strongly convinced — that the most
important notices of the form of Church government
in the New Testament point rather to Presbytery
than to Episcopacy, I do not for that reason feel in
the least degree moved to maintain the thesis that
Presbytery is of divine institution ; much less that
I am entitled, as an administrator of divine law in
the Church, to force that form of government down
the throats of all Christian congregations. On the
contrary, the wisdom of the founders of the Church
appears in nothing more than in this, that they left
not only forms of Church government but much more
important matters, such as slavery, to adjust themselves
according to the consuetude and the convenience of
time and place where the gospel might be accepted ;
and in fact, not only Presbyterianism and Independ-
ency and Episcopacy, but even Popery, as a mere form
of ecclesiastical administration, may exist, and has
existed, in the Churcli, without the sliglitest prejudice to
the energetic action of Christianity as the great engine
for the moral regeneration of society. There is no reason
in the nature of things why the three great types —
democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical — which stand
out everywhere with characteristic and marked
features in civil government, should not, by a neces-

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 321

sary law of social action, assert themselves with equal
emphasis in the outward body and visible presenta-
tion of the Church ; and that they have so asserted
themselves lies before us as an undeniable fact in
the records of the last eighteen hundred years.
Pure democracy stands represented in Independ-
ency ; democracy, less loosely aggregated, in Pres-
byterianism ; broad aristocracy in Episcopacy ; and a
more narrow aristocracy, limited by the monarchical
element, in Popery. And as it is not the form of the
administration of the laws, but the quality of justice in
the laws, and the character of justice in the administra-
tors, that makes a good civil government, so in Church
government. Pope and bishop and presbyter, so long
as they confine themselves purely to the machinery of
administration, are mere bottles out of which the wine
and the oil are poured that make the heart of the Church
glad, and its face to shine. ISTo doubt the office-bearers
of the Church, whether monarchical, aristocratic, or de-
mocratic, have a tendency to interfere with the form of
doctrine and the liberty of worship which belong to the
Church inherently, independent of all administration,
by divine right, and by the charter of its original institu-
tion. But this is in all cases a usurpation and a trespass
into a forbidden field, for the existence of which generally
the ignorance, tameness, laziness, and cowardice of the
Christian people are not less to blame than the ambi-
tion and the insolence of their officers. Unquestionably
Pope Pius, when by his recent famous bull he stamped

322 LAY SERMONS.

tlie character of an authoritative dogma on the imma-
culate conception of the Virgin Mary, previously only a
floating sentiment in the popular mind, went beyond his
function as the mere administrative head of a monar-
chico-aristocratical form of Church government ; and not
less certainly did Charles II. abuse his function as civil
ruler and head of an Episcopal Church in certain ex-
ternal matters, when he plunged Scotland into a pro-
longed civil war in order to assert his insolent claim of
framing an Episcopal liturgy for a Presbyterian people.
But these vices, which historically have manifested
themselves in connection with certain forms of external
arrangement in matters ecclesiastical, do not belong in
any wise essentially to the form. They are the accidental
result of a vicious moral tendency, and an error of judg-
ment on the part of the persons holding ofi&ce under
that form.

These remarks will have sufficiently indicated the
essentially unchristian character of all contentions
among the Churches tending to give any form of Church
government a position of importance or of primary sig-
nificance in the constitution of a Christian Church. The
direct consequence of all such perverse assertiveness on
the part of unwisely zealous Churchmen is to supply
artificial stilts to that natural self-importance which
among all classes is only too apt to rear itself proudly
upon some accidental externals of privilege and position.
Instead of encouraging this sort of ecclesiastical Phari-
saism, the leaders of the various Churches should direct

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 323

all their energies to induce all the Churches to act to-
gether, like the different corps in a well-generaled army,
provoking one another, as the Apostle has it, not to
strife and to denominational jealousy, but to love and to
good works ; for in Christ Jesus there is neither circum-
cision nor uncircumcision, neither a Church of bishops
nor a Church of presbyters, neither a Tree Church nor
an Established Church, but a new creature.

But what is this new creature ? Well, of course, it
is in the main a thing quite the reverse of all those
vanities of Externalism which we have just been con-
demning; it is essentially an inward and a spiritual
thing — a thing of motives and aspirations and j)urposes,
not of observances and rites and ceremonies. It is not
so much a deed, or a series of deeds, as a power ; it is
a power instinct with that divine mystery direct from
the primal source of all energy which we call Life ; it
is a root of moral spontaneity, out of which, by the divine
process of evolution which we call growth, is sent forth
a rich crop of green shoots and spreading branches in a
constantly enlarging ring ; it is a well-head out of which
living waters, heaven-fed, are ever discharging them-
selves with an unforced fulness of bright overflow ; it
is the full tide of a rich moral life in the soul. About
its excellence and superiority to all mere Externalism
and Ceremonialism there can be no question ; the only
question that will naturally be put is, Whence this
strong simile — the new creature ? The simile is strong,
no doubt, but it is in every way apt and adequate ; nor

324 LAY SERMONS.

is it, as some may imagine, a way of viewing tlie higher
moral life peculiar to Christianity, but a favourite phrase
with the Hindoos to indicate the transition from the
secular life of the common man to the spiritual service of
the Brahman. And the appropriateness of the simile wiU
appear when we consider the familiar phenomena of
the stages of life in human beings. The life of man
asserts itself in three platforms, rising gradually one
upon the other, like geological strata, in an invariable
order ; the sensuous or observant nature first, the intel-
lectual or comparing and generalising nature afterwards,
and last of all, the crown and top of human excellence,
the moral nature. However clever a child may be, and
however good, we cannot talk of its moral nature in the
proper sense of the word. One child may be more pliable
than another, more easily moulded, more open to all
the gracious and kindly influences of which the family
is the divinely-appointed nursery ; but what the child
does it does not by self-projected plans, purposes, and
resolutions, by any sort of internal dictatorship, but
by instincts and emotions, just as a hound pursues a
hare, or a hawk a pigeon. There must be, therefore, a
new birth, an awakening to a perfectly different form
of existence, before the moral life can be properly said
to have commenced. By good training and habits of
obedience a child may grow up into a most engaging
amiability ; but all this has been done for it, not by it.
A tree has flourished greenly in the nursery, but now
it has to be transplanted into the open air, and learn to

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 325

grow into independent hardihood in the face of the
buffeting blasts and the drenching rains of an unre-
gardful climate. The moral life of man, the regenera-
tion— TraXiryyevea-ia — more properly so called, com-
mences with a similar change. It commences with an
awakening to the full consciousness of the dignity and
lofty destiny of man as a moral being, and with a
deliberate purpose and plan to carry it out to its legiti-
mate consequences in the life of an essentially social
animal. This is what in the New Testament narrative
of apostolic preaching, and in many weU-known reli-
gious biographies of recent date, is called conversion ; and
there can be no doubt both of the necessity and the
reality of such a process. Those who are unwilling to
admit this are either persons of a low moral type, who
have never thoroughly escaped from the bonds of sen-
sualism and selfishness which our theologians call the
Old Adam, or persons whose lives have run on in such a
smooth and even tenor, and so free from all noticeable
transitions, that they are inclined to look with suspicion
on all accounts of sudden conversions and startling
experiences in the moral life, such as might be expressed
by the emphatic image of a new birth. But neither
are sudden conversions to be desired, nor in all cases to
be insisted on, as if they were a necessary step in the
process of the upbuilding of an ethical life. On the
contrary, as in the physical world all growth is gradual, so
there is every reason to expect that in the moral world
it shall be the same. Even in the case of physical

326 LAY SERMONS.

birth, though the forthcoming of the child from the
dark shelter of the maternal womb into the large free-
dom of the open air is a very marked phenomenon to
the bystanders, there can be little doubt that the con-
scious change of state after delivery is much greater to
the mother than to the babe. To assert that a young
person like the evangelist Timothy, brought up from
his earliest years by a pious mother on the milk of the
gospel, must necessarily be able to point to a moment
in his history when, like the jailer at Philippi, he
called in an agony of conviction. What must I do to he
saved? is to indulge in a onesidedness of theological
dogma as contrary to Scripture as to fact. The moral
heat of nature is too variously dispersed to be always
leaping from a fixed freezing point to fixed boiling
point in this monstrous fashion. Betwixt the night
and the day there must no doubt always be a sunrise ;
but the sun rises in divers ways, and with very differ-
ent aspects in different countries, and in the same coun-
tries at different seasons. Let no man, therefore, as
Baxter reports of himself in his biography, be painfully
anxious to put his finger on the exact moment of his
conversion from sin to holiness. After all, conversion,
when it is most striking, most undoubted, and most
deeply engraved into the living tablets of the memory,
is only a start — only the awakening to the fact that
there is a race to run ; not the race itself, much less the
goal. The great question is not. When did you begin,
and how did you begin to be what you are ? but What

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 327

ARE YOU ? How do you stand affected to our Lord Jesus
Christ, as the grand ideal of moral perfection which it
is your constant endeavour to realise in your own life ?
How do you answer the question, What is the chief
end of man? Have you any end in life at all? or do
you live at random like a boat without a pilot, a com-
pass, or a chart ? Or, to adopt the Platonic simile, do
you hold the reins of your chariot firmly, or do you
sit easily, or dreaming, or perhaps even drunk, upon
the chariot seat, at the mercy of the wild steed,
which at any moment may dash you on the granite
pavement or leave you floundering in the mire?
That is the one thing needful. No matter who put
your timbers together, and where or when you were
launched ; but once fairly out on the stormy ocean of
human life, take your bearings seriously, and know what
you are about. Nevertheless, there are such things as
sudden conversions, not only in individual cases, such
as the well-known instances of Colonel Gardiner and
Brownlow North, accompanied by very singular and
striking circumstances, but in great gushes, so to speak,
and spring-tides of popular emotion ; for in all political,
social, and religious movements there is an element of
contagion which acts as beneficently as in the case of
infectious diseases its action is pernicious. The Acts
of the Apostles in the first constitution of the Church,
and the records of " Eevivals " so common in later
times, are equally proofs of this influence. Had the
masses of the people at Stewarton, Canibuslang, Kilsyth,

328 LAY SERMONS.

and other parts of Scotland, been in any sound state of
Christian vitality in the first half of the last century,
no such sweeping storms of moral appeal would have
been required to stir the stagnant and clear the turbid
waters of their soul. But the age was flat and the
people were low, and were just as much in need of the
contagion of a sudden conversion in mass as the Aphro-
dite worshippers of Corinth were in the days of the
Apostle Paul, or the slaves of a sacerdotal tyranny at
St. Andrews in the days of John Knox. Similar sweep-
ing blasts of regenerative virtue occurred about the
end of the century, in the remarkable mission of the
brothers Haldane, and the preaching of MacDonald
of Ferintosh, the Apostle of the North. And if these
revivals were at times accompanied with strange scream-
ings and faintings, and hysterical agitations of various
kinds, that was merely a matter of nerves and tempera-
ment in a few, which could not in the least discredit
the reality and the soundness of the great change.
Many wild things were done and said at the great
French Pievolution which have passed away as fire and
smoke, like the show scenes in an operatic spectacle ;
but the principles of that great political earthquake
and overthrow remain to the present hour, impregnating
the atmosphere, ventilating the lungs, and purifying the
blood of every social organism in Europe. God does
nothing in vain.

In conclusion, we may remark that the great doctrine
of a new birth, brought into such prominence by the

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 329

phraseology of the New Testament, is not in anywise
peculiar to the religious world, but is found manifesting
itself vigorously in every manifestation of the higher
life of man. In akt, for instance, the ancient Egyptians
attained to a certain excellence of form and expression,
but there they stopped, and, instead of a rich expansion
into various forms of graceful development, such as
we see in the works of God, stiffened into the formal
rigidity of a hereditary type. Here, as in the case of
the Jews, the conservatism natural to all religious tra-
ditions came in to co-operate with the sterility of human
genius and the servility of artistic execution ; but, how-
ever caused, tliis phenomenon in the region of plastic
art was one precisely analogous to the formahstic
superstition in religion against which our text protests.
To these old Memphian artists, when in the days of
their decadence under the Persians they bescrawled
the walls of their shrines and sepulchres with the
thousandfold repetition of a cow-headed Athor or a
hawk-headed Ea, a Greek Phidias, working out in
marble the chaste dignity of a Pallas, or the awful
serenity of a Jove, might have said in the spirit of the
Great Teacher to Mcodemus : " Verily, verily, excp^^ V^
he horn again, ye shall not enter into the kingdom ^f ^'^^^
artr And in the same manner Poetry ha? ^"^^ ^^^
ages, when the tyranny of a fashionable t>pe fettered
the freedom of rhythmical expression, ai^cl a dexterous
manipulation of certain artificial flowers of rhetoric was
accepted as a substitute for the green exuberance of a

330 LAY SEEMONS.

spontaneous vitality. To put an end to such an epoch
of pedantic formalism and meretricious decoration, a
radical change, or, in the language of our text, a new
hirth, is absolutely necessary ; a new birth, of which in
this country at the end of the last, and at the com-
mencement of the present century, Cowper and Bums
and Wordsworth were the great apostles, — men to whose
powerful propulsion we owe whatever of true and pure,
and healthy, strong, and natural, still remains effective
amid the somewhat overstrained and over-ornamented
poetical productions of our time. So in Physical
Science the name of Bacon marks an epoch of regen-
eration and conversion from empty speculations about
Nature to fruitful inductions from Xature ; even as in
scholarship, the arid verbalism and stylistic pretti-
ness into which the sound and muscular erudition of the
b^-Xteenth century had degenerated was elevated into the
brotherhood of philosophy and poetry by the cosmo-
politan genius of Wolf, Boeckh, Lepsius, Grimm, Bopp,
and the other hierarchs of the great German philology.

n all things, but specially in religion, we must watch
K id pra}' against the lazy shift of cleaving to the form
^^ "en we ought rather to rouse the spirit ; of mistaking

' 10*. 1 custom or a hoary statute for an eternal rule of
right , >f seeing God indirectly through human creeds
instead Oif^ directly in his Word and works ; and
making our Religion consist rather in the strictness of
some external obp'^rvance than in the fervour of a
habitual piety. Lv ^ir vis observances are useful, and

ON SYMBOLISM, CEREMONIALISM, ETC. 331

sacerdotal theologies are ingenious, even as painted
glass is beautiful ; but as vision is not in a normal state
to him who enjoys the light of the sun not amid the
fragrant vegetation of green and golden ^Nature, but
only through the gay motley of the glass, so neither
will useful observance nor subtle theology beget a
reasonable piety in the man whom the new birth has
not redeemed from the slavery of human traditions into
the perfect liberty of the sons of God. This is the
alpha and the omega of all evangelical doctrine.

APPENDIX.

THE METAPHYSICS OF GENESIS I.

The first chapter of Genesis was not intended to teach
metaphysics any more than physics. It is neither historical
nor metaphysical ; it is philosophical or theological, or,
from another point of view, mythical ; not, of course, in
the sense in which St. Paul uses the word iMvk<i in
Titus i. 14, when he advises the youthful superintendent
of the Cretan presbyters or bishops to beware of Jewish
myths or fables, but in the sense in which a parable or
fictitious narrative is used in the New Testament as the
fittest medium for the expression of profound moral truth.
In this sense there can be no doubt that the Mosaic
account of the creation is a philosophico-theological myth;^
and the philosophico-theological truth which it pictures
forth is not of the nature of a formal metaphysical proposi-
tion propounded by a learned University professor, or spun
out of the subtle-brooding brain of some solitary Spinoza ;
but contents itself with stating simply in a few firm lines
such salient features of a reasonable theory of the universe
as under normal circumstances will satisfy the demands
of a fully awakened human mind ; and it expresses this
theory in a language neither studiously avoiding a conflict
with any possible metaphysics or any probable science, nor
carefully forecasting an agreement with the same, but in
such style as most aptly to convey to unsophisticated men
the great truths which it enunciates. What I mean to

^ ^^ Historisclie Datawird niemand heittzu Tage mehr darin sucJien;

DAS GaXZE 1ST BLOS PHILOSOPHISCH." — BUTMANN, MyTHOLOGUS.

Berlin, 1828. Vol. i. p. 122.

334 APPENDIX.

discuss in this Note, therefore, is not the metaphysical or
theological doctrine of Moses in scholastic form, for no such
doctrine exists ; but rather the subtle metaphysics and
curiously concatenated theology which the doctors of the
Christian Church, from their misapprehension of the nature
of early mythical teaching, have imported into it. Meta-
physically and scientifically there may be some disputable
points in the Mosaic narrative when pressed curiously ;
but, as this curious pressing is altogether impertinent in
the interpretation of a theological mythus, written in early
times for an early Oriental people, the flaws imagined to
be found in the composition of the mythical writer fall
properly to be charged to ignorance and want of intelligent
sympathy on the part of the interpreter.

(I.) "/7i the BEGINNING." — That is, at the beginning or
start of the present order of things j not an absolute
beginning of which theologians may talk or dream, but
of which Moses certainly was not thinking. An absolute
beginning of creative energy in the Supreme Eeason is, in
fact, impossible ; because, if there had been an absolute
beginning of a created universe, there must have been
previously to that beginning an absolute eternity of divine
existence devoid of all energy or plastic manifestation j that
is, an infinite period of imperfect divine existence ; for
unrealised thinking, or thoughts not shaping themselves
into deeds, can never be looked on as anything more than
a step in the process of perfect existence — a step which
may, no doubt, be predicated of finite man, whose plastic
function is altogether derivative and secondary, but not of
God, whose thoughts are essentially and necessarily deeds ;
as the great poet-thinker has it — " Im Anfang war die
That." And here I must dissent from Joaimes Damascenus,^
and, I imagine, also from the great herd of so-called
orthodox theologians, when he says distinctly that
benevolence led the Creator to create, he being otherwise
perfectly complete in the thinking of his own thoughts : —

^ Damcisceni Theologia Orthodoxa. Paris: Stepliau. 1512. Lib. ii.
ch. 2, Do Opificio.

APPENDIX. 335

" Quia ergo Deus bonus et superbonus, NON contentus est
SUA IPSIAS CONTEMPLATIONE, secl super abundant id honitatis
complacuit ut fierent qucedam qiiibus benefaceret, et quce ejus
participarent bonitate ; et ex nihilo ad esse deduxit atque con-
didit universa visibilia atque invislbiliar Of course Moses,
being neither a theologian nor a metaphysician, but only a
monotheistic laAvgiver, knows nothing about this ; and we
have simply to repeat that he knows as little of an absolute
beginning of the universe. He only sa}'s that the present
order of things on this earth had a beginning, with its
natural sequence, — a growth and a development, — a propo-
sition which no sensible man will dispute.

(II.) The next metaphysical point which arises out of
the Mosaic narrative is the nature of Matter, specially
in its relation to God, or self-existent, self-energising, self-
plastic Mind. Now, the vulgar opinion in the Christian
world, and the opinion stamped as orthodox by a long-
chain of Je^\dsh and Christian authorities, undoubtedly is,
that matter is a distinct and separate entity, altogether
diverse and discrete from Mind. In the words of Philo
Judseus, " Matter is a substance without order, without
quality, without life, full of all heterogeneousness, incon-
gruity, and discord ; but it is capable of receiving from the
Supreme Eeason virtues the opposite of itself — viz. quality,
vitality, likeness, identity, congruity, harmony, and what-
ever belongs to the dominance of the most excellent idea.''^
Now there seems no doubt that this vulgar opinion is founded
on one of the strongest conceivable contrasts, presenting itself
to the daily and hourly observation of all men — viz. the con-
trast between a hard granite rock or a heap of ice, and
a thought, a fancy, or a dream. No subtlety of argument,
no ingenuity of puzzling, will ever convince any sound-
minded man that these two glaringly contrasted things are
identical, or, to use Spinoza's language, modifications the
one of the other. But, however far they may be from being
identical, it is another proposition altogether to say that
they are separable ; and if they are never found separated in
^ De Mi'Mcli Oinficio, 5.

336 APPENDIX.

Nature as the system of things now is, the fair conclusion
seems to be, that they never did exist independently, and
never can so exist. That this is true with regard to the
spiritual pole of the contrast is plain from the fact that no
man can think without a brain, or live without blood ; and
with regard to the material pole of the contrast, while it is
on the one hand true that many forms of what is vulgarly
esteemed matter, such as electricity and light, are more swift
and more subtle even than human thought, it is on the
other hand no less true that the different forms of matter,
such as the granite rock, or the Arctic icebergs, are con-
stantly acted upon and kept in their consistency by two
omnipotent forces called the attraction of cohesion and the
attraction of gravitation. May it not therefore be true
that what we call matter is not a distinct separable sub-
stance, but a substance standing to mind in the same
relation that our nails stand to our souls ? — altogether dif-
ferent indeed from a thought or a fancy, but indissolubly
bound up with the compact totality of the creature man,
and partaking in a certain low degree of his vitality so long
as they remain a part of the body. And if this indissoluble
bond, as it seems, really exists, it never can be said in a
literal sense that God made the world by both making the
material out of which the world was made, and putting
that material into shape ; but we shall more properly say, as
Plato indeed has it in the Timceus, that the world is a divine
animal, and that what is vulgarly called matter is simply the
Body of God.^ Call this Pantheism if you please ; it mat-
ters nothing, so long as Pantheism does not merge the one
in the many, and is rather the highest and most effective
form of theism than any form of materialism ; for this

1 I cannot agree with Bentley {Siriss ^Yorks, ii. p. 476), that **to
conceive God as the sentient soul of an animal is altogether unworthy
and absurd." It is only not agreeable to our habitual modern associa-
tions. Had it been essentially unworthy or absurd, Plato certainly
was the last man to have used it so gravely. Plato was no Pantheist ;
but when the Finite talks about the Infinite similes, more or less in-
adequate are the only propositions possible.

APPENDIX. 337

Pantheism simply denies the existence of matter altogether,
as a substance capable of existing independently of the
great self-existent, all-present, all-plastic intellect which we
reasonably call GoD. And here we clearly see the reason
why Aristotle, Ocellus Lucanus, and, I fancy, all the great
philosophers, taught what Christian theologians are fond to
number among great heresies — the eternity of the world ;
for, as all philosophical speculation among Polytheistic
peoples naturally assumes a Pantheistic form, the eternity
of the world is merely an outside phrase for the eternity
of God : what we generally call the world being, in fact,
merely the face or external manifestation of that soul of the
world to which Christian theologians, in their nomenclature
of extreme spiritualism, confine the name of God. But
however these things may be understood, or argued about
in a round of pretentious logomachies, it is plain that they
travel altogether outside of the broad common-sense utter-
ance of the first verse of Genesis ; and though we may per-
haps see cause to agree with Tuch (Commentary on Genesis,
p. 12), that the creation out of nothing (sx rwv oix Ivruv,
2 Maccab. vii. 28) was the orthodox Jewish doctrine,
rather than the creation from amorphous matter ( Wisdom xi.
1 8 ; ig a!M(jo(pov vXrj<s), — supposing matter somehow or other
to have had an independent existence, — the sound-minded
interpreter of the Bible can look upon all these problems
with as much indifference as he does upon the question
whether Moses really taught that the earth was the centre of
the cosmic system, or only used that language in conformity
with vulgar parlance — as we talk of the sun rising, when
we believe only in the earth moving. As a popular teacher
Moses was not, and could not be, commissioned to take
note of any such unpractical, and, from his point of view,
altogether unprofitable speculations. Enough, that with
the wise Greeks he set the unity of the universe upon a
firm basis for all times, by planting the one Sovereign, vovg
and Xoyog, where Polytheism by the assertion of many an-
tagonistic gods had cherished intellectual and moral anarchy;
this being sure, the whence and the whither of Matter as a

Z

338 APPENDIX.

medium for the manifestation of the divine excellence, are
to him a speculation of perfect indifference.

(III.) The most important question connected with the
existence of Matter arises from the bearing which it neces-
sarily has on the exercise of the faculty called Volition in
the Divine Mind. Was the world created by a sovereign
and, so to speak, arbitrary act of the Divine Will, or did it
grow, as it were, from a Divine Necessity in the Supreme
Nature 1 Here we come upon debateable ground of a
much more serious character ; for while, on the one hand,
theologians of the high Augustinian type have been forward
to magnify the Divine Volition, so as to make it move in an
altogether uncontrolled fashion, within the range of infinite
possibilities. Pantheistic philosophers, like Spinoza, have
denied volition altogether to the Divine Mind, and prac-
tically, with Shelley, made Necessity, I will not say a
blind, but certainly not a free mother of the world.^ Now
the first point of the theologians here is certainly one that
I find considerable difficulty in conceiving, viz. that a cause
called Mind, having nothing in common with a substance
called Matter, should by a single act of omnipotent volition
be supposed to have brought such a substance into exist-
ence. If this be accepted as an act of Divine causation, it
is a kind of causation quite contrary to anything of the
kind of which the constitution of the world gives us any
indication ; for in every result or chain of results of which
we have experience, there is always something in the force
which precedes the result naturally and necessarily calcu-
lated to produce the result. I say, therefore, judging
modestly from analogy, and not rashly from presumptuous
speculation, that the creation of dead matter by omnipotent
Divine volition is a proposition which we have no right to
lay down ; and as to volition generally, whether in the
Supreme Being or in a finite Nature, we have every
warrant for saying that it must ever be exercised in a
manner conformable to the nature and excellence of the
Being in whom it resides ; in other words, it can neither

^ "Necessity, thou mother of tlie world." — Queen Mab.

APPENDIX. 339

be arbitrary nor omniiDotent ; — not arbitrary, because arbi-
trary volition means determination without reason; not
omnipotent, because no all-wise Being can do anything that
is contrary to the essential function of His own all-wise
Nature. Let us now see what Spinoza says on this point ;
for he is the great prophet at present in fashion with those
who delight to relegate the wisdom of Moses into the limbo
of silly legend and infantile conceit. Spinoza was no doubt
a profound thinker and a wise man, and a man essentially
noble in practice as well as in theory ; but no more than
other mortals may we expect to find him free from the
great law of reaction, by which all the processes of change
in the moral as much as in the physical world are con-
trolled. As Locke's system of sensational externalism was
not planted scientifically against the ideal internalism of
Plato, but arose occasionally in the way of reaction out of
the illegitimate theory of innate ideas held by certain con-
temporary writers, so we shall fail correctly to estimate the
proper significance and drift of Spinoza's theology if we
do not view it as an emphatic and thorough-going protest
against the great body of what we may call volitional theo-
logians, whose dogmas he found himself unable to digest.
But, in the first place here let us not forget prominently
to put forth the real character of Spinoza as a metaphysi-
cal theist. To him, as to all Christians, God is God, a Being
and a Substance, not, according to the senseless phraseology
of certain of our modern agnostics, only a name for an
order of things, of which it is useless to ask for a cause. ^
Again, our modern British philosophy since Hume has
earned for itself a cheap originality by confounding the
idea of cause with that of invariable sequence ; but into
the profound and serious and reverential thought of
Spinoza such a superficial sophism could never enter. He
does not, indeed, formally define the word cause, but he
allows that word to stand where, by the necessity of

1 Per Deum intelligo Ens ahsolutum hoc est Substantiam constan-
tern infinitis attributis quorum unumquodque aeternam ct injinitam
essentiam eocprimit. — Ethic I. def. 6, and proposition xi.

340 APPENDIX.

human thought, it always has stood, and always will stand,
as the expression of a precedent force, which, by an inherent
virtue, necessarily produces a corresponding result called
an effect ; and in this view God is not only the order of
things, an infinite series of invariable sequences, but He is
the alone ultimate cause of all the causes which make
that invariability possible. Farther on (Prop, xvii.) he
lays it down emphatically that " God is the only free cause"
or in other words, " Deus ex solis su^ nature legibis
ET A nemine CO actus AGIT," — a proposition which, as thus
simply stated, seems perfectly reasonable, but about which
we may feel at first inclined to hesitate, when in the
exposition of it we are told flatly that God is a Being, of
whom, properly speaking, neither intellect nor will can be
predicated. How are we to understand this 1 Happily on
this point he is so clear that it is our own fault altogether
if we misinterpret him. His proposition is, he tells us,
directed distinctly against those who, to magnify the divine
omnipotence, have chosen ^^ Beum ad omnia indifferentem
statuere nee aliud creantem j^rceter id quod absolutd quddam
voluntate volueriV Now this compliment from the orthodox
party, meant to be paid to the divine omnipotence, reveals
its absurdity in a moment when applied to an absolute
human governor; for, if to be determined by mere un-
reasonable will in the human case is the attribute of a
senseless, arbitrary, and oppressive tyrant, surely such con-
duct can never be attributed to the Sujireme Source of all
wisdom and goodness. The great Pantheist is therefore
right when he says that the Divine Being, though absolutely
free from any external compulsion, is not free to act other-
wise than according to the necessary laws of His own
excellence. And in this sense no sensible man will have
any hesitation in saying that neither intellect nor will, used
in such arbitrary fashion, can be predicated of the Supreme
Excellence. So far well. But Spinoza was fond of mathe-
matical similes ; and every simile lim23S, as the proverb
says ; and so, in illustrating this doctrine, he uses two
similes, which can be accepted only with a deduction. He

APPENDIX. 341

says, in the first place, that all things flow by the same
necessity from the divine nature, that the bi-rectangular
measure of the contained angles of a triangle flows from
the essential nature of a figure so circumscribed. Then,
again, he asserts that human intellect and human will diff'er
toto coelo from the divine intellect and the divine will, agree,
in fact, only in name, having nothing in common beyond
what the dog-star in the celestial constellations has with the
terrestrial barking quadruped which we call a dog. Now these
are startling propositions, and, taken literally, lead to very
questionable conclusions. Every human being feels that,
when he comes, for instance, to the parting of two walks
in a public park, he may take the path to the right hand
or that to the left from no necessity of his nature, but
simply and absolutely from the motive of proving his
freedom of choice in the face of any one who may contro-
vert it. This is what we call volition in man, and is a
quality which can no more be confounded with the neces-
sary outcome of spatial limitation in geometry than a
granite rock with a song of Robert Burns ; and if this be
true of the extremely limited and circumscribed sphere of
absolute volition in man, it appears most absurd to enchain
the divine will in a more dependent fashion. Again, when
it is said that there is nothing in common between the
human intellect and the divine — a notion ventilated also
in his easy way of dealing with deep things by David
Hume — this is true only of the method of action in the
divine intellect, not of its essential nature and c[uality ; just
as we might say that there is nothing in common between
the creative genius of Shakespeare and the receptive
criticism of his commentators. God acts from the centre
downwards, plastically ; man from the periphery upwards,
receptively; and these two methods of action have, no
doubt, nothing in common. Nevertheless, to say that the
writer Shakespeare and the readers of Shakespeare have
nothing in common, would be glaringly false ; for, if they
had nothing in common, they could not appeal to one
another, or enjoy one another, any more tlian Beethoven

342 APPENDIX.

with his sj^mphonies, or Mozart with his masses, could
appeal for sympathy to the braying capacity of an ass. We
shall therefore take the liberty of dealing here with Spinoza
as we do with the familiar paradoxes of the Stoics, and
some paradoxical sentences in the New Testament : we
shall suppose they are meant to be seasoned with common
sense, and, unless so seasoned, they are simply a more
ingenious sort of nonsense.

Only one remark in vindication of Spinoza we may
justly make. It is supposed by some, naturally enough,
that because choice and volition belong to the highest
excellence of human nature, they therefore must belong
in a higher sense, and with a wider range, to God ; and in
a certain sense, no doubt, as we have indicated, this is
true j but we must always bear in mind that, though a
wise choice and an effective volition are the highest things
in man, the necessity of making a choice and forming a
volition with human beings, does for the most part arise
out of their ignorance and the forecasting of chances, which
this ignorance, by a laborious process of calculation, renders
necessary. But such choosing and such determination cannot
for a moment be conceived of in Him who is the fountain of
all knowledge and the controller of all chance. And if in
this sense only Spinoza meant to deny reasoned choice and
volition to God (and at bottom I can scarcely think he
meant anything more), we can only thank him for his
heterodox protest, and leave all orthodox dogmas about
the possibilities of an arbitrary omnipotence to float about
in the inane of those cobwebby speculators whose stomachs
are not strong enough to digest any more substantial
nutriment.

(IV.) On Teleology, or the doctrine of design, I have
stated my views so fully in the text, that I have nothing to
do specially here but to prove, from an examination of the
famous chapter in the Ethics of Spinoza (Prop, xxxvi.,
Appendix) that the recent fashion of planting that profound
thinker as the antagonist of Socrates and the Stoics in re-
spect of this doctrine, is altogether a mistake. The argu-

APPENDIX. 343

ment from design, indeed, as John Stuart Mill clearly saw,
is so deeply rooted in the intellectual instinct of every
normally constituted mind, that any objections to it, how-
ever pretentiously paraded and echoed for a year and a
day, will pass away as certainly as darkness from the face
of the sun after an eclipse. Spinoza, with all his greatness,
could not as a finite creature shake himself free from the
destiny that follows all apostolic and iconoclastic activity
in this world ; such activity must, by the nature of things,
be one-sided, and, however effective as a blow, fail to be
decisive if taken as an ultimate verdict. But, on a careful
examination, I am not inclined to think that the great Jew
had any thought of an ultimate verdict here, such as a cool,
comprehensive, and judicial Aristotle, for instance, would
have given ; however absolutely he lays down the proposi-
tion in words, it is plain to whosoever follows the thread of
his whole language from beginning to end, that he is writ-
ing as a reactionist, and that his one end is not to deny a
large design in the grand scheme of creation, but to expose
the fallacies of conceited and presumptuous men, who would
dwarf the largeness of that design down to the measure of
their petty personal utilities. The proposition, " Omnes

CAUSAS FINALES NIHIL NISI HUSIANA ESSE FIGMENTA " is

introduced as the summation of a statement that men gener-
ally are of opinion " Deum omnia jpropter hominem fecisse^^
and that they consequently " Omnia naturalla ad suum utile
media consideranV " Unde factum, ut unusquisque diversos
Deum colendi modos ex suo ingenio excogitaverit, ut Deus eos
supra reliquos diligeret, et totam naturam in usum ccecce
illoi'um cupiditatis et insatiabilis avaritice dirigeret. This is
a slashing passage ; but it is a passage to which the most
intellectual Socratic philosopher, believing in design, will be
as willing to subscribe as the most one-sided British physi-
cist, who delights in exposing the so-called barren virginity
of final causes. For what does it substantially mean 1 Not,
as we have already said, that there is no design in creation,
but that men err greatly in supposing that that design
is limited and confined, or in any way influenced, by a

344 APPENDIX.

respect for their petty utilities and vain imaginations. And
what does he go on to say 1 He states his belief antago-
nistic to this debased and degraded form of teleology in the
words, " Omnia naturce cetcrna qiiddam necessitate summdque
perfedione p'ocedere,'^ which means that God, by the neces-
sity of his own most excellent nature, cannot do otherwise
than manifest himself in a procession of absolutely perfect
forms, that is, as parts of a grand whole, and not by forming
special purposes or designs, with a one-sided partial refer-
ence to the convenience of his creature, man. And observe,
further, in this view the very peculiar language which he
uses in apparently controverting the Socratic exposition of
a miraculous divine design in the structure of the human
frame. After stating that the will of God is habitually
used by a certain class of ill-instructed and pious people as
"the asylum of ignorance," he continues, '^ Sic etiamy ubi
corporis hunutni fabricam vident, stupescunt et ex eo quod tantce
artes causas ignoraiit, concludunt eandem non mechanicd sed
divincl vel super7iaturali arte fabricari." This antithesis
between mechanical art and divine or supernatural art
plainly shows that the writer is fighting against a class of
ignorant and superstitious persons, with whose imaginations
the idea of design in the mind of the highly intellectual
Socrates could have nothing in common ; for it is precisely
the perfection of the mechanical art which Socrates admires,
and it is not ignorance but knowledge of the nature of
mechanical art that leads all sound -minded persons to
attribute such structure to intellectual design. After this,
in the next paragraph, he reverts to his original starting-
point, which shows plainly the point of view from which
his whole argument is to be understood, " Postquam homines
sibl persuaderunt omnia quce fiunt propter ipsos fieri (still
harping on that string !), id in unaquaque re prcecipuum judi-
care debuerant quod ipisls ^Uilissimum, et ilia omnia prcestan-
tissima cestimare a quibus opthne afficiebantur." This is
manifestly directed not against large theistic thinkers, such
as Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Zeno, but against the most
shallow and superficial class of vulgar utilitarians ; and, in

APPENDIX. 345

fact, in the last paragraph he expressly says it is the igno-
rant ^^vidgus," and not philosophers, against whom his
whole appendix is directed. Any other supposition, indeed,
completely breaks down the boundary line between the
lofty intellectual theism of the profoundest of Hebrew
thinkers and the Pyrrhonism and scepticism of the most
idle and quibbling of the Greek sophists. Nevertheless, we
must honestly say that the very strong language in which
the concluding paragraph of the appendix seems to make all
moral and aesthetical judgments depend, according to the
sentence of Protagoras, on the subjective judgment of the
individual may have given only too ready a handle to
the irreverent spirits of the age, to quote Spinoza, as the
protagonist of their monstrous doctrine of a reasonable
framework of effects without the inherent and indwelling
action of a reasonable cause. But those who enter into the
soul of Spinoza with a deep and reverent sympathy will
never be led to interpret any individual polemical passage
in his book in such fashion as to confound him with any
class of sceptics and sophists, however clever. His constant
drift is not to banish God from the world, but to banish
human conceits from God's plan. His rejection of teleology,
as vulgarly applied by certain shallow dogmatists of his time,
is in its whole spirit and scope manifestly a rebuke to human
impertinence, not an insensibility to divine wisdom.

(V.) The only other question on which a few words
may seem necessary here is, whether we have any hint in
the Mosaic account of the creation and the state of man in
Paradise of the existence of an Evil Spirit or Devil as the
author of Evil. Of course, historically, there is none ; that
is, if we are right in interpreting the account of the fall as
a theological myth ; nevertheless, it may be thought that
the serpent in the myth may not be simply an allegorical
figure, but an indication of a personal principle of evil, which
afterwards appears on the stage of Jewish faith in a more
distinct and less equivocal form. And here, as in some
other theological questions, we must commence by stand-
ing on our guard against the very natural tendency in all

346 APPENDIX.

Christian believers to look on the Bible as a book present-
ing a consistent unity of creed from beginning to end, and
not rather, as it manifestly is, in not a few essential points,
a development from a less to a gxeater, and from a some-
thing unseen and unsuspected, to a something publicly
displayed and emphatically acknowledged. Nor is it
necessary that the development should always be, — as no
doubt it has been in the main, — from worse to better ; it is
quite possible in the growth of Jewish, as of other opinions
with regard to accessory and unessential matters, that there
may have been a development from better to worse, from
the silence of a wise ignorance to the profession lof a pre-
sumptuous knowledge. Of this sort of retrogressive
development, the acceptance of a personal Devil, or transcen-
dental Author of Evil, as a part of the popular Jewish
creed, is perhaps one of the most notable. Of such a
malignant Power, beside and antagonistic to the divine
goodness, there is not the slightest trace in the Pentateuch.
The serpent in the my thus of the fall has just as much to
do with the orthodox Christian Devil, as the Lucifer or Sun
of the Morning, in Isaiah xiv. 12, has to do with the
Pandemonian personage who, from the days of Jerome
downwards, has appropriated that appellation. And as to
call the evil spirit Lucifer was not an interpretation of the
Lucifer meant in the prophecy of Isaiah against the king
of Babylon, but only a new application of an old simile, so
the identification of the Devil and Satan with the old
serpent in Rev. xx. 2, is an adoption of an apt image, —
nothing more. And when St. Paul, in 2 Cor. xi. 3, talks of
the serpent beguiling Eve, whether he accepted the fall as
a historical fact or as a theological myth, he does merely
what Aristotle or Zeno might have done, when they
quoted the Homeric sorceress Circe as turning her
victims into swine, that is, degrading them from virtue
into sensuality. Circe might be a fact or a fiction ; what
they used her for was to point a moral. In fact,
nothing but the persistent vice of retrospective interpreta-
tion, so deeply seated in the bones of so-called orthodox

APPENDIX. 347

theologians, could have led any sober thinker to introduce
a counter Power of transcendental Evil into the theology of
the Old Testament. The existence of such a power is
altogether inconsistent with the absolute omnipotence of
the Jehovah whom it was the national boast and special
privilege of the Hebrew people to acknowledge ; and had
any such idea governed the writer of the book of Exodus,
he could not possibly have talked as he does of God
hardening Pharaoh's heart ; but the Devil would naturally
have been named as the author of this state of contumacious
disobedience to the divine commands. And here we must
note a curious coincidence between the extreme Hebrew
monotheism and the polytheism of the Greeks. Neither
the one theology nor its opposite could acknowledge a
Devil ; not the Hebrew theology, because the existence of
such an adverse power implied a curtailment of the Divine
Omnipotence ; not the Hellenic theology, because the
Homeric gods, as being radically elemental forces, and
only by development moral forces, might be the authors of
evil without contradicting their own nature. Not, of
course, that either in Homer or Moses the guilt of sin is
transferred from man to God ; the great practical mystery
of free will and moral responsibility in some sort still re-
mains, only the Devil is not called in to explain the intru-
sion of evil into a fair world. And as the faith of Moses
in this respect originally stood, so it remained deep in the
Hebrew heart, so late as the days of Isaiah, who, in his
prophetic vision of Cyrus (xlv. 7), loudly proclaims the
absolute sovereignty of God in the sublime words, " I

FORM THE LIGHT AND CREATE DARKNESS j I IVIAKE PEACE
AND CREATE EVIL ; I, THE LORD, DO ALL THESE THINGS ! "

And this, so far as I can see, was also clearly the doctrine of
St. Paul, who, in his Epistle to the Eomans, touching the
deepest questions, makes no mention of the Devil ; and if
St. Paul required no aid from such a supernatural rebel
against all good, his prominent appearance in our modern
Calvinistic theology, based as it is on the metaphysical
theology of the apostle, must be regarded as a superfluity,

348 APPENDIX.

or rather an incongruity, a notion that has stuck to our
creed by traditional accretion, not sprung out of it by
organic virtue. Strangely enough, the only distinct men-
tion of the Devil, as a historical personage, behind or with-
in the serpent, as the author of the fall, occurs in a book
which our orthodox Protestant Churches have combined to
denounce as apocryphal. I mean, of course, the passage in
the Book of Wisdom which runs thus : — " God created
man for immortality, and made him the image of his own
peculiar nature ; but, by the envy of the Devil, death
ENTERED INTO THE WORLD. "^ We have here a distinct
dogmatical assertion, leaving no doubt as to the faith
of the writer, and perhaps of the age to which he be-
longed ; but in the other passages of the Old Testa-
ment, as in the Book of Job and Zechariah iii. 1, which
are adduced to prove the Hebrew belief in the modern
Christian doctrine of the Devil, I can only see a dra-
matical figure, like "Ar?3 in Homer and the Greek trage-
dians, which never attained to the dignity of a thoroughly
incarnated and universally recognised cosmical personage.
How far an acquaintance with the celestial dualism
of the Babylonian and Persian theologies during the
Captivity may have made the Hebrew mind in its latter
stages familiar with an idea at war with its original
character, I will not inquire ; certain it is, from the vague
and contradictory allusions to Satan in the historical
books,^ that the modern Devil had then acquired a certain
position in the theological conscience of the nation. As to
the modern Christian doctrine of the Devil, and the place
which, by the tradition of centuries, it holds in the creeds of

^ 6 Qebs 'iKTiae rov Hvdpwirov iw d<pdapaig., /cat eiKova rijs iStas
IdidrrjTos eTrolrjaev avrbu ^dbvu} 5^ dia^oXov ddvaros elaifKdev els t6v
k6<t/jlou. If St. Paul had held tliis dogma, or thought it of any con-
sequence, he could scarcely have omitted to allude to it in Romans v.

- Contrast 1 Chronicles xxi. 1, -svith 2 Sam. xxiv. 1. The old
idea of God as the ultimate author of evil prevails in 1 Kings xxii. 23.
Here the lying spirit is, as he ought to be in a strongly monotheistic
system, altogether servile and ministerial.

APPENDIX. 349

Christendom, it is no business of mine to discuss it here.
I may only make the remark, in conckision, that the
framers of creeds in our Church Councils, from the third
century downwards, have been a great deal too hasty in
assuming that certain vague floating ideas in the popular
mind, and which had incorporated themselves into the
current language of the times, were to be considered as
coming to us stamped with a divine sanction, and to be
accepted in all seriousness as dogmatic propositions forming
an inseparable part of the Christian creed. The Athana-
sian Creed, though in no wise remarkable for modesty, says
nothing about the Devil ; and, if he were omitted similarly
in all the creeds and catechisms of Christendom, the
omission would do no harm. The question of a personal
Devil is a question of metaphysical curiosity, not of evan-
gelical doctrine ; and, so far as moral motives and moral
judgments are concerned, his existence is, for all practical
purposes, null.

THE END.

Pritited by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.