The Master of the heart

OF r/?;,V;'

JUN 24 1910 *j

BV 4310 .S64 1908

Speer, Robert E. 1867-1947

The Master of the heart

The

JUN 24 1.910

Master of the Heart

By
ROBERT E. SPEER

Author of " Missionary Principles and Practices,'
'•'The Man Christ Jesus " etc., etc.

New York Chicago Toro/^o

Fleming H. Revell Company

London and Ed.-^nburgh

y

Copyright, 1908, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

^ccoND Edition

New York- 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
♦-■^ndon: 21 Paternoster Square
Ediuburgh: 100 Princes Street

PREFACE

The chapters of this Httle book are not essays,
but addresses. They are not theological or liter-
ary, but practical. They were spoken in the first
place to the young men and women of the North-
field Conferences in the summertimes. They
present simply and earnestly some personal
aspects of Christian truth. They were reported
at the time and are printed here in almost their
original colloquial form, in the hope that in
some life they may make a larger place for our
Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. Their only merit
is their effort to exalt Him.

R. E. S.

New York.

CONTENTS

CHAPTEH PAGE

I. Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ 9
11. The Believing Heart .... 33

III. Christ's Appeal to the Doubting

Heart 56

IV. The Heart's Response to the Mas-

ter's Call .... » , *]2

V. The Inner Circle ..... 93

VI. Looking Away to Jesus . . .110

VII. The Unity of Hearts in Christ . 132

VIII. The Master, the Maker of Strong

Hearts 151

IX. The Master's Work for His Fol-
lowers ........ 167

X. The Burning Heart . . . .185

XL The Master, the Satisfaction of

the Heart 206

XII. The Uniqueness of Our Lord and

Master Jesus Christ . . . 223

I

OUR LORD AND MASTER,
JESUS CHRIST

ONE of the most beautiful scenes in the
Bible is the picture which John draws
for us in the twentieth chapter of his Gos-
pel, of Mary Magdalene at the tomb of Jesus on
Easter morning. John tells us that before it
was light she had come to the grave, unable to
accustom herself to the loss of her Master. If
she could no longer have Him personally with
her, she would, at least, be as near as possible to
His body. She found the stone taken away, and
hastened back to the city to tell the Apostles that
the sepulchre was empty. Peter and John at
once ran together to the tomb, John, the younger
man, outrunning Peter. Not having the courage
of the elder man to go into the sepulchre, how-
ever, he waited until Peter came up and looked
in, and then together they noticed that Jesus' linen
clothes were there, but that He was gone. The
empty chrysalis of the grave clothes convinced
them of the resurrection, and they went away.
Mary Magdalene had evidently followed them
from the city, but remained at the sepulchre after
their departure. John tells us that as she was

10 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

waiting there, she summoned up courage to look
in, and saw two angels in white, " one at the head,
and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus
had lain," and that after these two angels had
asked her why she wept, and she had answered,
" Because they have taken away my Lord and I
know not where they have laid Him," she heard a
sound over her shoulder, and turned her face
to see who was there. She turned only her face,
and, John says, supposed it was the gardener
whom she saw. He asked her the same question
which the angels had asked, adding, " Whom
seekest thou ? " The Lord's thought was of the
object of her search, rather than of the cause of
her tears. Finding that she failed to recognise
Him, and had turned back to the tomb again,
He called to her at last by name — " Mary " ; and
John says she wheeled about at once, her whole
body this time, with the quivering words, "My
Master! " I do not think there are many sweeter
things in the Gospels than that, or any sweeter
words than these which Mary used at the sepul-
chre—" My Master." The Gospels show that
nowhere in the Gospels did Jesus bid men to
call Him " King." He told no one to call Him
" the Son of God." He was both. But He did
tell them clearly that they did right in calling
Him " Master."

We use the word often nowadays. There is
scarcely any word that is so frequently on the
lips of earnest students in our schools and

OUR LORD AND MASTER 11

colleges in describing Christ as the word " Mas-
ter," and perhaps there is scarcely any word that
is used so often with inadequate conception of
the full content of the personality of Christ. Men
speak of *' Christ and other masters." People
who do not think of acknowledging that Jesus
Christ is their divine Lord and only Saviour,
speak of Him as their " Master." It is not a
new thing that the word should be used even in
the way of thoughtlessness or insincerity or cant.
The same word that Mary used Judas also used
when he came to Jesus with his kiss — " Hail
Master."

It is right for each of us to use the words,
" My Master," but is it right for us to use them
without an appreciation of what they mean?
Glance back over the past year, and let us see
whether, tested by what we have done, Jesus
Christ has been our Master. Have we been
where we have been solely because we have
thought it would please our Master to have us
there? Have we regarded Him as in any sense
Master over the choice of electives, our relations
to men, the reading of books, all tastes and
habits of life, the form of business, the choice
of friends, the use of money, the expenditure of
time ? Or, tested on the touchstone of our plans
for the future, is Jesus Christ our Master? Are
we planning to do next year what we believe it
is His wish for us to do? Have we shaped our
ideals and tastes, our thoughts of life, with sole

12 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

reference to the pleasure of the one whom we
call our Master? I think if we are honest with
our own hearts, no matter which test we use,
we shall see that in a very poor sense has Christ
been the Master of any one of us. And yet He
claims to be. " I," He says, " Your Lord and
Master."

What is covered by this claim of Christ's to
perfect sovereignty over us, and by our recogni-
tion of His right to the first place in our lives and
wills ? It will help us to answer if we take time
to think of some of those terms by which the first
Christians avowed their recognition of Christ's
right to this pre-eminence, especially two sets of
titles by which they referred to our Lord in the
first years of the Christian Church. First of all,
the title of Master, and those other names that are
associated with that. There are five different
words in the New Testament which are translated
master in our English Bibles. The first of them
(SiSao-KttAos) means simply teacher. It is the
word that was used by the two disciples of John
when they left their master, and turned to follow
Jesus, and said to him, " Rabbi," which is by in-
terpretation "Master, where dwellest thou?"
It was the word that Mary used on the resurrec-
tion morning. This was the simplest of the titles
by which the early Christians recognised the pre-
eminence of Jesus Christ. They acknowledged
that He was their Master in the sense that they
had now entered His school, and that whatever

OUR LORD AND MASTER IS

education they were receiving was an education in
which He held the place of pre-eminent teacher.
Now, our Lord teaches men still, who call Him
" Master " in many ways. There is a powerful
educational influence just in His presence. Many
times we forget the power of education which
there is in personal companionship, not in speech,
or in pressed influence only, but in the uncon-
scious influence of presence upon the thought and
judgment. There are thousands of men who can-
not think in their mother's presence of that of
which they can think when out of her presence.
There is a wrath against sin born in the presence
of Christ that cannot be maintained outside His
presence. There is love of tenderness, there is a
fondness for the likeness of His Father's counte-
nance, in the presence of Christ that is not be-
gotten where Jesus Christ's presence is not ex-
ercising the mastery of education over life. We
see this principle in the life of our Lord, in those
expressions in the prologue of the Gospel of John,
that declare to us that the face of the Word was
ever directed towards the face of the Father, Trpos
Tov ©eov — not that He was with God only, but that
He never looked at anything in itself, but only in
the face of God; that He saw this world not
in itself, but reflected in the face of God ; that He
judged life and all its values not as they ap-
peared in themselves, but as He saw them in the
face of God. Our Lord thought His thoughts
and formed His judgments in the educating pres-

14 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

ence of God. And if He is my Master, He be-
gins in my life this process of education by per-
sonal influence; He makes me loathe or love
those things that I would not loathe or love if I
did not make Him my pre-eminent teacher in
this regard and feel always as I would feel with
Him.

The Apostles constantly appeal to this truth
when they hold before the eyes of the early
Christians the prospect of Christ's second com-
ing, and exhort them by the hope of His coming
to greater purity and strength of life. Why?
They appealed to them to cherish certain judg-
ments because, if Christ were there, they would
cherish those judgments; they appealed to them
to lead certain lives, because in Christ's presence
they would not be satisfied with any other kind
of life. " And now, little children, abide in Him,
that when He shall appear, we may have confi-
dence and not be ashamed before Him at His
coming.'*

But if Christ is my Master in any real and
complete sense He will be teaching me in other
ways than by this general educational influence
of His presence. Think of His masterful teach-
ing in the matter of prayer, in the matter of
service, in the matter of humility! Who ever
entered His school who was not taught lessons
in service and humility and prayer that none
but the Master could teach? Or think how He
sets Himself to be the lesson that we are to learn.

OUR LORD AND MASTER 15

I like the way in which, after so constantly put-
ting things indirectly, the New Testament rises
with dauntless directness and says we are
not to feed only upon the influence of Jesus;
we are to feed upon Jesus. We are not alone to
live by the words of God that come out of His
mouth, we are to eat the flesh and drink the
blood of Christ. And so we are not only to
sit in our Master's school and have His influence
work upon our judgments in its mighty trans-
forming power, not alone to sit in His school
and be taught lessons of prayer and humility
and service — we are to set Him before us and
learn Him. " Ye have not so learned Christ,"
said Paul in one of his choice expressions.
And Simon Peter conveys the same idea by
the phrase in which he describes Jesus by
the same term that was used to describe the copy
that a schoolmaster wrote at the head of the
wax tablet for his pupils, an iTnypdfXfjirj that they
should reproduce, " Follow in His steps." If
Jesus Christ is our Master — not in any perfunc-
tory sense, not in the sense in which we speak
of other masters — if He is our Master really and
sincerely and vitally, then you and I are pupils in
His school, and all our judgments take form from
His influence. We ourselves are little children
learning the lessons that He sets for us. Yes,
we are the little children who learn the lesson
that He Himself is.

The second word for " Master " occurs only

16 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

once, and then in the Gospel of Matthew towards
the close of the Gospel, where Jesus says to His
disciples, " Have not many masters, for One is
your Master, even Christ, and all ye are breth-
ren." Ka$rjyr)Tr]<s is the Greek word, and it means,
literally, " leader," the man who goes before, after
whom the disciples go. It was a more pertinent
word, perhaps, in those early days when schools
moved about and walked after their teachers,
their pedagogues, but it is a pertinent word even
still. If Jesus Christ is my Master I set Him
before my eyes and give Him pre-eminence as the
leader of my life, and all that I am and do must
take shape for the path in which He leads me.
The very natures that He has given us demand
such a Master as Jesus Christ in just this regard.
No human life can get along without some kind
of a master of this sort. We make them for
ourselves out of our friends, we make them out
of dead heroes, or we find him in Jesus Christ,
our Master Leader, Himself. He sets for us the
example of our life, so that we deem those things
despicable which He deemed despicable, those
things loathsome which He despised, and only
those things beautiful and holy which lay close
and warm upon His heart.

Is Christ our Master, in this sense of setting
us as leader an obligatory example? We look
at His example, and the first thing that impresses
us is the breadth of His spirit. Probably the
influence of most of us is not felt beyond twentjr

OUR LORD AND MASTER 17

or thirty souls. Christ's influence was unre-
strained and illimitable. They once tried to con-
fine Him to the city of Capernaum, where He had
had great success ; where people were willing to
give Him everything He needed. His disciples
suggested that they should localise their work
there. It was a rational course which they pro-
posed, but the breadth of His spirit would never
allow Him to stay within the borders of a single
village. He broke such bands asunder as Sam-
son had broken his in the days of his strength,
to let His love and effort go out widely, to all
the cities and villages of His country, and to
those other sheep who were not of that Jewish
fold. He spoke not of any one community or na-
tion, but of the world as His field. He told His
disciples He had a message which was intended
for the whole earth. If Christ is our guide, in
the sense that we are to follow Him, to possess
the same traits of character that marked Him,
then no one of us dare be narrow in our love or
our service. The world must be our parish, also.
Looking at Him still as our leader, our example,
we note, as a second thing that marked Him,
His self-sacrifice. Paul spoke of it tenderly
when he said, " Though He was rich, yet for our
sakes He became poor, that we, through His
poverty, might be rich." He spoke of it yet more
tenderly when he wrote to the Philippians that
he wished very much that they might have in
them that mind that was in Christ Jesus, who

18 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

though He was in the form of God, thought not
equaHty with God a prize to be jealously re-
tained, "but made Himself of no reputation,
and took upon Him the form of a servant, and
was made in the likeness of men; and being
found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself,
and became obedient unto death, even the death
of the cross." Yet a third characteristic was
His unwearied, unhesitating constancy, the un-
wavering persistence of the service He wrought.
He was weary or hungry; He worked on
still. The Son of man came to meet the needs
of men, and no obstacle was great enough to
hinder Him in His effort to meet those needs.
Is Jesus Christ our Master in the sense that our
lives are following His guidance, and seeking to
resemble Him in these respects?

The third word for " Master " occurs only in
the Gospel of Luke, and there about half a dozen
times. It is the word which Simon Peter used
after the night of their fruitless fishing on the
Galilean sea when Jesus bade them to cast the
net on the other side and they would find fish.
" Master, we have toiled all night and taken
nothing; notwithstanding, at thy word, I will let
down the net for a draught." It is the word the
disciples used when Jesus was asleep in the boat
among the troubled waves of the sea. '' Master,"
they said, " carest thou not that we perish ? " It
is the word which the sons of Zebedee used when
they came to Him and said, " Master, we saw one

OUR LORD AND MASTER 19

casting out devils in thy name. We forbade
him, because he followed not with us." ETrto-Tarr;?
is the Greek word. " Overseer," it means, the
one who has complete control over our methods
of service, the one who has a right to direct us
in our toil, to tell us the things to be done and
not to be done, the one to whom we look for
counsel and direction and advice, and under
whose rule we reverently lay all our schemes and
plans for His direction and control. Is Jesus
Christ our master in any such sense? Have we
given Him the pre-eminence honestly in this re-
gard, so that He has become the true overseer
of our lives, so that He directs us in our work?
Think of the immense amount of fruitless, flip-
pant, frivolous, shallow and squalid work done
in this world that would be undone at once by
men who took their directions from Him. Think
of all the tenderness of heart that would come
into the toil of men who were working under
His direction and following His methods in their
toil. I met an old man some years ago who told
me of a visit he had paid to the city of Dundee
in Scotland not many years after the death of
Robert Murray McCheyne, for whom the whole
of Scotland wept, although he died at the age of
only twenty-nine. He said that when he got
off in Dundee, he asked a man on the street if
he could tell him where McCheyne's home was.
" Oh, yes," said the man with a smile, pointing
him down the street to where McCheyne's church

20 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

and manse were standing. Then he knocked at
the door where McCheyne had lived, and his old
sexton let him in and took him into the study
where McCheyne's books were still upon the
table, and he said, " Sit down here," taking him
up to the chair in which McCheyne worked, and
my friend sat down. " Now," he said, " put
your elbows down on the table," and he put
his elbows down. " Now," he said, " put your
face down in your hands," and he put his face in
his hands. " Now," he said, " let the tears fall.
That was the way my pastor used to do." And
he took him into the church and into the pulpit
where McCheyne had preached, and he said,
" Put your elbows down on the pulpit," and he
put his elbows down on the pulpit. " Now," he
said, " put your face in your hands," and he put
his face in his hands. " Now," he said, " let the
tears fall. That was the way my pastor used to
do." And that was the way our Master used to
do. As He drew near the city, we read that He
wept over it, and He cried, " O Jerusalem, Jeru-
salem, if thou hadst but known in this thy day
the things that belong unto thy peace; but now
they are hidden from thine eyes." I think one
reason why so much of our service is dead and
fruitless is because it has no vision of the over-
seeing Christ whose eyelids knew the touch of
tears, and who would direct those who would
follow Him as their loving and pre-eminent Mas-
ter, in ways of service that would find access to

OUR LORD AND MASTER 21

the hearts of men as His way found access to
their hearts and holds them in absolute sover-
eignty still.

It is this mastery of Jesus Christ that will do
in the realm of our work what the teaching of
Jesus Christ will do in the realm of our thinking
and our judgment. There is a power in the
presence of Christ to quicken the sluggish life.
Who has not seen the torpid life touched by-
Christ? I have a friend who is a workman in a
steel mill. Some years ago he was not able even
to read. When he was converted, he could not
read a chapter in the Bible, but after his con-
version he made up his mind he must learn to
read in order to be able to study the Bible. He
has had no education except what he has found
in the mastery of Christ and in the study of His
word. And it is a treat to hear that man pray —
the rich, fluent dignity, the deep, reverent spirit
— and to sit down and talk with him is like talk-
ing with a man who had been at school at the
Master's feet, who had had all his sluggish in-
stincts touched by Christ and raised into new
life, whose torpid life had been quickened and
awakened by the living One. The dullest of us
can be touched by the power of Christ's mastery
when once His pre-eminence as overseer of life
is honestly and candidly recognised and the
whole life yielded up to His rule.

The fourth word that is translated " Master "
is the word Kv/atos." Most of the time it is trans-

22 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

lated '' Lord." It is the word which Jesus uses
in the Sermon on the Mount when He says that
" no man can serve two masters ; either he will
hate the one and love the other, or cleave to the
one and despise the other." It is the constant
word in the New Testament of address to Jesus,
for reference to Jesus' power over life, and often,
instead of being translated Lord, it is translated
by our old word, Master. I think there is scarcely
any title of Christ's that is quite so familiar to us
as this, that we use so often in our prayers and
perhaps in our speech about Christ to one an-
other, nor any that we take upon our lips more
often in vain — Lord. What does it mean that
Jesus Christ should be my Lord? I heard Dr.
A. J. Gordon of Boston say once, not long before
he died, that there was nothing that gave him
such a thrill of pleasure as to hear a young man
call Jesus Christ Lord, if he had any knowledge
at all of the meaning of what he was saying —
Jesus Christ, Lord, the Owner of life, the utter
King of life, everything yielded up to His domi-
nating control. If Jesus Christ is my Master in
the sense of being my Lord, then all the plans
of my life must be laid down for His supervision
and judgment and authority. I go where He
sends me; I do what He tells me; I stay where
He bids me. We worry ourselves so many times
about our difficulty in finding the will of God.
The will of God is seeking every one of us with
more eagerness to discover us than we feel to find

OUR LORD AND MASTER 23

that will. We cannot get away from the will of
God if we have the least desire that the will of
God should discover us and set us in the Father's
place. And the man who has once called Jesus
Christ Lord honestly — and no man can say that
honestly except by the Spirit of God — has at
once guaranteed to himself that his Lord will
put him in the place where He wants him to be.
It is of infinitely more consequence to our Lord
that we should be where He wants us than it is
to us that we should be there, and we may be
sure that He will see that that which He owns is
where it can be of greatest service to Him, and
that He will guard alike all its hours and its place
and vocation in life, if once it has yielded itself
to Him as King and Lord. If Jesus Christ is /
our Lord He is Lord of all our thoughts. I
know my own heart well enough, and yours, too,
to know that Jesus Christ is not Lord of our
thoughts. Read over again before you lie down
to sleep to-night what Jesus Christ had to say
about thinking — of the guilt of evil thinking — in
the Sermon on the Mount; what He had to say
with reference to certain standards of judgment
that had prevailed with reference to sin, and His
own views of sin as a thing not alone of the outer
act, but of the inner imagination and desire, and
then answer the challenge, " Can I say I am a
man of an untarnished heart and unsoiled mind?"
Who of us has brought every one of his thoughts
into captivity and obedience to Christ? Who of

24 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

us has honestly yielded up his thinking to Jesus
Christ, his Lord?

The last summer of Major Whittle's life I
went in to see him one evening at Northfield, not
expecting ever to see him again. He was so
weak that they were watching with him day and
night. Only a few days before, when trying to
lift one of his arms from the coverlet, the weight
of the arm proved too much, and it had fallen
and broken on the bed. He lay there almost
unable to move, with the red sunlight coming in
and falling across the pale, wan face. The doc-
tor and the nurse were there at the time, and he
asked them to step out of the room for a few
moments. He told me the days were very long,
that he could not sleep more than a few hours
and that he waked up every night just a little
after midnight, and then had to He alone until
the sun came and the friends began to come in.
I asked him what he did during all those hours.
Well, he said, he gave all the time to thinking
upon Christ. He thought upon Christ in the Old
Testament types and prophecies; he thought
about His lovely life, the sweet things He had
said when He was here, all His ways with the
little children and with the poor and sorrowful,
and all the mighty things He had done; he
thought of Him as He is now at God's right hand,
and then he thought of Him as, in some sweet
day, when the eastern sky grows all ruddy with
the hope of His return, He will come back again.

OUR LORD AND MASTER 25

Then he asked me what was the best thought I
had had that day, apologising by adding that
that was the only thing he could do now to
freshen up his own thinking, inasmuch as he
could not read and had only to recall what was
already stored in his memory and to live upon
what friends said to him. I told him I had been
thinking that day of what an immense blessing
it would be if ever>^ time a man's mind was re-
leased from the pressure of any objective duty
and free to go to its own place, if every time it
was at liberty from every external strain and
could do the thing that was natural to it, it would
fall back inevitably on Christ.

Yes, he said, he had often thought of that, and
he quoted a quatrain:

"As a wee bairn to its mither,
As a little bird to its nest,
I fain would lie down

On my dear Saviour's breast."

And then he opened up his heart and spoke to
me of Him. And I had a fresh revelation that
summer evening, as the light of the setting sun
streamed in over the face that was so near the
vision of the great land that, after all, is not
so very far away from any one of us, of the
beauty, of the transforming power, the sweetness,
the ineffable glory of the life that has made
Jesus Christ Lord of its thought. Have you
thought one single moment to-day only of Jesus ?

26 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

Have we recalled to-day, spontaneously, I mean,
and not when it was forced upon us by someone
speaking to us, a single thing that Jesus said?
Has our imagination brought back to-day a single
incident or event out of the life of our Lord?
What else was the imagination given to us for
except to play upon Christ, except to make Christ
live again, except to bring back to us every
recorded event in His earthly life? I have
spoken of our thoughts. I will not speak of will,
of passion, of emotion, of taste, of use of time,
of standards of judgment. Over all these things,
too, Jesus Christ is to be Lord, if, with any hon-
esty of heart, I call Him my Master.

The last word that is used in the New Testa-
ment and translated " Master " occurs only
three times there, and twice with reference to
those who deny Him. Once it is found in one of
Paul's Epistles to Timothy, where he speaks of
vessels meet for the Master's use. Once it ap-
pears in the Second Epistle of Peter, where he
speaks of certain men who deny the Master that
bought them. Once it appears in the Epistle
of Jude, where he speaks of those who deny
their only Master and Lord. Aco-ttott;? is the
Greek word. " Emperor " will do for a transla-
tion for us, the One to whom we yield everything,
the absolute Ruler and King whom we joyfully
recognise as possessing us, all that we are and
have, and ever may be, possessing the thoughts
with which we awake in the morning, and the

OUR LORD AND MASTER 27

thoughts with which we He down to sleep in the
evening, possessing our affections, all our human
relationships and friendships, possessing all our
tastes, possessing every activity and power of our
lives — Jesus Christ enthroned as absolute Em-
peror of life. There is a story of one of the
Napoleonic wars which relates how one of Na-
poleon's men was wounded on the battlefield and
the bullet lodged in the cardiac region. It was
before the days of anesthetics, and they took the
soldier off the battlefield and began to operate in
the hope of finding the bullet. He lay with his
eyes looking up into the surgeon's face, while
he cut closer and closer to his heart, until at last
the heart itself was nearly laid bare, and he could
almost feel the wind blow in upon it, while the
surgeon still probed for the bullet ; and he looked
up quietly in his face, and said haltingly, " Sur-
geon, I think if you cut much further, — you will
touch the Emperor." He had him there more
truly than he sat upon any throne, more truly than
he sat in any judgment hall ; there on the throne
of the soldier's life, and affection, and will, was
the Emperor. Is Jesus Christ our Master in
these senses ? If He is not, is He our Master at
all? If He is our Master at all, He must be
Master of us. Teacher of us, Leader of us, Over-
seer of us, Lord of us. Emperor of our lives.

I must add a few words in closing about that
other set of titles in which the early Christians
recognised the pre-eminence of Christ in their

28 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

lives, — the name Saviour, and those other names
of our Lord that are analogous to that one. We
think sometimes that that is a term for men and
v^^omen who have not yet come into the Christian
life. Do we think so or do we feel more in need
of Jesus Christ as our Saviour now than we felt
before we confessed Him as Lord and Friend?
Professor Davis pointed out in his memorial ad-
dress regarding Professor William Henry Green
of Princeton that his Christian life began as a
boy of sixteen, in a deep sense of sin and of
Christ's power to save, and that sixty years of
busy, useful toil in Christ's Church, instead of
removing that sense, had only deepened it and
made it more keen and acute. The further on
we go in the Christian life the more sensible we
become of our necessity for the Saviour. The
unclean thought, the selfish ambition, the harsh
judgment, the unkind word, the low ideal, the
thousand and one things that are sin in our lives,
Jesus Christ alone can save us from. We need
Him to save us not alone from the coarse vice
which, let us hope, we laid away from us with all
temptations to it years ago; we need Him now
to save us from the infinitely more subtle tempta-
tions that come with every day of growth in the
Christian life. As men go on in the Christian
life, temptations drop from them. Yet tempta-
tions assail them more. Temptations, after all,
are a form of compliment. There is evil in this
world to be slain, and God apportions it to men

OUR LORD AND MASTER 29

as He sees them able to bear it. If He allows
one man more temptation than another, He gives
him no more than he is able to bear, and only as
much evil as He sees that he is capable of slay-
ing, and as year by year we go on and feel the
Spirit of Christ nerving us for fresh strife and
struggle, Christ answers that sense of growth
by giving us more of battle with the evil one as
our share of the conflict with the sin and wicked-
ness in the world. And the purer and better we
grow the more deeply shall we feel the need of
Christ's salvation. I suppose Isaiah was one of
the holiest men of his time, but it was he who, in
the year that King Uzziah died, fell down in the
temple while the house was filled with smoke,
when he saw the Lord on high, and lifted up the
cry, " Woe is me, I am undone, I am a man of
unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people
of unclean lips. For mine eyes have seen the
King, the Lord of hosts." I suppose Paul was
as clean a man as there was in his time. But it
was he who pronounced himself the chiefest of
sinners. I suppose there was no man among the
Apostles more earnestly sincere in his desire to
follow Christ than Simon Peter, and it was he
who fell down on the shores of the Tiberian sea
crying, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man,
O Lord ! " And that man is the worst hypocrite
who, as he grows in his spiritual life, thinks he
has been growing away from the necessity of
Jesus Christ's saving work still in his life. Every

so THE MASTER OF THE HEART

fresh vision of Christ gives a fresh vision of the
man's own selfishness, and every fresh sense of
divine power is a fresh sense also of human
shortcoming. If Jesus Christ is to be pre-eminent
with us, Jesus Christ must each day be our
Saviour in a sense more real, more complete,
more overwhelming than we have known Him
before.

Jesus Christ, the Saviour? Yes, but more than
that, too. It was not enough for Him that He
should die for us. He insists afso that He must
live in us. Jesus Christ will be pre-eminent
in our life not alone as our Saviour from sin,
but as our life itself, until at last, if we will let
Him, He will make that true in us which He
made true in the Apostle Paul, so that we shall
be able to say what now, alas, we cannot say,
*' For to me to live is Christ." Christ, my life!
I met one summer, going home from a meeting
in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a man, now in
the Christian ministry. He told me, as we sat in
the same seat in the car, something of his past
life. He had run away from home as a boy of
sixteen, and enlisted as a private soldier in the
Union Army in the Civil War. He had yielded
up his life to vice until sin had almost slain his
character and eaten his will away. At last one
dark bright day he touched bottom, and Christ
caught him. And he told me that from that day
there had stood out before his mind without fail-
ure by day or by night, the message that flashed

OUR LORD AND MASTER 31

across his soul that hour, " He died my death for
me that I might hve His Hfe for Him." Nine-
teen hundred years ago He did what He did on
my account, that now I might do something,
which is in a real sense the same, on His account.
He made me pre-eminent then, that I might make
Him pre-eminent now. Shall we not do it? Shall
we not give Christ the real first place in our lives ?
— I do not mean professionally, I mean vitally ;
so that when we lie down to sleep to-night, it
shall be with the living sense that Jesus Christ is
our Lord, our King and Ruler. When Cyrus
took captive the king of Armenia, and Tigranes,
his son, with their wives and families, and carried
them off to his capital, for several days they lay
under sentence of death, and then, at last, on
pledge of relinquishing all their claims and pos-
sessions, he set them free and let them return to
their own land. It is said that on the way back
they fell to discussing among themselves the glory
of the court of the great conqueror, and one
spoke of the splendid jewels, and another spoke
of the magnanimity of the king, and, at last, Ti-
granes turned to his wife, who had been silent
during the discussion, and said to her, " And
what didst thou think of Cyrus ? " " In truth,"
replied she, " I never saw him." " Where were
thine eyes ? " said he. " I fixed them," said she,
" upon him " — referring to an offer that Tigranes
had made — " I fixed them," said she, " upon him

32 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

whom I heard in my presence offer to lay down
his Hfe for me." She had eyes for none other
than him. I wish I had eyes for none other than
Christ, that in a real sense He might have with
me in all things the pre-eminence. Let us give it
to Him now.

II

THE BELIEVING HEART

I WISH to speak now regarding the impor-
tance of our keeping, if we have it, and of
our regaining, if we have lost it, what might
be described as the beHeving heart; and what I
have to say here is suggested by the divergence
between the King James Version and the Revised
translation of a phrase in the first chapter of the
Epistle to the Ephesians. The old translation
runs, " The eyes of your understanding being
enlightened," and the Revised Version, " The
eyes of your heart."

There are a great many significant changes
made in the Revised Version as compared with
the old, but few of them, I think, are more signifi-
cant than this one. It is illustrative of the great
change that has passed over the thought of men
as to our nature and the nature of the great life
in which we live. We are only com.ing out from
the slavery of notions that prevailed for many
centuries. We are even yet but little delivered,
still there was a time when that slavery was
much denser and more servile than to-day. In
his " History of English Thought in the Eigh-
teenth Century," Leslie Stephen grounds his
33

34 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

great admiration for Edmund Burke, whom he
calls the strongest mind that has ever worked
on the problems of English politics, upon the
fact that he was the first English statesman to
repudiate in practical politics the notion that
had prevailed until his time that a man was not
very much more than just a mathematical unit,
that his inner Hfe could be reduced practically
to an impersonal reasoning machine, and that
opinion was purely intellectual. It has been in
an intellectual intere^st, a gain to honesty, that
in politics, and in metaphysics, and in religion,
we have outgrown that old conception and are
unable any longer to think of a man as made
up of reasoning capacity, as a mathematical rea-
soning creature alone, or to think of our intel-
lect, if we separate it from the rest of our
nature, as constituting the only organ by which
we discover truth and create character. It has
been, of course, in a moral as distinctly as in an
intellectual interest. The deistic point of view,
and those temperaments which the deistic view
bred, although they do survive in a way in
schools of physical science to-day, have been made
permanently impossible for the world. We
know now that our nature is vastly richer than
men thought it was in the days between the trans-
lation of the King James Version and the open-
ing of the nineteenth century. We all of us
know that we come at a great deal of truth in
other ways than by the use of mathematical rea-

THE BELIEVING HEART 35

soning; and I suggest now that in a very prac-
tical way we try to think for a bit of the indis-
pensable importance in life of another faculty
than ratiocination, which, as the revised trans-
lators recognise, really exists; a faculty which
we now see and are not afraid to say that we see
St. Paul had in mind as an organ for the dis-
covery of truth and for the building up of char-
acter when he incorporated in his prayer for
these Ephesian Christians his desire that the eyes
of their hearts might be enlightened.

For, in the first place, the believing heart is
indispensable for the discovery of truth. I do
not say it is indispensable to the discovery of all
truth, although there is a sense in which it is
true that no truth can be discovered without it.
I do say that the truth he needs cannot be discov-
ered by any man unless one of the organs by
which he sets about perceiving it is the heart of
trust and faith. No man by mathematical rea-
soning can get at the whole truth. We know
that at all that range of truth that is personal no
man arrives by his mathematical reasoning; that
he gets at that, if he ever gets at it at all, by
quite other faculties than these. That is what
. Tennyson declares in his protest in " In Memo-

If e'er when faith had fallen asleep
I heard a voice, * Believe no more,
And heard an ever-breaking shore

That tumbled in the godless deep.

36 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

"A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part
And like a man in wrath, the heart
Stood up and answered, * I have felt' "

He does not mean to shut out any one set of
faculties ; he simply means to assert in behalf of
another set its rights in our search after and dis-
covery of truth.

There is an illustration of what I mean in the
story in the last chapter of the Gospel of John,
where the disciples were out in the little boat on
the sea. Precisely the same intellectual facts
were presented to the minds of all those disci-
ples. They saw a man on the shore. There was
no difference in their eyesight that made one
man keener than another to discern His features,
and yet one of them spoke up after a moment,
the others still failing to perceive Who that Man
on the shore was, and said softly, " It is the
Lord " ; and the writer of that Gospel adds sig-
nificantly that it was the disciple between whom
and Jesus there was a peculiar sympathy who
first discovered this. He discerned with a dif-
ferent set of faculties from those which the other
disciples were using, or because those faculties
in him were better developed than they were in
the other disciples. Who this Man was Who stood
ttpon the shore. And I suspect we would have
just the same experience to-day if Jesus Christ
were actually to appear. Some of us would rec-
ognise Him long before others would, and some

THE BELIEVING HEART 37

of us would not recognise Him at all ; we would
deny utterly that it was Jesus Christ, simply be-
cause we would apply to His identification a set
of faculties futile to accomplish that end, and
we would not have in our hearts that enlighten-
ment of the eyes of faith that would enable us
to discern what could not be discerned otherwise
than in just that way.

That is one reason why so many of us live so
much poorer lives than others live, simply be-
cause we are content to get at truth with a
smaller number of faculties than other men use,
or because the eyes of our hearts are blinded,
short-sighted, less capable of vision, less accu-
rately trained, less enlightened than the eyes of
the hearts of other men. We look at a picture.
Precisely the same physical conditions are there
to every man's eye, but one man sees in it infi-
nitely more than another man sees in it, because
the eyes of his heart have been opened towards
it. A great many men reason themselves away
from the larger vision of truth. That is what
Mr. Chesterton complains of in his " Twelve
Types," that all of us are perpetually making
the error of using the word " superficial " in a
sense that is grounded on a fundamental mistake,
namely, that second thoughts are best, whereas
as a matter of fact, regarding most of our
lives, the first instincts are the only trustworthy
judgments we ever have. What we casually
and instinctively feel about the look of the

38 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

skies, about the aspect of the trees, about
the faces of our friends, that, we must be-
lieve, he sayS; and not what we subsequently
reason out on the basis of all that, will remain
our vital philosophy to the day of our death.
That is the reason why little children are often
so much more accurate judges of character than
grown-up people. You can often deceive an
adult regarding trustworthiness of character
more easily than you can deceive a little child.
There is an alertness of instinct in the child that
touches the core of character more surely than
any of our mathematical measurements ever do.
You remember the story in the life of Robert
Morrison, who was obliged to come to this coun-
try in order to secure passage as a missionary
to China, and to whom Mr. Oliphant gave free
passage in one of his ships. While in New
York he was entertained at the home of a gentle-
man, who afterwards wrote in a paper, entitled
" Reminiscences of Dr. Morrison," published in
the New York Observer: " As the notice had been
very short, he was placed, for the first night, in
our own chamber. By the side of his bed stood
a crib, in which slept my little child. On awak-
ing in the morning, she turned, as usual, to talk
to her mother. Seeing a stranger where she ex-
pected to have found her parents, she roused
herself with a look of alarm ; but fixing her eyes
steadily upon his face, she inquired, * Man, do
you pray to God ? ' * O yes, my dear,' said Mr.

THE BELIEVING HEART 39

Morrison, * every day. God is my best friend/
At once reassured, the little girl laid her head
contentedly on her pillow, and fell fast asleep."
The little child's measurement of Morrison had
been taken and she had gone in a moment home
to the real inner character of the man whom she
was judging, with an accuracy much quicker
than the stupid ways in which you and I
would have tried to get at and measure that
character.

Our hearts know a thousand things that we
never otherwise discover. Pascal was not speak-
ing extremely when he wrote in his " Thoughts " :

" The heart has reasons which the reason does
not know. It is the heart that feels God, not
the reason. There are truths that are felt, and
there are truths that are proved, for we know
truth not only by reason but by the intuitive
conviction which may be called the heart. The
primary truths are not demonstrable, and yet
our knowledge of them is none the less certain.
Principles are felt; propositions are proved.
Truths may be above reason and yet not be
contrary to reason.'*

Many of us, I suppose, have proved that a
lie is sometimes justifiable who know in our
hearts that it is not, and who to the end of our
lives will distrust the liar, no matter how much
rational justification we may find for his lie, be-

40 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

cause back of all our intellectual reasonings
about it there is an instinct more accurate and
correct than these.

After all, love — one real, great love, by which
a man enters into the infinite with his life, is a far
more potent solvent of doubts than all of the
speculations he can spin out of the spider-body
of his thought. Real love, the breaking loose
of the man's true under-nature, the real deliv-
ery of the man to himself and to God, — that sets
more men free to the truth than any mathematical
attempt to demonstrate propositions or to imveil
the unseen. The believing heart for many of
us, for all of us, is the only road by which we
shall come to the truth that is most vital to
life.

The believing heart, in the second place, is
ever essential to the living of a consistent and
real life. There never was yet in the world an
absolutely consistent infidel. Life would break
down for the man who did not live practically on
faith, however much theoretically he may cast it
out of his life. You remember the verses which
have been wrongly attributed to Charles Kings-
ley:

" There is no unbelief !

Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod,

And waits to see it push away the clod,

He trusts in God.

" Whoever says, when clouds are in the sky,
* Be patient, heart, light breaketh by and by,*
Trusts the Most High.

THE BELIEVING HEART 41

"Whoever lies down on his couch to sleep,
Content to lock each sense in slumber deep,
Knows God will keep.

"Whoever says * to-morrow,' 'the unknown/
* The future ' — trusts unto that Power alone
He dares disown.

"The heart that looks on when the eyelids closej
And dares to live when life has only woes,
God's comfort knows.

" There is no unbelief:
And still by day and night, unconsciously,
The heart lives by the faith the lips decry,
God knoweth why."

It seems to me a man may argue against infi-
delity on the simple ground of its absolute incon-
sistency with honesty and integrity of nature.
You cannot succeed, no man ever yet succeeded,
in living a faithless life, and for a man to com-
mit himself to a philosophy that excludes the
possibility of faith from life is to necessitate a
contradiction in his soul, for he cannot live at
all and live with no faith. To live a consistent
life or any life a man has to make room some-
where in him for a believing heart of trust.

It is the only way to live, not a consistent life
alone, but a life that is real. To believe, as we
do and must, and yet to play the sceptic, is just
as truly to lead an insincere and hypocritical
life, except that it is unconsciously done, as in
the case of the man who professes to be what
he is not, who claims to wear the badge of

42 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

Christ's purity while he lives his life of sin.
The believing heart is essential to men and
women if they will live a real life. As one
thinks of the materialistic attitude of some pro-
fessors of science in our colleges there comes
to his mind the protest of Walt Whitman in be-
half of the faith that is back of the figures:

" When I heard the learned astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in col-
umns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add,
divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lec-
tured with much applause in the lecture room.

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself.

In the mystical moist night air, and from time to
time,

Look'd up In perfect silence at the stars."

No man can break away from the unreality of
the mechanical chains of half -thinking, away
from the view that would make him a mere
physiological or intellectual machine, into the real
life and discover his soul without feeling the be-
lieving heart that is in him expand to lay hold
on the noble ranges of a real life.

Now, I do not mean, of course, that a man
should have a credulous heart. I believe that the
most credulous heart in the world is the unbe-
lieving heart, that the man who is most careful
about truth, the man who knows best the canons

THE BELIEVING HEART 43

by which to discriminate it, the man who is most
cautious about what he accepts, is the man who
has a believing heart. The believing heart shuts
us out from the possibility of believing a thou-
sand follies toward which the man of unbeliev-
ing heart is credulous. A few years ago we
received in the Presbyterian Board of Foreign
Missions an appHcation for appointment as a
medical missionary from a young doctor. He
sent in response to questions a list of references
whom the Board might consult regarding his
adaptation for missionary work, and the Board
sent to each of these men, of course, a list of
questions. Among the answers that came back
was quite a long and outspoken reply from a
doctor in an inland city in the State of New
York. With candour and evident honesty he
answered the inquiries, and then he went on at
the end to say :

" I do not attend church any more. I formerly
did, but stopped because I saw too much hypoc-
risy and I refused to be a hypocrite myself, so
I think you can trust my word."

On the basis of the testimonials this applicant
was discouraged, and the matter rested for a
time, and then I wrote to the doctor who had
sent this. I told him that I was writing to him
not in any official capacity, but, if he would let
me, just as a man to a man, and I wanted to dis-

44 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

cuss with hlrrij if he was willing, the question
that he had raised. I said in substance :

" You do not regard yourself as justified In re-
fusing to do the good which your knowledge of
medicine enables you to do because yours, of
all professions, perhaps because of its very no-
bility, has so many charlatans and quacks in It.
You would not think of pleading this hypocrisy
as a reason why you should refuse to be a doctor
and as a doctor to do good in the world and alle-
viate human suffering."

I said some more things that are not essential,
and this is the letter that I received in reply:

" I thank you very much for your sincere let-
ter of recent date, but I fear you have under-
taken too tough a job even for the entire Board
of Foreign Missions. The reason stated In my
testimonial was of course the truth, and per-
haps was the primary cause of my present state
of mind. I am writing frankly, as you did. You
will notice I said ' too much hypocrisy.' I can
stand for some, as, of course, it Is necessary to
do, as you point out. But in my opinion there
Is more of It In church than In everything else
combined. Look over an ordinary congregation
in almost any walk of life. Take the men ; seven
out of ten do not do or try to do as they prac-
tically claim to do. A man in attending church,

THE BELIEVING HEART 45

in my opinion, acknowledges Christ as his Master
and Saviour and agrees to do as nearly as possible
what Christ would do in the same circum-
stances. Don't you think nine out of ten would
be nearer? Perhaps my definition of a hypocrite
is too exact, shall I say ? Perhaps I should relax
it a little. But a person who says one thing Sun-
day and another Monday is a hypocrite. A man
who goes to church on Sunday and prays to be
forgiven for the sins he has done during the
week and then goes and does them over again is
a hypocrite. Am I too severe ? Take the church
of which you are a member ; scan the congrega-
tion carefully; does not the result surprise you?
Mind you, I don't want you to think only of the

* scoundrels ' and ' charlatans.' But entirely out-
side and separate from this is an insurmountable
obstacle. I am not a Christian. I do not believe
in a personal God. I believe that every man
should do as nearly as possible what is right, as
laid down by Moses and Jesus. I believe that
Jesus was the greatest and best man that we
have any record of, but I do not believe that He
was the Son of God, for I do not believe that
God can have a son, any more than ' Nature ' or

* Electricity ' can have. I believe that the uni-
verse is governed by immutable laws and is ruled
by an all-powerful force. I believe that this
force is what we call * electricity.' This state-
ment must seem absurd to you and you must
think that my brain is turned, but I assure you

46 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

that this is not the case. I have read and pon-
dered on this subject for five or six years, yes,
ten years. My rehgion is all I need. I feel abso-
lutely satisfied with it. What more do I want?
I threshed over this subject more than once with
my pastor, who is one of the brightest minds I
ever knew, and he has acknowledged that I
ought not to go to church, and he has said, * Al-
most thou persuadest me/ If at any time you
wish to hear from me further, write me. I
would be glad to hear from you anyway. I am
not a scoffer at religion, nor do I force my belief
on others. Probably not more than a dozen peo-
ple know what I believe, but if you wish, in the
future, I will explain my reasons for my belief."

This will suffice as an illustration of the cre-
dulity of the unbelieving heart. On this view,
when a man looks at a great landscape or the
shimmer of the moonlight on rippling water and
feels little thrills of joy run through his soul, it
is electricity. When his little child creeps up
into his arms, and the tears of a great love fill
his eyes and his heart warms and glows as wave
after wave of God's goodness sweeps over him,
it is electricity. When four or five thousand
men witness and cheer some great feat of hero-
ism, when a martyr dies for his faith, or a man
lays down his life for his friends, it is electricity.
Can there be anything more credulous than the
unbeHeving heart? It would be impossible for

THE BELIEVING HEART 47

us to lend ourselves to any such opinions as
these. Why ? Not because our minds are trained
differently so much as because our hearts are
believing hearts. The only road to a sincere
a;id complete life, a life that stands squarely,
that is ready for all the facts of the world and
the soul, is in the believing heart. You remem-
ber Von Sturmer's lines prefixed to Richard
Jeffries' "Story of My Heart":

"Dim woodlands made him wiser far

Than those who thresh their barren thought
With flails of knowledge dearly bought.
Till all his soul shone like a star

"That flames at fringe of heaven's bar.

Where breaks the surge of space unseen
Against Hope's veil that hangs between
Love's future and the woes that are."

That is what the believing heart does for a man.
And, once more, it is the believing heart
alone that makes it possible for men to find the
will of God. The will of God is not a
proposition to be demonstrated by syllogisms;
the will of God is an obedience discover-
able only to sympathy, and no one of
us will ever find the will of God for his life
unless he finds it by the believing heart that
opens to God and that responds with filial alac-
rity to every intimation of His will to us. A
Christian lawyer from Cripple Creek, Col., told
me once, as we talked over the question of how

48 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

a man might get his life righted, of an experience
of his own years ago, when in a great deal of
perplexity he had gone to his old pastor to ask
him for help as to how he might get his life
directed aright. He said the old man simply
turned to the Thirty-second Psalm and read him
these tw^o verses:

" I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way
which thou shalt go; I will counsel thee with
mine eye upon thee. Be ye not as the horse, or
as the mule, which have no understanding:
whose trappings must be bit and bridle to hold
them in, else they wall not come near unto thee."

Then my friend said the old man shut up his
Bible and turned away. At first he felt no little
resentment at his pastor for this curt way of
replying to his inquiry, but when he went away
and thought it over he saw that the whole secret
of a right life lay just here, that the only way
in w^hich God could ever guide a man was not
by some mechanical instruction, not by fitting
a bit into the man's mouth and pulling him
this way and that with a rein, but by planting
in his heart His own Spirit and letting that
Spirit guide him. The boy goes away to college
from his father. How is his father to shape the
boy's life? There is no code of instruction that
he can give him that will cover all the emer-
gencies and exigencies of it. He can only try
to make that boy his boy, so that when he goes

THE BELIEVING HEART 49

the father's character will express itself in the
boy's life. I remember Dr. Trumbull's telling-
years ago of a Connecticut lad who had grown
up on a farm until he was about twenty years
of age, and then was going away into the city
to make his own fortune. On the last Sun-
day evening before he left home Dr. Trumbull
said the old father called his boy and said:
"John, you are going away from home to-
morrow to the city. I would like to have a
little talk with you before you go, if you
wouldn't mind." Well, the boy and the father
had always lived together a common life, and
the boy went out with his father to walk around
over the farm and hear his father's last counsel.
And they walked down to one of the meadows
where the boy had played from his infancy, up
over the hillside, where they watched the sun
set, as he had watched it for many years; down
through the fields and the orchards until they
came, after an hour's walk, to the back of the
house again, and the old man had said never a
word to his son. And when at last they came
to the gate of the garden and were about to
go in, the old man turned to his son and said:
" John, I have only one thing to say to you —
always do as you have a mind to." What better
could he say? That is the only way you can
guide a life. You cannot guide a life the way
you would guide a beast; you must guide a
life in life's way; and it is just so that we will

50 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

get our guidance, if we ever get it, from our
Father. " My son," He will say to us, " have
you the mind of Christ? " " I hope so, Father,"
will be our reply. " Well," He will say, " always
do as you have a mind to," and will say nothing
more to us. Unto the end of our days we will
get no clearer divine guidance for our lives than
that, and will need none.

Of the great Christians of the last generation,
George Miiller would stand out first before
many minds as an unreasoning, superstitious
mystic. May I read you out of his own life his
account of how he ascertained the will of God?

" I. I seek at the beginning to get my heart
into such a state that it has no will of its own
in regard to a given matter.

" Nine-tenths of the trouble with people is just
here. Nine-tenths of the difficulties are over-
come when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's
will, whatever it may be. When one is truly in
this state, it is usually but a little way to the
knowledge of what His will is.

" 2. Having done this, I do not leave the re-
sult to feeling or simple impression. If I do so,
I make myself liable to great delusions.

" 3. I seek the will of the Spirit of God
through, or in connection with, the Word of
God. The Spirit and the Word must be com-
bined. If I look to the Spirit alone without the
Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also.

THE BELIEVING HEART 51

If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, He will do it
according to the Scriptures and never contrary
to them.

" 4. Next I take into account providential
circumstances. These often plainly indicate
God's will in connection with His Word and
Spirit.

" 5. I ask God in prayer to reveal His will
to me aright.

"6. Thus, through prayer to God, the study
of the Word, and reflection, I come to a delib-
erate judgment according to the best of my
ability and knowledge, and if my mind is thus at
peace, and continues so after two or three more
petitions, I proceed accordingly.

" In trivial matters, and in transactions involv-
ing most important issues, I have found this
method always effective."

Surely in this method George Miiller reveals
himself as a man of as great practical judgment,
of as sound discernment of the method of the
Christian life as any Christian you could find in
this or any day. And the same method will
work in our case. If, to-day and to-morrow, we
want to know what God's will for our life is, we
will find it only as the eyes of our heart are
enlightened that they may see the things that
are excellent in the sight of Jesus Christ.

And lastly, the believing heart is the secret of
the possession of the things of chiefest value in

52 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

life. It is the secret of strength and power.
Can you find in your acquaintance, now, or in
all human history, a man of power who was
not a man of a believing heart? Such men may
not have been Christians, but they had the atti-
tude of heart which should have made them so.
Whether Abraham Lincoln was a very evangel-
ical believer or not I do not know, but the heart
of a Christian was in him. He believed; the
eyes of the inner vision had been enlightened.
He walked through those dark days before his
flock as a shepherd. He stood in the midst of
those surging seas like a great rock on whose
base the waves broke with futility. He stood
there with power and strength, holding the love
and confidence of men, four-square to every
wind. Why? Because his heart rested on God.
You remember the laconic telegram he sent to
the war governor of Illinois. Governor Yates
had written a despairing letter to the great man,
whose patient heart was already bearing all
that human heart could bear, complaining that
hope was gone. All that Lincoln sent back in
reply was the brief message, ^' Dick, stand still
and see the salvation of the Lord." And if one
of us is a stronger man than another, if he has
more power over other men, if he is one of those
men who come in time to stand out above other
men with something of the eternal power of the
hills, so that other men rest their lives on him and
say, " While he believes I can believe," it is be-

THE BELIEVING HEART 53

cause deep in that man's life the eyes of his
heart have been enlightened to see, and he lives
by faith.

The believing heart is the only secret of love.
No one of us will ever learn to love who has not
a heart of trust and faith. And the best things
there are in the world are denied to us if the
eyes of our heart being unenlightened we have
not learned in the school of Christ to love. And
in those days when the storms beat on our lives
and we do not know whether the clouds will
ever break and the blue sky shine again; in
the times when it seems as though the very
foundations had dropped out beneath us; in
those times when we are numbered with the men
whom Professor Drummond describes in one of
his talks as the men who fight their last fight with
their backs against the wall, with no room, not
another step, to recede — if we shall have peace
at all in that hour, we shall get it through our
believing hearts. I read somewhere, years ago,
of a Swiss martyr who was condemned to be
burned, and as he stood, before the fire was kin-
dled around his stake, he turned to the judge
who had condemned him and said : " Sir, I
have one last request to make of you. It is that
you will put your hand on my heart first, and
then lay it on your own, and then tell the people
which heart beats more violently." Then he
stood in the midst of the fagots and the flames,
tranquil, unmoved, serene. Through the smoke

54 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

and the heat he endured as seeing with his heart's
eyes by faith the invisible.

Some of us have lost it, haven't we? We
would give anything if we could slip back across
the years and get it again — that great heart of
trust that we had when we were little children.
Suspiciousness, furtiveness, doubt, indirectness,
unease, all those things which we know when
we think about them are the curse of character,
have slipped into our lives. Maybe we feel the
treasure going now. Whether it is going or
gone, we may have it again to-day. Shall we
not face any sacrifice rather than lose the be-
lieving heart out of life? What other loss can
equal this?

" Upon the white sea sand

There sat a pilgrim band,
Telling the losses that their lives had known.

While evening waned away

From breezy cliff and bay,
And the strong tides went out with weary moan.

One spoke with quivering lip

Of a fair freighted ship
With all his household, to the deep gone down!

But one had wilder woe

For a fair face, long ago
Lost in the darker depths of a great town.

There were some who mourned their youth

With a most loving ruth
For the brave hopes and memories ever green;

And one upon the West

Turned an eye that would not rtst

THE BELIEVING HEART 55

For far-off hills whereon its joy had been.

Some talked of vanished gold,

Some of proud honors told.
Some spake of friends who were their friends no more,

And one of a green grave

Beside a foreign wave,
That made him sit so lonely on the shore.

But when their tales were done,

There spake among them one,
A stranger, seeming from all sorrow free:

* Sad losses ye have met.
But mine is heavier yet,

For the believing heart has gone from me.*

* Alas I ' those pilgrims said,
'For the living and the dead.

For fortune's cruelty, for love's sure cross,

For the wrecks of land and sea !

But howe'er it came to thee.
Thine, stranger, is life's last and heaviest loss,

For the believing heart has gone from thee —

Ah ! the believing heart has gone from thee ! ' "

Oh, let it not go to-day ! Under the trees, in
our rooms, in the city street, let us kneel down
if it has gone and pray that it may come back
to us again as we open up our hearts of childlike
trust unto the Saviour in whom we beheve.

Ill

CHRIST'S APPEAL TO THE DOUBTING
HEART

WHAT we have just been considering
generally is brought home to us con-
cretely in the Master's appeal to the
man who represented so well among the Apos-
tles the hesitant spirit of our own day. The
Christian centuries which intervened between the
Apostolic age and the Reformation are often
spoken of as the era of Peter. The Christian
centuries that have elapsed since the Reforma-
tion have been spoken of as the era of Paul.
Some have suggested that as the era of Peter
waned and gave place to the era of Paul, so the
era of Paul is waning to give place in our day
to the era of John. It may be true, and yet one
is sometimes inclined to think that this is the
age of Thomas. Above all the other Apostles
he seems to embody those types of character
which are finding dominant expression in our
own day. He was a man in whom the specu-
lative, reasoning nature was above the vital; a
man who naturally took a hesitant attitude; a
critical man ; a man full of scruples, whose opin-
ionative nature ruled the rest of his life. Every
time Thomas appears in the Gospel of John he
56

APPEAL TO DOUBTING HE^ART 5l

is shown as a man wanting the vitaHtles and
the optimisms of the beheving nature. He was
a man in whom the critical and opinionative dis-
position had gained the mastery over the trustful,
hopeful, childlike disposition of faith.

He appears before us in his true character
especially in the scene described in the twentieth
chapter of John. He had not been present when
Jesus had appeared to the ten Apostles, and
when they told him of it he at once replied : " I
will not believe that He is risen from the dead
unless I can put my finger into the print of the
nails in His hands, and unless I can thrust my
hand into the wound in His side." It was a
very coarse way of stating even Thomas's desire
for some physical evidence of Jesus's resurrec-
tion, and it was an indication once again of his
want of that trustful disposition which would
have led an ordinary man to believe the testi-
mony of the ten Apostles and of Mary.

On the eighth day after this Jesus appeared
in the upper room when Thomas was present.
Jesus then repeated in their bald detail the condi-
tions that Thomas had laid down. " Thomas,"
He said, " here I am. Reach hither thy finger
and put it into My hand. Reach hither thy hand
and put it into My side, and be not faithless, but
believing."

Now it is worth noting what the charge was
that Jesus laid upon Thomas. He did not criti-
cise Thomas's want of faith in any particular

58 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

event; He criticised Thomas's moral and intel-
lectual disposition. He did not say, '' Now that
the evidence has been presented to you, be-
lieve in this fact of My resurrection " ; He said,
" Now that you have had evidence to convince
you of this one fact, can you not lay aside your
speculative, your debating, your opinionative dis-
position, and have a faithful and believing tem-
per, such as my other disciples here have? Be
not a faithless, but a believing man."

Then, strange to say, this man forgot all about
the conditions that he laid down, on the fulfil-
ment of which alone he said he was willing to
believe in the resurrection of Jesus, and without
any desire to apply the test he fell on his knees,
crying out, " My Lord and my God." He was
satisfied, not with the presentation to his physi-
cal senses of the evidence that he had demanded,
but with the touch upon his personality of the
personality of Jesus. His answer is the sublim-
est confession in the Gospels ; it affirms just what
he had been doubting — ** My Lord and my God."

Now, we have here the two great elements of
Christian life and faith and thought. On the
one hand the offered personality of Christ, wait-
ing to touch our personalities ; on the other hand
the accepting will of Thomas answering to the
offered personality of Jesus. These are the two
great facts of life, of thinking, of belief, of re-
ligion, distinctly of our Christian faith.

A divine personality is offered to the heart of

APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 59

man. This is what revelation is. The substance
of revelation is not truth ; the substance of reve-
lation is person. What God was doing through
all the years of the Old Testament dispensation
was not slowly making men familiar with a few
veracious facts, or any system of principles or
truth. He was showing men Himself. The com-
munication of truth is only a means to the
communication of person, of spirit, of life. The
whole Old Testament dispensation was just a
long attempt on the part of God to reveal Him-
self to the heart of man under and over certain
laws, under and over certain precepts, under
and over certain principles or commandments.
When Moses asked His name, and who he
should say had sent him when he went as the
ambassador of God, Jehovah said to him, " 1
AM THAT I AM, and wheu anyone asketh thee
who sent thee, thou shalt say, I am hath sent
me." The God of character, the God of per-
son, the God of being; not the God of descrip-
tion, not the God of metaphysical idea, not the
God of intellectual notion; the real living God
of spirit and person and life, as He said to
Moses, was striving through all the years of the
Old Testament history to reveal Himself to men.
When Christ came, therefore, it was in pre-
cisely the same way, as a self-revelation to life.
He convinced Thomas in the little upper room —
Thomas, who thought he would not be con-
vinced except by certain physical evidences pre-

60 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

sented to his senses — by the touch of His own
personaHty upon Thomas's spiritual nature, and
Thomas answered by the surrender of his own
life to Christ, " My Lord and my God."

Christ addresses His appeal to the whole per-
sonality, the willing nature, rather than to man's
opinion as supreme over the rest of his life.
You can see all through Christ's earthly history,
in the method of His dealing with men, hcfw He
strove to exalt this conception of His mission,
and how He sought to enable men to meet Him
on the plane of full personality, of highest testi-
mony. On the night of the supper Philip broke
in upon the answer which Jesus was giving to
Thomas's difficulty with the request, " Lord,
show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." He
wanted some physical manifestation of the
Father, some revelation of Him that would
coerce the senses, that would lead opinion into
bondage and force it, irrespective of the integ-
rity and dignity of the complete nature, to assent
to the presence of God and the claims of God.

Christ's answer was : " Have I been so long
time with you, and yet hast thou not known me,
Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the
Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the
Father? Believest thou not that I am in the
Father, and the Father in Me? The^ words that
I speak unto you I speak not of Myself, but the
Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works.
Relieve me that I am in the Father, and the

APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 6l

Father in Me: or else — if that is too high, and
your heart does not answer at once to My heart,
if the spirit of man that is in you does not
instantly respond to the Spirit of God that is in
Me, well, I will drop down to a lower plane —
believe Me for the very works' sake."

Our Lord has every kind of evidence to pre-
sent to man. The man who cannot believe save
on the plane of historic proof can find evidence
enough on that plane to support Christ's claims ;
but what Christ strove for constantly with men
was to get them to assent to His claims upon
their lives on the high ground of the self-reve-
lation in Him of God the Father to man the
son, of the Spirit of God to the spirit of man
that is within men, that was born of the Spirit
of God, and that finds its true life and anchor-
age only in rich, responsive answer to the Spirit
of God.

The same principle was manifested in the par-
able of the Good Shepherd. He had told the
Jews that His sheep knew His voice and fol-
lowed Him. It was the only way in which they
discovered that He was their shepherd or showed
Him that they were His sheep. Every one whom
the Father had given Him would recognise His
voice and come to Him, and He would know
each one of them by name. That was too high
for the Jews, and John tells us that they took up
stones to stone Him. Then He drops down
again, as He did with Philip, to the lower level

62 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

of argument, and says, " For which of My
works do you stone Me ? " They said, " For
none of Your works, but because You, being a
man, make Yourself God." He took up their
thought, not denying that He had made Himself
God, but contending that the works He had
done were in themselves sufficient evidence that
He was the Son of God, and that He had the
right to make these claims on the lives of men
that He was making on theirs. He would drop
down to the evidence of Thomas, to the plane
of Thomas's desire, whenever men insisted that
He should, but only when He had exhausted
His attempt to get the hearts of men to answer
straight and clear to His heart. But when Jesus
had once offered this lower physical evidence to
Thomas, Thomas wanted none of it. He had
come now into the presence of Christ, where he
was able to take in the kind of testimony he had
not been able to recognise before, and he an-
swered straight out of his own soul to the soul
of Christ.

I have a friend who has a distorted hand. Do
you think it is necessary for me every time I
meet that friend to ask him to let me feel his
distorted hand to make sure that it is he? I
know that when he and I sit down together and
our hearts have touched, that he and I are there,
without any gross sensual evidence gained by
feeling his withered hand. It was even so with
Jesus. He would let men feel, if they wanted,

APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 63

the nail print in His hand. He would allow
men, if they must, butcher-like to thrust their
hands into the wound in His side ; but when once
He had offered Himself to men for the satisfac-
tion of their desire for that kind of testimony,
their desire for that kind of testimony was gone,
and they fell down on their faces before Him,
and the heart of man answered to the heart of
Christ with Thomas's cry, " My Lord and my
God."

Now, because Jesus Christ addressed His
word in this way to the highest in man, to what
is in man of God's nature, He was constantly
defining faith in properly corresponding terms.
There are very few passages in the Gospels
where Christ uses the word " faith " or the word
*' believe " to describe an intellectual attitude
toward certain truth. Constantly, Christ uses
faith as a term that is not applicable to the re-
lation of a man to an opinion, or of a man to
a thing. He uses faith as a term that is appli-
cable only to the relation of a person to a person.
I believe, not things that people tell me, I be-
lieve the people themselves, and my belief in
them is faith. A little child, knowing very little
of life, sits on the father's knee learning its first
lessons of life, and believes what the father tells
it. Now its beHef in what the father says is not
an act of faith, it is a fruit of faith. It is the
relationship of confidence between the child and
the father that makes the child believe anything

64 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

the father says, and its belief in what the father
tells is simply one of the accessory sequences of
its faith in the father. Faith, with Jesus, is per-
sonal confidence in Himself. Faith, with Jesus,
is the answer of a man's soul to His soul, the
tourh of a man's personality, upon His person-
ality, the surrender of a willing life to Jesus
Christ as its Lord and its King.

Now, there is nothing unreasonable in this
view of faith. As a matter of fact, all Hfe rests
on faith of just this kind. Business life does.
What makes prosperity? The fact that times
are good? Not necessarily. Men's belief that
times are good. What creates a panic? Hard
times? Not at all, of necessity, but man's belief
that hard times are coming, man's want of con-
fidence, man's loss of faith. It often happens
that the years after a panic are really more
arduous years, less prosperous years than the
years during which the panic was upon men. It
is the loss of faith, the loss of the atmosphere
of trust, the loss of the spirit of confidence that
destroys society. It is the presence of faith,
of confidence, of trust, not primarily of opinion,
not primarily of intellectual agreement, that
holds society together. Opinion has its place,
but it is not the first place.

It is the spirit of faith and of trust that
underlies our physical life and makes it possible.
The veriest sceptic, as we have seen, is living by
trust. He is trusting in the continuity of nature.

APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 65

which is only another name, and a poorer one,
for the fidelity of God. He is trusting to this
law or that, which is only an impersonal state-
ment of some one of God's minor activities. He
trusts that his food will work out certain results ;
that taking sleep will produce certain conse-
quences ; that when he walks out on the face of
the earth the stars will not fall down on him and
crush him. I say the most honest sceptic that
ever lived was compelled by the very necessities
of his life to confine his scepticism in the honest
application of it to only part of his life. It is
impossible for man to live except in the spirit
of confidence and faith.

Far more is this true in- the realm of our
higher life. We live, as Paul says, by faith.
We live by fellov/ship. We live by confidence.
We live by trust. We live, not by reasoning out
God's dealing with us, not by the adjustment of
certain mental opinions — no man gets more than
an inch or two toward the goal by that means —
but by the willing adjustment of the volitional
life to a trust in God and the laws of God.

And, accordingly, Jesus Christ in preaching
His gospel made His preaching pre-eminently
just an assertion of Himself. " Believe Me," He
said. " Believe in Me." We see this in all its
beauty in the last paragraph of the ninth chap-
ter of John, in the story of the man born blind.
After the man was cast out from the synagogue
Jesus found him, and said unto him, " Dost thou

66 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

believe in the Son of God?" And he said,
" Who is He, Lord, that I may believe?" And
Jesus said, " Thou hast both seen Him, and He
it is that speaketh with thee." Immediately the
man responded, " Lord, I believe," and he wor-
shipped Him.

Even those parts of Christ's teaching which
are admired by people most hostile to Christ's
claims are fullest of Christ's assertiveness. I
wonder if you can find in all of Christ's teach-
ings anything more assertive of His claims, of
His supremacy, of His uniqueness, than the Ser-
mon on the Mount. And so at other times, " I
am the light of the world. I am the bread of
God which came down out of heaven to give life
to the world. I am the Messiah. I am the Son
of God. I and my Father are one."

Jesus Christ presented Himself in this way,
because that is just what He came here for.
Christ was not the preacher of the message,
Christ was the message. Christianity differen-
tiates itself from every other religion. Christ is
His own religion. A man who entered His re-
ligion entered Christ. The man who began to
learn His religion learned Christ. The man
who began to feed himself with what that re-
ligion provided, ate of Christ's flesh and drank
of Christ's blood. And so Christ made His word
a direct appeal to the will of men, to the whole
living nature of men, and never once an appeal
merely to that part of man which lies within the

APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 67

sphere of his opinionative powers. Jesus Christ
spoke straight home to the whole Hfe of man
and demanded that man surrender all his will
and his whole Hfe to Him. BeHef, He told men,
was an activity of their whole nature, and not
a mere matter of their thought. Belief, He told
them, was the great and necessary thing. A few
acts of outside conduct, a few precepts as to be-
haviour, these were comparatively trifling mat-
ters with Him, because the great causative
forces of conduct are the important things.
What He wanted, as He told them, was to lay
His hand on that spring of life within, out of
which came the things which defile the true
life and which is the source of all man's external
conduct and behaviour.

Christ spoke right home to the personalities
of those to whom He spoke. In the midst of
great crowds He would separate Himself and
one man immediately from all the crowd, that
He might bear home to the heart of that one man
His personal offer of life. He would see in the
man's face, He would catch in the man's bear-
ing, some faint intimation that the man was hear-
ing, though far off, the true note of His voice,
and perhaps recognising in it the accents of the
Father's voice, and straightway Christ spoke
His message home to the heart and life of that
man.

He never tired of insisting, as He spoke to the
Jews, that their difficulty was not an intellectual

68 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

difficulty. It was a moral and vital one. " Ye
will not come to Me," He said, " that ye might
have life. Ye cannot hear My voice because you
are not willing to hear My voice. Ye are not of
My Father, and therefore ye will not hear Me.
Ye are the sons of the devil and the works of
your father ye will do. I come in My Father's
name and ye will not receive Me. Some other
man will come in his own name and him ye will
receive." And so, over and over again, He told
them that what He wanted of them as a test of
their acceptance of Him was not mimic-like
repetition of a few formulas, was not crying
out in the market-places, " Lord, Lord," it was
a keeping of His commandments. " Ye are my
friends if you bring your lives into surrender
and obedience to Me." " If ye love Me, ye will
keep my commandments. If ye love Me, ye will
do what I have commanded you, and My Father
will love you, and We will come to you and will
make Our abode with you."

Jesus Christ is making His appeal to the
whole of our life; He is offering us the whole
of Himself to be appropriated by the whole of
ourselves. He is offering us His life in exchange
for ours. He is offering us Himself in ex-
change for ourselves. His divinity for our hu-
manity ; and all that He asks of us is not that we
should adjust ourselves to a certain opinionative
attitude toward Him — -we shall do that all right
in time if we do this other — but that we should

APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 69

bring ourselves, as He Himself put it, into the
temperament and atmosphere of a little child.
" Except ye be converted and become as little
children, ye shall never enter, ye shall not even
recognise the kingdom of Heaven/'

But some one may say : " Is opinion, then, of
no account? May I think just what I please, so
long as I have right feelings toward Christ ? "
By no means. What a man thinks is of vast
account. It is one of Christ's own questions,
"What think ye of Christ?" Christ Himself
was always insisting that His appeal was ad-
dressed to the will of man as a reasonable will.
He made appeal in reasonable ways. He as-
sumed that man himself, even in his most voli-
tional life, is a reasoning creature, and He came
down to deal with men, in a measure no other
great religious teacher ever did, upon the plane
of man's inquiring apprehension, and ready to
make perfectly clear to men the enigmas of
His faith in His own good time. What I insist
on is that we are wrong in subjugating the will,
the life, the power of vision, the inalienable in-
stincts of being, and Christ Himself to our mere
opinionative nature; that we do despite to our
own life when we trample underfoot our own
constitution, when we pick out wilfully one de-
partment of our life and deliberately make all
the rest of our life the slave of that ; when in this
day we keep insisting that physical evidence, the
meanest and grossest kind of all evidence, is the

70 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

only evidence which can accredit truth to us.
What I insist on is that Jesus Christ makes His
appeal to-day just as He did in the days of
Thomas, not to the putting of fingers in the nail
prints of His hands not to the putting of hands
in the spear wound m His side, but to the sense
that will be born in men whenever, with the
heart of a child, they desire to be made like
Christ, when they believe that they are Christ's
friends and that Christ is theirs; when they ac-
cept a moral attitude, a spiritual atmosphere, the
feeling of love and of kinship and of desire, the
surrender of life that led Thomas to cry, " My
Lord and my God." This is the foundation of
spiritual life, the foundation of all true life of
whatsoever sort.

Just in proportion as we understand this, and
perceive that Jesus Christ appeals to the highest
and most splendid in us, will He be able to lead
us out into His own fulness of power. " If any
man will do My will/' He said, " intellectually
he shall be freed from difficulty in time. He
that beheveth on Me, out from the depths of his
life shall pour torrents of living water. He that
believeth on Me shall do not only what I have
done, but greater things than these shall he do
because I go unto My Father."

Jesus is offering Himself to us in this vital
way, not in any dead, mechanical fashion; not
as a physical body laid outside of us, to be han-
dled as men handle the bodies of men which are

APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 71

shells of men, not men; but as the living Spirit
of God, sent here to touch the living spirits of
men. And those of us who are His sheep will
hear His voice and will follow Him. And that
is the only essential thing. Everything else fol-
lows in its own good time, and doubt, perplexity,
hesitancy over this matter of opinion or that
matter, find their full solution in the lives of the
men who are willing to do His will. Shairp
gathers up what I have been saying in his verses :

"I have a life with Christ to live,
And, ere I live it, must I wait
Till learning can clear answer give
Of this and that book's date?

"I have a life in Christ to live;
I have a death in Christ to die;
And must I wait till science give
All doubts a full reply?

" Nay ; rather, while the sea of doubt
Is raging wildly round about,
Questioning of life and death and sin,
Let me but creep within
Thy fold, O Christ, and at Thy feet
Take but the lowest seat;
And hear Thine awful voice repeat.
In gentlest accents heavenly sweet,

'Come unto me and rest;
Believe me and be blest.'"

IV

THE HEARTS RESPONSE TO THE MAS-
TER'S CALL

FROM one point of view, there are two
Christs. There is the Christ within. And
the experience of the Hfe in which Christ
dwells is expressed in Paul's great words : " To
me to live is Christ." " When Christ, Who is
our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear
with. Him in glory." " I am crucified with
Christ ; nevertheless I live ; yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me." Then there is another Christ —
the outer Christ. Of course the Christ who
would dwell within is the Christ without, until
the door of the life is opened to let Him in ; but
even when He has been admitted, there is an
outer Christ still — a Christ who lays a law upon
the Hfe as well as lives a Hfe within the life ; and
the words of the experience of the outer Christ
are such words as these: "A new command-
ment give I unto you." " Ye are my friends, if
ye do whatsoever I command you."

From one point of view there are two Christs.

And yet we know that there is only one Christ,

and that the outer is the inner Christ, that the

Christ who dwells within is the Christ, also, to

n

THE HEART'S RESPONSE 7S

Whom our eyes are turned without. They make
a vain endeavour who try to get along with one
or the other of these two Christs, excluding the
one with Whom they wish to have little to do.
Those who think they can have the Christ with-
out, without also accepting the Christ within,
or the Christ within without also accepting the
Christ without, can have neither Christ in His
fulness.

Now, the call of the Christ of the inner life is
such a word as this : " Verily, verily, I say
unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of
Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in
you." And the call of the outer Christ is such
a word as this : " If ye love Me, keep My com-
mandments." We must often be confused by
the effort of men to keep these two Christs apart,
and perhaps there are few of us who are not
often thrown into confusion by our own thought
of a Christ within and a Christ without, whose
missions we attempt to keep separate one from
the other. The two Christs are one. Is there
any call of the common Christ, following which
we shall be able to surmount the difficulties
which come from trying to sever the call of
the Christ within from the call of the Christ
without? I think there is such a call, and that
it was equally the primal and the final call of
Jesus to men : " Follow Me ! "

Our Lord walked by the shores of the Sea
of Galilee, and saw Simon and Andrew his

74 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

brother casting a net in the sea, for they were
fishers, and He said to them, " Follow Me," and
they left their nets and followed Him. Walk-
ing further, He saw John and James, his brother,
mending their nets in their boat, and He called
to them, and they left their father Zebedee and
followed Him. A few days later, as He came
out of a city in which He had been preaching,
He passed a publican sitting at the receipt of
custom, and He said to him, " Follow Me," and
he rose and left his money tables and followed
Him. And it came to pass, as they were on
their way to Jerusalem, that one came to Him
and said, " I will follow Thee whithersoever
Thou goest." And He answered and said unto
him, " Foxes have holes, and the birds of the
air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not
where to lay His head." And He said unto an-
other, " Follow Me," and he said, " Suffer me
first to go and bury my father." He said to
him, " Let the dead bury their dead ; but go
thou and preach the kingdom of God." And
another said to Him, " Lord, I will follow Thee ;
but suffer me first to go and say farewell to
them that are at home at my house " ; and He
said to him, " No man, having put his hand to
the plough, and looking back, is fit for the king-
dom of God." And as He went on in the way
a young man came to Him, and said, " Master,
what good thing shall I do that I may have
eternal life ? " And He said to him, '' Why

THE HEART'S RESPONSE 75

askest thou Me concerning that which is good?
One is good, even God. Keep the command-
ments." And the man said to Him, " Which
commandments ? " And He replied, " Thou shalt
not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not
commit adultery; thou shalt not bear false wit-
ness; thou shalt honour thy father and mother,
and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'*
And the young man said to Him, " All these
have I observed; what lack I yet?" He said to
him, " If thou wouldst be perfect, go and sell
what thou hast and give to the poor, and thou
shalt have treasure in heaven ; and come and fol-
low Me."

Now, these were all calls of Christ to men
practically at His first meetings with them; but
if you study the Gospels, you will find that
Christ's call to men who had been with Him
for three long years was still the same, " Follow
Me." On the last night of His intercourse with
them, He knew no better way to sound them the
call of the inner and the outer life alike than in
these same terms : " For where I go," He said,
" ye cannot follow Me now. Your discipleship
must be incomplete for a little while; ye shall
follow Me afterwards." And Simon Peter said
to Him, '' Lord, why can I not follow Thee now ?
I am ready to go with Thee both to prison and
to death." And even at the end, when He
walked with Simon Peter, in one of the last of
all His interviews which are preserved to us in

76 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

the Gospels, in the grey dawn of the early morn-
ing by the shores of Galilee, as He welcomed him
back to the new life and the new service, He
said to him, " Follow Me." " If I will that he
tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow
thou Me."

That was Christ's call to men. He did not say
to them, "Will you join My organisation?"
For at first He had no organisation to invite men
to join. He did not say to them, " Will you
accept these views that I am proclaiming?" For
when He first invited men to follow Him, He
had as yet proclaimed no views. He asked men
to join Him. He did not ask them to join an
institution; He did not ask them to believe in
His opinions; He asked men to join Him and
to believe in Him. It was on the personal re-
lationship to Himself that He laid all the em-
phasis; and even when years had passed away
and Christ's organisation had begun to develop
and His views had been set before men and He
called them into His life. He did not say to
them even then, " I wish you would accept these
views of Mine; they are the only truths." He
did not say to them, " I wish you would join this
fellowship of Mine; it is the only fellowship."
He still said to them, "Follow Me." At the
close of His teaching it was still the thought of
being personally united to Himself that He
would have understood to be the fundamental

THE HEART'S RESPONSE 77

thought of His kingdom. " I know My sheep,
and My sheep know Me, and they follow Me."
And when He set before His disciples in the
twelfth chapter of John's Gospel, with a clear-
ness and a fulness of intimation which He had
scarcely used before, the thought of His death,
His crucifixion, and His larger power. He still
spoke to them in these terms. It was not, " Be-
lieve now in these great views of My going
away, and all that for which My going stands,"
but, " If any man serve Me, let him follow Me ;
and where I am, there also shall My servant be."
It is worth noting that Jesus Christ is the
only person in the world who dares to say to
men, " Follow Me." No other founder of a
great religion has based his religion on a per-
sonal following of himself. Confucianism, as
a religion, consists merely in the practice of
maxims, in memorising them, and in the mould-
ing of life on the basis of those ideas, now
twenty-five centuries old. It is a religion of
precepts and antiquarianism. Buddhism is a
religion of a method. Buddha proclaimed noth-
ing else than the discovery of a way; and by
his philosophy we are to learn simply the method
of satisfaction and absorption. Mohammedan-
ism is the rehgion of a book and a formula.
Twelve hundred years ago Mohammed wrote it
all down, never to be changed while the cen-
turies pass, so that

78 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

"Though the world rolls on from range to range.
And realms of thought expand,
The letter stands without expanse or change,

Stiff as a dead man's hand.
While as the life blood fills the growing form
The Spirit Christ has shed
Flows through the ripening ages quick and warm,
More felt than heard or read."

Among all the teachers and leaders of men Jesus
has dared to stand out and to cry over the tumult
of life's sea, " Follow Me ! Follow Me ! "

I do not wonder that that call made on the
first disciples the impression which it did make.
In the first chapter in John's Gospel we read
that He was minded to go into Galilee, and He
said to Philip, " Follow Me," and Philip found
Nathanael, and without any other proof of
Christ's divinity than that contained in those
words, " Follow Me," and in Christ's person-
ality, said to him, " We have found Him, of
Whom Moses in the law, and the prophets did
write, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph."
By the interpretation of a phrase, Philip sprang
out of his dead lovelessness into the love and
the life of Christ; and I am sure that no life
has ever heard that sweet voice " that makes
whoever hears a homesick soul thereafter until he
follows it to heaven," saying " Follow Me," with-
out seeing back of that voice the lovely face of
the divine Messiah, the Lamb of God Who came
to take away the sins of the whole world.
" Follow Me."

THE HEART'S RESPONSE 79

But what does following Jesus Christ mean?*^
I suppose that there is scarcely one of us who
would not claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
But what does it mean to follow Jesus Christ?
Well, what does it mean to follow any man? If,
when Mr. Hewitt defeated Mr. Roosevelt
and Mr. Henry George in the municipal cam-
paign for the mayoralty of New York City, I
had said that I was a follower of Henry George,
you would have understood, of course, that I
believed to an extent in Mr. George's views;
that I was supporting him in. his candidacy for
the mayoralty; that I was lending my influence
to his election; that I believed in his personal
character, and was willing to trust to him the
large responsibilities of the office for which he
was a candidate. Is that what it means to fol-
low Christ? Not much more than that, if Jesus
Christ was only a man. But Jesus Christ was
more than a man, and to follow Him means
more than simply to believe in His views, or to
have confidence in His character, or to be a
supporter of Jesus for the position which He
is claiming as spiritual King of all the children
of His Father. It means more than that to
follow Christ, for Christ demands of those who
follow Him what no man ever dared to demand
of his followers. He demands that every thought
shall be brought into captivity to His obedience;
He demands that all life shall be laid down at
His feet, and that He Himself shall be given the

80 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

throne and sceptre in the human Hfe that would
call itself His. He claims in the life of every
man a surrender of the man's whole will, of all
a man's nature to Himself, and He offers, of
course, in exchange to give that which is of in-
finitely greater value — even the indwelling of
His own life. But that does not alter the fact
that He demands in those who would call them-
selves His followers what no man ever dared to
demand, what no man could ever expect to obtain
from his fellowmen.

What does it mean to follow Jesus Christ? It
means very clearly that my life must be like
Christ's life, not by any mechanical external
imitation. I think that many books that are
written in our day with the most earnest and
devout purpose make this great mistake of lay-
ing down for us rules of mechanical imitation
of Jesus, which are themselves the denial and
the distrust of the Spirit of Jesus, which is lib-
erty. There is no need of effort in making
one's Hfe Hke Christ's. Christ Himself will make
the life like His which is willing to assume
toward Him the attitude of discipleship, and to
say to Him, " Master, I follow Thee," for Christ
Himself will put into operation in that Hfe the
principles that make His own Hfe.

As one studies the Master's life, the principles
that made His life seem to fall into these five
classes. First of all, the principles that found
expression in what Paul called Jesus's empty-

THE HEART'S RESPONSE 81

ing of Himself, what the Buddhists call, with
reference to Sakya Muni, "the great renuncia-
tion." All that Gautama Buddha gave up was
his human, kingly crown, while what Christ gave
up was the crown and throne of a heavenly king-
dom, when with an infinite stoop of condescen-
sion He came down thence to walk to and fro
here among men. Surely, that was the first
great principle of Jesus's life. A life that would
be like Christ's must be imbued with that same
principle. Jesus Himself taught this. " If any
man will come after Me, let him deny himself,
and take up his cross daily, and follow Me."
He pointed out to His disciples that, first of
all, this great principle must be put in opera-
tion by His Spirit in their lives, which had ruled
His life, the principle to which Paul referred
when, in the second chapter of the Epistle to the
Philippians, he said : " Let this mind be in you '
which was also in Christ Jesus; Who being in
the form of God, counted not equality with
God a prize to be jealously retained, but emptied
Himself, taking the form of a servant, being
made in the likeness of man and being found in
the fashion as a man. He humbled Himself and
became obedient unto death, even the death of
the cross." We who would follow JesMs Christ
must learn, first of all, to be like Him in this
absolute renunciation of self-life and self-pur-
pose. We must be willing " to give up the love
of life for the sake of the life of love."

82 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

The second set of principles in Jesus's life are
the principles of testing and of endurance of
testing. When He began His ministry He went
out at once into the great temptation where He
was tried. For we have not a high priest that
was not tempted, or incapable of being tempted,
or that is unable to sympathise with us, but one
who was in all points tempted like as we; and
who in that " He Himself hath suffered being
tempted, is able to succour them also that are
tempted." Is it not true that the better the life
the larger its temptations? I believe, even
though it is not a true view, there is truth in
the view that the best compliment that God
can offer us is to suffer temptation to come to
us; for there is evil to be overcome in this
world, and that evil must be distributed among
those who are able to overcome it, and God
allows to us just that burden which is within
the measure of our strength. If He allows one
more or less than his brother, it is because his
ability to endure is greater or less than his
brother's. The holier a life is the larger its
temptations will be ; finer temptations, of course,
not so gross as the old; temptations accom-
panied with a larger power of resistance than
was possessed before, but temptations so bitter,
so hot, so keen, that the low, coarse life could
not conceive them if by any means they could
be expressed to it. To all of us the following
of Jesus, each step in the way, will mean a life

THE HEART'S RESPONSE 83

of larger temptation, and therefore a life of finer
fibre and of larger glory, and a life laid under
heavier responsibilities to resist. What if Jesus
Christ had played traitor to humanity in the
wilderness ? What if He had fallen when Satan
came to Him endeavouring to overthrow Him at
the beginning? All history since Christ, all his-
tory before Christ, would have been written over
with a great blur. The principle of temptation
in Christ's life was accompanied with a principle
of a perfect endurance; and it must be so with
us who would follow Him.

Then, thirdly, after His temptation, the Mas-
ter came out at once from the wilderness, and
stood forth before men to make His public dec-
laration. Imagine yourself, for a moment, in
that crowd that stood around Him, the carpen-
ter's son from the village of Nazareth, and hear
Him speaking, " I say unto you, that except
your righteousness shall exceed the righteous-
ness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no
case enter Into the kingdom of Heaven." " Not
every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall
enter into the kingdom of Heaven ; but he that
doeth the will of My Father which is in Heaven."
The most difficult confession you or I were ever
called upon to make was as nothing in compar-
ison with the self-declaration which Christ was
called to make that day when untried, fresh
from His obscure life, He stepped out into the
blaze of the scrutiny of all Israel, and said to

84 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

those worshippers of tradition and of authority:
" Ye have heard that it was said by them of old
times, but / say unto you, I, I, I." And so
throughout His ministry. His preaching was a
declaration of difficult truth. He closed His life
with confessions as great as those with which
He began. Have you ever thought why Paul,
in charging Timothy, " I charge thee in the
sight of God, Who quickeneth all things, and in
the sight of Jesus Christ," added, " Who before
Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confession."
It was because Paul understood that among all
the great principles of Christ's life, scarcely any
was greater than that principle which found its
expression in His absolute fearlessness of asser-
tion of His message and His person and of the
relationship which had existed between Him, the
Son, and the Father Who had sent Him. If we
follow our Master, we must be in our confession
of Him before men as clear, as unqualified, as
strong, as He was, when, nineteen centuries ago.
He stood upon the hills overlooking the tremu-
lous blue waves of Galilee or faced Pontius
Pilate.

The fourth set of principles that controlled
Christ's life, and which He Himself will set to
control our lives, — ^how can they be expressed
better than by calling them the principles of
loving human tenderness, the principles which
governed, throughout, that career of gentle, little
Vinremembered acts of kindness and of love, th^

THE HEART'S RESPONSE 85

life of " the first true gentleman that ever
breathed," that " very perfect, gentle knight " :

"And of His port as meeke as is a mayde,
He nevere yet no vileynye he sayde."

Those of us who would follow Him must show
those principles of loving tenderness which made
His life so sweet, so generous, so thoughtless of
all self-interest, so thoughtful of all innocence
and of all sinners, and let them govern also in
our lives and shape them after the fashion of His
own.

Last of all, there is the fifth set of principles,
which we must allow to control our lives, and
which are summarised in the great names of
Gethsemane, and Calvary, and Olivet. No one
enters into the life of Christ's discipleship who
does not seek, not the renunciation only, but the
very death of all his old low self and self-life.
For life is far more than just ease and gentle-
ness, far more than confession and the endur-
ance of the tests that God sends us. Life is a
daily dying and rising — as the old lines run:

'* As once toward heaven my face was set,
I came unto a place where two ways met.
One led to Paradise and one away;
And fearful of myself lest I should stray,

I paused that I might know
Which was the way wherein I ought to go.
The first was one my weary eyes to please.
Winding along thro' pleasant fields of ease,

86 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

Beneath the shadow of fair branching trees.
*This path of calm and solitude

Surely must lead to heaven,' I cried,
In joyous mood.
*Yon rugged one, so rough for weary feet,

The footpath of the world's too busy street.

Can never be the narrow way of life.'

But at that moment I thereon espied

A footprint bearing trace of having bled,

And knew it for the Christ's, so bowed my head.
And followed where He led."

In the life of each one of us truly follov^ing
Jesus, these principles that make Christ's life
and Christ Himself Hving in these principles,
must be operating.

Is that all that following Jesus means ? From
one point of view, yes ; and yet there is one ele-
ment which has not had emphasis enough. Fol-
lowing Jesus means that I turn over to Jesus
all my judgments, all my tastes, all my opinions,
all my few talents for His use; that I sink in
Him all my interests ; that in the fine old phrase
of Ignatius, He becomes to me " my inseparable
life," and I have no longer any life " divided, O
Lord of Life, from Thee," All my life becomes
Christ's when I have once said to Him, as I
have heard His voice say, " Follow me," " Mas-
ter, I follow thee."

Following Christ means, of course, also, the
complement of this. As I hand over to Christ \
all that I am and all that I have, Christ hands i
back to me all that He is and all that He has.

THE HEART'S RESPONSE 87

I say it very reverently. Our Master says to us
"Ye are My Master;" just as truly as we say
to Him, "Thou art My Master;" for He has
put at my disposal all that is His, even as I have
tried to put at His disposal all that is mine.
Nothing that He possesses is held back from me.
All those treasures of wisdom and knowledge
that are hidden in Him are made mine. He
Himself is made to me the unlimited horizon
of a new heaven and a new earth. Jesus Christ
gives far more than He asks from any of those
whom He asks to follow Him. Years ago, one
who was at that time perhaps the best known
astronomer of our country, in an address which
he made at Smith College when he was speaking
there one Sunday afternoon, quoted a hymn
which he said was his favourite hymn. I have
thought of it often as coming from him, a man
who had seen more things than any of us can
hope to see. This was the hymn he said he
loved best of all :

"Jesus, these eyes have never seen

That radiant form of thine.
The veil of sense hangs dark between

Thy blessed face and mine.
I hear Thee not, I see Thee not,

Yet art Thou oft with me;
And earth hath ne'er so dear a spot

As where I meet with Thee."

Only the old hymn errs in this : that Christ is not
"oft" with those that follow Him. "If any

88 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

man serve Me, let him follow Me; and where
I am, there also shall My servant be." It is
one of the laws of the Kingdom of God that
Christ and His servant, His follower, can never
be apart. Though I go down into the uttermost
depths of the earth, even there will His love
protect me. Though I wander off out of the
sight of all men. His love is with me still.

"I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air,
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care."

Into the secret of His presence we go morning
and night. In the secret place not " oft " but al-
ways is the soul that is following Jesus privi-
leged to live and to walk, to wake and to sleep,
in Him. These things it means to follow Christ.
But even more. " Come ye after me," was
His word to those disciples on the shores of
Galilee, and what ? " Come ye after me, and I
will make you to be fishers of men." In other
words, " Follow me, and others will follow you."
Following Jesus Christ is the door to the influ-
ence we covet. I suppose that all of us covet
influence. There is nothing for which men
hunger so as they hunger for influence over
their fellow men. Until the new era dawned,
2,000,000 men came up to take the annual ex-
aminations in the civil service in China every
year. Men took these examinations year after

THE HEAHT'S RESPONSE 8^

year for seventy years. There were instances
of old men over a hundred years of age still try-
ing to pass the entrance examinations of what
was practically the great university of China,
so hot was their ambition after those positions
of influence and leadership which could be ob-
tained in no other way. Scarcely a year passes
in India that some of the young Hindus who fail
in the examination do not commit suicide, so dis-
appointed are they at having lost the chance of
rising into the positions of influence that they
desire. Few of us probably want anything more
than we want the ability to influence men and
women to follow Jesus. We do not long for a
crown of glory. We do long for the fulfilment
in our lives of that old promise in Daniel, that
they that turn many to righteousness shall shine
as the stars forever and ever. We would like
to feel as Paul felt, who was willing to be ac-
cursed from God for his brothers' sake if only he
might turn them to the light and joy of Christ.
We want to feel, as he felt, the thrilling eagef'
ness and joy of influence.

"Oft when the Word is on me to deliver.
Lifts the illusion and the truth lies bare.
Desert or throng, the city or the river.

Melts in a lucid Paradise of air.
Only like souls I see the folk thereunder
Bound who should conquer, slaves who should bf
kings.
Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder.
Sadly contented in a show of things.

90 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

Then with a rush the intolerable craving
Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call,

Oh, to save these, to perish for their saving,
Die for their life, be offered for them all."

And here is the secret : " Follow me." " Come
ye after me, and I will make you to become
fishers of men."

Nor is even that all. " He that foUoweth me
shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the
light of life." I do not know the way I go;
you do not know the way you go. Now and
then we become conscious that the way is dark,
and we are far from home, and we cry for the
kindly Light to lead us on. " He that follow-
eth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall
have the light of life " ; He Himself stands wait-
ing by the side of those who are waiting with
willingness to follow Him, ready to lead us on.

" And although the way be cheerless.
We can follow calm and fearless.
Till we safely stand in the Fatherland."

Nor is that all. " If any man serve me, let
him follow Me; and he that followeth Me, him
shall My Father honour." He is calling us to-
day, as nineteen hundred years ago He called
over the waves of Galilee, saying, " Christian,
follow me." Shall we let Him pass by, with the
gleam of His white robe dying out of our sight,
and the sweet voice growing fainter and fainter
in our ears, and the radiance that always goes

THE HEART'S RESPONSE 91

with Him sinking out of our sky; shall we let
Him pass ? Or, as He cried, " Follow me," shall
we turn to Him, knowing well what It means,
and rising up, leave all and follow Him ?

This is the whole of it. He, Himself, stands
waiting, with all of the Father's life and the
Father's joy and the Father's fulness, and the
Father's glory, ready to give them to us if we
will follow Him, and there is nowhere else that
they can be found.

"Long did I toil and knew no earthly rest.

Far did I roam and found no lasting home.
At last I sought them in His sheltering breast

Who opes His arms and bids the weary come.
With Him I found a home, a rest divine;
And I since then am His, and He is mine.

" The good I have Is from his store supplied,
The ill is only what He deems the best.
He for my friend, I'm rich with naught beside.

And poor without Him, though of all possessed.
All things may change; I take or I resign,
Content while I am His and He is mine.

"Whate'er may change, no change in Him is seen;

A glorious sun that wanes not nor declines.
Above the clouds and doubts He walks serene,

And sweetly on His people's darkness shines.
Whate'er may come, I care not nor repine
While I my Saviour's am, and He is mine.

"While here, alas! I know but half His love.
But half discern Him and but half adore:

92 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

But when I meet Him in the courts above,

I hope to love Him better, praise Him more,
And sing and tell amid the choir divine
How fully I am His and He is mine."

Let us go with Him and be His, that He may
go with us and be ours.

THE INNER CIRCLE

AMONG the multitude who followed Jesus,
^\^ attracted by the novelty of His doctrine and
the magic of His mighty works, there were
a few who heard in His doctrine the voice of the
Father and who perceived that the mighty works
were signs. How many men and women of sin-
cere and discerning faith were hidden in the
multitude we can not say. We know that there
were some hundreds of them. From among
these Jesus selected seventy, and sent them out
two by two before His face into every city and
place whither He Himself would come. Besides
these seventy He chose twelve, not to go out
from Him, but to be with Him, to learn His
ways and to acquire His spirit. And within
this circle He had another circle of three —
sometimes of four — who were closer to Him still.
Who the men were who composed this inner
circle we know. They were the first four dis-
ciples whom He had won — ^John and James and
Simon Peter and Andrew his brother. Apart
from the story in the first chapter of the Gospel
of John, which tells us so ingenuously of how
these four men became the disciples of Jesus,
we see on three different occasions three of them

93

94 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

living in the closest relations with Him, and
on one other occasion all four close by His side.
Peter and James and John were the only three
whom He would suffer to go with Him when
He went into the room and restored the little
daughter of the ruler of the synagogue. We
read later that when He would be transfigured
He took Peter and James and John and went
up into an high mountain apart and was glori-
fied before them. Later, as the end drew near,
He sat on the Mount of Olives, over against
the temple ; and there were with Him Peter and .
James and John and Andrew. And last of all,
when He went down into the Garden of Geth-
semane, there were three whom He took along to
watch with Him — Peter and James and John.
As last in the old life so first in the new He drew
these men close to Him. To two of them He
appeared on Easter Day and then to all three
and perhaps to Andrew also on the shore of the
old sea where He had first called them to come
after Him.

What these men who made up the inner circle
daily saw and heard in their intimate relations
with Christ we may somewhat guess from what
we know that they saw and heard on these occa-
sions when we see them with Him. They saw as
no other men the tenderness of Jesus; they saw
as no other men the glory of Jesus ; they saw as
no other men the calm dignity and prophetic
discernment of Jesus, and they saw as none

THE INNER CIRCLE 95

others the exquisite suffering and sympathy of
Jesus. It is impossible that our hearts should
not long to have seen what they saw. We also
pray :

" Oh to have watched Thee through the vineyards
wander,
Pluck the ripe ears and into evening roam ! —
Followed, and known that in the twilight yonder
Legions of angels shone about Thy home."

But could we have seen if we had been there?
.AH the disciples were not in this inner circle.
How did Jesus come to have an inner circle
among His inmost friends? Was His choice
of these three men a matter of partiality and of
divine selection, or might any disciple who de-
sired have belonged to this inner company if
he had been willing to live as close to Jesus
as these? Whatever limitations were imposed
upon our Lord's selection of His friends by the
conditions of His earthly life, however narrow
the possibilities of membership in this inner
circle may have been when Christ was here, we
have His own word for it that now any man
who will may belong to the inmost company of
His friends. He Himself said to the woman
by Jacob's well that the day was coming — yes,
was now come — when those who worship the
Father will worship Him in spirit and in truth,
for the Father is seeking such to worship Him;
and in ways that seemed almost to exhaust His
own divine powers of appeal our Lord spoke to

96 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

those about Him, and left to His disciples of all
days the most winning invitations to come and
join the most secret company of His own. He
speaks still as He spoke of old in His pathetic ex-
postulation to the Jews : " Come unto me. Ye
search the Scriptures, because ye think in them ye i
have eternal life ; and they are they which testify
of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye
might have life." We read that as He came
around over the brow of the Mount of Olives for
one of His last visits to Jerusalem, and emerged
from the shadow of the rock which, as Dean
Stanley says, hides the city completely from the
sight of the traveller imtil it bursts all at once
upon his view, He wept over it, and He said, " If \
thou hadst known, even thou, the things that be- )
long unto thy peace ; but now they are hid from /
thine eyes." From beside that rock on Olivet we
may still hear the invitations of His love. And
we read even in that stern chapter, the twenty-
third chapter of Matthew, in which. He de-
nounces so unhesitatingly and with so little com-
promise the hypocrisy and the blindness of the
Pharisees, that He could not even then restrain
the desire to invite men into the closest possible
relationship with Him; and He broke out at the
end of that chapter with the appealing cry, "O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have
gathered thy children together as a hen gathers
her little ones under her wings, and ye would
not ! " For a surety the picture that John Bun-

THE INNER CIRCLE 97

yan draws of the man at the gate, of which
Barbara MacAndrew makes use in her poem, is
wholly justified by Jesus's own words.

" Thus day and night they are drawing nigh
With tears and sighs to the heavenly gate.
Where the Watchman stands in His majesty,
With a patience that never has said, * Too late I '

" Let the sorrowful children of want and sin
Draw near to the gate whence none depart.
Let the nations arise and enter in,

For the Lord is willing with all His heart."

But we may say in our hearts, as we recall
in this way the Saviour's eager invitation to us
to be among His best friends, that our tempera-
ments preclude the possibility of our ever becom-
ing members of the inner circle. But the con-
stitution of the first inner circle is proof of the
capacity of every man to belong. A man may
say: "I am incapable by my disposition of be-
longing to the inner circle at all. I am vacillat-
ing, unreliable, impulsive, hasty in my spiritual
judgments. There are hours when I could be-
long, but there are other hours when I am far
away, and I would be but a hypocrite if I pre-
tended now that I could join and remain faithful
to that sacred company. I have always been in-
constant and unreliable and changeable and full
of moods, and the inner circle is not for me."
But Simon Peter was this sort of a man, and he

98 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

belonged. Another may say : '' I am by nature
cool and undemonstrative ; my mind is not spirit-
ual— it is mathematical. I am all the time cal-
culating; I am frugal of my emotions. Much
that is said in religious meetings makes no appeal
to me. It does not touch me. If I were a man
of delicate spiritual sensibilities, as others whom
I know, I could join." But Andrew was just
such a man, and he belonged. Or one may say :
" I am hard in my judgments of others. I am
prone to severity. I am not of that generous
and charitable temperament which disposes men
to free spiritual fellowship. I have my opinions,
and everything has to bend to them. I cannot
let myself go. I am of a different sort from
the demonstrative men who belong in the inner
circle." But James was such a man, and he be-
longed. And as for all the men of love, John
was a member of this early inner circle, and
represents the right of every man whose heart
is tender toward Jesus — who, however weary he
may be of his own weakness and stern tovv^ard
himself, is all gentleness and love toward his
Lord Jesus, to come and abide with Him. For
such men John is the sufficient evidence that they
belong in the inner circle of the Saviour.

But how may men enter this circle, if it is
not a matter of election or of partiality, but is
open to every Christian man? How did these
first disciples enter? In the first place, they
esteemed membership in the inner circle as a

THE INNER CIRCLE 99

desirable thing — they wanted to belong; and as
Simon Peter said, far on in his life, they were
willing to sacrifice everything else for the sake
of belonging,' " Lord," he said, " we have left
all that we might be close to Thee." If there
be some of us who are not desirous of belonging,
we cannot get in. If there are other things
that we esteem as more to be desired than mem-
bership in the inner circle of Christ's friends,
we cannot enter. If we are esteeming some per-
sonal vice, if we are counting some personal am-
bition, if we are holding this or that taste as a
more valuable thing than membership in the
inner circle of Christ's friends, we cannot be
admitted there. But we can go in, just as these
first disciples went in, if we want to go — if we
count membership in the circle of Christ's closest
friends a worthy and noble thing, and if, count-
ing it so, we are willing to walk in the footsteps
of those first disciples who, when they heard His
voice, rose up and left all and came in.

In the second place, they followed Him. It
was doubtless hard work climbing the Mountain
of Transfiguration; but it was enough for them
that His figure went before. We know that it
was hard work for them to go into the Garden
of Gethsemane with Him. They were so
wearied that they could not watch with Him,
and fell asleep ; but still they followed Him. And
if one voice could speak to us again that is
silent nowj but is speaking in the courts of that

100 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

upper City, I think that voice would tell us again
the story of the resolute and persistent following
of Elisha upon the footsteps of his master. The
true disciple will not be turned aside from fol-
lowing his Master. These men followed Jesus,
and therefore they must be with Him. When
He went to see His Father face to face on the
Mount of Transfiguration they were with Him
there. When He sat on the hill over against
the temple and thought on the boundless years
that were to roll before He came back again
they were with Him there. And when He went
down into the garden among the little olive
trees that were kind to Him, to fight out there
the last battle of all, they were with Him still,
and saw glistening upon His brow the sweat-
drops of blood. If men will follow Him He
will not flee from them, and they will find them-
selves through the sheer force of their follow-
ing in the circle of His inmost friends. These
first three not only wanted to be with Jesus
and to follow Jesus — ^they 2i\so_ wot. chedjmih
Him. Though their eyes were heavy with
slumber, they still would try to watch with Him
— and while they watched they beheld. So far
as they would not let their Master slip from
them, they perforce lived within the circle of His
closest companionship. And wherever, still fol-
lowing in the steps of these first who made up
the inmost circle of His dear ones, men are
eager for Christ's deepest companionship, will

THE INNER CIRCLE 101

follow Him whatever must be left that they may
follow, and will watch with keen and undimmed
eyes His footsteps, they will find themselves, as
Peter and James and John did nineteen hundred
years ago, in the inner circle of the Lord.

"If I ask Him to receive me

Will He say me nay?
*Not till earth and not till Heaven
Pass away.

"Finding, following, keeping, struggling.
Is He sure to bless?
Angels, Martyrs, Prophets, Virgins
Answer, * Yes.' "

But there are some things that will keep men
out of the inner circle of Christ. One of them
is ^ayerlessness. When we pray that we may
be brought and kept within the spirit of the
prayerful life we ask that He Who alone can do it
should enable each one of us to comply with one
condition of membership in the inmost circle of
the Saviour's friends. The prayerless life is
shut out of the closest companionship of Christ.
I imagine that many of us would be ashamed to
answer if anyone should ask and each one of us
should be obliged candidly to reply whether we
have the habit of personal daily secret prayer.
I was reading recently some extracts from the
diary and letters of old Andrew Bonar that may
persuade our hearts to a greater desire to rise

102 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

beyond that prayerlessness of life which bare
the gates of the inner circle against men:

" God has this week been impressing much
upon me the way of redeeming time for prayer
by learning to pray while walking from place
to place."

" God will not let me get the blessing without
asking. Until I get up to the measure of at
least two hours in pure prayer every day I shall
not be contented."

" My chief desire should be to be a man of
prayer, for there is no want of speaking, and
writing, and preaching, and teaching, and work-
ing ; but there is need of the Holy Spirit to make
all this effectual."

" Pray for my new charge, for we have no
more than a few drops yet, and I believe I am
to blame. I work more than I pray."

" Fully convinced that the best thing that I
can do in my study and mode of conducting
work will be to give more time to prayer, and
always to give it the earliest place in my em-
ployments."

" In prayer in the wood for some time, having
set apart three hours for devotion ; felt drawn
out much to pray for that peculiar fragrance
which believers have about them who are very
much in fellowship with God."

" I must at once return, through the Lord's
strength, to not less than three hours a day
spent in prayer and meditation upon the Word„"

THE INNER CIRCLE 103

" I got away alone in the forenoon to the
hills, and spent five hours in meditation and
prayer."

At the age of sixty-six he writes, " The Lord
is teaching me more prayerfulness " ; and he
recalls a new lesson " in regard to the helpful-
ness of trying to pray every hour of the day,
though only for half a minute."

Do we pray with any such spirit of prayer as
this ? Our own hearts tell us that we lose much
of the sweetness of the inner circle of Christ's
friends which can be given only to those who
have learned in the life of unceasing prayer to
be receiving it from Him. Prayerlessness will
shut men out of the inner circle.

Carelessness will shut men out. Many of us,
perhaps, have thus far had no very high and
strenuous spiritual purpose. It is possible for
men to lose the joy of the inner circle of Christ's
closest friends because they have no care to be-
long to that circle nor any care to meet the con-
ditions of entrance thither. I think often of
that verse in our Lord's utterance after the feed-
ing of the five thousand, when He turned to the
multitude who had struggled so hard to find
Him, some rowing across the lake and some
coming around until they met Him on the other
side. '' Work, my friends," He said, not intend-
ing to dissuade them from doing things or from
drawing the tension of their life tight — '' work,
my friends; only work not for the meat that

104 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

perisheth, but for the meat that endureth to ever-
lasting life, which the Son of Man shall give to
you." The emphasis of our Lord's declaration
falls upon that one word " work." He intends
men to labour, to agonise — that with all the rest
and peace and placid surrender of the Christian
life they should string themselves high also for
that spiritual effort without which prayer is
impossible and valueless, and without which
there cannot be any high and holy fellowship
with God at all. As Frederick Myers writes
in "St Paul":

"Let no man think that sudden, in a minute,
All is accomplished, and the work is done.
Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it,
Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun.

" Oh, the regret, the struggle and the failing !
Oh, the days desolate and useless years.
Vows of the night, so fierce and unavailing,
Stings of my shame and passion of my tears I "

We pay for spiritual possessions with pain.
Then and only then they come deep and abound-
ing, the vast experience of God in Christ.

Another thing that will bar the gates of that
inner fellowship is uncleanness. Our Lord will
not entrust the pure chalice of His communi-
cated life to uncleansed hands. Impurity of life
will disqualify men for association with that
white and stainless Christ Whose eyes are too

THE INNER CIRCLE 105

pure to look upon iniquity — who, though He was
tempted in all points as we are, yet is without sin,
and cannot admit to the secret places of His
own pure heart one who tries to take in with
him any tainted way. Into that inner secret of
Christ's fellowship the man who would go must
go leaving behind him at the gate his sin and,
defilement. " Forasmuch," says John Bunyan,
'' as the passage was wonderful narrow, even
so narrow that I could not but with great diffi-
culty enter in thereat, it showed me that none
could enter into life but those that were in down-
right earnest and when also they left this wicked
world behind them; for here was only room for
body and soul, but not for body and soul and
sin." Into that hidden place where Jesus Christ
sits quiet forever with the circle of His dearest
friends, only those men can go who are willing
to go with clean hands and pure hearts. Into
that great city which lies beyond, whose gates
are pure jewels and whose streets are of pure
gold, and out from under the throne in the
midst of which there flows a river of water as
pure as crystal, there is to be admitted nothing
that worketh uncleanness or abomination or
any defilement; and into the inner circle of
Christ's friends here, no more than there, can
that man come who cannot come with hands
washed clean in the blood of Christ, a mind
stripped of foul imagery and a heart desiring to
be pure of all polluting things. As —

106 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

" Beyond our sight a city four-square lieth,

Above the clouds and fogs and mists of earth;
And none but souls that Jesus purifieth
Can taste its joys or hear its holy mirth,"

SO there is opened before us here a secret fellow-
ship with Christ made up of hearts ready in
Him to be kept purified.

Is that which is found in the inner circle
worth the cost ? In that inner circle with Christ
is the sight of the Father's face. None of the
other Apostles saw the Father's glory as those
saw it who that night went up with Jesus on the
Mount of Transfiguration and saw His raiment
made all white and glistening — whiter than any
fuller on earth could whiten it; who saw the
glory of God come down and rest upon Him, and
who heard the Father's voice speak out of the
clouds, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I
am well pleased."

Our Lord waits still to give new deep reveal-
ings : " I have had some delightful times and
passages since I came here, such as I never had
before," wrote Horace Bushnell while away
from home seeking health and finding God more
deeply than ever before. " I never so saw God,
never had Him come so broadly, clearly out.
He has not spoken to me, but He has done
what is more. There has been nothing debat-
able to speak of, but an infinite easiness and
universal presentation to thought, as it were by
revelation. Nothing ever seemed so wholly in-

THE INNER CIRCLE 107

viting and so profoundly supreme to the mind.
Had there been a strain for it, then it could not
be. Oh, my God! what a fact to possess and
know that He is ! I have not seemed to compare
Him with anything, and set Him in a higher
value; but He has been the all, and the alto-
gether, everywhere, lovely. There is nothing
else to compete; there is nothing else, in fact.
It has been as if all the revelations, through good
men, nature, Christ, had been now through, and
their cargo unloaded, the capital meaning pro-
duced, and the God set forth in His proper day,
— the good, the true, the perfect, the all-holy and
benignant. The question has not been whether
I could somehow get nearer, — nearer my God,
to Thee ; but as if He had come out Himself just
near enough, and left me nothing but to stand
still and see the salvation ; no excitement, no
stress, but an amazing beatific tranquillity. I
never thought I could possess God so completely.
What is to come of it? Something good and
glorious, I hope."

If any of you are hungry for a more living
touch with God, I speak to you of a place where
hunger can be satisfied. Someone is said to
have asked Lord Tennyson what was the great-
est desire of his heart, and to have got the answer
in reply that the greatest desire he had ever had
was to have a " clearer vision of God." Who
does not grow weary at times of what is said
about Him, of his own beliefs regarding Him,

108 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

and hunger with an unappeasable hunger for
Him, and say over to himself the prayer of
George Macdonald:

" Oh, let me live in Thy realities,
Nor substitute my notions for Thy facts,
Notion with notion making league and pacts.
They are to truth as dream deeds are to acts,
And questioned make me doubt of everything.
O Lord, my God! my soul gets up and cries,

'Come, Thine own Self, and with Thee my faith
bring ' " ?

If any of us are hungry for something more real
than that which we have in our Christian lives — ■
sick of the sham and the insincerity of them ;
the forms crumbling away beneath our touch,
while we have not reached to the great verities
that lie beyond them — here in the inner circle of
Christ's inmost friends we may come upon, if
we will^ a new and living experience of Him.
We shall enter into the secret of our God which
is with those who fear Him and who go to dwell
under the Almighty's shade.

There are some who will recall the quaint son-
net of John T. Napier, who worked in the office
of the Sunday School Times in Philadelphia, and
whose genius was cut untimely short:

"O weary soul, that yet with willing feet

Wouldst trudge o'er many a hard and rugged way
In uncomplaining toil, and never stay
Until within His courts thine eyes shall meet

THE INNER CIRCLE 109

The splendour of His look, to thee be sweet
That word He spake: 'Unto me pray,
Not as the hypocrites, in blaze of day,

In public paths or in the open street,

"'But in thy closet kneeling; there within
Unto me make thy prayer, to me thy moan,
And I will hear in heaven where I abide,
And I will give thee cleansing for thy sin —

Yea, we together shall abide alone.
Shut thou thy door; heaven's gate shall open
wide/ "

We shall find these things if we want them — the
experience of God and the secret of the Most
High — in this near companionship of our Master
Jesus Christ. He is here as truly as nineteen
hundred years ago He stood before those Jews
pleading, " Ye will not come to me that ye
might have life." He stands here calling us,
calling us, calling us into the number of His
most intimate friends — into the limits of the
inner circle of those He loves. Do we not wish
to go in — further in than ever in all the years
that have gone by ? And when we think on what
is there, and what is to be missed if we do not
go in, are we not willing to pay the price? Are
we not willing? If we are, shall we not go in
together to the inner circle of our Master's
dearest, closest friends, and sit down there by
His side, to come no more out forever?

VI

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS

THE first summer conference I ever at-
tended was the General Conference for
Christian Workers at Northfield more
than twenty years ago. At the end of my sopho-
more year in college I was persuaded to come
up by a friend who is now a missionary in India.
We lived in what was then called Hillside Cot-
tage, and the first night through a heavy rain we
made our way across the ploughed fields, where
the Auditorium now stands, to the evening meet-
ing in Stone Hall. Mr. Moody spoke that night
on Elisha's miracle in filling the waterpots with
oil and thus giving that widow woman money
enough with which to discharge her debt and
save her children from her creditors. I saw new
things that night. I saw the neighbours peeking
through the windows at the carrying of all those
water jars to the widow's house, the joy that
filled the widow's heart when her two little chil-
dren were saved from the clutches of her
creditor, and I understood for the first time what
our imaginations were given to us for, and how
living a book this Bible is.

Professor Drummond was present that sum-
mer and Dr. A. J. Gordon, and a great many

110

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 111

others whose Hving words left an indehble im-
pression on all the men and women who came
under their influence; but of all those we heard
that summer I think there was scarcely anyone
who left a deeper and stronger impression on the
lives of the men and women who had gathered
that month of August than old Dr. William
Henry Green. He was the foremost Hebrew
scholar in America and one of the simplest and
most gentle Christian men. The blessing that
came to me through him came indirectly,
through my friend who had persuaded me to
come. He was one of the most devout, earnest
Christian men I have ever known, and he was
making it his practice then to spend the first
hour of every day over a page in the Psalms.
He said he got that suggestion from Dr. Green,
who had once mentioned in one of his classes at
Princeton that for years he had been in the habit
the first thing every day of reading a page from
the Psalms, to nourish his life on the beauty and
glory that is there. I learned a great many les-
sons afterwards from Dr. Green, as did every
one who ever came under his influence. Any
who were in classes of his will remember the al-
most womanly tenderness of his love of Jesus
Christ, and the way in which he often broke down
in the midst of his prayers, having to pause for
a while until he recovered his self-possession
again and was able to go on to the end. I re-
member what I think must have been one of his

112 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

favourite hymns, for he gave it out so often when
he led chapel services. It began:

" Enthroned on high, Almighty Lord,
The Holy Ghost send down."

and some stanzas down this couplet came:

" And bring us where no clouds conceal
The beauty of Thy face."

And nobody could feel that influence without
being able to trace back to those early morning
hours over the Psalms much of the power,
beauty and simplicity of the man's Christian
faith and character. Very many times since I
have come back to that suggestion of spending
the first moments of the day over a page of the
Psalms. They have this great advantage over
other portions of the Bible: they are so easily
detachable. We feel regarding many other
parts of the Bible that we scarcely have any
right to take to ourselves some isolated verse.
In the Psalms we feel that every verse may be
separated, that each throbs with some old moral
experience of long years ago, breathing out in
those old days struggles, conflicts, aspirations
and desires that are akin to those that fill our
own hearts.

I have been very much struck lately in read-
ing biographies with the way in which the lives
of great and strong men have received practical

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 113

nourishment from the study of the Psahns. In
Thring's " Life and Letters," a book which every
college man ought to read, you may recall the
way in which he speaks in his private journal of
the feeling he has that he was living over again
all the experiences of the men who wrote the
Psalms, and that what they wrote down there
in that ancient time was only forecasting the bat-
tles of his own life. Some of you doubtless re-
call the passage in Morley's first volume of the
life of Gladstone, in which he quotes an ex-
tract from one of Mr. Gladstone's diaries regard-
ing the place which the Psalms had filled in his
life : '' On most occasions of very sharp pres-
sure or trial, some word of Scripture has come
home to me as if borne on angels' wings. I
should put some down now, for the continuance
of memory is not to be trusted. ( i ) In the winter
of 1837, Psalm cxxviii. This came in the most
singular manner, but it would be a long story to
tell. (2) In the Oxford contest of 1847 (which
was very harrowing) the verse, * O Lord God,
Thou strength of my health, Thou hast covered
my head in the day of battle.' (3) In the Gor-
ham contest, after the judgment: 'And though
all this be come upon us, yet do we not forget
Thee; nor behave ourselves frowardly in Thy
covenant. Our heart is not turned back ; neither
our steps gone out of Thy way. No, not when
Thou hast smitten us into the place of dragons:
and covered us with the shadow of death.' (4)

114 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

On Monday, April 17, 1853 (his first budget
speech), it was: 'O turn Thee then unto me,
and have mercy upon me : give Thy strength unto
Thy servant, and help the son of Thine hand-
maid.' Last Sunday (Crimean War Budget) it
was from the Psalms for the day : * Thou shalt
prepare a table before me against them that
trouble me ; Thou hast anointed my head with oil
and my cup shall be full.' " It was a surprise to
me to think that when Mr. Gladstone rose to
speak in Parliament before presenting his great
budgets, as he paused for just a moment before
beginning, the thing that was sometimes in his
mind was some verse from the Psalms, by which
he was nerving himself toward the vision of
great righteousness, and the fearless expression
of what he saw as the truth. I think we lose a
great deal, because we have not taken into our
lives the living message of the Psalms to men
who are fighting the battle and around whom
the dread adversaries are encamped.

I suppose one reason why we do not do this
is that the Psalms have become so commonplace
to us, their language is so familiar that there is
no longer any bite or tingle to it. For this
reason it is a good thing for a man to read the
Psalms in some other language — in French,
Spanish, German, or Latin, or to take some other
translation of the Bible than that to which he is
accustomed. I have gained a great deal of help
myself from reading the Psalms over in the

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 115

American Standard Revised translation, which
gives new significance to a great many old and
worn phrases. Take, for example, the marginal
reading of the first verse in the forty-fifth
Psalm. It reads, you remember : " My heart
overfloweth in a goodly matter; I speak of the
things which I have made touching the king."
Now, the revised margin is : " My heart over-
floweth with a goodly matter; I speak: my work
is for a king." Shame? I am speaking for a
king.

Or take the tenth verse of the fifty-ninth
Psalm. That reads : " The God of my mercy
shall prevent me." The new version reads:
" My God with His loving kindnesses will meet
me." Or take the third verse in the seventeenth
Psalm, if we want something by which to test
our lives, " Thou hast proved my heart : Thou
hast visited me in the night ; Thou hast tried me,
and findest nothing." Let the man who wants
something by which to check his inner moral
life when he lies down to sleep recall that old
word : " Thou hast visited me in the night ; Thou
hast tried me, and findest nothing of which I
need to be ashamed." Take for one other illus-
tration the verse, " They looked unto Him, and
were lightened." The new version reads, " They
looked unto Him and were radiant." I do not
know what word can come to us more appro-
priately than this word: the influence of looking
away unto Jesus Christ upon our lives and char-

116 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

acters, the power of the vision of Christ to make
our lives, however scarred and clouded and shad-
owed they may have been, bright and radiant
with the purity and the beauty of His own life.
If you will read two passages, one from the Old
and the other from the New Testament (Ex.
xxxiv. 29-35; Matt. xvii. 1-9), you will have
the two outstanding Bible illustrations of this
power of the divine vision to transform the faces
of men. As Moses came down out of that secret
fellowship with God, he knew not, but others
knew, that there was a divine light shining on
his face; and as Jesus went up into the moun-
tain and knelt there in that prayer that lifted
His life from the lower levels into the very
highest and most unclouded fellowship with God,
His face also shone as the sun. His very gar-
ments became all white and glistening, whiter
than any fuller on earth can whiten them. And,
while doubtless these were two great exceptional
experiences, the principle that is in them is a
living principle still, that the same vision that
Moses saw as he talked with Jehovah, the same
vision that Jesus saw on the mountain of trans-
figuration, the vision that made their faces shine
as the sun, will have power to make our lives
all luminous and radiant, too.

As a matter of fact, the vision is doing this
still. You know that during the Boxer troubles
in China it was said that the Chinese Christians
could not have escaped even if they had tried.

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 117

because their faces betrayed them. There was a
Hght in their eyes which their heathen neighbours
recognised as characteristic of the followers of
Jesus Christ. They had looked unto Him, and
their lives were lightened by that look. A little
while ago Mrs. Edward Hume, from Bombay,
showed me photographs of her work in India.
Among the pictures which she laid down were
two that were conspicuous because of the great
contrast between them. The first of them was
a photograph of thirty women, all of them
dressed in dark garments, and in the middle of
the forehead of each one was a little ash dot,
showing that each one was attached still to the
old idolatrous Hfe. There was no need of that
mark to tell you that about them. The low
brows, the unintelHgent eyes, the very aspect of
dejection and hopelessness that lay across those
lives told the story without any sign upon their
foreheads. They had never looked unto Him
Who is able to throw radiance into the life. The
other photograph was a photograph of the same
number of women, all of them dressed in white.
There were no ash spots on their foreheads. Nor
was the absence of them necessary to tell you
that the light had touched those lives. They
were thirty girls that Mrs. Hume had long had
under her care. The influence of her life had
played on the lives of those girls. They had
passed with her through all the torture of famine
days in India, They had nursed the orphans

118 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

when it was almost nauseating to do it. The re-
fining influence of unselfishness and sympathy
with suffering was stamped upon each life. A
light shone in it. They had looked unto Christ
and their faces were radiant.

And what has taken place in these lives all of
us have seen taking place in other lives. Any
one is to be pitied who has not a friend, many
friends, who have looked away unto Jesus Christ
and been made radiant, on whose faces there is
the visible light that comes from their having
caught the far-off vision of the beauty and per-
fectness of the Saviour. There is a chapter in
Dr. Trumbull's " Old Time Student Volunteers "
entitled " What a Boy Saw in the Face of Ado-
niram Judson." Years ago, long before he ever
thought of writing that story, in his boyhood
days in Stonington, Conn., when the journey
from New England to New York was by train as
far as Stonington, and then by Sound boats to
New York, Dr. Trumbull said the boys used to
play around the wharf in the evening in the
hope of seeing some great character of the na-
tion as he passed to or fro between New England
and the South. There was an accommodation
train that came in early in the evening, about
an hour before the express. Immediately after
the arrival of the express the boat put off for
New York. Often some one would come in on
the early train and have an hour to wait before
the boat left. One evening the accommodation

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 119

train came in, and he saw a man get off the train
whose appearance immediately attracted the boy.
He walked up to him, looking at him curiously.
Dr. Trumbull said he had never seen any such
light on a human face before, and at last it
dawned upon him that the man was Adoniram
Judson, of whom he had seen a picture. He
hurried up the street to find the local Baptist
minister to bring him to see whether this was
the great missionary. Sure enough, it was Ado-
niram Judson ; but the Baptist minister forgot all
about the little lad as soon as he saw the great
Judson, and fell into conversation with the mis-
sionary. The boy circled about meanwhile, look-
ing at that face. Fifty years and more had
passed away when Dr. Trumbull told me the
story. He had not forgotten, he would never
forget until the day he died, the beautiful light
that shone upon Adoniram Judson's face. He
had been with Jesus Christ, and the light was
there that shone like the sun, so that whoever
stood beside him saw that Someone had been
near him Who gave a radiance to life.

How many times each of us has practically
annulled his gospel, and frustrated the words in
which he has proclaimed the gospel simply be-
cause his face has borne no corroboratory evi-
dence of that which he has been speaking with
his lips.

I remember reading some time ago a chapter
in Dr. Murdock's '* Indian Missionary Manual "

120 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

dealing with methods of presenting the gospel,
where he emphasises the necessity of presenting
it in the spirit of gentleness and love, and tells
of a discussion between a missionary and a
Hindoo disputant. The Hindoo became furious
and struck at the missionary's head with a big
stick. The spirit of the gospel which Lacroix,
who was the missionary concerned, manifested
by word and look was such that the Hindoo au-
dience burst out with the shout, " Victory, vic-
tory to Jesus Christ." What had won them?
Lacroix had been with Jesus Christ and Jesus
had touched his life so that the light that was in
Christ was shining through his face and bearing
testimony to the truthfulness of what he spoke,
and he acted as a Christian. A friend was speak-
ing recently of some of the sources of power
of a faithful and beloved missionary worker. He
was a humble and gentle man who had derived
his influence from his association with Jesus
Christ. My friend spoke of the way the Saviour
had gained control of this life in its expressions.
He told me how he had had to send once for a
plumber's boy to repair an old-fashioned chande-
Her made of glass pendants. It was an old fam-
ily heirloom, and the man to whom it belonged
valued it very highly because of the associations
connected with it. In repairing it the boy did
not notice that in turning it one way below he
was unscrewing it from the ceiling above, and
after a little the whole massive thing came down

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 121

in ruins on the floor. The lad stood dazed at
the havoc he had caused, and waited trembUngly
for the owner to enter, making ready for the out-
burst he felt sure would come. When the owner
came in he surveyed the wreck in silence, and
then turned to the frightened boy with the quiet,
kindly words, " Well, my lad, I trust you didn't
hurt yourself? " The lad was not a Christian at
the time, but that was the beginning of his be-
coming one. The look on that man's face, the
evident transformation of his life by the power
of Christ were irrefutable commendations of the
Saviour. He had looked away unto Jesus Christ
and been made radiant by it.

And unless we learn the secret of looking unto
Jesus Christ and having our lives transformed
by our vision of Him, what influence will we
have as we go out except the influence of nulli-
fication upon the gospel and reproach upon Jesus
Christ? If we want our Hves changed, here is
the secret that each of us may gain for himself
to-day. Looking away unto Jesus Christ and
keeping our eyes fixed there is the secret of the
radiant light.

First of all, it is looking unto Christ that gives
us the right conception of what character is. I
look away from Christ and I have one idea of
what constitutes perfect character. We are
forming, all of us, diverse judgments of ideals
and standards of life proportioned exactly to the
clearness of our vision of Jesus Christ. What

122 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

ideals do we see? I was sitting in my library
the other day dictating some letters, and I hap-
pened to look up suddenly at Watts' picture of
Sir Galahad. There was a little yellow Hght
falling just on the face and nowhere else, and I
said. Is it possible that Watts put that light there
and I never saw it before? I examined the pic-
ture and found a stray ray of sunlight coming
in and falling upon Sir Galahad's face. I saw
anew what gave that picture its grace and power.
What Watts had painted was not Sir Galahad,
but what Sir Galahad was seeing. What was
there in the fresh, wistful, youthful face? What
was there was just the reflection of the far-off
vision of the grail Sir Galahad was following.
The purity, strength, and holiness of what he
saw were painted there in his life. The qual-
ities of character which he was beholding were
writing themselves on his face. And what, as I
have already said, is the significance of those
words in the prologue of the Gospel of John,
"and the Word was toward God," but that the
face of the Word was ever directed toward the
face of the Father, so that what we see in looking
toward the face of Jesus Christ is not so much
anything original as a reflection upon the life of
Christ of what He sees passing in the face and
heart of God? He is what He is in His character
because He is looking away unto what God is in
His character. We will have in our lives as we
go out precisely those ideals of character which

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 123

we see as qualities in Christ. Is our vision of
Him dim, obscure, oblique? We shall go away
with defective standards of judgment as to our
moral Hfe. Is our vision of Christ clear and un-
clouded and direct? If we have been brought to
where no mist conceals the beauty of His face,
we shall go with our standards of character pat-
terned after His own.

Looking away unto Christ not only gives a
man the right conception of what character is,
but it shames him out of evil character ; solidifies
him in the deliberate choice of the character
which is right. Every one of us knows the pos-
sibility of doing things under some circumstances
which we cannot do under other circumstances.
If we are living with our faces turned toward
our Lord Jesus Christ there are certain practices
that become absolutely impossible in our lives.
You cannot have certain thoughts if you are
aware that Jesus Christ is in the room, which you
might think, barring Him from your presence.
You cannot do certain things with your hands
realising that Christ is near and that at any
moment He may lay His pierced hands upon your
hands, that you can do thinking that the Saviour
is not near.

I was reading again not long ago the life of
Keith Falconer, and some of his boyhood letters.
In one he is speaking of the hymns of which he
was most fond. There were many that were dear
to him, but none so dear as the hymn we call by

124, THE MASTER OF THE HEART

the name of Rutherford, " The Sands of Time
Are Sinking/' especially the second stanza:

" O Christ, He is the fountain,

The deep, sweet well of love !
The streams on earth I've tasted.

More deep I'll drink above.
There to an ocean fullness

His mercy doth expand,
And glory, glory dwelleth

In Immanuel's land."

And then in another he goes on to tell how with
this fresh, loving Christ, glowing all warm and
tender in his Hfe, new tests have come to him,
and certain things which were practicable to him
before he now finds to be utterly impossible in
his life : " I must say something about Jesus
Christ, because I think He ought never to be
left out; and that is the fault I find with parties
and balls and theatres: Jesus Christ Who is the
All in All is utterly left out." Suppose we
ran that rule across our lives. How much evil,
shame, sin, and impurity would vanish from
them! You remember the powerful story that
is prefixed to the eighth chapter of the Gospel
of John. What is the lesson of that story ? How
differently the presence of Jesus Christ made
things look ! Those men thought they were do-
ing a very fine thing when they got that poor
woman and resolved to bring her into Christ's
presence. Every man felt proud in the thought

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 125

of his own sinlessness as he dragged the tar-
nished woman into the presence of the Saviour.
How differently it looked after they got there,
when Jesus wrote with His finger on the ground
while the men looked and thought. How utterly
different everything began to look to these men !
After a little while the oldest man slunk off, and
the next, and the next, and the next, until Jesus
was left with the woman alone. They did not
feel as they stood in Christ's presence as they
had felt out in the street. You and I know we
do not feel the same toward sin away from Him.
H only we could school ourselves into looking
unto Him every hour, every day, it would make
impossible many things that have stained and de-
filed our lives.

And looking away to Him would nerve us to
resist all evil and to do the things that are right
and good. You recall how the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews makes use of this con-
ception. He is thinking of the Christian life as
a race to be run. On every side of the course,
banked up tier above tier, reach the tens of
thousands of those who have run their race and
won, and are now watching the living contest-
ants. At the end of the course, behind the goal,
he imagines the Saviour is standing holding the
chaplets of olive leaves in His hand waiting to
greet the runners as they come in. " Therefore
let us also, seeing we are compassed about with
so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every;

126 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us,
and let us run with patience the race that is set
before us, looking unto Jesus the author and
perfecter of our faith." We should rise up above
our craven fear of those adversaries under whom
we have again and again gone down, if only we
kept our eyes fixed on the Saviour there waiting
for us behind the goal. Looking away to Jesus
would shame many of us out of evil character.
It would form and perfect in us a more stainless
life.

Looking away to Jesus Christ Is the only way
in which to nourish and unfold in each of us
the perfect character. One of the addresses
which Professor Drummond gave here twenty-
one years ago was the address he published after-
wards under the title of " The Changed Life,"
from the words, " But we all, with unveiled face
beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord,
are transformed into the same image from glory
to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit." And
he told in that address the story which has
grown familiar to us, of the little Scotch girl
who had such a simple, exquisite character that
all those who knew her marvelled at the secret of
it, but to none would she betray it, until at last
she told one that when she was gone it would be
found in the locket she had worn about her neck.
Upon looking they found simply a scrap of
white paper, on which were these words, " Whom
having not seen I love." That affection for the

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 127

unseen Saviour Whom having not seen she loved
v^as the influence that had been moulding and
transfiguring her life. And there is not one of
us, however evil and coarse our character, how-
ever sin may have tainted us, who cannot be
changed. It may be gradual and long delayed,
though I believe it is possible for Jesus Christ to
change a man in a night. He could take any
of us this hour and make new men of us if we
would only deliver ourselves up unto His trans-
forming power. Some of you will have read
the story which Dr. James H. Taylor wrote some
years ago of the curious old New England char-
acter of the third decade of the last century
named Jake Parsons. The change in his life
was far-famed, so significant and revolutionary
had it been. He lay down to sleep one night an
absolutely drunken, worthless wretch, having
wellnigh lost his power of speech through his
dissipation, loved only by the fragment of the
family that was left to him. He woke up the
next morning an absolutely changed mati. For
nearly forty years after that he lived a life with-
out blemish or blot. Eight years after the
change some one asked him what had produced
it. This is the explanation he gave : " That
night Jesus Christ appeared in my sleep. His
face, as I saw it, seemed so pure, so lovely, and
so friendly to me that when I awoke I forgot my
old vices, and so loved my Saviour that I could
not displease Him. Why, the sight of the face

128 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

of Jesus was so pure, so lovely, and so beautiful !
He did not speak to me, He only looked at me;
but His look told me that there was hope for
me, that I could be forgiven, I could be purified.
I looked at Him and cried like a child ; I felt that
I was a vile, miserable, wicked wretch, filthier
than a dunghill. I cannot tell how I felt. When
I looked at Him I was too happy to be afraid ;
but when I looked at myself I was too afraid
to be happy. I forgot all about rum and to-
bacco, 1 was thinking so much about Christ, so
pure, so lovely, so beautiful, so friendly. He
was all heaven, all grace and beauty." One who
knew him well, so Dr. Taylor says, wrote : " For
thirty-five years he lived a blameless life, beloved
by everybody. On a fine summer morning, my
friend writes, the glorious old-new creature
would crawl out of doors, and seating himself
on the grassy bank in front of his humble home,
turning his sightless face to the sun to feel its
warmth, would say : ' The door is open into
Heaven, just a little crack, and I shall soon see
Jesus again. I shall know Him. He will look
just so.' So he lived until he fell asleep in
Jesus."

Each of us knows his own life, and just how
unlike the life of Christ it is. Conceited, self-
satisfied, pure but vain and self-confident, or
scarred with evil imagination, we may be bear-
ing about in our body the marks that will never
leave us, that tell the story of vices, haunted by

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 129

the sins we would forget, that cHng all the closer
to us the more we struggle to lay them down.
Or if it is not this, each of us knows the weak-
ness of his own heart. But there is One Who,
if we will look away to Him now, will take us
just as we are, and will deliver us, scarred and
full of shortcomings, and make us radiant with
His own light and glory and purity. Shall we
not let the transforming Christ make a trial with
us?

I went one Sunday afternoon in New York
City not long ago to a religious meeting, where
a man was talking to men about Hoffman's pic-
tures of our Lord. He had an excellent col-
lection of them in stereopticon slides which he
was showing to this crowd of men. He reserved
until the last Hoffman's picture of Jesus as a
lad talking with, the doctors in the temple. As
he threw the picture on the screen, a beautifully
colored picture, he told the story of how he
came to be in possession of his copy of it. He
had gone to visit Hoffman, he said, immediately
after the completion of that painting, and Hoff-
man gave him the first copy. He brought that
copy home and put it in his business office in
New York City. One day, as he was sitting
there, a judge from the Supreme Court of one of
the New England States came in to consult him
about some business. He saw the picture stand-
ing on the easel. Instantly his eyes were at-
tracted to it. He looked at it all the time he

130 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

was discussing his business, and after the busi-
ness was over he sat a httle while still looking
at the picture, and then went away. Later in
the morning he came back and said, " I want to
see that Boy again." He was invited to sit down,
and he sat down and gazed at that face, at those
great open eyes, at that look of purity, which
speaks of such hope and strength for men. He
sat for nearly an hour looking at it, and then
got up, his eyes very moist, and walked away.
In the afternoon he came back and said, " I
would like to see that picture of the Boy once
more." The owner gave it to him, and said,
" Go into my private office, sit down and look
at it as long as you want to." He took the pic-
ture and went into the office and laid it down
in his lap and cried over it. An hour passed,
and then he came out and laid the picture down,
and with tears running down his cheeks he said,
'' The Boy has conquered me." And he went
out from the room with the picture of that Boy
lingering in his life and transforming it. He is
living now, said the speaker, in his own State,
an influential Christian man, teaching scores of
young men in his Bible class of Him unto Whom
he had looked away and by Whom he had been
changed.

I want to be changed myself very much in
many ways that I do not propose to tell any-
body else. But He knows, and I know He can
do it. It may take Him a long time — ten, twenty.

LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 131

fifty years — but I know that the changes I want
made He can make, and that even if He never
gets them made down here there will come a
day when I shall wake and be satisfied with His
likeness, seeing Him as He is. And that hope
is worth all the world.

Would that we might let Him begin to effect
His larger and richer results in our lives, that
every one of us might fix his eyes upon Jesus
Christ. Looking unto Him. He will make us
radiant. We shall walk in the light as He is in
the light.

VII
THE UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST

WHATEVER other ideals of the Christian
Church men may have formed, it is
certain that the conception entertained
by our Lord was that the Christian Church should
be a body of men and women who had learned
to love God and His Spirit and His Son with all
their hearts and minds and souls and strength,
and one another better than they loved them-
selves. Our Lord gave Himself, through His
short life, to the working out of this ideal. He
gathered around Him a little company of men
whom He loved with a great love, whom He
sought to teach what love was by revealing to
them a new kind of love in Himself. He hoped
to persuade these men to love one another with
the same love wherewith He Himself loved them.
By example He strove to reveal to them what this
new love that filled Llis own heart was, and to
lead them to have it for one another.

In some measure the early Church learned this
lesson. As the heathen world looked on, it was
the afifection that bound the Christians together
that most deeply impressed it. " Behold," they
said, " how these Christians love one another."
A great many came into the Church undoubtedly
13^

UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 133

drawn there by the warmth of friendship and love
which visibly united the early Christians. If one
had and another lacked, the one who had shared
his possessions with the one who lacked. The
early Church went out in power to begin its early
conquests for Christ because it went out with
a heart full of warm and unselfish love, because it
could say to a world filled with people who knew
no such fellowship : " Come, join our brother-
hood; we will love you; we will take you into
friendship; you too may belong to this unique
society of men and women who are all truly
lovers one of another."

" Now, for the first time," says Harnack in
"The Expansion of Christianity in the First
Three Centuries," "that testimony rose among
men, which cannot ever be surpassed, the testi-
mony that GOD IS LOVE. The first great
statement of the new religion, into which the
fourth evangelist condensed its central principle,
was based entirely and exclusively on love : ' We
love, because He first loved us/ * God so loved the
world,' * A new commandment give I unto you,
that ye love one another/ And the greatest,
strongest, deepest thing Paul ever wrote is the
hymn commencing with the words, ' Though I
speak with the tongues of men and angels, but
have not love, I am become sounding brass or
a clanging cymbal.' The new language on the
lips of Christians was the language of love.

" But it was more than a language, it was a

134 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

thing of power and action. The Christians
really considered themselves brothers and sisters,
and their actions corresponded to this belief. On
this point we possess two unexceptionable testi-
monies from pagan writers. Says Lucian of the
Christians : * Their original law-giver had taught
them that they were all brethren, one of another
. . . . They become incredibly alert when
anything of this kind occurs, that affects their
common interests. On such occasions no ex-
pense is grudged.' And Tertullian (Apolog.
xxxix) observes : * It is our care for the helpless,
our practice of loving kindness, that brands us in
the eyes of many of our opponents. " Only look,"
they say, " look how they love one another ! "
(They themselves being given to mutual hatred,)
" Look how they are prepared to die for one an-
other! " (They themselves being readier to kill
each other.) ' Thus had this saying been really
fulfilled : ' Hereby shall all men know that ye are
my disciples, if ye have love one to another.'

" The gospel thus became a social message.
The preaching which laid hold of the outer man,
detaching him from the world, and uniting him to
his God, was also a preaching of solidarity and
brotherliness. The gospel, it has been truly said,
is at bottom both individualistic and socialistic.
Its tendency toward mutual association, so far
from being an accidental phenomenon in its his-
tory, is inherent in its character. It spiritualises
the irresistible impulse which draws one man to

UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 135

another, and it raises the social connection of
human beings from the sphere of a convention
to that of a moral obligation. In this way it
serves to heighten the worth of man, and essays
to recast contemporary society, to transform the
socialism which involves a conflict of interests
into the socialism which rests upon the conscious-
ness of a spiritual unity and common goal. This
was ever present to the mind of the great apostle
to the Gentiles. In his little churches, where
each person bore his neighbour's burden, Paul's
spirit already saw the dawning of a new human-
ity, and in the Epistle to the Ephesians he has
voiced this feeling with a thrill of exultation.
Far in the background of these churches, like
some unsubstantial semblance, lay the division
between Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian,
great and small, rich and poor. For a new hu-
manity had now appeared, and the apostle viewed
it as Christ's body, in which every member served
the rest and each was indispensable in his own
place."

We must put it in this way if we would do
justice to the whole great truth as it lay in the
mind of Christ and as it was afterwards devel-
oped by St. Paul. It is true that the Christian
society is a band of men and women who love
one another with this great unselfish love. But
our Lord and Paul carried the thought of Chris-
tian society far beyond this. They thought of
the Christian society, as our Lord puts it, as a

136 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

vine of which the Hfe-blood was Christ, of which
He Himself was the trunk, the disciples being
the branches, springing out from Him, all of
them bound together because they were common
branches of one vine, while there flowed through
them all, whether upper branches or lower
branches, large branches or small branches, the
one common tide of the single life. In Paul's
mind the Christian Church was a society of men
and women who loved one another with a love
so real, so full, so life absorbing, that he could not
think of any figure of speech more truly expres-
sive of it than to say that the Church was a
body, one organic unity, with hands, eyes,
feet, and ears, but one body, one common
life binding all altogether, so that the hands
could not say to the eyes, " We have no need
of you " ; nor the honourable parts to the unhon-
ourable parts, " We are not one with you," for
all were members of one body ; and the hearing,
smelling, tasting, walking, handling members, all
different in their functions and duties, were yet
bound together by one common life, separable
only at the pain of each and at the mutilation and
ultimately the death of the body which they all
made. If one member suffers all the members
suffer with it ; if one member is honoured all the
members are honoured with it; if one member
lacks, all the members want with it ; if one mem-
ber possesses, all the members own with it.
What a marvellous transformation would pass

UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 137

over our Christian life if our conception of our
relationship to one another fulfilled this great
ideal of Paul. Now, what is malice but rejoic-
ing in the hardship and loss of others? But in
the body when one member suffers all the mem-
bers suffer with it and there can be no malice.
What is envy but repining when others are hon-
oured ? But if the body is all one no member can
be honoured and the other members not to be
honoured with it. What is selfishness but desir-
ing that which others have not, or being vexed
because others have that which we have not?
But if all the members are one body, one can
have nothing that all the others do not possess,
nor any lack anything for the want of which all
the others do not suffer, too.

You remember the old and quaint story of
Charles Kingsley. Two monks had lived to-
gether in a cave remote from men until at last,
wearied of the monotony of their quiet life, one
of them made the suggestion that they vary it
by quarrelling after the fashion of the world.
But the monk to whom the suggestion was made
said : " Brother, we have nothing to quarrel
about. How can we change our life? What
have we to quarrel over ? " " We will take this
stone," replied the other, " and we will lay it
down between us. And I will say. This stone
is mine. And you will say, No, the stone is
mine. And so we will quarrel after the way of
the world." So they took the stone and laid

138 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

it down between them, and the first monk said,
" This stone is mine." The second monk said
hesitatingly, " I think, brother, the stone is
mine." " Oh, very well," said the monk who
had suggested the quarrel, " if the stone is thine,
take it." It was impossible that between those
two lives, bound in a real unity for years, there
should be any divergence. What one had the
other possessed.

It would be well if we realised this truth, that
there is no such thing as an isolated life. Every
attainment of every one affects every other,
every failure of every one affects every other.
There is no such thing as isolated sin or purity.
Your purity helps to make me pure, my sin
helps to defile you. In all this world we cannot
move faster than all move. There is no such
thing as a single life getting perfection alone.
We must remember that great saying of Paul in
the second letter to the Corinthians, " But we all,
with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the
glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same
image." Nobody can do it alone. Paul under-
stood this perfectly. You will find him striking
this note again and again in his Epistles, that no
solitary life can ever come to the fulness of
God's ideal for it alone. We shall only reflect
Christ perfectly as we all reflect Him ; we shall
only behold Him clearly as we all behold Him.
We are all of us hampering or helping one an-
other. Our lives are bound together not as our

UNITY OF HEARTS IX CHRIST 139

ten fingers may be interlaced, but as my hand
is a part of my body. Just as truly as my hand
is a part of my body are your life and my life
parts of one another, one common tide flowing
through them both. And all evil, disease, sick-
ness, and wrong in any one of us is just so
much crime against every other one of us.
Every victory, triumph, purity of life and soul
is just so much victory won for every other
human life.

It is true that the Christian Church is a gath-
ering of men and women who love one another
with a great and unselfish love. It is true that
it is a gathering of men and women who are
parts of one another, just as truly as our eyes
and our ears and our hands are members of this
one body of ours. I suppose that for many of
us putting it this way is a difficult thing. We
can understand how a physical body can be
united, but we do not understand how a great
mass of human beings can constitute an organic
unity as a body does. This is because we do
not know what Hfe is. It is true that we are
one with God in a far more real and true sense
than that our bodies constitute one organism ;
it is equally true that we are one with one an-
other in as true a sense as it is true that our
physical bodies are one physical unity.

But if we cannot take in Paul's great thought
we can grasp the other metaphor, in which he
thinks of the Christian Church as a great fam-

140 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

ily of which God is the Father and in which all
the different men and women sustain to one
another a relationship of brotherly and sisterly
love, such as bound the Master, Jesus Christ, the
elder Brother, and His disciples together. Is
that true of the Christian church to which we
belong? Think of your church in your com-
munity. Is it a family in this sense? You
know how our Lord looked forward to Heaven
and made clear what it was to be, by speaking
of it as His Father's house, the home, the meet-
ing place of the family, where by and by when
all the struggle and work of life are over the
whole family will gather, as oftentimes the hu-
man family gathers at Christmas time or Thanks-
giving Day — the elder children who have gone
far away, the younger children who stayed at
home — and the whole unbroken family sits down
together in the evening, while the rich family love
binds them together into one. That is what the
Christian Church is meant to be — a gathering
of men and women loving as brothers and sis-
ters love one another; yes, even more than that,
loving with the kind of love that Jesus Christ
reveals in the family life of His own Father's
home. How daringly Paul puts this in the Epis-
tle to the Ephesians when he speaks of the re-
lationship between Christ and His Church as
being akin to what he calls that " great mys-
tery," the most close of all human relationships,
the relationship between husbands and wives!

UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 141

" Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also
loved the Church." Both were to leave fathers
and mothers, and cleave to one another, and be
one. Here Paul says the great mystery comes
in — even as Christ and His Church are one.

The dearest and most intimate home life of
which we may know, that home where love
binds together in the closest and most unclouded
intimacy and confidence, where no angry word
is ever heard, where no angry look is ever seen,
where you breathe, as you cross the threshold,
the atmosphere which you know to be of that
other home, our Father's home — all this but
symbolises to us the relationship that should
exist between us as members of Christ's Church.
We ought to feel a great wave of love sweeping
over us, carrying us out of our lives of jealousy,
envy, malice, bitterness, and evil, and welding
us together in one deep consciousness of family
life, loving as one body in which we are mem-
bers one of the other. We ought to feel that the
Christian Church came into the world not to be
a form or a guild for worship, but to be first of
all a loving union of men and women bound
one to another in a consuming, absorbing, un-
selfish love.

Do we feel this in our hearts? Do we not
feel it now as we think of the beauty of Christ's
conception and ideal for His Church? Is there
not a great outgoing of our life toward those
other lives round about us, a great desire to be

142 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

more to them, to love them more unreservedly,
to realise actually in our daily life what Paul
meant when he said that we were all of us one
body in Christ — suffering each of us with the
rest, honoured each of us with the rest, lacking
each of us with the rest? We are one body and
Jesus Christ is Head over all.

Would that it were possible to make all the
vital significance of this truth clear. Such unity
as this is an essential condition of our securing
the knowledge we need as Christians. There is
no such thing as knowing Christ fully all by
one's self. You may know a little bit of Christ
all by yourself, but you will never know Christ
fully outside of the brotherhood. It is only as
we all know Christ together that any one of
us can know Christ alone. I see one beauty in
Him, you see another beauty in Him. It is only
as we sit down side by side and each share with
the other the beauty that we have seen that each
of us can see Him in His perfect beauty. No
single member of the Christian Church can draw
off alone and apprehend Him or drink in the
fulness of the glory of His perfect character. It
is as we draw close together and love one an-
other with great discerning love that we are
able to apprehend the fulness that there is in
Jesus Christ. Most of us get our truth from
others. I can look back over the great lives
from which almost all I have got has come to
me. You can look out over the lives which

UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 143

you know have made your life what it is. You
can think of so and so. He gave you this
thought about Christ. You can think of so and
so. She showed you this beauty about Christ.
It is as we all come to know Christ that any
one of us shall come to know Him. It is only
" with all saints " that we shall be able to com-
prehend what is the breadth and length and
depth and height and to know the love of Christ
which passeth knowledge. All may know what
one can never know.

And there are some truths that we cannot see
in any manner outside this Christian fellowship.
It is only as our hearts are filled full of the love
that binds all Christ's together that we can un-
derstand these truths. You remember that other
verse in St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians,
" Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith,
and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto
a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stat-
ure of the fulness of Christ." There is that
" all " again. We shall never come alone or
apart; we shall never come into this unity of
the faith and knowledge of the Son of God
until we all come.

One of the pathetic things of our day is the
way in which the Christian Church has lost what
men outside are groping after. Here is the im-
pulse that drives the socialistic movement of
our day. It gets its power from proposing to
supply what Christ came to give. He came

144 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

that the hunger and thirst of men's hearts for
fellowship and equality should be satisfied. He
preached here in this world nineteen hundred
years ago a unity of life, closer, more intimate
than any ever known outside of the Christian
Church. Why shall we not go out into the
world to say : " O world, looking for fellow-
ship, seeking after unity of life, we have it all.
Here is the secret of it, if you will come with
us. And you will never find it unless you will
come with us, and join this society of ours, the
fellowship of God."

And just as such unity as this is essential to
Christian knowledge, it is essential also to the
efficiency of the service of Christ's Church in the
world. It is all one body, says Paul, but there
are diverse functions; different members have
different duties to discharge. If all the body
were an eye, where were the smelling? If all
the body were an hand, where were the seeing?
There are diverse functions, but it is all one
body. What a blessing it would be if we could
realise such a unity in Christian life and ser-
vice! We do feel it at times. We belong to
scores of different church bodies, but we are all
one. These differences are as nothing to us as
we sit together in the presence of Christ. In a
real sense it is true that we are one mighty
army and that our differences are merely divi-
sional separations. But I suspect that many of
us are missing God's personal spiritual blessing

UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 145

for our lives because we do not carry the same
great thought into our individual life — the
thought that we are different members but one
body, some set to be apostles, some prophets,
some workers of miracles, some teachers, but
one spirit running through us all, each with a
peculiar mission and separate duty, but all one.
There is a German riddle that asks what is the
most wonderful thing that God has made. The
answer is the human face, that He has made so
many, and no two are alike. If He has made
so many human faces in the world and no two
of them alike, do you suppose He would dupli-
cate His life plans? Do you not suppose that
the great and rich Father of all our lives has
for each one of us a fresh, original scheme of
His own, a new, distinct idea for each of us?
He does not mean that any one is simply to
resemble somebody else. He means that each
of us is to be our own true self, to realise that
we are not to be like any one else save that we
have the same spirit that flows through them.
Each of us is to take up our own place and
duty in the body, whether humble or honourable,
each place glorious because we are all joined
together to the one Head from Whom we draw
our common glorious life.

And this ideal of unity is necessary not alone
to our knowledge and service, but also to our
prayer. The full power of prayer is found only
when it is corporate. The relationship of

146 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

each one of us to God determines in some real
way the relationship of every one of us to God.
Nothing is more real in this world than an-
swered prayer, than fellowship in prayer. No
one of us can hope to realise in the prayer life
all that is there for us until every one of us
tries to realise what is there for us. It is only
as we all pray that any one of us can pray in
the fulness of the joy and power of prayer.

What a pathetic thing it is with so much de-
pendent upon the realisation of Christ's ideal of
unity for His people that we are willing to let
that unity be impaired? You know the things
that impair it. Falsehood destroys it. It is the
ground on which Paul argues against falsehood.
He does not say that lies are wrong because
they are contrary to the character of God, al-
though this is true. He does not say that lies
are wrong because they are dishonourable, al-
though this also is true. He says we cannot lie
because it disintegrates the Christian society to
He.

" Put away all falsehood, therefore," he says,
" and speak the truth one with another, be-
cause ye are members one of another." He
realises that falsehood is like a sort of anarchy
or disease in the body. And his conception is
that the only way in which the body can be one is
that it should have the absolute truth running
through it all. Every little lie, black or grey or
vermilion or white, bv which we soil our lives,

UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 147

constitutes just so much schism and sin against
the unity of the body of Jesus Christ.

MaHce and evil speaking, and all unkindli-
ness impair the unity of this body. Oftentimes
in our own churches Christ's body has been
broken up through evil slander, gossip, unkindly
speech. We have all at one time or another
seen Christian fellowship impaired in this way.
" Behold how great a matter a little fire kin-
dleth ! " A perfect hell of power lies in these
tongues ! I remember when I first reached
China, taking a walk with a friend through the
streets of a Chinese village, and seeing for the
first time a Chinese dog open his mouth. I
stopped and asked my friend, " What is the mat-
ter with that dog's mouth ? " The inside was
not red like the inside of our dogs' mouths, but
blue, as though he had been eating berries. My
friend said : " Why, there is nothing the mat-
ter. That is the colour of the mouth of a Chi-
nese dog." How many Christians there are who
have the mouths of Chinese dogs, not red and
clean as Christian mouths ought to be; but
stained and defiled with malicious speaking, un-
kindly and ungenerous talk, with all that kind
of conversation which is death to Christian
unity. Will we backbite, be ungenerous and
un-Christlike in our talk when we walk in all
the sweetness and confidence of our Father's
house? Shall we not resolve that we will cease
from this sin of unkindly, un-Christlike speech,

148 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

to which Paul refers all through his Epistles as
much as to any other sin save the sin of im-
purity, and thus promote the unity and harmony
of the body of Christ?

And we know, last of all, what Is to promote
and increase this unity binding all Christians
together into one. As we draw near Christ we
draw near to one another even to the ends of the
earth. Dr. Trumbull Backus used to say that he
always knew as he looked over the report of the
church treasurer on what days the communion
services had fallen by the size of the missionary
offering. Invariably whenever the offering fell
on a communion Sunday the missionary offer-
ings were from twenty-five to fifty per cent,
greater than on any other day. On the days that
the people drew nearest to Jesus, when their
hearts were melted and tender with His love, on
these days they drew near also to the uttermost
parts of the earth. What draws us close to
one another at any time is the fact that each
one of us is drawn close to our Lord. If only
each one of us had Him perfectly for our Head
then all of us would be perfectly members
one of another. Forgiveness draws us together,
and there is nothing so severing and schismatic
as the spirit of unforgiveness. If any one of
us cherish in our hearts any bitter feeling, any
animosity, any hatred against any other human
soul, we are making it impossible that we should
be true members of the Church of Christ. I

UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 149

heard of a church once in which there were two
brothers who would not speak to one another.
Is it possible that any blessing of God could
come down upon that church? If there is any
hate in our hearts, any unkindliness, let us lay
it aside. If there is any person in all this world
against whom we are bearing a grudge, let us
at once go or write a letter to that person for-
giving him freely from our hearts now. If we
forgive not our brothers their trespasses, neither
will our Heavenly Father forgive our trespasses.
There is nothing so much like the cross of Christ
as forgiveness. When we have lifted up every-
thing in our lives until all the self-pride, bitter-
ness, malice, and envy are all dropped out of
them, then we know in part what the cross meant
to Christ, then our hearts all tender will be ready
to enter into the secret of Christ's uniting love.
And if we will draw, all of us, close to Him in
a great common service, as well as in love and
forgiveness, we shall find ourselves realising
increasingly the communion of saints and the
unity of the body of Christ.

Whatever may be the differences which sep-
arate all those who belong to Christ from one
another here on the earth — the incidental dif-
ferences of speech, of complexion, of manner of
life, of history and tradition — back of all these
the common love for our common Lord ought
to bind us all together into one, be we Chinese,
Japanese, African, Armenian, Bulgarian, Amer-

150 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

ican, or English. From whatever land we come,
to whatever denomination we belong, whatever
our social condition may be, if we are Christ's
we are one another's also, and all of us are one
body in Him. Jesus is waiting to reveal to us
how one we are, how unreal are all the social
and caste lines that divide us, how un-Christian
all the lines of separation are that are run by
wealth or education or social inheritance ; that,
after all, the one fundamental fact of the Chris-
tian life, if we have that life at all, is that we
are God's, and therefore one with all who are
God's ; that I am your friend and you are my
friend; what you have is mine and what I have
is yours ; your honour is my honour, and my
shame your shame, and the sufferings of one the
sufferings of us all. When we have learned this
we shall have received the Christian inheritance
and have entered into the experience of the re-
peated and solemn affirmation of our creed, " I
believe in the Communion of Saints."

VIII

THE MASTER, THE MAKER OF
STRONG HEARTS

** TESUS looked upon him, and said. Thou art
J Simon, the son of John: thou shalt be
called Cephas (which is, by interpretation,
Rock)." These words of our Lord were spoken
on the day on which He called his first disciples.
The day before John had borne testimony that He
was the Lamb of God, and this day, seeing Jesus
passing by, had gently constrained two of his
disciples, John and Andrew, to leave him and
follow Jesus. After they had satisfied them-
selves, Andrew found his brother Simon and
brought him to Jesus.

I suppose there were some other people stand-
ing around when Andrew and Simon came; un-
doubtedly John must have been there; and one
can imagine the looks of surprise, perhaps the
play of a sneer on the lips of some, as Jesus
spoke thus to Simon : " Thy name is Simon ; thy
name shall be Cephas, which is by interpretation,
Rock." Simon, rock! Why, he was the most
vacillating, changeable, unreliable fisherman on
the sea of Galilee. We picture John and Andrew
exchanging glances of astonishment at the idea
of fickle Simon ever being called rock. Perhaps
151

152 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

the first influence of Christ's words upon Simon
may have been the same. One can imagine
the flush of shame that would rise to his cheeks
as he was thus singled out for the gaze of the
bystanders as the man who had been weak and
changeable, but who was now to be called rock.
" Rock," Simon would say to himself, " call me
rock! This man is giving me a nickname, and
taunting me." And then, back of the first flush
and feeling of shame there came pulsing through
all Simon's veins the sense of his discovery. He
was ashamed of his fickleness. Nobody else
taunted him with it with half the bitterness with
which he taunted himself. Here, at last, he
stood before a man who had discovered him, who
had found out his own deepest sense of discon-
tent, who was giving him a new name, and with
the new name the promise of a new character.
" I know thee, Simon," Jesus said ; " I know
thy reputation here; I have watched thee for
many years, and know thee well as the man of
most notorious uncertainty and vacillation of
character to be found among the fisher folk here ;
and I know, too, that deep down in your soul
you want a better character. Your name has
been Simon ; it shall be Rock." All Simon's soul
must have thrilled, as he stood at last before a
man who had thus found him in the depths of
his life, and who promised him, with a new name,
the satisfaction of the deepest longings of his
heart.

MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 153

We read that on the next day the Saviour was
minded to go forth into GaHlee, and He findeth
PhiHp, who was of the village of Andrew and
Peter. And when Philip had satisfied himself
of the Saviour, he went to bring Nathanael to
Him. And when Nathanael came, Jesus, seeing
him, said to those who stood by, " Behold an
Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile ! " " Whence
knowest Thou me ? " was Nathanael's exclama-
tion of surprise. Jesus's answer to him, though
in form different, was in spirit the same that
He had given to Simon Peter. He had discov-
ered Simon at depths below the surface ; He had
promised Simon that which he was* not, but
which he wanted to be. He revealed now to
Nathanael that he understood what lay back of
the surface of his life, too. " I knew thy long-
ings, Nathanael," He says, " as thou wast under
the fig tree there. I knew thy meditations upon
that ancient day when Jacob, not so far away,
laid his head down by night on a pillow of stone,
and the heavens were opened above him, and the
angels of God ascended and descended above his
head. Thou hast been wondering whether those
old days would ever come back again, whether
the privileges of such association with God, of
such divine fellowship, were for the fathers and
the patriarchs alone. Thy heart has been covet-
ing an open heaven once again. Verily, I say
unto thee, thine own eyes shall see the heavens
open, and the angels of God ascending and de-

)

154 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

scending upon the Son of Man." I imagine there
were no smiles among the bystanders this time,
but deep down in Nathanael's soul there must
have been the same pulsing sense of new discov-
ery, the same sense of having been found at last
by some one who knew what no other knew about
the deeper longing of his heart, and who in the
act of revealing him to himself had held out the
promise also of fulfilling the aspirations of
his soul.

Now there is one truth that lies right on the
rface of these two sweet incidents in the early
public Hfe of our Lord. It is, that every man of
us is two men, that every man is made up, first,
of the man as he actually is on the surface, as
perhaps he appears to himself, as certainly as he
appears to his fellow men, and the deeper man
underneath, as he may be, as God wants him to
be, as perhaps the man himself longs to be, as
Jesus Christ the Master of men can make him.
And Jesus sees both of these two men. We read
in the next chapter of this Gospel that He need-
eth not that any should bear witness of what is
in a man, for He Himself knows all that is in
man, all that there is of actual striving with sii
and failure, all that there is of delicate desirq
after something holier and stronger that thus farj
has eluded the man. He knows the two men'
that are in each one of us, and He discovers thgrn
to Himself and to us.

Sometimes He finds the actual man without

d

MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 155

better than the ideal man within. The man back
of the curtain, where He Himself is piercing to
the realities of the man, is basely different from
the man as he appears to the world without.
That was the case with Judas. Ju^as passed ^o
^friend forthree^j^ars. The very night c *
betrayal not one of the Apostles could guess wh'
the traitor was, but all the time Jesus knew that
he was the one who was to betray Him. Back
of the surface of fidelity He saw the treasonable
heart. The r^^l rnaji in Judas as Jesus saw him
was worse than the outer man in Judas as men
saw him.

Sometimes one man is no better than the other,
but all that there is in the man lies on the surface
of his life. I think that was the case with the
rich young ruler who came to Jesus, and whom
Jesus, when He looked at him, loved. There
was nothing more to the man than showed on the
surface. The moment that Jesus put His finger
on the core of the man's soul, He found that
what was back of the man was no more than was
on the surface of the man. There were no real
longings that were not already realised in his life,
so far as he was truly desirous that they should
be. There were none of those deep dissatisfac-
tions, those earnest discontents, those aspirations,
hestitating at no price, after something beyond
his experience that lay in other men whom Jesus
touched. And the moment Jesus found his shal-/
lowness, that there was nothing to the man ex-

156 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

cept what showed, and discovered this to the
man himself, the young man turned away from
Christ.

[^nrhere are other men in whom what does not
I appear is better than what does, in whom the
hidden ambition of the Hfe, unknown of men, is a
holier and a better thing than the life that thus
far men have seen. That was the case with
Simon. There he stood, the object lesson of
vacillation and pliability. Deep down in his soul
was a discontent with that reputation, a desire
after a solid, steadfast character; and Jesus,
looking into him, saw that the surface of his
life covered over this better and deeper and
richer longing within. " Thou art called Simon,"
He said to him ; " thy name shall be Rock."

And just as our Lord Jesus Christ was dis-
covering men when He was here He is discover-
ing men still. He is here now with each of us,
scrutinising alike the surface and the core of our
lives. How doe^ He find us? Does He find
no more back of the surface tTian lies upon the
surface? There are many men who are clean,
decent fellows, not intending to commit any
crime, with their wills firmly set to hold aloof
from all coarse vice and sin, men who pass as
good fellows in the world, sociable, more or less
Christian men, and that is all that can be said of
them. There is nothing back of the life that
is not on the surface of it. Does Christ find any
of us so, with no longings beyond our attain-

MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 157

ments, with no desires behind that which Hes
already printed plain on the surface of our lives?

Maybe He finds some of us worse than we .
appear. Outside we are clean, but we are I
tainted within. We have been passing as (
leaders; we may have been called to foremost
positions in Christian service; we may be
looked upon at home as clean and Christian men,
and down at the core of our lives there may be
something despicable and defiling. Maybe we
are gentlemen without while inside we are rot-
tenness and dead men's bones, outside clean and
attractive to the sight of men, while we carry
with us inferiority and vileness of spirit with-
in. As Jesus, with those eyes of flame that
pierce the very joints and marrow, scrutinises
our lives, does He find us actually worse as His
eyes see us than we show ourselves to men, or
even to ourselves?

Perhaps He finds us better than we appear.!
Perhaps as He looks upon us He sees more in^
us than we have seen even in ourselves as yet,
and far more in us than our friends see. Maybe
they are calling us Simon. Maybe they say:
" Yes, I know that fellow. He pretends to be a
Christian man. You cannot place any reliance
on his word ; there is no solidity in his character ;
it is all profession and no reality beneath " ; while
Jesus sees within a deep sickness of soul, a hun-
gering and thirsting after that which we know
better than any other man that we are not. Pos-

158 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

sibly, looking upon us, Christ does find us tar-
nished without, but longing to be cleansed and
free within. Some time ago a little fellow
from a Southern college said to me : "I am
tempted dreadfully with evil thoughts, and when
I fear that I am going to be tempted and I fight
against them, the thoughts come all the more —
just at the time when I hate them the most and
most desire to be free from them. The very
fact that I strive to avert their coming brings
them on, and I fight day and night against them.
How shall I free myself from them ? " Now
any man looking on this boy's life without, as he
looked on his own life without, saw tarnish and
stain, saw the soil and the defilement of the evil,
but only Jesus saw beneath the passion of dis-
gust at it all, the great longing desire to be free,
while yet the desire to be free only forged the
chains, as it seemed to him, more strongly upon
him. It may be that there are some of us worse
soiled than by evil thoughts alone, tarnished with-
out, yet who, as Jesus sees us, are longing for
cleanliness and purity within. Possibly, as we
look on the outside of our lives, and as our fel-
lows look upon them, they are coarse and selfish
lives, heavy with all sorts of narrow desires and
tastes and aspirations, while all the time deep
within we want to be unselfish. Our self-con-
sciousness is felt to be a curse by us ; that em-
phasis upon our own will and our own ways that
shuts us out from richest generosity of spirit is

MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 159'

more detestable to us than it could be to any one
else. Maybe we are very conscious of our want
of attainment, but full of eagerness and keen de-
sire to get hold of that which is best and which
we most truly need. Jesus, looking upon us, sees
us not alone full of the failure of the outer
shortcomings, but beautiful with the inner desire
to be perfect and unselfish and true.

Perhaps as Jesus looks down upon us He sees,
as no other man sees, the intense and bitter
struggle with the disposition to be satisfied with
something less than what is best. Perhaps as
He looks upon us to-day, just as He looked upon
Simon Peter that spring day by the shores of
the sea of Galilee, He sees us, as He saw him,
weak, pliable, fickle, unreliable men without in
our relations with other men, possibly in our
control over ourselves ; but back of all He sees the
irrepressible sickness with ourselves, the great
desire that He Who said to Simon, '' I know
you, you shall be called Rock," should say that
same thing to us to-day : " I know you, unreli-
able, impulsive, uncertain, and yet eager also to
be firm set in truth and righteousness. You shall
become what you desire."

Now, it would be a dreary message simply
that Jesus sees through us, that we cannot play
ofif any sham on Him, that He knows exactly
what is hypocrisy in us and what is reality, that
His eyes can never be stayed on the outside but
will drive home clear to the inner truth of our

160 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

souls. It would be a poor message if we could
only console our hearts with the thought that
Tesus Christy cannot be cheated in us. It was not
enough for Him that day on the shores of the sea
to say, '' Simon, I know you, I know your repu-
tation on this coast, I know your character thor-
oughly " ; He went on to hold out to him the
promise of becoming that which he was not, of
being that which he longed to be. " Thy name
has been Simon: thou shalt be called Rock."
And Jesus is looking down upon us now, not
alone clearly distinguishing just the sort of men
we are, but holding out to us also His promise
to make us the kind of men we would like to be,
and to remould us, defaced, blemished, scarred,
incomplete, howsoever we may be, into the like-
ness of His own perfect and glorious image.
" Thy name has been Simon : thou shalt be called
Rock."

There is something wonderfully attractive,
something that speaks home to the conscious
needs of our hearts, in this thought of the
stability and power of Christ, which He is able
to impart to us, and to make a part of our own
personal character and hfe. From the very
beginning Israel loved to conceive religion so.
They were ever speaking of the Lord God as
their everlasting Rock Who could not be moved,
in Whom they could stand impregnable and un-
assailable. Moses sang, '' He is the rock. His
work is perfect: ascribe ye greatness unto our

MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS l6l

God. For their rock is not as our rock, even
our enemies themselves being judges." And
there was David, in the day when the Lord deHv-
ered him out of the hands of his enemies and out
of the hand of Saul, singing, " The Lord is my
rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my
God, my strong rock, in Him will I trust; my
shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high
tower." And there is yet again his cry in
one of the psalms that is attributed to him:
" Hear my cry, O God ; attend unto my prayer.
From the end of the earth will I call unto Thee,
when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the
rock that is higher than L For Thou hast been
a refuge for me, and a strong tower from the
enemy." A poor people hunted out of their
own land, driven to and fro over the surface of
the earth, who found no shade of trees, but who
dwelt only under the shadow of a great rock in
a weary land, Israel loves to lean still on the
Lord God its rock. An old Jewish legend is
said to be referred to in Paul's First Epistle to
the Corinthians, where we are told tliat all
through the wilderness journeys the rock that
Moses smote in the wilderness followed Israel,
and they drank of that rock. And that rock,
Paul says, was Christ. And the very core of all
religion lies in this, the binding back of life into
its solid moorings in God. Religion is the tak-
ing of that which is adrift, of that which is out
chartless and masterless, and bringing it home to

162 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

its just relations in the impregnable and endur-
ing God.

Jesus stands waiting to set our feet in rock;
and it does not matter where we go, we shall
need each one of us to have Him do in us this
mighty ministry. Some of us may be going into
business life. We shall need nothing more as we
go there than that He should set our feet se-
curely in an immovable righteousness and steadi-
ness of character. Mr. Richard Croker is not
an admirable man, but there are two things
that are said to his credit. One is that
he speaks his mind without fear, and the
other is that he keeps his word without false-
hood. Some time ago the Evening Telegram
printed an interview with him, in which he was
reported to have said : " I don't propose to pose
as an adviser to the young men of this city, but
speaking solely from my personal observation, I
should say that all that is necessary for the truly
ambitious young man to do is to possess himself
of those principles which go to make up the prac-
tical business man, and those are, in my judg-
ment, first of all, integrity, pluck, perseverance
and sobriety." The same truth was better said
by a better man in " Under the Old Elm."

"The longer on this earth we live,
And weigh the various qualities of men,

Seeing how most are fugitive
Or fitful gifts at best of now and then,
Wind-wavered, corpse-lights, daughters of the fen,

MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 163

The more we feel the high, stern-featured beauty

Of plain devotedness to duty.
Steadfast and still; not fed with mortal praise:

But finding amplest recompense

For life's ungarlanded expense
In work done squarely and unwasted days."

If we are going out into business life, let Jesus
speak to us His message of power and turn us
from pliable Simon into enduring Rock, making
us rigid with His righteousness.

Every one of us, whatever his or her particu-
lar work is to be, must expect to be tried by seven
times hotter temptations than have ever tried
us before. Every fresh privilege is only a fitting
of men for fresh temptation. And we can be
sure as we go out with larger powers to fight
with that which is vicious and evil, that we shall
have more of it to struggle against. Tempta-
tions will come to us with fresh power. The
adversary in yet more insidious ways will creep
subtly in and try us at some new place.
We shall need Christ to stand by us and
put rock i^ us, need Christ to stand by us and
make us steadfast to fight against him who fights
against us, to clothe ourselves with all the
armour of God aijd then to stand, and having
done all, to stand still, until at last, having over-
come, we sit down by Christ upon His throne, as
He overcame and was set ddwn by the Father
upon His throne.

Some may have to stand all alone in their col-

164 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

leges or circles of companions. It is an awful
thing to try and pull other men up to a higher
spiritual level. There is no other work in this
world that drains men so, that tears the very soul
as the attempt to make plain to other men some
larger spiritual vision and to turn them to its
obedience. It would be a far easier thing to go
out and plough. Many will have to stand alone
in this way. May Jesus, who Himself stood,
help us to stand and breathe into us the very dis-
position of stone. In all of our service of Christ,
wherever we go now, or whatever we are to do,
we need to be given, each one of us, more of
that new character which came to Simon when
Jesus found him and gave him his new name.

One of the wonderful things about our Lord
Himself was the way He stood against everything
that assailed Him whether from within or from
without, and counted nothing too great a sacrifice
for His ministry and His Father's love, the way
at last, when all turned against Him, when every
disciple fled, when even John turned and left with
the rest. He remained unmoved, immovable.
Some of you will recall the old lines of Irving
Brown in the Albany Law Journal back of which
as we read them rises the vision of the enduring
and the immovable Christ, in which he con-
trasted the lions of Trafalgar and Lucerne.

" The drowsy lions of Trafalgar lie,
With pride and conquest sated,
Round about the victor's column.

MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 165

Travellers pass by without a glance

And oftener without a thought of all the glory buried

there
That makes the Lion Island's fame so fair.

'* Thou solitary lion of Lucerne
Defeated, gasping on an alien shield,
To thee the strangers' steps in fondness turn,
Thou dying majesty.

To thee we yield the tribute due to loyalty and love,
Unshaken as the solid cliff above."

So may our Lord Jesus Christ, Who so stood
that all the powers of hell could not shake Him
in His standing, give us of His own strength to
stand with Him.

I stood some years ago outside the wall of
the city of Seoul, in Korea, on the banks of the
river Han, and I thought of that great scene
thirty years before, when the Tai Won Kun, who
for nearly a generation was the baleful curse
of that land, ordered the death of all the Catholic
Christians of Korea, and they were brought
down, thousands in number, to the shores of the
Han. The priests and the bishops had arrows
thrust through the lobes of their ears and the
muscles of their chests, and were obliged to run
up and down the sandy bank of the Han until
they fell exhausted, and one by one the multitude
of Koreans, women, men, and little children,
poor, simple people, deemed by the Japanese and
Chinese alike as cast off In the world and feeble,
knelt down, and for their Master, Jesus Christ,

166 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

were willing to die, and did die, until the water
of the Han ran red to the Yellow Sea. That
scene was later brought back by a letter from
a missionary in the city of Ning-po in China,
describing a meeting of the Synod of southern
China, about the time of the Boxer storm, in
which in a farewell address the oldest minister
in the Synod rose and spoke to his friends of the
fiery trials which he felt were coming upon all
who confessed Jesus Christ in China. He ad-
vised the other pastors to prepare their people
by reading to them from the Bible the passages
about the martyrs of the early Church, and to
tell them the stories of the Christian Church
through all the ages, that they might be made
ready to stand immovable, steadfast, and true,
in the day of fire and of sword.

Feeble as dust, fickle, changeable, unreliable
Simons, all of us, needing each of us to have
given to him the strength which Christ possesses,
once again, as in the days of old by Tiberias, the
Master stands offering to change every man
from Simon to Peter, to take us just as we are,
no matter how unsatisfactory, vacillating, un-
true, and make us by His grace. Rock, rigid
Rock.

IX

THE MASTER'S WORK FOR HIS FOL-
LOWERS

IN the beginning of the great prayer of our
Lord which is recorded in the seventeenth
chapter of the Gospel of St. John, occurs this
sentence : " I have glorified Thee on the earth ;
I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me
to do."

Surely none but the lips of Christ would have
dared to utter these words. What is peculiar
and personal in them, however, is not the idea
that our Master had a work given Him by God
to do. I think we are at times disposed to think
that that was the distinctive and peculiar thing
in the life of Jesus, and unmistakably it was an
emphatic thing. How many times He Himself
refers to it ! " My meat is to do the will of
Him that sent Me, and to finish His work."
" I came not to do Mine own will, but the will
of Him that sent Me." ''He that sent Me is
with Me; He hath not left Me alone, for I do
always those things that please Him."

Because Jesus was often insisting upon this
and because so manifestly what Jesus was about
in this world was the work of God, we are some-

16T

168 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

times led to think that His life evidenced a
working of God which we may not be privileged
to have in our lives, and we often draw the line
of distinction between our Lord and ourselves
here, admitting that God had given to Him a
great work to do in this world and admitting
sadly that we do not believe that He can or
intends to give us any such work. But surely
instead of being most remote from us at this
point, it is precisely here that Jesus Himself
fully reveals the real and essential significance
of our Hfe; instead of setting Himself off
from all other men in declaring that He had a
work given Him of God to do, He was ranging
Himself in this with all His brethren. We as
truly as He have each one of us a specific God-
assigned work in the world.

Jesus often touches upon this truth in His
parables. He tells us that the kingdom of
Heaven is like unto a householder who went off
into a far country, leaving to each of his servants
his own work. And He makes it plain that this
is not alone the work of each servant for himself,
but God's work for each servant. The work
which we are trying to do in this world is our
work surely enough, but it is not our work for
ourselves in any such true sense as it is God's
work for us, and we get the chief comfort and
contentment out of our lives from that convic-
tion. The truest joy which any man can find
in his life is in perceiving in it some unfolding

WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 169

of God's purpose and in recognising in the thing
that he is trying to do not a work that he has
picked up at random here, but a particular piece
of work set for him, set for him long before he
himself ever came into this world, by the loving
purpose of his Father.

Conceive for a moment the irresistible strength
and power of such a conception of life as this.
Not every man can do everything that he will,
but every man can do everything that God wills
that he should do, and neither life nor death,
principalities nor powers, things present nor
things to come, can prevent any man from doing
in this world the work which God wants him
to do if the man will take his work from the
hands of God and do it.

This is no narrow conception of life. To hold
this view of life does not require a man to nar-
row his thought of the things allowable to him
within the Hmits of a certain few occupations
and duties. John Tauler was telling the truth
when, seven hundred years ago, he wrote:

" Every art or work, however unimportant it
may seem, is a gift of God; and all these gifts
are bestowed by the Holy Ghost for the profit
and welfare of men. Let us begin with the low-
est. One can spin, another can make shoes, and
some have great aptness for all sorts of outward
arts. These are all gifts proceeding from the
Spirit of God. H I were not a priest, but were
living as a layman, I should take it as a great

170 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

favour that I knew how to make shoes, and
should try to make them better than any one else,
and should gladly earn my bread by the labour
of my hands. There is no work so small, no art
so mean, but it all comes from God and is a
special gift of His. Thus let each do that which
another cannot do so well, and for love, return-
ing gift for gift."

It was the same perception of a divine truth
that led his friends to inscribe on the tombstone
of David Golf in Scotland : " David Golf, Shoe-
maker by the grace of God." Any work which
God assigns to a man is worthy work for that
man to do, and if it be very humble and secular
as men regard it, it is yet the most spiritual and
divine work that the man can take up, if God
gave it to him.

On the other hand, this conception of life does
not tolerate any maudlin breadth. There are
young men in our colleges who are answering
the missionary call by saying that they expect
to stay at home and earn money for missions.
There is not a verse in the Bible that justifies a
man in believing that God has ever called or ever
will call a man primarily to make money, and I
have never been able to persuade myself from
studying the character of God that He would do
such a thing as that. There are men whom God
calls to some living spiritual service who earn
money by the way, and they are bound to admin-
ister that money as a trust ; but I do not believe

WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 171

that God is opening before any man, or ever has
opened before any man, the door to escape from
a Hving spiritual service under the pretext that
he is to earn money that the spiritual service of
other men many be maintained. William Carey
said that he cobbled shoes to pay expenses, and
that is all that cobbling shoes or stock-broking or
keeping a bank is good for, either to pay ex-
penses or to serve men. The real purpose of a
man's life is to pay expenses In these ways and
to use himself, use himself utterly in the living
work of God. It is a fine thing that God makes
work His gift and not money and not fame, nor
this thing nor that thing, but just living work,
and that every day He gives to each man of us a
work for that day and offers to us the joy of
conceiving it as a personal partnership with..
Himself. " To every man his work."

In the second place, it is a possible thing for
every man to discover just what the work of God
for him in this world is. There is not one man
who cannot discover the precise work which God
has for him to do. As a matter of fact, God
is more anxious that we should discover that
work than we are to discover it. We often tor-
ture ourselves with the contrary thought, sup-
posing that we are anxious beyond God to get
into just our right place in this world, whereas,
all the time, the living God Himself, to Whom
our life is of more importance than it is to us,
has been far more anxious to guide us into

172 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

that precise place which He has made for us
than we are to be guided.

Not only can each of us find what the work
of God for us in this world is, but each of us
must find that work. Life is a wasted thing,
Hfe is missing its real purpose here in the world,
life is sin — which simply is missing the purpose
— until we have discovered for ourselves what
God's work and will for us may be.

I. How can we discover the work of God
for us in the world? First of all, God does not
propose to reveal it to us by any ecstatic emo-
tion or by any mechanical external pressure.
God has guided men in these ways ; but no man
has any right to demand that God should guide
him so. When God works within my heart, will
not His workings be so perfect that they will
seem to be the motions of my own heart? God
will not coerce our spirits ; He will not in any
objective way throttle our liberties. Whatever
guidance we get from God will be in the way of
the movings of the Spirit of God along the chan-
nels of the orderly activities of our own life.

n. In the second place, as Horace Bushnell
points out in his great sermon, " Every Man's
Life a Plan of God," there are certain things
that must be excluded. We must exclude, first
of all, the desire to be singular. The man who
is ambitious for some peculiar thing, who is
tying God down to the revelation of some indi-
vidual and singular project for himself, is pre-

WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 173

venting that divine leading which is only given
to the soul that is pliable in His hand.

Second, v^e must exclude the copying of any
other man's life. I look at my friend and his
life so rich in all strengths and blessings, so set
in all rigidity of truthfulness, so strong and
clean in all its human ministries, and I v^ant to
pattern my life after his. The rich God is too
rich to give me the cast-off clothes of another
man's life. He proposes for me an original and
vital project of my own, and He does not expect
me as I seek His will for myself to ape the life
of any other man.

Thirdly, we must exclude insistence upon
knowing the whole thing at the beginning. That
was the difficulty of some of the disciples on the
last night. " Lord," said one of them to Him,
" we know not whither Thou goest ; how can we
know the way ? " Men are perpetually making
that mistake, thinking that unless they can see
the goal they cannot see the road thither. Now,
the living God cannot reveal to any man his
whole life. We have as yet no intellectual con-
ceptions in which to phrase our future life to
ourselves. If Christ should unveil it before us
it would be to us a strange and unintelligible
thing. We must be content to take God's guid-
ance of our lives step by step as we are able to
bear it.

III. Now, with these warnings, in the third
place, consider^ first of all, the character of God.

174 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

That makes it impossible for any man to be a
saloon keeper or go into the business of keeping
a dive. God could not approve it, and whatever
is inconsistent with the character of God, it is
not possible for any Christian man to do. Now
that may seem like a very obvious suggestion,
but apply it and see what a great swath it cuts
through life. How many things that perhaps
we have been cherishing as possible become in-
stantly impossible the moment we sit down to
estimate them again in the light of what we
believe to be the character of God!

Let us consider, in the second place, our own
relation to God, as men who belong to Him, who
have no right to set ourselves up in the world
in business independently of God, who are here,
as His workmanship, our whole Hfe depending
upon Him. Whatever we do in life must be
something that recognises our utter dependence
upon God.

Let us take account, thirdly, of our own moral
judgments. Many a man makes his life decision
in the face of the light that shines in his own
moral life. He sins; he knows he sins. When
a man deliberately follows some selfish end when
there is opened up before him an unselfish ser-
vice he is sinning, and he knows that he is sin-
ning against his own moral judgment. On the
other hand, a man may unconsciously walk into
sin with the approval of his moral judgment.
Not everything that my moral judgment tells

WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 175

me is right, is right. The thugs committed mur-
der with the most rehgious motives ; are they
therefore justified in their course? The fact that
a man's moral judgment allows him to do a thing
does not justify him in doing it. While a man
must consult his moral judgment and do nothing
that his moral judgment condemns, it is not
enough for any man to say that his moral judg-
ment approves. Is his moral judgment right?

In the fourth place, he must consult, there-
fore, that one corrective of a man's moral judg-
ment— the law of God as revealed in the Word
of God. It was given us for the purpose of
setting erroneous moral judgments right and for
establishing those standards of life which are
to be the norm of our moral judgment.

In the fifth place, let each of us consult his
own friends. They know us. We need to con-
sult our friends, although we may disregard
their advice. Many times men are called to do
this ; and many are first born into the real sense
of what it is to be a man by refusing to follow
the advice of friends. Not every father's advice
even is infallible. And many a time a man will
consult his friends and follow their advice, and
many a time also he will consult his friends and
not follow their advice.

He must consult also not alone his friends, but
that greatest Friend of all Who is perpetually
guiding man's life by the providences that sur-
round it and are shaping it. Who brought you

176 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

here ? God. Who forced on your mind the con-
sideration of a certain Hne of Hfe work? God.
You may say the considerations that are pressed
on you to take up that Hfe work are considera-
tions that would force every man into it. No,
they are not, and you know that that is no honest
reason; for God brought you to face those con-
siderations ; He did not bring other men to face
those considerations. I may stand on the shore
of a river where there are drowning souls, and
I ma}^ say that no obligation rests on me to save
those drowning souls that does not rest also on
every man, but I know that I am playing with
the truth in saying this ; not every man is stand-
ing on the bank of the river, and I am. Not
every man is looking out on the world of need
to-day ; you are, and you are looking out upon it
because God brought you face to face with it,
and because there is a loving providence in your
life guiding and directing you toward its need.
This is a thing to be weighed now by you or it
may be weighed some day against you.

Last of all, it is necessary for each of us, hav-
ing guarded ourselves against these dangers and
having followed these various courses of help,
to go straight to God with the matter and to
trust Him to guide us, and then walk straight
forward with a quiet heart, certain that He has
guided us as we have asked Him that He should.
God has a work for each of us to do, a partic-
ular individual work that will never be done in

WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 177

this world unless he to whom it is assigned does
it, and He has given us the means of discover-
ing that particular work of His for us.

IV. In the fourth place, this is the thing that
the man is to do. " The work," says Jesus,
*' which Thou hast given Me to do/' And you
know how Jesus did it. His disciples came back
and they marvelled as they saw Him sitting by
Jacob's well talking with a woman, and they
said, " Hath any man brought Him aught to
eat ? " And Jesus said, '' My meat is to do the
will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His
work." And you know how He poured His
life into the doing of that will so that, as His
disciples said, the zeal of His Father's house ate
Him up. He even took no leisure so much as
to eat. Every true life that has walked with
Him and has learned the secret of His life has
done thus the work that God has given it to do.

All the great things that have ever been accom-
plished in this world have been accomplished by
men who had a will to work. Take the life of
Richard Knill. Where was the secret of that?
In the advice that Venning, the philanthropist,
gave him : " Knill, labour for Jesus Christ as
long as you have a drop of blood in your
body." Take the life of T. H. Huxley. What
was the secret of it? The motto of his Hfe:
" Like the stars, without haste, without rest."
Take the life of Samuel Bowles. Friends said ^
to him, " Mr. Bowles, you are ruining your /

178 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

health with overwork." " I have the Hnes
drawn," was his reply, " and the current flowing,
and by throwing my weight here now I can
count for something. If I make a long break or
' parenthesis to get strong I shall lose my oppor-
tunity. No man is living a life worth living
unless he is willing, if need be, to die for some-
\ body or something."

And so St. Paul in his talk with the Ephesian
elders at Miletus : *' I count not my life as dear
unto myself, so that I may finish my course with
joy and the ministry which I have received of
the Lord Jesus to testify the Gospel of
the grace of God." I like the missionary enter-
prise on this account; because it sets before us
a definite divine work in the world to do and
gives a man a chance to spend his life in doing
it. Yes, it gives him a chance, if he wants it, to
lay down his life in doing it. And, after all,
what was life given to men for? Many of us
are content to make a living, live a comfortable,
quiet, decent life, and then at the end turn over
and die; and that will be the end of it all — no
great thrilling passion in it, no great divine vi-
sions overcoming it and overpowering it, no
great sympathy with Jesus Christ in His work
of sacrifice and of service in the world. But was
life given men to nurse in velvet and to keep
as long as they could? Life was given to men
to burn up, to spend and to spend out clear to
the end. Some Christians do not realise this,

WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 179

but to others the view of the Saviour regarding
His own priceless Hfe has been given, and they
see that Hfe is a trust to be used, not a treasure
to be hoarded. As a mother wrote of the death
of a daughter killed during the Boxer troubles
in China:

" The bitterest part of our trial was the faith-
less reproaches of fellow Christians because of
what they called the waste of such valuable lives.
My soul was literally torn with anguish by such
words. They seemed to reflect dishonour on our
Lord, and my constant prayer is that He may
vindicate Himself and His servants, so that no
one can doubt that all has been according to His
wise purpose.

" Personally, we have gone through the Val-
ley of the Shadow — but He has been with us,
and the days of our deepest sorrow have been the
days of His greatest nearness. We have been
like distressed children clinging close to the
strong and loving Father's side, and it has been
sweet to be made so conscious of His protection.
The earthward side of my dear one's death is
very dark, mysterious; but I thank God for the
glory of the heavenward side. I thank Him, too,
that the suffering was at longest measured by
hours, but the glory is for eternity. Oh, what a
Master we serve; what an inheritance He has
purchased for us I "

Many a man who is moving around with grey
hair, having lived out a long term of years,

180 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

has wasted his Hfe; but those missionary-
martyrs had not wasted theirs when they laid
them down there, in their fresh beauty, in north-
ern China. Jesus Christ did not waste His Hfe
when He died at the age of thirty-three upon a
cross when He might have hved on, if He had
wanted to, ten, twenty, thirty, forty years more.
He conceived that hfe was given to Him to
spend, and He spent it in doing the work that
His Father had given Him to do.

In Leonard Huxley's life of his father you
will find a letter in which Huxley speaks of the
death of Chinese Gordon at Khartoum in the
Soudan. Chinese Gordon was the man whom
above all other men, unless it was Darwin, Hux-
ley admired, deeming him the most refreshing
personality of that generation, and he is speaking
in this letter to Sir John Donnelly of Gordon's
strange death in the Soudan ; and he says : " I
imagine that the manner of his death was not
unwelcome to himself. Better wear out than
rust out, and better break than wear out." For
what was life given to men for except to fling
it with all the energy and power that it holds
against sin and for the thing that is right and
good and holy in the world? Each of us has a
work to do, and must do that work while life
lasts, as Jesus Christ had a work to do and
made it His meat and His drink to do it and to
bring it to a finished end.

y. I said at the beginning that no lips but

WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 181

our Lord's would ever have dared to speak those
words, and I said also that what was peculiar
and individual in them was not the fact that
Jesus had a work given Him of God to do. I
would say now that the thing that was distinc-
tive and pecuHar was the fact that Jesus was able
to say, " I have finished My work." Nobody
else in this world ever said that. Each one of
us looks at his work as he has done it up to this
day. If he should die to-day much of it would
have to be undone, and the man who tried to
pick it up would be torn with the splinters that
are sticking out from it. It is no finished, pol-
ished piece of work as Christ's was. Some of
you may have seen in one of the marine journals
a little while ago an interview with President
Hill of the Great Northern, in which he spoke of
men's experience in taking hold of the life work
of other men who had gone before them, of the
necessity that they had been put to of undoing
much of it, of the ambition which he felt to do a
man's work in such a way that when he let it
go nobody would need to undo any of it. And
beyond that, even if a man is able to leave his
work so that other men can take it up and find
no imperfection in it, how much is there yet of
shortcoming in it all, things we wanted to do
that we never did. Leonard Huxley writes of his
father, that his hands were full of a great burden
of investigations he wished to make that were in-
complete, and there were scores of questions

182 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

in his mind that he wanted time and strength
to consider, but for which time and strength
were not given. What human Hfe is there of
which we could not say that? And the richer
and the more glorious it is, the fuller it is of
unfinished and uncompleted projects.

And even beyond all this, long before we have
ever got to the end of our race our strength has
failed us and our pace has lagged and we have
fallen short of our own ideals for ourselves.
There is not one of us who carries his bat
through to the end of the game. Long before
the game is ended we have grown tired and
have fallen down.

I said that no lips but Christ's could ever say,
" I have finished my work." Some of you may
be remembering words that the Apostle Paul
wrote that seem to contradict that statement.
It was his ambition to finish his work. " I count
not my life dear to myself, so that I may finish
my course with joy"; and he wrote, in the last
of his Epistles, " I have fought a good fight. I
have finished my course." But did he finish his
work? He finished his course and came to the
end, to be sure, but did he finish his work? Why,
men are fighting to this day over the work of
the Apostle Paul who are agreed over the work
of Christ. The work of Jesus stands complete,
polished, finished. No man can add one word
to it or subtract one word from it. You cannot
say as much as that even of the work of the

WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 183

Apostle Paul himself. Alone of all those who
have ever lived, Jesus finished His work. He
carried it through to the end. All the shame of
that dark hour and the stinging pains of those
nails in His hands and His feet did not obscure
His vision of His work. He opened there in
the last hour of all the gates of the kingdom of
heaven to one of His dying companions; He
prayed that the Father might forgive the mur-
derers who knew not what they did, and He
made a home for His mother. At the very end
He was rounding out the perfect work of His
life. Men now and then have come near to that.
It is told of old Father Taylor, the seaman's-^
chaplain in Boston, that once in his old age, /
when he was in his dotage, he came in a corridor '
to a great mirror and he saw an old man there.
Not recognising it as himself, he went up to him,
and he said : " Old man, I wish you would come /
to Christ; you haven't very much life left. [
Your sun will soon set ; the night of death is just ^
ahead. Forsake your sins now and come to
Christ before it is too late." And you
know that among the last things recorded of
John Eliot, apostle to the Indians, was the scene
described by one who went in and found him on
his death bed. There was a little Indian girl i
standing by the bed, and John Eliot was teaching |
her the alphabet; and when somebody remon- I
strated with him because he was using up his
strength and overtaxing himself, he reminded

184 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

them of Christ. Jesus finished His work. He
finished His work in the sense that until the very
end He was rounding it out to completeness.
He finished it also in the sense that He did it
absolutely truly — no omitted thing in His life;
no committed thing that He afterwards repented
and grieved for. We measure our own life over
against His to-day, besmirched and ragged, torn
through with schism and rent and imperfection.
Who are we that we should even be given a
work of the Father to do like Christ's ? And yet
if it be true that the work given us is God's
work for us to do, we may hope also that it is
God's work for us also to complete it, and that if
we try to round out perfectly this day, filling it
with as much loving ministry, as much abhor-
rence of sin, as much detestation of every evil
way, as much tenderness toward little children,
as much love of what is pure and worthy and
beautiful as we can, by His grace at last it may
be possible for us also to say, as Christ said : " I
have glorified Thee on the earth. I have finished
the work which Thou gavest Me to do " ; and
until then we have no ambition that it should end.

" I ask no heaven till earth be Thine,
No glory crown while work of mine
Remaineth here. When earth shall shine

Among the stars,'
Her sins cast out, her captives free,
Her voice a music unto Thee,
For crown, more work give Thou to me.

Lord, here I am."

X

THE BURNING HEART

THERE passed away a few years ago from
the United States Senate one of the most
conspicuous of our national politicians.
Some would be disposed to say one of the most
notorious, but it is only fair, both to him and
to the nation, to say one of the most conspicu-
ous. One of the ablest of the New York daily
papers, the day after his death, published a just
and discriminating analysis of his character, in
which the man's good qualities were fairly
recognised. Attention was called to his
moderation, to his restraint, to his usual
clear-headedness, and to his patience. Those
were the Christian qualities of the man. But
the editorial went on to point out that side by
side with great good qualities like these the man
was marked by fundamental weaknesses. He
was without the imagination, the fine sense of
public feeling, the look beyond mere tactical ad-
vantages, that the statesman needs. He lacked
the perception and the inspiration of vital be-
liefs ; the genuine enthusiasm for a principle
vitally believed in he seemed never to have
shared or understood. These were the great
Christian qualities that the man lacked. Hq
185

186 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

had no great vision of the truth ; he never knew
what it was to have made a great moral choice
of the truth as against all falsehood, and there
never burned in him any deep and intense de-
votion to a principle for its own sake or to the
truth even until death. And those are the three
qualities, surely, which are essential to a true
character : a clear perception of the truth, a
decisive moral choice of the truth, an intense
service of the truth with all the zeal of the soul.
Now every effort has been made in God's
education of us to confront each one of us with
a clear statement of the truth. Again and again
appeal has been made to us to make a deliberate
moral choice of the truth and the right. And
the remaining question is whether, as we look
out upon the scenes of daily life, we are going to
carry with us into the testings and the services
and the duties of the days that intense spirit of
devotion, that genuine earnestness of heart, with-
out which we will not be able to keep either the
vision of the truth or the choice of the truth
which we may have made, and without which
we shall not be able to make that impress on
the world which God has commissioned us to
make. I do not know how better to state this
quality of character than in one phrase in the
twelfth chapter of Romans, the phrase which is
found in the heart of the verse that runs, " Not
slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving
the Lord."

THE BURNING HEART 187

Now, that word " fervent " does not do jus-
tice to the word which Paul used. The word
that Paul wrote means literally " boiling."
Paul's idea was of a man with a hot and burning
heart. Let us tone the word down, if we wish
to, and call it simply " earnestness," a real de-
votion to the thing to which we have now com-
mitted our lives. Is that earnest glow now
really burning in our hearts?

We need this earnestness in the warfare in
which we are now engaged, in which we are to
continue to be engaged, with evil and with sin.
It would be a fine thing if we might believe some
of the counsels that are spoken to us, that these
lives of ours were meant to be dress parades,
that there is no enemy to fight, that all that we
need to do is just to shut our eyes to the foe and
that that extinguishes him. We know perfectly
well that we are engaged in a war. As St. Paul
says, in Myers' words:

"Battle I know as long as life remaineth,
Battle for all."

It will not deliver us from the reality of that
battle to try to be nice toward sin. Sin only
asks of us that we should persuade ourselves
that it does not mean to fight in order to thrust
us in the back the moment we have begun to
trust that the war is done. From the beginning
to the end of the Bible it is military metaphor.

188 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

I do not know what those men are going to do
with the moral message of the Bible who make
Christian experience a gentle and uncontrover-
sial thing. The whole New Testament is full
of the idea that Christianity is a strife, and that
the man who takes up the Christian life takes
up a struggle that will never close until his life
closes, and maybe not then. We are told re-
peatedly there that w,e have great enemies who
are waiting for our souls, that we wrestle not
with flesh and blood — that were an easy con-
flict— ^but with principalities and powers and
with the spirits of darkness, who lie in hiding
for us when we are least aware. Our adversary,
the devil, goes up and down like a roaring lion,
seeking whom he may devour, whom we are
bidden to resist steadfast in the faith. And you
remember the vivid verse in the beginning of
the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the He-
brews, where the writer of the Epistle evidently
has in mind the young Hebrews or Hebrew
Christians of his day, I suppose the second
Christian generation, and is comparing the fight
which they were making against sin with the kind
of fight which their fathers had made and the old
Jewish heroes and heroines before them. " See-
ing," he says, " that we are surrounded with so
great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with pa-
tience the race that is set before us, looking unto
Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. As
for you, you have not begun to fight yet. Ye

THE BURNING HEART 189

have not yet resisted unto blood striving against
sin." Now, all the context is a story of men
and women who resisted unto blood, some of
whom were sawn asunder, others of whom were
torn with wild beasts; and in comparison with
all that devotion to righteousness and that will-
ingness to battle even to death against sin, the
writer of the Epistle speaks to the young men of
his day and says, " As for you, you have not
yet offered the manly resistance of your blood."
You remember the picture in " The Seawolf "
of the man who was put to work, unaccustomed
to such toil, amid the ropes of the rigging, and
compelled to work until the ends of his fingers
were worn off and the blood ran over his hands.
Well, that is the kind of fight that the writer of
the Epistle to the Hebrews thinks men ought to
wage against sin. And, after all, all life that
is worth anything is the letting out of blood,
whether it is in the accompHshing of good or
in the suppression of evil. Somebody asked
Quintin Hogg once, the founder of the Poly-
technic Institute of London, a man who put a
large fortune into the accomplishment of his
work, but who laid down something beside that
was worth more than a fortune, " Mr. Hogg,
how much does it cost to build up an institute
like yours? " " Only one man's life blood," was
Mr. Hogg's reply. And how much does it cost
to wage a successful warfare against sin? Only
one man's life blood. Every heroic story of

190 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

conflict with sin has been written with ink of
blood. Every separate achievement and victory
in it has been won by the letting out of life;
and if you and I are to wage any war-
fare at all in this conflict that gives promise of
success we must go into it with intense and
burning hearts.

Now, one great difficulty with the religion of
our day, I think, is just here. There is an
anaemic softness that has come over it that leads
a great many men to loosen their grip on the
old militant purpose of a warfare against sin.
There is a passage in Cardinal Newman's
" Apologia " in which he sets forth his idea of
a real religion, and frankly expresses his wish
that the religion of Great Britain were fiercer
and gloomier and more terrible than he found it
to be. I think in our own land it would be
a better thing if our religion were a little fiercer,
if we got into it more of that spirit that we
put into some of our non-religious conflicts, if
we understood that in this great battle for our
souls we are to fight with evil and wickedness
even to the knife, and with the knife to the hilt.
When Christ masters men's hearts they will
blaze as His blazed against sin.

And sometimes this will involve violent con-
flicts with men. There are bad men in the
world, and we are not meant to go hand in glove
with all men. We are meant now and then to
confront our man. It is all very well to say

THE BURNING HEART 191

that the battle with sin is to be an impersonal
battle, and indeed we should keep it so just as
long as we can. We are to hold on even to the
bad men with the truest love, but there are
men who go beyond the bounds ; there are men
who put themselves where at last the only thing
for Christian men to do is to confront them
and fight them as themselves the emissaries and
the friends and the incarnation of that evil
against which we must manage somehow to
drive home and war in the name and spirit of
Christ, who made no compromise with it even
though it cost Him His life. We may be sure
that as we go out through life we shall only go
in the spirit that makes victory certain if we
go with burning hearts of hatred against all
evil and sin.

Now, there are four different attitudes that
men take toward sin. There is the attitude of
indulgence, there is the attitude of indifference,
there is the attitude of ignorance, and there is
the attitude of indignation. It is a good thing
for a man to be ignorant of such sin as he can
— no man needs to know it in order to be influen-
tial ; the power of experienced sin is not as great
as the power of innocence that has met sin and
vanquished it without surrendering its innocence.
It is not necessary for any man who would be
a man of power to acquire intimacy with sin.
But there are many sins of which we cannot
be ignorant. They rise right up out of our own

192 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

hearts, they confront us in the Hves of our
friends. Against these sins, whether in us or in
other men, the only right Christian attitude is
the attitude of a hot indignation. When we
think of what sin has done, when we think of
the Httle children who are bearing its scars in
their innocent bodies, and will bear them until
they die, when we think of all the purity that
has been wrecked by it, when we think of the
treason with which sin will make truce and then
stab beneath that flag, when we think of the
spirit of sin which leads it to poison its enemies'
wells and fight under every rule abhorrent to
right men, there is nothing for men to do in
their conflict with sin but to be hot against it,
and to go out into the battle with that boiling
spirit which was the spirit of the Lord whom
the fires of His zeal consumed.

And we need this spirit of earnestness not
alone in our conflict with sin; we need it also
in fidelity to our principles and convictions.
There is a philosophical spirit — or that is the
way men dignify it — in our day that makes a
man unwilling to collide with another man in
the advocacy of his principles and his convic-
tions. If he cannot get the other man to take
it softly he will not try to get the other man to
take it at all; and there are many men who will
not stand for moral principles which involve any
rigidity of attitude or interfere with other men's
liberties. But there are antagonistic principles;

THE BURNING HEART 193

you cannot get them together, and the only way
in which this world can move on into that great
kingdom where the true and pure things prevail
is by virtue of the readiness of the men who
have the truth not to be afraid to let that truth
come in conflict with the error and the false-
hood.

After all, no movement will run that does not
run on men. There is, to be sure, a power in
the truth apart from its embodiment in men;
but after all the only way that movements work
in the world, the only way that truth accom-
plishes results in social order, is when the move-
ments work and the truth accomplishes by and
in and through men. It would be an easy mat-
ter to run back over the history of. our own
land in its politics ; it would be a very easy
thing to run back over the history of the Church
and show that movements are just as strong as
the men in them are earnest. What made the
Reformation what it was was the great robust
German, the unbending Genevan, the unfright-
ened Scot back of it. There never would have
been any Reformation with Erasmus. " I was
always timid," he says ; " I never could bear
confusion. There are times even when a man
must suppress the truth. What am I, a mere
worm, that I should disturb the state?" Then
there rose up a great, rough German who looked
out on the world with no such timid soul, who
Relieved that when men had the truth they were

194 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

to fight for the truth, were to carry the truth
against the world, and with his strong shoulders
by God's grace Luther moved the current of
human history. And the current ran without
the deflection of weakness or fear across the
cool minds and hot hearts of John Calvin and
John Knox.

As we go out through life, we must go as
propagandists. Christian men cannot go out
with their lights hidden under a bushel; they
cannot go out with the savour and the power
of their salt concealed. If our faith is not true
we should change it; but if it is true, we should
subdue the world to it. We need not only to
be earnest in our battle with sin: we must be
dead in earnest also in the convictions that we
hold. We believe in the divinity of our Lord
Jesus Christ. We must refuse to compromise
this truth. We must not allow the foundations
to be taken out from under the Christian Church,
that stands, if it stands at all, on Him; and I
believe that we who believe in Him, who know
that He is the only Saviour of the world, have
no dispensation from Him to go out into the
world and allow our Lord to be trampled under
foot and His cross to be made of none effect.
" Fervent in spirit " means that with heat of
heart we are to hold immovably by our princi-
ples and our convictions.

Being fervent in spirit means much more —
that our hearts are to be warm in fellowship.

THE BURNING HEART 195

Christian men ought to display in their brother-
hood a relationship so real, so powerful, so deep,
that it will not be necessary for men to set up
all these fictitious brotherhoods outside the
Christian Church. These organizations are a
great reproach to Christ's brotherhood. They
have grown up, many of them, because we have
not shown the real spirit of brotherhood in the
Church, because we have not shown a heat of
heart in our relationship to one another. Life
is broken into castes. Human fellowship is fet-
tered by artificial conventions. In his life of
Stonewall Jackson, his British biographer points
out that when he went to West Point life there
was hedged in, as life everywhere is hedged in,
by all kinds of traditional limits of conduct.
Now, Stonewall Jackson would have none of
these things, and he was a strong enough man
to set up his own standards against the stand-
ards of the crowd. And in much of our Chris-
tian life such crowd ideals as these prevail. We
must feel in our hearts that great passion for
one another of which Peter speaks, " That see-
ing our hearts have been purified by obedience
to the truth unto the unfeigned love of the
brethren, we should love one another from a
pure heart fervently." How infrequent a thing
it is for a man to say to a man, " My friend, I
love you." We shut all that down deep in our
hearts and allow no such confessions to emerge.
And this is a small thing. Do we feel and prove

196 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

the love? Where is the real commanding hu-
man brotherhood, though unexpressed in words?
I do not wonder that men who want the fellow-
ship of hearts set up all kinds of brotherhoods
outside of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are
seeking what Christianity was meant to give
them. Surely we ought to go out to illustrate in
the world the reality of the great fervent brother-
hood of Christian men.

And, once more, we need this earnest spirit in
our service of God and man. Consider for a
moment the example of our Lord Jesus Christ
in this. His brethren came once to Him assured
that the man had gone mad. He took no leisure
so much as to eat He had made it so fully His
meat and drink to do His Father's will that He
actually neglected the meat and drink of which
His body stood in need. And you remember
the great words into which He condensed the
whole spirit of His life : " We must work the
works of Him that sent Me while it is day, for
the night is coming when no man can work."

When we turn from His life to the life of
St. Paul we find another hot-hearted life, the
kind of man who, when he was a Jew, was a
Jew to the full, and when he became a Chris-
tian was likewise to the full a Christian man,
and who at last rejoiced when he was counted
worthy to lay down his life for Christ. We are
reminded in connection with him of the fine words
of Thomas Fuller of Cromwell's time : *' The

THE BURNING HEART 197

good soldier grudgeth not to get a probability of
victory by the certainty of his own death, and
fleeth from nothing so much as from the men-
tion of fleeing; and though the world call him
a madman, our soldier knoweth that he shall
receive the reward of his valour with God in
Heaven, and making the world his executor
leave it to the rich inheritance of his memory."
The men who have been good soldiers of Jesus
Christ have gone forth in His service with such
a heart. They have not been lukewarm men;
they have not been men who gave Christ part
of their hearts and held back the rest ; they have
been men who have gone after Him into ser-
vice with all the heat of devoted lives, who have
served Him with the single-mindedness with
which John Brown, for example, served what
he conceived to be his cause. Now you may
call John Brown a crazy man if you please.
Governor Wise of Virginia did not think he was.
Somebody spoke in that way once about John
Brown in Governor Wise's hearing, and he re-
plied : " They are mistaken who take Brown to
be a madman. He is a bundle of the best nerves
I ever saw ; cut and thrust and bleeding, and in
bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage,
fortitude, and simple ingenuousness. He is
cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but
just to him to say that he was humane to his
prisoners, and he inspired me with great trust
in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a

198 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, truthful,
and intelligent. He professes to be a Christian,
in communion with the Congregational Church
of the North, and openly preaches his purpose
of universal emancipation ; and the negroes
themselves were to be the agents, by means of
arms, led on by white commanders.
Colonel Washington says that he was the cool-
est and firmest man he ever saw in defying dan-
ger and death. With one son dead by his side,
and another shot through, he felt the pulse of
his son with one hand, held his rifle with the
other, and commanded his men with the utmost
composure, encouraging them to be firm, and to
sell their lives as dearly as they could."

Mr. Sanborn, his biographer, relates that one
day in Charleston Jail a minister came to call
on him and defended slavery as a Christian in-
stitution. " My dear sir," said the old man,
" you know nothing about Christianity. You
will have to learn its a b c. I find you quite
ignorant of what the word Christianity means."
And when the man looked at him, very much
disconcerted, John Brown softened a little : " I
respect you as a gentleman, of course, but it is
as a heathen gentleman." And it was exactly
that intensity of feeling in the old man that made
him willing for the sake of his cause to lay down
his life, and the heat of his passion set this land
on fire.

Christian men are to serve Christ and men

THE BURNING HEART 199

with no less sacrificial devotion. General Arm-
strong was this type of Christ's servant. Gen-
eral Marshall says of him and his attitude to
difficulties : " For most people an obstacle is
something in the way to stop going on, but for
General Armstrong it merely meant something
to climb over, and if he could not climb all the
way over he would get up as high as possible,
and then crow." As he said himself, " I have
had a taste of blood, i. e., I have had the taste
of life and work — cannot live without the arena.
I must be in it. . . . Despair shakes his
skinny hand and glares his hideous eyes on me
to little purpose. I feel happy when all my
powers of resistance are taxed." He believed
that all men were called on to wage a great war
for God, and that in their warfare for God they
were meant to work and fight in an even in-
tenser spirit than that in which they would work
and fight for their native land. You re-
member Chinese Gordon's experience with Li
Hung Chang. Now, Chinese Gordon was a
man of peace. He did not usually carry a
weapon, but he went and hunted once for the
life of Li Hung Chang. Li Hung Chang had
lied to him. He had promised to save the lives
of the Taiping princes taken in the city of Soo
Chow, and then he had them executed, and once
in his life Chinese Gordon's temper got beyond
his control. He took a revolver and went on a
hunt for Li Hung Chang, and. if he had ever

200 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

found him Li Hung Chang's subsequent career
would never have been fulfilled. I imagine that
Gordon was glad afterwards that he did not find
him, but I imagine that he was glad also to the
last day that he went and looked for him, that
he had in his heart the spirit that made him
desire to resent a great crime and wrong, that
put him in his " sparring mood," as one of the
gentlest of our women missionaries put it just
a little while ago — that put him in his " sparring
mood " against all evil and sin. Are we ever in
a " sparring mood," or are we living hand in
glove with all sorts of tepidity and weakness,
and in surrender to sin and quietness and indo-
lence and spiritual torpor and cowardice? Is
that our spirit, or have we hearts hot to do in
the world the work of God? It is all put for us
in one of Dr, Bonar's hymns:

"Time worketh. Let me work too.
Time undoeth. Let me do.
As busy as time my work I ply
Till I rest in the rest of eternity.

" Sin worketh. Let me work too.
Sin undoeth. Let me do.
As busy as sin my work I ply
Till I rest in the rest of eternity.

" Death worketh. Let me work too.
Death undoeth. Let me do.
As busy as death my work I ply
Till I rest in the rest of eternity "

THE BURNING HEART 201

And now, lastly, not alone do we need to have
hearts hot for battle with sin, hot in fidelity to
our great principles and convictions, warm in
their love for the men who with us love our
Brother, the Lord Jesus Christ, and for those
who ought to love Him, warm in their devotion
to their duty in the world, but they must be
warm also in their personal love and loyalty to
the Master of Hearts, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Whatever of life and power we have ever re-
ceived, we have received because of our living
contact with Him. It has not come to us be-
cause of any preaching of high ethical doctrine;
it has not come to us because of any general
atmosphere, save as that itself is the product
of our Lord's personal power. Whatever has
come to us of heavenly good has come from
our divine Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the
Life and the Light of men ; and if we are going
to keep it as we go on our way we shall only
keep it because we walk in a warm and earnest
fellowship with Him. And that fellowship in-
volves a real life of prayer, a Hfe of prayer in-
tensely real. There is no more Scriptural ad-
jective to use about it than just this adjective,
" earnest." There are two places in the New
Testament where this word is used with refer-
ence to prayer: once in Luke's account of our
Lord's prayer in the garden of Gethsemane,
" And He prayed yet more earnestly, and the
sweat stood out on His brow as it were great

202 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

drops of blood." Now, If you will look in your
tjreek Testament you will find that the word that
is translated here " earnestly " is a word that a
Greek might have used in describing a race be-
tween men or horses, when at the very last,
when the two men come down breast and breast,
or the two horses neck and neck, one leans for-
ward with just an extra strain, and by that
strain prevails. Luke's idea is that our Lord
prayed strainingly, and how strainingly He
prayed we may judge from the fact that His
sweat was red blood. The other place where the
word occurs is in the last chapter of the Epistle
of James, where we are told that Elijah prayed
earnestly. Now the Greek word is not the same
there. If you will turn to your Greek Testa-
ment you will find that it says He prayed " in
prayer." That is. He did not describe God in
prayer; He did not issue a moral exhortation in
prayer; he did not do anything in prayer but
pray; He prayed in prayer, and the English
translators have correctly said He prayed ear-
nestly. Can we apply such terms of description
to our prayers? Are we earnest in them? Do
our prayers reach down and grip the bottom
cords of our hearts?

And do our hearts burn within us toward
Christ? In southern China, some years ago,
in a city on the borders of the province of Hu-
nan, I talked with a young Chinese Christian
man. He was a graduate of a college in the

THE BURNING HEART 203

far north. He had come a thousand miles away
from home to preach Christ among his own
countrymen. He was one of the most intelli-
gent Chinese Christians whom I had met. And
I was asking him many questions regarding his
nation, and especially regarding the life and
spirit of the Chinese Christians. And when I
was through he said, " Mr. Speer, you have
asked me a great many questions, and some of
them have been very difficult. You have asked
about the Christians in China. Now, I would
like to ask you one question. You know what
the Christians in your country are like. Are
they all men and women of burning hearts ? "
It was a quaint Chinese idiom of which he
made use, but that was its literal translation.
He desired to know if we were all of us of
burning hearts. What would you have said to
him? What would you have said to him about
yourself? What would you have said to him
about the great mass of our so-called Christians ?
Are we of burning hearts? Have any of our
hearts burned within us as did the hearts of the
two who walked with the Saviour that evening
long ago? Have our hearts ever burned within
us while He talked with us by the way? Are
our hearts now aglow in a great and tender love
for Jesus Christ? Oh, whatever else our hearts
may be cool about, let them at least be warm
toward Him who loved us and gave Himself
for us and whom having not seen we ought to

204 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

love. Are we sure, as we look at our hearts
now, that we are in the right relationships regard-
ing our lives? Perhaps some of us have put off
to this moment great decisions which we know
we ought to make, and our wills are trembling
in the balance now; a feather's weight of influ-
ence would carry them over. And I suppose
some of us — who have heard Christ asking
us for our lives, for our wills, for our hearts —
will refuse and instead of handing them over to
Him will go on retaining them in our own
control. There are many who have seen the
great vision of a service of the world who are
still going on their way without yielding up their
lives to its glory. " Though you and I are
very little beings," said Samuel J. Mills a hun-
dred years ago, " we must not rest satisfied till
we have made our influence extend to the remot-
est corner of this ruined world." The tempera-
ture of our hearts toward Christ will determine
the issues of our decision.

" 'Tis not for man to trifle, life is brief

And sin is here;
Our age is but the falling of a leaf,

A dropping tear.
We have no time to sport away the hours,
All must be earnest in a world like ours.

" Not many lives, but only one have we,
One, only one,
How earnest should that one life be.
That narrow span.

THE BURNING HEART 205

Day after day spent in blessed toil,

Hour after hour still bringing in new spoil."

Until at the last, the work of the day done, the
battle over and the long shadows of the evening
falling across the land, we make our way home.
What will our greeting be from Him who is
waiting for us by the setting of the sun ?

XI

THE MASTER, THE SATISFACTION OF
THE HEART

*' Y AM the way, the truth, and the life."
I These words were spoken by our Saviour
-°- in answer to the second of the four inter-
ruptions which He suffered from His disciples
in the upper room on the night on which He
was betrayed. He had been speaking to
them of the characteristic of the new Chris-
tian society, as a body of men whose love for
one another marked them as Christ's. Simon
Peter, intent, as most of us are, on future des-
tiny rather than on present duty, caught up some
remarks of Jesus about His intention to go away,
and passing by altogether His command to love,
the most significant thing that He had said,
asked Him whither He was going. Our Lord
answered Simon's inquiry, and left him dumb-
founded with what He told him of his own
heart. I do not wonder that the body of dis-
ciples was thrown into consternation by this
remark of Christ's. They had heard Him say a
little' while before that one of them was to betray
Him ; they had heard Him say now of the leader
of their company that that very night he would
deny Christ before the cock had crowed. What

206

SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 207

confidence could there be in man any more?
Looking out upon their troubled faces, Jesus
said : '' Let not your hearts be troubled. You
have lost all confidence in one another, you have
no confidence in yourselves, but you believe in
God ; believe also in Me. In My Father's house
are many mansions : if it were not so, I would
have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go, I will come again, and will receive
you unto Myself ; that where I am, there ye may
be also. And whither I go ye know the way."
Then Thomas broke in, here as always, as Mar-
cus Dods says, " the mouthpiece of the despond-
ency of the twelve." " Lord," he says, " we
know not whither Thou art going ; how can we
know the way ? " It may have been reprehen-
sible in Thomas to have doubted so much and to
have had such a chronic disposition of despair,
but it was not reprehensible in him to carry his
doubts and his despondencies to Jesus. Think
what we should have lost if he had not spoken
out the frank, blunt feelings of his heart to the
Saviour. If he had not told the Lord this night
in the upper room that he did not know where
He was going, and, therefore, could not know
the way, we might not have had this priceless
saying of Jesus, " I am the way, and the truth,
and the life."

Let us think, for a moment, of this declara-
tion as a whole, of the bold comprehensive claims
of it. A man can at the most show to others the

208 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

way, says Gess; he cannot claim himself to be
either the way, the truth, or the life. Jesus is
uttering here another of those great declara-
tions that separate Him from all men and all
other teachers of religion. " I am the bread of
Hfe." "I am the light of the world." '^ I,
if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all
men unto Me." " I am come, not to condemn
the world, but to save the world." " I am the
way, and the truth, and the life." Now, Jesus
does not say, as other masters, " I show you
the way, and the truth, and the life." He came,
as has often been said, not to proclaim a mes-
sage, but that there might be a message to pro-
claim. Jesus Christ did not only preach the
gospel; He was the gospel. In this thing Jesus
sets His religion ofif against all other religions.
Buddhism, as has often been pointed out, is
the religion of a method; Mohammedanism is
the religion of a book; Christianity is the re-
ligion of a person. It is Jesus. Whosoever
enters it, enters Him; whosoever would learn its
lessons, learns Him; whosoever would feed
upon its nourishment eats His body and drinks
His blood. " I am," said Jesus, " the way, and
the truth, and the life."

Now we cannot, at the very outset, over-em-
phasise the significance of Jesus Christ's having
declared that He was Christianity. In some of
our colleges we organise ourselves into Chris-
tian bodies on the basis of some common spiritual

SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 209

sympathies; all the people who have any admir-
ing regard for religion are affiliated on one com-
mon basis and in one common organisation.
Our religion degenerates into a common ethical
sympathy, into the adoption of a few indefinite
religious principles, and has divorced itself from
a person, from loyalty to the supreme and unique
claims of Jesus Christ Himself. Now Chris-
tianity was Christ to Paul. I cannot conceive
of Paul's being able to understand any kind of
Christianity that was not Christ, that did not
root itself in Christ, that did not lead on to
Christ, that did not guard as with anxious jeal-
ousy the deity and the uniqueness of Christ.
And the hymns of Christendom find all of Chris-
tianity also in Him.

" Oh, Thou art all to me !
Nothing to please I see,
Nothing apart from Thee,
Jesus, my Lord!'*

"Thou, O Christ, art all I want;
All I need in Thee I find."

It was this sense of the indissoluble relation-
ship between the Christian faith and Christ Him-
self that led Robertson of Brighton, for example,
to say, as he talked to working men in the town
hall of Brighton regarding infidel publications,
" I refuse to permit discussion respecting the
love which a Christian man bears to his Re-

210 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

deemer, a love more delicate far than the love
which was ever borne to sister or the adoration
with which he regards his God, a reverence more
sacred than ever man bore to mother." When
Jesus, standing in the midst of His disciples,
told them that He was everything, He made it
impossible for all time for any disciple of His
ever to compromise His claims or ever to sur-
render one whit of that which Jesus Christ alone
is, " I am the way, and the truth, and the life."

Let us think a little while on these things that
Jesus Christ said He was. " I am the way,"
He says. What way? He goes on in this same
verse to indicate what way He means, for " no
man," He says, " cometh to the Father but by
Me. I am He who opens to men the way to the
Father and the Father's heart." Now apart
from Jesus Christ human history Is one thing;
with Jesus Christ human history is a different
thing. Omit the incarnation and human history
reads in the terms of man's search after God,
and His only answer is silence on the Father's
lips, whatever is in the Father's heart; with
Jesus Christ human history reads in the terms
of God's search after man, with pathetic pleas
upon the Father's lips and pathetic love in the
Father's heart. " I am," says Jesus, " the way
home for men to the heart of the Father."

Now, as Augustine says, men must find that
way, because we were made for God and we can
never rest until at last we find our resting place

SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 211

in Him. And all human history, the whole tale
of the best experience of men, is but the confes-
sion of their longing after the way home to the
Father's heart. Those of you who have read the
" Life and Letters of Romanes " will recall the
picture there of the discontent, the utter rest-
lessness of heart of the man who had once rested
on the Father's arms and who had experienced
the vision of the Father's face, and who has
gone out but must come back again to the
Father's love. Many a man and many a woman
feels a hunger that will not be appeased until at
last it feeds itself upon the Son of God who is
the true bread come down out of heaven. The
knowledge of God, which Jesus Christ intends
to give us through Himself as the way, is the
goal of all our irrepressible human longing.

You remember the character of Calista in
one of Cardinal Newman's finest tales, the story
that contains the wonderful picture of the locust
plague in northern Africa, and her cry, " Oh,
that I could find Him ! On the right hand
and on the left I grope and touch Him not.
Why dost Thou fight against me, O First and
only Fair?" And you remember the same
longing expressed in one of Mr. Matthew Ar-
nold's essays, in which he quotes — Mr. Hutton
says he could not have been the first to use
them — the words of Israel : " Thou, O Eternal,
are the thing that I long for. Thou art my
hope, even from my youth." And you remem-

212 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

ber the passionate expressions of this longing
in the Psalms: ''As the hart panteth after the
water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee,

0 God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the liv-
ing God. O God, Thou art my God ; early will

1 seek Thee; my soul thirsteth for Thee, my
flesh longeth for Thee in a dry and thirsty land
where no water is." And nothing appeals to
us quite so much, I think, as we read the lives
of good men as those great experiences in which
they have entered at last into the fulness of the
consciousness of God. Is there one of us whose
heart does not hunger for such a satisfaction in
God as this? How shall we find this longed-for
way to Him? I, says Jesus, am the way. In
Christ we find it, home.

" It shall be
A face like My face that receives thee;
A man like to Me

Thou shalt love and be loved by forever;
A hand like this hand

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee.
See the Christ stand."

When our hearts long for the way, Jesus
Christ stands before us saying to us, " I am the
Way, the Way home for the lost child, the Way
that ties the two worlds together, the Way from
the seen into the unseen, the Way from the
present into the everlasting, the Way out of our
restlessness into the perfect rest of God, the
Way that can never weary or grow old." I

SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 213

like the phrase in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
"a new and living way," a way that we can
never tire of, a way in which each of us shall
be finding in Jesus Christ every day some new
and fresh discovery of love and be resting our-
selves in His inexhaustibleness Who said, " I am
the way."

The early Church made a noble use of this
word, and it became a synonym of Christianity,
so that Luke tells us when Paul set out from
Jerusalem to Damascus, with letters hunting
for Christians, it was that he might find any
who were of " this Way/' and bring them bound
to Jerusalem. We read that in the city of Ephe-
sus no small stir was aroused regarding " the
Way " ; of Felix, that he was better acquainted
than others with " this Way," and we hear Paul
himself saying, that in those old days " I myself
persecuted those who were of the Way unto
death." Christianity is not a terminus: it is a
progress. Jesus Christ Himself is not an at-
tainable end; He is a route; He Himself is
fathomless and inexhaustible, and when once we
have set our feet in His way, He leads us on and
on forever to larger and richer things every day,
and to an end that never is to be found. " I,"
says He, " am the way."

" I am the truth," says Christ ; " the gathering
up into one of all that is eternal and absolute
in this changing world. Primarily I am the
truth about God, and the way to Him, but, more

214. THE MASTER OF THE HEART

than that, I am all the truth that men need
know to live by in this mortal life of theirs."
Mark once again the calm assurance of Jesus;
He speaks as though all the problems of life
were perfectly clear and simple to Him. I heard
a very suggestive paper a little while ago read
before a large gathering of Christian men, in
which the writer took the ground that we must
shift the whole line of Christian work and teach-
ing, that old problems that a generation ago
you could take for granted as settled are now
regarded as open problems, such, he said, as,
Is there a God? or Is there an immortal life?
Perhaps there was more or less truth in this
view; at any rate, we are ever perplexing our-
selves over many questions that seemed to Jesus
to have been just as clear as the sunlight, never
to have been confused in his mind by a soli-
tary doubt ! " I am the truth," He says. Men
debate as to whether there is any truth, or as to
whether, if there is truth, we can ever know we
have found it, while Jesus stands before us all
the time telling us that He Himself is the truth.
He is the truth about man. He tells us what
man is, and what man may be. We measure
ourselves over against Him, and for the first
time we realise ourselves. We hold ourselves
aloof from Him, and our ideals seem glorious,
and our attainment passable, and our sins venial.
We measure ourselves against Christ, and we
abhor ourselves in dust and ashes. We stand

SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 215

up face to face with Him who is the truth about
man, and for the first time we understand what
we are ; all the misery and the flaw of our lives,
all the shame and the loathsomeness of our
shortcomings. And we look up into His face
once again, and we see there not alone what we
are, but what we may be. We hear Him speak-
ing of Himself as the Son of Man ; we hear Him
telling us that the Father sent Him to show what
in the Father's mind we are, and that we may
hide ourselves in Him. Jesus Christ is to us
the truth about ourselves as we are and as we
may be.

He is to us the truth about God. Men com-
plain, a large and growing class of men, of our
anthropomorphic statements about God. Can
we think of Him otherwise? We know our-
selves only and have none but anthropomorphic
metaphors in which to speak of personality or
being. And Jesus Christ comes to us as a man
to make God plain to us and vindicate once and
forever our human ways of speaking about God.
As good Pascal said years ago : " Not only do
we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we
know ourselves by Jesus Christ alone. Apart
from Jesus Christ we know not what is our life,
nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves." We
are lost in our thought even until we stand be-
fore Him Who, in that upper room before His
confused disciples, said, " I am the way ; I am
the truth.''

216 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

Notice, once again, He does not say that He
teaches the truth. We speak about " Christ and
other masters," about Jesus as a teacher of truth.
Jesus Christ is Himself the truth. As Thomas
Erskine, with all his peculiar views, wrote to
Lady Elgin, " I believe all notions of religion,
howsoever true, to be absolutely worthless.
Christ is far above all doctrines about Him,
however true. Christ is the truth. A doctrine
that can be separated from Himself is a vanity
and a deception." And those of us who think
that we can cultivate the religious life while we
stultify Christ's claims, those of us who think
that we can cherish the sympathies of Jesus
while we deny the character of Jesus, are simply
forgetting that Jesus Christ is not the teacher
of a separable truth, that Jesus Christ Himself is
a personal, and living, and incarnate truth. To
be sure He did come to reveal truth to men. In
the case even of any of us who are not Christians,
all our ideas of God are borrowed from Christ,
all our true ideas of human nature are borrowed
from Christ, all our worthy standards and con-
ceptions of life are borrowed from Christ. Even
to those who have not taken Jesus Christ as
Himself the truth, Jesus is the teacher of truth.
What He said that day in answer to Pilate's
taunt, " Art Thou a king, then ? " " Thou sayest
that I am a king. For this purpose I was born,
and for this purpose came I into the world,
that I might bear witness to the truth, and he

SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 217

that is of the truth hears My voice," is true still.
Jesus Christ has come to teach men truth, and
if honest men and women in Christian lands
would strip out of their life and thought the
truth that they owe to Jesus Christ, they would
see instantly how poor and inadequate the life
and the thought that are left to them are, and
how utterly and absolutely they stand alone in
the truth that Jesus Christ is. "The word be-
came flesh," says John, " and dwelt among us,
full of grace and truth." O perplexed heart,
that questions sometimes as to where truth is
and knows not where its foundations are to be
found, that, perhaps, many times has sympathised
with poor James Thomson's wail about

"The sense that every struggle brings defeat,
Because fate holds no prize to crown success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat

Because they have no secret to express.
And none can pierce the great dark veil uncertain.
Because there is no light beyond the curtain,
But all is vanity and nothingness,"

remember that One has come out from behind
that curtain. Himself full of grace and truth, to
say to men perplexed and women distressed, " I
am the way ; I am the truth."

" I am the life," added Christ, " the way, the
truth, and the life." The death which cast its
shadow over the eleven and over Himself should
itself be swallowed up in life. Standing there
beneath the shadow of His cross, before the

218 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

Open grave over which the stone was to be rolled
to hide His burial, Jesus Christ, the frailest life
in the world, declared to men, " I am the life."
All the longing of our day is answered by this
assertion of Christ's. The term " life " has be-
come the catch-word of our time. Once and
again men speak about it who have no notion
whatever of what Jesus Christ meant by life,
who simply mean by life some expansion of
tastes, some enlargement of one's range of
vision, some greater reach of sympathies, life
that is to end when conscious being ends, which
will be when the body lies down and dies. There
are scarcely any lines more quoted than the lines
of Tennyson's, in which he gives voice to this
longing of our day:

"Tis life wherever our nerves are scant;
Oh, life, not death, for which we pant,
More life and fuller that we want."

Life is the great word. Not love or truth or
duty, but Hfe. The new theologies build around
it. The poets and the poetesses sing of it,
though they do not mean what Christ meant.
We cannot suppress, if we would, dissatisfaction
with contraction, with narrowness. We hun-
ger for perfect energy, for perfect liberty to use
that energy, for boundless scope of life, for end-
less development. The way a little child shrinks
from being shut up in the dark is only the indi-
cation of the way all our life covets liberty and

SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 219

freedom. It struggles frantically against that
sense of contraction, of narrowness, of limita-
tion, of death which comes to it in confinement
in the gloom. Our souls rise up in revolt
against the sense of termination, against the feel-
ing of narrowness, against anything that shuts
them out from perfect liberty of destiny. What
Tennyson writes about wages is the cry of the
soul of each of us:

"Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid by a voice flying by to be lost on an endless
sea;
Glory of virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the
vi^rong.
Nay, but she aimed not at glory — no lover of glory
she:
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.

"The wages of sin is death; if the wages of virtue be
dust,
Would she have had heart to endure for the life
of the worm and the fly?
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the
just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer
sky:
Give her the glory of going on, and not to die."

Our souls rise up in war against the thought
of ending, and as they struggle with their lim-
itations and their chains, the great Deliverer
comes, as He stood that night before the little

220 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

group shocked with the sorrow of His depar-
ture, and says to us, " I am the life." All that
longing for life which even the narrowest and
smallest human soul can never suppress, Jesus
Christ promises to complete and to fulfil. He
Himself is ready to link us to that supernatural
connection which means life divine. There is
no physical difference visible in the life that
has accepted Christ and the life which has re-
jected Him, or that has not yet taken Him in His
fulness, but the eye of God sees a difference as
great between noonday and midnight. The soul
that has accepted Jesus Christ is tied to God,
the living God, with ties that cannot be broken,
with all the channels of intercourse open in the
fulness of their wealth and treasure between it
and God, the living God. " I am the life," says
Jesus Christ, " the resurrection and the life ; so
that he that believeth on Me, though he were
dead, yet shall he live again; and he that liveth
and believeth in Me shall never die." " I am the
way, and the truth, and the life."

What an unsatisfied, discontented lot ours
would be if there were no such voice as
this speaking in our ears, out of the ineffable
life, a message of real life to our dead souls, " I
am the life." How weary, and wretched, I say,
it would be if what Mr. Arnold has written in
" Obermann Once More " were true :

"That gracious child, that thorn-crowned man,
He lived while we believed,

SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 221

"* While we believed on earth He went
And open stood His grave.
Men called from chamber, church and tent,
And Christ was by to save.

" Now He is dead ; far hence He lies,
In the lone Syrian town,
And on His grave with shining eyes
The Syrian stars look down."

" I am the wilderness, and falsehood, and
death," Jesus said ? Oh, no ! "I am the way,
and the truth, and the life." The way home
to the Father's heart, the truth for your per-
plexed souls to find, the life to satisfy you
utterly ; " I am the way, and the truth, and the
life."

Oh, my friends, will we not let Jesus Christ be
Himself to us? Why will we insist on taking
only a fraction of His gifts, while he offers us
in Himself a satisfying way, a satisfying truth, a
satisfying life? Shall we not answer rather a
Kempis's appeal in the third book of his " Imi-
tation"?—

" My son, the more thou canst go out of thy-
self, so much the more wilt thou be able to enter
into Me.

" As to desire no outward thing produceth in-
ward peace, so the forsaking of ourselves in-
wardly joineth us unto God.

" I will have thee learn perfect resignation of
thyself to My will, without contradiction or
complaint.

222 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

"Follow thou Me. I AM the way, the truth,
and the life. Without the way there is no going ;
without the truth there is no knowing; without
the life there is no living. I am the way, which
thou oughtest to follow; the truth, which thou
oughtest to trust; the life, which thou oughtest
to hope for.

" I AM the way inviolable, the truth infal-
lible, the life that cannot end.

" I AM the straightest way, the highest truth,
the true life, the blessed life, the Hfe uncreated.

" If thou remain in My way, thou shalt know
the truth, and the truth shall make thee free, and
thou shalt lay hold on eternal life."

XII

THE UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD AND
MASTER JESUS CHRIST

IT is a very significant fact that in our
thoughts about men we are unable to come
to the Ufe of Christ without an altered feel-
ing. This is true even if we have been thinking
of religious men, of men to whom we owe some
debt of the deepest character, toward whom our
temper is naturally reverent. As we pass one
after another of these men before our eyes, and
our gaze at last falls on Christ, no matter how
loving our thoughts may have been, they are
touched with a new tenderness and our rever-
ence deepens into awe. And this is equally true
if we turn from the thought of men as religious
leaders and think of them just as men who have
swayed the minds and wills of their fellow men.
We cannot think about Jesus Christ in any such
list of men with the same feeling with which
we think of others. There is not one other
great leader about whom we cannot speak
humorously or jocosely if we wish, or with a
little pleasantry, but we cannot speak in that way
about our Lord. When we come to Him

224 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

It is as though a still voice whispered in our
ears, Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the
place whereon thou standest is holy ground.

But someone may say : " We have simply
grown up in a Christian atmosphere, speaking a
language that is infiltrated with Christian ideas
and terms. What we have inherited from those
who went before us makes it impossible for us
to speak lightly of One Who was so dear to
them, however our thoughts differ from their
thoughts about Him." But it is true even of
men who have shaken themselves free from the
Influence of education and association that they
feel this same spell when they come to think
and to speak of Jesus Christ. Mr. John Morley
surely has done, as far as any man can, the work
of separating himself from the external influ-
ences of the atmosphere in which he lives so far
as thoughts about Jesus Christ are concerned,
and in his essay on the book entitled " Super-
natural Religion" he says he might say some
things derogatory of Jesus if he wished, but
that he will not say them. If they are true
things, why does he not say them? If there
are some things that he knows about Jesus
that other people do not believe to be true about
Jesus, why should he not say them so that other
people may have their opinions about Jesus cor-
rected? And it is said that when Renan pub-
lished the popular edition of his great work on
Jesus he deliberately omitted from It those pas-

UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 225

sages which had been most unkind and unsympa-
thetic in their reference to Christ, because he
said it was not necessary to tell those true things
to the people. Why did they deal with Jesus
in this way? If it had been Napoleon or Julius
Caesar, Mr. Morley and Renan would not have
felt so, but they did feel so about Jesus Christ.
It is very strange.

And the strangeness of it is accentuated when
we stop to reflect upon the scantiness of what
we know about Jesus. Here was a short life
of thirty-three years, and of the first twelve
years of it we know only one or two or three
incidents. The next eighteen years are an utter
blank, and of the last three years of it the doings
and the sayings of a few days only are
chronicled. We think sometimes that the
Gospels tell us what Jesus did every day, but if
you enumerate all the different days of Christ's
life with which the Gospels deal you will find
that they show us Christ in a very small portion
of His public life. How small is the volume of
what has been told us about Jesus ! You can
read it all through in one afternoon, and yet
there is not one of us who would undertake,
short of many days, to explain the significance of
Christ's life. Men would venture to give in
fifteen or twenty minutes the important lessons
of Napoleon's life, or of the life of JuHus Caesar,
about both of whom we know much more in vol-
ume of material than we do about Jesus, but

226 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

none of us would attempt that in the Hfe of
Christ.

Our feeling about Christ becomes more sig-
nificant still if we turn from thinking of the
scantiness of the records of our Lord's life to
think of the insignificance and obscurity of that
life itself. What did the great world in which
He lived care for Him? What did it know
about Him ? Away off in a remote and despised
province of the Roman empire, He lived and
died, making a little disturbance locally, the
news of which I suppose never reached the ears
of anyone who cared for it at all in Rome. What
a simple unknown life it was, a peasant lad, a
tradesman, uneducated according to the facti-
tious standards of His day, going about for a
few years saying words to the people, gathering
a little company of friends about Him and influ-
encing them, doing kind and loving things, and
then dying on a cross between two thieves. That
was all, and yet you and I cannot think of it
without trembling lips and a thrill in our hearts.

Why should it be that in this way Jesus is
singled out from all other persons who have ever
walked about on this earth? I think one chief
reason is found in the claims that He made for
Himself and that were made for Him. Take His
own simple declarations about Himself : " I am
the good shepherd," " I am the door of the
sheep," " I am the true vine," " I am the light of
the world," " I am the bread of life," and " The

UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 227

bread which I will give is My flesh, which I will
give for the life of the world." Of course it is
possible to say that these are only bold oriental
metaphors, and that they seem to imply more
than they actually contained in the thought of
Jesus, but you can turn to other things that
Jesus said and find that these metaphors not only
did not contain more than the truth, but barely
hint at truth which on every side overflows them
and which the metaphors cannot contain. What
did He say about His relations to the Father?
" The words that I speak unto you, I speak not
of myself, but the Father, which dwelleth in
Me, He doeth the works." More than that : " I
am the way, the truth, and the life; no man
Cometh unto the Father but by Me." And more
than that: "I and the Father are one," "He
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father."

But there are many who say that all these
declarations of Jesus and these claims that He
makes are contained in one Gospel, and that
that Gospel's authorship is disputed, and that
the accuracy of its representations of Christ's
words is very questionable. Fall back on the
Sermon on the Mount, if you wish. The people
who throw out the Gospel of John, who discredit
the claims of Christ, who try to pare down what
is said about Jesus's deity by the evangelists,
exalt the Sermon on the Mount. But the Ser-
mon on the Mount makes its own claims for
Jesus Christ. The very note of authority in the

228 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

beatitudes is a divine claim. Who is this young
man Who stands up saying who the persons are
to whom the kingdom of God shall belong?
Who is this man from Galilee Who dares to
declare by whom the whole earth is to be pos-
sessed, Who sets on one side all the teachers of
the Jewish nation, and stands Himself on the
other side, and says, " Ye have heard that it hath
been said by them of old time so and so, but I
say unto you," and Who declares that at the
last day of all not every man that says to Him,
" Lord, Lord," shall enter the kingdom of
heaven, but the man who has done His Father's
will ? " In that day / will say unto you, Depart
from Me ; / never knew you ! " And Jesus
closes the sermon with a declaration as to whose
are the stable lives and whose the unstable : " He
that heareth My words and doeth them not, is
like the man that built his house upon the sand."
Jesus Christ said marvellous things about Him-
self.

But is it not even more marvellous that, hav-
ing said them, people think Him modest? If
one were forced to lay his finger on one single
characteristic of Christ that is universally ac-
knowledged, and that is an unconscious confes-
sion of His Divinity by every one who acknowl-
edges this characteristic in Him, it is His
humility. For Jesus Christ was the most boast-
ful, the most arrogant person who ever lived
if He was not Divine, "I am the way, the

UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 229

truth, and the Hfe." " I and the Father are
one." " No man cometh unto the Father but
by Me." What modesty or humlUty can be
found in those words if they are not true?
Grant that Jesus Christ was what He claimed
to be, and He is the humblest and most lowly-
minded person who ever walked about among
men. But, if Jesus was not what He claimed to
be, how does it come that the whole heart of man
turns to Him and believes that He spoke the
truth when He said, " I am meek and lowly in
heart " ?

I am not speaking, now, with any special pur-
pose to convince any who may not be persuaded
of our Lord's deity. He rises up before our lives,
and we know that what He has done there none
but God could do. He stands out before our
hearts, and what He is to us we know that none
but God could be. But I would speak of some
things in Jesus that were most divinely human
in Him, and which, one might almost say, those
people who believe least in His deity are under
chiefest obligation to repeat in themselves. For
that is the difficulty in which many of those
who do not regard Jesus Christ as the strong
Son of God involve themselves. If Jesus Christ
was what He was just as a man, then these are
the very people who are under chiefest obligation
to repeat those qualities in Jesus which they al-
lege it is possible for a mere man to display.
Those of us who regard Jesus Christ as God

230 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

can believe that there were some things in Him
difficult for us to attain.

Think for a moment, first of all, of Christ's
sincere directness of character. There are
sinuous people, furtive, indirect, disingenu-
ously reticent, whose life does not ring
genuinely true, who speak to you with an
averted eye, who do not carry with them
the tone of a robust sincere integrity of life.
Jesus was not that kind. There was a
large ingenuous candour about Him, a direct
sincerity and reality in His life that made Jesus
Himself the standard of truth in character in
the little band of disciples in whose midst He
stood and in human life since down to this day.

We see the sincere directness of Jesus in His
methods of work. He was no manipulator. He
dealt not with institutions, but with life. His
disciples were pressing Him constantly to be-
come an institutionalist. They pointed out to
Him the risk He was running of leaving His
kingdom disorganised. They wanted Him to
appoint the places, to assign positions of author-
ity, but Jesus steadfastly refused to do so, and
died without ever having accomplished what His
disciples desired. He had comparatively little
interest in institutions as such ; He built on the
life that is back of institutions. He was dealing
not with outer laws, but with inner principles
of life. His word constantly was not. Thou
shalt dOj but, Thou shalt be. He does not say,

UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 231

*' Do the perfect things, as your heavenly Father
does them," but " Be ye perfect, even as your
heavenly Father is perfect."

Of course, from one point of view Christ was
compelled to do this. Many people appeal to
Christ's example in His attitude toward govern-
ment as justifying Christian men and women in
holding aloof from political duty. They quote
His words, " My kingdom is not of the world,"
and they point out also how He held Himself
free from any political relationships. He had
none, for one thing, but the reason why He
taught that His kingdom was not of this world
was that the only kingdom that will ever prevail
over this world is a kingdom that is not of it.
Jesus would have ended His ministry before He
did and would have failed in it before He ended
it if He had not pursued the principles that He
did pursue. Fie stood before the institution
of human slavery, and never mentioned it once
in all His teaching, or spoke one word of loath-
ing or hatred of it. He simply taught that men
were all children of one God and that justice
was to prevail among men. He said to His
disciples when He gathered them together on the
last night of all, " A new commandment give I
unto you, that ye love one another." And that
was the doom of human slavery. He stood be-
fore half of the human race shut out of its
rights. He never said one word about woman's
equality with man, but He never said one thing

232 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

that did not imply it. Pick out any ten or a
dozen of Christ's commands, and they are not
masculine commands ; they apply equally to men
and women alike. And when He exalted
those qualities which are the qualities of the
woman's heart, when He said to men, " Come
unto me all ye that labour and are heavy-laden,
and I will give you rest, for I am meek and lowly
in heart," Jesus Christ made women free.

We can see Christ's luminous honesty and di-
rectness in His teaching. I once heard a law-
yer in Pennsylvania, who was one of the most
successful lawyers in the state, speaking of how
the truth shone round him often as he stood
before a jury. " Sometimes," he said, '' I can see
it flashing, like the lightning in the sky, around
my mind, or it blazes out like the very fierce-
ness of the noon, and I am in agony and fear lest
I cannot put it into words which will convey
it to the minds of other men." There are
men who cannot perceive truth, and there
are other men who cannot express it after
they have perceived it. The sincere directness
of our Lord's character displayed itself in the
way He spoke as never man spake, and said
things that the little children could understand,
that old people who are ignorant can rest their
dear heads upon and comprehend.

Are we like Christ in His sincere directness
of character? How much of deceptiveness
there is in us, how much of white falsehood in

UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 233

our social conversation, how much of evil tinge-
ing our judgments of one another and making
wrong imaginations in the chambers of our heart !
How much we need to be changed to be like
our Lord Jesus Christ in the sincere purity of
His character and of His life!

Think once again of the calm confidence of
Jesus. We see it in His pursuit of this method
of which I have been speaking. Now this is
the hardest method in the world to pursue. I
venture to say that no Christian leader has ever
arisen without facing the same temptation that
the disciples forced upon Jesus, the temptatiqn
to create a sect, to erect a party, to build up a
machine. It is one of the temptations that con-
front every Christian man, to strive to do that,
rather than just to let the grains fall into the
ground and die and trust the Lord of the harvest
to bring the harvest in His own good time. The
divine faith of Jesus Christ is seen in nothing
else more clearly than in His readiness to pursue
this plan of recklessness of result in His pubHc
work and life.

I bid you think of the significance of this spirit
of confidence in Jesus. Who was He? A man
with no influence behind Him, a man command-
ing no wealth, a man possessing none of the
qualities that were supposed to be essential to
leadership in His day. This man was confident.
Think of what it was He was confident about.
He proposed a project that was universal when

234 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

the world was barely known, a small fraction of
it known to His contemporaries, a great section
of it absolutely unknown to them, a project not
alone to absorb the whole world, but to run
through endless ages of time. No mere man
sits down before a perpetual project; no man
proposes a universal dominion. A man from
Galilee, out of which arises no prophet, proposes
to establish a universal and an eternal kingdom !
And mark the confident spirit of Christ as He
sets about His work. There are no moods or
despondencies in it. We speak of the Transfig-
uration and the agony of Gethsemane as moods.
These are not moods. They are triumphs, con-
flicts, epochs of struggle and victory, but not
moods either of exaltation or despondency. Con-
sider the life, beset on every side, pressed down,
not one single soul to understand or sympathise
with it, crushed within limitations against
which it wrestled beyond the possibility of any
one of us to understand, and yet walking with
quiet, calm evenness of will and heart through it
all, with never one moment's hesitation as to the
certainty of final and complete victory, speaking
quietly of His Gospel as to be preached every-
where, of all nations to be made His disciples, of
the tale of a woman's love to be told wherever
throughout the whole world the knowledge of
Him and of His salvation should go. Think of
the confidence, the calm steadfast rest of Jesus
Christ, who never doubted either His project

UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 235

or Himself. We know men who never doubt
themselves, but sometimes doubt their projects;
and other men who never doubt their projects,
but often doubt themselves. But here was One
Who doubted neither His mission nor Himself.
We very greatly need to be like our Lord
Jesus Christ in this. When we have a sense of
having failed utterly, when we look back over
our life and it seems only havoc and shipwreck,
He can help us also to rest with perfect con-
fidence in Him Whose will we have come
to do.

Think, thirdly, of the unselfishness of Jesus.
I am not speaking of the unselfishness of the
incarnation, though that grows ever more mar-
vellous and incomprehensible. I do not see how
any reverent man or woman can grow old in
human sorrow and experience without standing
each day with fresh wonder before the miracle
and the marvel of the incarnation. We speak
about the agony of Christ's death. It was de-
liverance to Him. The agony of Christ's Hfe
here on earth was not in the end of it, but in the
continued endurance of it while He lived, hedged
in with the standards of our moral life with all
the fresh high judgments of heaven in Him.
In Browning's Karshish is the story of Lazarus
come back from the grave to live still among
people who are bound to this present world
while Lazarus, perforce, must move about
among them carrying always in his heart

236 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

heaven's standards and visions. Our Lord
Jesus had to do that all the time He was here,
and the unselfishness of it passes all understand-
ing. When with that infinite stoop of conde-
scension our Lord emptied Himself, buried Him-
self in a grave that was many times more real
a grave to Him than Joseph's clean and new-
made tomb, even the grave of our human flesh,
and went about amongst us imprisoned in this
charnel house of our humanity, there v/as the
real object lesson of unselfishness.

But I am not thinking of that, but of the un-
selfishness of Jesus's human life, of His careless-
ness of the little things, the food and the shelter
and the raiment; of His contempt for all the
things that men counted great, and valuable, and
worthy, of the absence of all wilfulness and
caprice, the most contemptible and yet the most
common marks of selfishness, from His life ; the
absence of all the self-pride which showed itself
in His constant loving forgiveness of men, and
that great unselfishness which displayed itself
in His contempt of death. It is the one thing
in one of our best known lives of Jesus which
mars its beauty, that it accuses our Lord of cow-
ardice in Gethsemane, says that He was young,
that the thought of death was abhorrent to
Him, that the tides of youthful life were run-
ning in His veins and He could not look forward
with equanimity to the dark shadows of the
grave. Ten thousands of His friends have

UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 237

walked up to the jaws of death without fear.
There w^ere two Httle children in one of the
villages, near Pao-ting-fu during the Boxer
massacres who looked right up into the eyes of
the Boxers when they came into their village
and threatened their lives, asking them if they
were believers in the Christian's God, and they
replied, " Yes, we are," refusing to deny that
they were the heavenly Father's little chil-
dren under the edge of the overhanging sword.
Was Jesus Christ less brave than these little
Chinese children who died for His name? He
was not afraid of death in Gethsemane; it was
not the death upon the cross from which He
shrank ; it vx^as death before the cross. He feared
that He might not live to die for the world upon
the cross, that the agony which He was facing
in the garden might so far overtax His
vital energies that He would never live to come
to the cross ; and therefore, as the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews says, with strong cry-
ing and tears He called unto Him that was able
to deliver Him from death, and was heard in
that He feared. Selfishness of every sort was
as distant from the nature of Jesus as the noon-
day is from the midnight. Oh, friends, so
bent upon our ways, so set in all our little
caprices of taste and of judgment and of
opinion, how much we need the great, divine
unselfishness of Him Who emptied Himself and
became of no reputation, and took on Him the

238 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

form of a servant,, and became obedient unto
death, even the death of the cross!

Think once again of the way Jesus Christ
bound up in Himself a.ll great qualities in unison
and balance. It is true that many of the quali-
ties that Jesus displays have been found in
others. There are men who possess great quali-
ties, but there has never been a man who pos-
sessed all great qualities balanced by their proper
counterparts. Jesus alone took everything that
is great and worthy and so balanced it with its
contrary desirable quality as to keep His life
free of distortion. Buddha exalted poverty
and preached the contemptibleness of the things
that men prize, and what is the consequence?
There is a palsy as of death resting on all the
lands where Buddha's influence abides, while
wherever Jesus's influence has gone men have
set to work with their hands, with their minds,
with their hearts, and the people whom He has
shaped are doing the whole work of the world.
Balance off in Jesus each quality you think ad-
mirable with the quality needed to safeguard it,
and you will begin to get some conception of the
marvellous beauty and perfectness of that unique
life. Innocent He was, and yet He had power ;
can you make that combination in your life?
Pure He was, and yet; He was not hard or unin-
telligent toward evil;; can you make that com-
bination? We love innocence and we lose influ-
ence. We love purity, and we become hard

UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 239

and uncharitable. We fling ourselves against
sin, and it is soon stern hatred not of sin alone
but of the sinner also. Alone of all those who
have ever taught among men Jesus Christ stands
out as the One in Whom no defect but instead
the perfect balance of just character was found.
In this we all need to be like Him ! We love
truth, and grow soft. We hate lies, and grow
hard. We set ourselves against sin, and before
we know it our hearts have lost the tenderness of
Christ No one has ever walked with a perfect
balance of Hfe such as marked Jesus; and if
there be one of us who says that Jesus was only
human we stand in a position of strange respon-
sibility and obligation; for if nineteen hundred
years ago that peasant of Galilee was the kind of
man He was, we of to-day, with all the advan-
tage of what has taken place in this world by
His influence, are bound to be better men than
He.

Think, lastly, of the sinlessness of Jesus. He
said, " Father, forgive them," but He never said,
" Father, forgive Me." Alone of all who have
lived, Jesus Christ was able to live His life with-
out ever asking forgiveness. He challenged
men to find a flaw in Him. " Which of you,"
He said, " convinceth Me of sin ? " And while
that was only an appeal, of course, to human
standards of measurement. He went far beyond
it : "I am unable to find any flaws in Myself. I
do alway those things that please Him." Now

240 THE MASTER OF THE HEART

the greatest love in this world springs always
from the deep sense of forgiven sin. That is
what Jesus said in Simon's house. " Simon,
who thinkest thou would love most, the one who
has been forgiven little or much ? " " Why,"
said Simon, " the one who has been forgiven
most would love most." And yet here was one
who was never forgiven at all, who loved most.
You cannot keep up human piety without re-
pentance. There never was a holy character that
was not built on the consciousness of forgiveness.
You can search human history through and the
world from end to end, and not find in it one su-
premely good character that is not built on re-
pentance and the sense of forgiven sin; and yet
those things are totally absent from the life of
Jesus. He stands out the one unique and stainless
life. And I think that when we have got back of
all that people say about Him, we will discover
that that is the root of His enduring influence
still. It is not the teaching of Jesus ; it is not the
miracles of Jesus ; it is not the general beauty of
Jesus's character. Men may dwell on these
things wisely; they do not know the human
heart if they think that these explain the
hold of Christ on human life. That hold rests
on Christ's sinlessness, and the deepest con-
sciousness of man knows that It rests there. Back
of all that is superficial in our thought there lie
principles of action and of conviction that root
themselves in this truth, that Jesus was of men

UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 241

the only one who never needed to say, " Father,
forgive me, for I have sinned." Far and wide
through this world the hearts of men and women
have turned to Him in the past, and turn to Him
to-day still, and will turn to Him, until at last
the ages are done, because deeply in their souls
the Spirit of God is telling them that there is
One who having been tempted in all points like
as they are, yet without sin, is able Himself also
to succour them that are tempted. The glory of
our Master's life, the power of His life, the
beauty of His Hfe, the secret influence of His
life, are found in this which sets Him off from
us alone. He was not of us ; He became of us
that we who are not of Him might become of
Him. He was not like us, and He became like
us that we who were not like Him might become
like Him. *' I gave, I gave My life for thee,"
is His word, and it was a perfect life that He
gave. Let us answer Him back from our lives
of flaw and imperfection : " Thou alone art
worthy ! Here is my life for Thine ! "

END

Theological Semmary-Speer Library

1 1012 01127 8597

Date Due

1

^1130 '^

^'^'^Ui r^l

Mr 1 6 '4

,r,m

5u •» _ *i-t

Mr k.3

#W <> — mw.

S 21 '43

^52St*

0 16 '43

% P

.,.4W^^

r-issr-

- ^ ■■

iUHH"

wsa/

''■ «

• , . , f ' 'i

«V",; ^^

9C30^*^

(

f€3 '5«

Wr 51 5?

m i'^-^'>

FEIO'5.?

^