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BX 5937 .B83 N4 1896
Brooks, Phillips, 1835-1893.
New starts in life '9
h
Phillips Brooks's Sermons
In Ten Volumes
1st Series The Purpose and Use of Comfort
And Other Sermons
2d Series The Candle of the Lord
And Other Sermons
3d Serioi Sermons Preached in English
Churches
And Other Sermons
4th Series VisionS and Tasks And Other Sermons
5th Series The Light of the World
And Other Sermons
6th Series The Battle of Life And Other So-mons
7th Series Sermons for the Principal Festi-
vals and Fasts of the Church Year
Edited by the Rev. John G)tton Brooks
8th Series NeW Starts in Life And Other Sermons
9th Series The Law of Growth
And Other Sermons
1 0th Series Seeking Life And Other Sermons
E. P. Dutton and Company
681 Fihh AveBue New York |
New Starts in Life
( JO
And Other Sermons ,,x
By the
Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D.
Eighth Series
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
68i Fifth Ave.
COFVSIGHT, 1896
BY
E. P. UUTTON & COMPANY
CONTENTS.
Sermon pacs
I. New Starts in Life i
' ' And when he had agreed with the laborers for a
penny a day he sent them into his vineyard." — Mat-
thew XX. 2. (Sept. 28, 1879.)
II. The Tares and the Wheat 20
" But he said, Nay ; lest while ye gather up the
tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both
grow together until the harvest." — Matthew xiii. 29.
(Feb. 6, 1887.)
III. The Motive of Religion 36
" Then Satan answered the Lord and said. Doth
Job serve God for nought ? " — Job i. 9. (Dec, 11, 1887.)
IV. Unseen Spiritual Helpers 51
*' And Elisha prayed and said, Lord, I pray thee,
open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened
the eyes of the young man ; and he saw : and, behold,
the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire
round about Elisha." — 2 Kings vi. 17. (Feb. 23, 1873.)
V. Heavenly Wisdom 70
" I said I will be wise : but it was far from me." —
Ecclesiastes vii. 23. (Nov, 3, 1884.)
VI. The Duties of Privilege 86
" But glory, honor, and peace, to every man that
worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile."
— Romans ii. 10. (Jan. 14, 1877.)
IV CONTENTS.
Sesmok Pagb
VII. The Sacredness of Life io6
" He asked life of thee and thou gavest it him,
even length of days for ever and ever." — Psalms
xxi. 4. (March ig, 1882.)
VIII. The Gifts of God 124
" Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none,
but such as I have give I unto thee." — Acts iii. 6.
(May 2, 1875.)
IX. The Dispensation of the Spirit . . . 141
"In demonstration of the Spirit." — I CORIN-
THIANS ii. 4. (Oct. 14, 1888.)
X. The Glory of Simplicity 158
" But let your communication be Yea, yea ;
Nay, nay : for whatsoever is more than these
Cometh of evil." — Matthew v. 37. (Nov. 20, 1887.)
XI. The Little Sanctuaries of Life . . . 176
" Thus saith the Lord, Though I have cast them
far away among the heathen, and although I have
scattered them among the countries, yet will I be to
them a little sanctuary in the countries where they
shall come." — Ezekiel xi. 16. (Sept. 30, 1888.)
XII. Storm and Calm 193
"And there was a great calm." — Matthew viii.
26. (June 29, 1873.)
XIII. The Blessing of the Lord 213
" The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich and
he addeth no sorrow with it." — Proverbs x. 82,
(March 23, 1879.)
XIV. Joy and Sorrow 234
" Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh
to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon
it."— John xi. 38. (Sept. 28, 1890.)
CONTENTS,
Sermon Page
XV. The Law of the Spirit of Life . . , 252
1 ,' " For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus
hath made me free from the law of sin and death."
— Romans viii. 2. (May 17, 1874.)
XVL The Secret of the Lord 271
" The secret of the Lord is with them that fear
Him." — Psalm xxv. 14. (April 4, 1875.)
XVII, The Great Attainment 286
" Worthy to stand before the Son of man." —
Luke xxi. 36. (March 15, 1S85.)
XVIII. The Joy of Religion 303
" And as for the prophet and the priest and the
people that shall say, The burden of the Lord,' I
will even punish that man and his house. Thus
shall ye say every one to his neighbor and every
one to his brother, What hath the Lord an-
swered ? and. What hath the Lord spoken ? " —
Jeremiah xxiii. 34 and 35. (Dec. 14, 1884.)
XIX. The Preeminence of Christianity , . 320
" Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord to
•whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of
eternal life." — John vi. 68. (Dec. 12, 1875.)
XX, The Mitigation of Theology . . . 337
" And Moses said unto him, As soon as I am
gone out of the city I will spread abroad my hands
unto the Lord ; and the thunder shall cease, neither
shall there be any more hail, that thou mayest know
how that the earth is the Lord's. But as for thee
and thy servants I know that ye will not yet fear
the Lord God."— ExoDUS ix. 29 and 30. (Oct.
87, 1878.)
THE WAITING CITY.
A CITY throned upon the height behold,
Wherein no foot of man as yet has trod ;
The City of Man's Life fulfilled in God.
Bathed all in light, with open gates of gold,
Perfect the City is in tower and street ;
And there a Palace for each mortal waits,
Complete and perfect, at whose outer gates
An Angel stands its occupant to greet.
Still shine, O patient City on the height,
The while our race in hut and hovel dwells.
It hears the music of thy heavenly bells
And its dull soul is haunted by thy light.
Lo, once the Son of Man hath heard thy call
And the dear Christ hath claimed thee for us all.
Phillips Brooks.
S. S. "Pavonia,"
September, 1892,
NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
I.
NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
" And when he had agreed with the laborers for a peany a day
he sent them into his vineyard." — Matthew xx. 2.
The parable from which these words are taken is
one of the most complete in its details of any that
the Saviour ever spoke. It covers a whole day, and
as we read it the whole course of the day stands out
clear before us. In the words which I have quoted
we are set at one moment of the vivid story and can
see exactly what is going on. The master of a
vineyard having gone out into the highways and
found some workmen waiting there now stands at
his vineyard gate and, coming to an agreement with
each man about the wages which he will receive, he
sends each in succession into the great field where
the work is waiting. It is a bright, fresh picture.
Everything is sparkling in the morning hght. The
men all ready for work stand waiting. The master,
thoughtful and considerate, stands talking with
them. Through the open door we see the vineyard
2 NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
with its long rows of young vines. Here is strength
waiting for work. Here is work waiting for strength.
The two are just upon the point of touching one
another. There is no sense of exhaustion any-
where. Everything shines with vigor and hope.
There is no Hmit to the work which we dream may
be done before the day is over. The exhilaration of
beginning fills the verses.
A man has faded out of the real happiness and
strength of life who does not know what that exhila-
ration is, who does not feel the brightness of the
picture which this verse draws. It is sad indeed
when any man comes to that state in which each
new day does not seem in some true sense to begin
the world anew, recalling every departed hope and
brightening every faded color of the night before.
There is a human instinct which tells us that our
life, while it is meant to have a great continuousness
and to be always one, is no less meant to be full of
new starts, to be ever refreshing its forces and be-
ginning once again. The true proportion between
these two feelings, between the sense of continuity
and the sense of ever new beginning, makes the fin-
est, the freshest, and the primest life. We may
picture to ourselves two rivers of wholly different
kinds. One is a great, broad, quiet stream, ever
moving swiftly but smoothly on, unbroken by rapids,
majestic in its calm and noble monotony, each mile
of its great course seeming like every other mile, so
perfectly and evidently is it everywhere itself. Its
great thought is continuity. The other river is a
mountain torrent. Broken and stopped perpetually,
NEW STARTS IN LIFE. 3
it is always gathering itself up in a pool, at the foot
of the rock that stopped it, for a fresh start. It is
always full of new beginnings. It is different in
each mile of its course from what it is in every other
mile ; when it grows calm for a moment it seems as
if it had wholly stopped, until it finds an outlet and
plunges down another precipice, and with a new
cascade begins its life again. Like the first stream,
like the majestic and continuous river, is the life of
God. Continuousness and identity is our great
thought of Him. " From everlasting to everlasting
thou art God," we cry. Full of movement, the im-
pression of His life is stillness, like the impression
of the vast and solemn Nile. But like the mountain
torrent is the life of man. With a true continuity,
so that it is the same life from its beginning to its
end, it yet forever is refreshing its vitality with new
beginnings. It loves to turn sharp corners into un-
seen ways. It loves to gather itself into knots and
then start out with the new birth of a new resolu-
tion. It loves to take into itself the streams of new-
born lives that its monotony may be refreshed with
their freshness. It is wonderful how ingenious men
will be in making artificial new starts in their lives,
as if at midday they shut up the house and lighted
all the lamps and made believe that it was night,
only in order that in a moment they might fling the
shutters back again as if a new morning had come
with its enthusiasm. So all live men covet the ex-
hilaration of beginning.
I want to speak to-day about beginnings or new
starts in life. It is a subject which the time sug-
4 NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
gests. For, beside the aspect of perpetual renewal
of which I have been speaking, life here among us in
the city in these autumn days has a peculiar look of
newness which belongs to the season and the place.
For in our city life we have changed the feeling of the
seasons. The autumn is the real spring-time of the
town. It is then that the gray pastures of our paved
streets begin to blossom once again with their bright
flowers of enterprise and fellowship and charity.
And I am speaking this morning to more of the
spirit of expectation, of experiment, of new hope in
new circumstances than I should find here at any
other season of the year. The schools have just
begun ; the college boys have started their new
year. The young recruits in all the old professions
are making the old ranks look young again with that
perpetual youth which one of the great professions
always keeps. In many ways there is a sense of stir
and start about us. He must be dull who does not
feel it. And so I want to speak about the true dig-
nity and beauty of beginnings.
The essential power of a new beginning, then,
seems to be very simple. It is that it recalls and
freshens the principle and fundamental motive under
which a work is done, and so keeps it from degene-
rating into mechanical routine. When the stream
starts over a new fall it cannot help being conscious
anew of its own fluidness and of the force of gravita-
tion. It is the renewed sense of these things, of
what it is and of what a great power is at work upon
it, that sparkles in it and fills it full of life as it begins
its new career, which is simply the old career with
NEW STARTS IN LIFE. 5
its fundamental consciousness freshened and revived.
And so when a man starts afresh, either with the
newness of a new day, or with the stimulus of altered
circumstances, or with the inspiration of a new work,
what his new start ought to do for him is to refresh
the deepest principles by which he lives. You feel
the engine when the steamer starts. After that
when the steamer is on its long monotonous voyage
you feel as if the machinery moved itself. So in a
new beginning men ought to feel, and in some way
more or less real and clear they do feel, what they
are and what great powers are at work upon them,
as they do not ordinarily feel these things in com-
mon times.
Let us keep all this in our mind as we come back
and stand in the bright morning light which floods
the vineyard gate where the laborers of the parable
are just beginning their day's work. " When the
householder had agreed with them for a penny a
day, he sent them into his vineyard." In that
verse, taken as the story of the way in which human
life as a whole and also of the way in which any
special department or enterprise of human life be-
gins, there are two ideas — which we may examine
and develop in succession. One of them is the idea
of mission. The other is the idea of wages. First
the master of the vineyard sends the men to do
their work, and second he agrees with them for ' ' a
penny a day." We will look at these two ideas in
relation to the great new starts or beginnings that
come in every full human life.
I. First the idea of mission. " He sent them in
6 NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
his vineyard. " " He," in the parable, means God
in human life. See what a personaHty steps at once
into the story and see how, when it once is there, it
cannot be left out again. The whole story lives and
moves and has its being in that central person, by
whose sending the laborers start out on their day's
work. Suppose at first that you did not see the
householder. Suppose you only saw a host of work-
men with their tools streaming in through an open
vineyard gate. " What are they going for ? " you
say. The answer must be one of two. Either it is
the mere pleasure of the exercise they love, as when
a company of boys go hurrying to a fruitless, profit-
less game of ball, for the pure pleasure of the game,
or else it is the desire for something that they are to
get, some profits, some reward that lies waiting for
them in the vineyard. Both of these are conceiv-
able, both are legitimate motives. And motives
which correspond to both of them come in legiti-
mately at every beginning in our lives. Any new
undertaking of ours may properly be inspired by the
pleasure which we find in its execution and by the
advantage which it will bring to us when it is fin-
ished. But now put in the householder. Set him
in your picture beside the vineyard gate. Make
every laborer who passes in pass under his inspec-
tion, go in by his commission, and then have you
not put another motive in which does not exclude
the others but surrounds and comprehends them ?
Now you ask any laborer why he is there, and point-
ing back to the master at the gate, he says, " He
sent me." No matter how much any laborer might
NEW STARTS IN LIFE. J
rove the work or want the profits, he would have
no right to be there unless the householder had sent
him in. Do you not see the parable ? Whenever
any man believes that God has given him a work to
do that belief becomes the great motive of his labor.
It does not exclude the others, but it overshadows
and, as it were, includes them. Still the man may
find the work delightful and may expect from it a
great result, but when you ask him why he does it,
he rises from his happy toil and points back to where
God stands beside the gate and says, " He sent me."
However he might love the work, whatever advan-
tage he might look for from it, he would have no
right to be doing it if God had not sent him.
Every work ought to begin simply and with one
clear simple motive. It is not pleasant to hear the
beginner in any work talk too far-looking talk, an-
ticipate the gain that lies for him far away when his
work shall have been successful. Prophecies are too
doubtful, and this anticipative spirit is too apt to be
discouraged. Some cloud comes between the be-
ginner and his vision of the end, and his impulse is
all gone. Nor is it pleasant to hear the new worker
congratulating himself that his work is pleasant, that
he loves it, and trusting to that love for his energy
and his persistence. There will surely come times
when the love will grow dull, when the enthusiasm
will flicker. What then ? There must be some
authority that impels as well as some attraction
that invites. Not merely a bright vineyard but a
majestic master of the vineyard there must be.
All serious men have craved a master as well as a
8 NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
task. Some workers call their master duty. Others
wiser and devouter call him "God," but all have
done their best work only when they were not
merely called by the thing that was to be done
but sent by him for whom they were to do it. It
is like the going of the arrow out of the bow. The
starting arrow is only conscious of the string, not
yet has it any perception of the target. You ques-
tion it as it goes flying past you, and ask it why
it takes that track, and its reply is not " Because
the target stands this way," but " Because this
way the bow-string sent me." It is only in going
where the bow-string sent it that the arrow finds
first the joy of the rushing air and then at last the
satisfaction as it buries itself into the very centre of
the target.
" Like arrows in the hand of a giant so are the
young children," says the Psalm. The child's life
is marked by this, that it is conscious of impulse far
more than of aim. It does all that it does because
its father sent it, not because the essential attrac-
tiveness of the task invited it. If the task's attrac-
tiveness is felt it is as an accidental pleasure, not as
the main motive. The main motive is the Father's
will. And in God's family we are all children always.
We are God's arrows. Not because the end attracts
us, but because He says to us " Go " must be the
main motive for our going. This is so clear in the
life of Jesus, the perfect Son of God. No man ever
felt as He felt the essential joy of holy work. No
man ever saw as He saw the glorious fruits of holiness.
And yet it was not for these at last that He always
NEW STARTS IN LIFE. 9
said that He was holy. The last, the deepest, and
the strongest reason was that his Father sent Him.
" I came down from heaven not to do mine own
will but the will of Him that sent me." Those are
the key words of His life. And these words do not
necessarily mean, I beg you to observe, that his will
was contrary to the will of Him who sent him.
They apply even when the wills are just the same.
Then it meant everything to Jesus that the action
which he did, though outwardly it would have been
just the same act in either case, was done not be-
cause he wanted to do it, though he did, but because
his Father wanted him to do it. " Father, not my
will but thine be done," Jesus was always saying
even when there was no difference in what the two
wills separately would have chosen. In that word
" Father " lies the commission of his life. Only to
a father would one have a right to say that, but when
one once knew God to be his father there could be no
other real completion of his life, no other crowning
and filling of it with its consummate motive.
I am afraid this looks to some of you like foolish
subtlety, but, indeed, my friends, it is not so. Let
me try to apply it more closely and show how prac-
tical it is. I said that there were certain different
beginnings in men's lives to which the parable of
our text might be applied. In every full life, in the
life of every man who goes through the whole circle
of what a man ought to be, there must be at least
three such beginnings or new starts, and to each of
those three we may apply what I have just been say-
ing. These three beginnings are: i. Youth, or the
lO NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
start of the physical life. 2. The choice of occupa-
tion or the deliberate selection of one's work; and
3. Religious consecration or the entrance of the soul
in its deeper life with God. No man lives com-
pletely who does not at least start in each of these
three roads. O, think of it, you to whom only the
first beginning has any recognizable reality. You
who were born, but who have never entered upon
any work upon the earth and who have known noth-
ing whatever of that deeper birth in which the spirit
takes up a willing loyalty to God. This is the meas-
ure of your wretched incompleteness. Judged by the
standard of the completest human being, does it not
seem as if you were really nearer to the brutes than
to Him. For you have entered upon only the first
and lowest of careers, and even for that it may be,
as we shall see, that you have not begun to conceive
the true motive which gives it its real value.
Take the mere physical beginning. How beauti-
ful it is! It is not confined to any one moment
when the new-born being first catches with a gasp
our earthly air. It runs through all those bright and
happy years which we call youth, the years in which
the, physical life is always coming to some new rela-
tion to the earth where it has freshly come. Youth
is but one long birth. The leaping of new tastes,
the timid trying of new skills, the ripening of the
senses in answer to the skies they see and the world
full of melody which they are ever hearing. Youth
is one long bright being born — one rich and gradual
beginning. And what shall be its consciousness, its
great prevailing feeling about this life that lies be-
NEW STARTS IN LIFE. II
fore it ? O my young friends, the world is beautiful
and every breath of your young life is happiness.
You have a full right to feel that ! And life is full of
promise. There are great prizes to be gained in this
great world with which your relations grow com-
pleter every day. But those are not all. These two
are like two flowers which need a stem to hold them
and to give them life. If they have no stem and try
to live alone, they are doomed to wither. The stem
must be the consciousness of God, God as the sender
and the source of life. The instant that conscious-
ness stands up firm and complete everything else
takes its true place and value. The beauty of the
flowers means something when they hang upon the
stem. It means seed and endless perpetuity of
growth. A young man to whom life stretching out
before him is not merely something which attracts
him for himself but something to which God has
sent him with a commission to live peculiarly his
own, to him youth gets its full glory. His spirit, as
he gazes forth into the future, is full at once of hu-
mility and hope. Into his beginning work there
comes a noble union of energy and repose. Respon-
sibility becomes to him an inspiration, not a weight.
There is an utter absence of frivolity, a perfect seri-
ousness, and at the same time an absolute buoyancy
and joy. Is not that what we all want to see in
youth as its chief glory. There is a youth which
sets forth on the sea of life as a pleasure yacht sails
from her moorings on a summer morning. All is
gay and bright and trifling, all is light and laughter.
She sails because the wind is fair and the sea smooth.
12 NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
No one bids her go and there is no port for her to
seek. There is another youth whose start is hke the
sailing of a great deep-freighted ship. There is no
less joy and exhilaration, but there is no laughter.
Faces are serious. Still the sweet freshness in the
breeze, the sunlight on the water, bring their influ-
ence of happiness, but there is so much underneath.
This ship is sent. Great interests are embarked in
her. She is freighted with sacred hopes. And so
she sails forth in the silence of a joy that does not
break out in chattering talk. Such is the sacred joy
that fills a child's, a young man's, or young woman's
life to whom the simplest and greatest of all truths
has come, that they are going forth into life sent by
God. That just as truly as He sent Moses, David,
Paul, Luther, God has sent them into life out of
His own great hand. O parents, what a task and
privilege is yours — to make God so real to your chil-
dren's life that they shall know that He did send
them ; and so to make God great and true and
sweet and good to your children's first thoughts of
Him, that they shall rejoice and triumph in the
knowledge that they are sent by such a God as
He is.
n. The second beginning which I spoke of was the
start of a new occupation, the deliberate entrance by
a young man upon what is to be the profession of
his life. With regard to that time I think that all
of us who have seen many men will bear witness that
it is just there that very many men grow narrow,
and, from being broad in sympathies, large, generous,
humane, before, even in all the crudity of their boy-
NEW STARTS IN LIFE. 1 3
hood, the moment of the choice of their profession
seems to make them Hmited and special, shuts them
up between narrow walls, makes them uninteresting
to all the world outside their little work, and makes
all the world outside their little work uninteresting
to them. It is not strange. The works that men
must do to live become more and more special and
absorbing. Anybody who thinks about it sees that
the escape must be not in the worker refusing to do
one work and undertaking to do all things. It must
be in his doing his one thing in a larger spirit.
Where shall that larger spirit come from ? The spirit
of an act comes from its motive. There must be a
larger motive then. And the largest of all motives
is the sending of God, the commission of Him who
is the Father of us all. When the young lawyer
dares to believe beyond the pleasure which he finds
in the practice of the law, beyond the fortune or the
fame that he hopes to make out of it, that God sent
him there, that the fitness for it which he has found
in his character and circumstances is something more
than a lucky accident, is a true sign of the inten-
tion concerning him of the dear, wise God ; when a
young lawyer dares to believe this, two great bless-
ings come to him out of so high a faith : first he is
armed against the lower temptations of his profes-
sion, and second, he is kept in cordial sympathy
with all other children of God who are trying to find
and follow the same Father's intentions concerning
them, though in works utterly different from his.
The true salvation from the sordidness and narrow-
ness of professional life comes only with a profound
14 NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
faith that God sent us to be the thing we are, to do
the work that we are doing.
III. And then with regard to the third great begin-
ning which comes in every man's Hfe who hves com-
pletely, the beginning of conscious religion, of the
deliberate consecration to God and culture of the
soul. It begins in every kind of way, suddenly with
one man, gradually with another. With one man
like the swift illumination of a flash of lightning,
with another man like the slow brightening of the
dawn ; but to all men who come to their full life it
surely comes by that unchangeable necessity which
is in the words of Jesus, " Except a man be born
again he cannot see the kingdom of God " ; and no
man truly lives who does not see that kingdom.
But of this deeper life, the life of spiritual struggle,
of prayer, of search after divine communion, the life
that sacrifices the body for the soul, that hopes for
heaven and overcomes the world by faith, of this
life so misty and vague to many men, so much realler
than all realities besides to every man who lives it,
what is the motive power ? why do the best souls
undertake it ? The simplest answer is the truest, I
believe. Because God calls them into it. Ask me
why I am a Christian, and I may say, " Because the
Christian life is satisfactory and full of daily sweet-
ness," or I may say, " Because in the certain dis-
tance hangs the prize of everlasting life." Both
are good answers. But suppose I say, " Because
God bade me be." That is a better answer. It in-
cludes both the others. The soul that makes it is
sure of happiness and reward not by its own direct
NEW STARTS IN LIFE. 1 5
perception of them but because they are involved in
the very nature of God, in obedience to whose au.
thority it gives itself to Him. It makes the persist-
ence of the Christian life depend not on the constancy
of our emotions but on the unremitting sense of the
Divine authority. The best and noblest Christians,
I am sure, have always most loved to give this sim-
plest account of their experience. " Why are you
in the vineyard ? " " Because He sent me," that is
all. Afterward the perception of the sweetness of
the work, but first of all because He sent me. O
my young friends to whom the soul's life with its
vast hopes and mysterious joys is just opening, I
beg you to set at the gate through which you enter
into it the simple authority of your master. Come
to your Lord because He calls you. As John and
James came off the lake where they were fishing; as
Matthew came out of the shop where he was gather-
ing taxes ; for only to the soul that first gives itself
to Him in unquestioning obedience can Christ give
himself in unhindered love.
I must pass on to say a few words on what we saw
to be the second point suggested in our text, namely,
the wages which were promised to those whom the
master sent into his vineyard. " When he had
agreed with them for a penny a day he sent them
into his vineyard. " The first thing that strikes us
is that there should be any wages. It is that truth
of covenant, that picture of a bargain between God
and man which runs through all the Bible, and has
often given much trouble to very spiritual and un-
l6 NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
selfish hearts. " Can I not give myself to God and
God promise me nothing ? Must I have a promise
of advantage to myself, to watch every consecration
of myself to Him whom I love better than my life ?
Is not the * penny a day ' an intrusion and offence
coming in between me and my Lord?" Such
thoughts have come to many minds. I know but
one answer. The master owes something to himself
as well as to his laborers. He owes it to himself to
recognize the service that they give him. Not even
from the child will the father take a wholly unac-
knowledged duty. The " penny a day " is wages,
but it is wages raised to its highest power in love.
It is valuable not for itself alone, but as the token of
the master's recognition of the service. In other
words, I think we have the perpetual recurrence
of the covenant idea all through the Bible until some-
thing of it appears even in the mystery of the Atone-
ment, and the precious sacrifice of Calvary is called
the " Blood of the Everlasting Covenant " ; we have
in all this not a degradation of the spiritual relations
to a commercial sordidness, we have rather an exal-
tation of the essential idea of commerce, an assertion
of the invariable and beautiful reciprocity which runs
through all the universe; a declaration that right-
eousness and justice, the return of like for like, is
not an arbitrary arrangement, which can be tam-
pered with or repealed, but is in the very nature of
all things and beings because it is in the nature of
Him from whom all things and beings come.
And then, if the idea of wages need not trouble
us, see what the special wages are which the Lord
NEW STARTS IN LIFE. 1/
offers. He agreed with them for a penny a day.
It was no outright gift, given in bulk, one large,
round sum with which He fastened their allegiance.
It was to be a daily payment. Evening by evening
they were to come to him, and only gradually
should the money accumulate and grow large in
their hands. What picture could more truly show
the way in which the Lord gives His rewards to all
His servants ? What could more truly set before us
all the kind of promise which He makes us as we
begin our life, or our profession, or our soul's expe-
rience at His command! Not in one complete gift
is physical life bestowed on any child. " A penny
a day " is the promise which is fulfilled in the slow
development of the vital powers which goes on all
through the infancy and early years. Not all at
once are the fruits of a new career or profession put
into the eager hands of the young aspirant. " A
penny a day " comes scholarship to the scholar,
power to the statesman, wealth to the merchant.
Not all at once does the new Christian win the com-
pleteness of his Saviour's grace. " A penny a
day " ! "A penny a day " ! so only does the soul
grow rich, so only are truthfulness, courage, humil-
ity, patience, love, faithfulness given to the soul and
made its own. Surely it is a kind warning of the
master at the open gate. He will not have us disap-
pointed. O, hear His warning, you who are taking
any of His invitations. You cannot take it all at
once. Even to His Incarnate Son God gave life in
slow development. What wonder if to us it comes
with a slowness that makes us often despair; and
l8 NEW STARTS IN LIFE.
yet when it does come completely we shall know
that except as it was thus slowly given it never could
have been made really ours at all.
There is a reason for this method of God's gifts
which we soon learn to know. It lies in two truths.
The first is that the very nature of the soul itself
requires it. The soul appropriates slowly. A tor-
rent drowns the soil which a rain would make fertile.
There is such a thing as a soul gorged with blessing
and not fed.
And the other reason is still truer and deeper.
The object of God's giving us any gift is not that
we may possess the gift, but that through the pos-
session of the gift we may possess Him. The gift is
a pledge to assure us of His presence and His love.
God's gifts are given to us not like robes to clothe
us in. The only robe in which we can be clothed is
He Himself, His righteousness made truly ours not
in an unreal, artificial sense, but really, truly. The
gifts He gives us are the clasps that hold the robe
about us — not the robe. Therefore it is that they
are given only as they are required. Not once for
all, so that we might take them on our shoulders and
go away and forget the Giver, but day by day, so
that each day the day's gift might make the giver
real and so all life be filled with Him.
I have spoken mainlv to the young to-day. At
least, they have been mostly in my mind as I have
spoken. To them the exhilaration of beginning is an
ever-present consciousness. Thank God life may be
always so full of new beginnings that it never need
NEW STARTS IN LIFE. I9
be stale to any of us. And before us all there always
is the great beginning of the everlasting life to keep
us always young. Aye, even to make us count our-
selves as babes unborn. But to the young the sense
of starting is the great prevailing sense of life. I
wish that something I have said to-day might make
you feel how noble and rich the opening of any life
becomes when at the very gate it comes to agree-
ment with God. It is a beautiful moment when
with life before you, with your work before you,
with your soul's salvation before you, you stand first
with Him beside the gate and let Him, when He has
agreed with you for a penny a day, send you into
His vineyard. I dare to think that some of you are
standing there with Him now ; that while I speak it
is that moment, awful and glorious for some of you,
in which, while those who sit beside you in the pew
cannot guess at what is passing, you are giving
yourself to Him and taking Him to be yours for all
your life. If it is so, may He make the consecration
perfect and keep you always faithful with His great
surrounding love !
vv^""
II.
THE TARES AND THE WHEAT.
" But he said, ' Nay ; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up
also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the har-
vest.' " — Matthew xiii. 29.
No parable of Jesus more than the Parable of the
Tares gives us His general view of human life. In it
the everlasting problems lie in the sunshine of His
celestial wisdom. Just think what there is in it.
First, the ownership of the field, that which lies
behind and surrounds and pervades all of Christ's
thought and teaching, the fact that everything be-
longs to God, exists in Him, and nothing can take
place outside of His Fatherhood. That is always
the great elemental truth to Jesus. You lose the
key and soul of all His teaching if you lose that.
Then comes the sowing of the seed. Then the ene-
my's interference, the sowing of the tares. The
actual condition of the world is reached — evil and
good, good and evil, mingled and confused together.
And then the appeal of the servants to the master,
"Wilt thou that we go and gather them up?"
How natural that is! How instantly -<'•, recognize
this quick impatience to get rid of the evil of the
20
THE TARES AND THE WHEAT. 21
world instantly. We cannot think that the master
looked at his eager servants disapprovingly, although
he could not let them do what they wanted to do.
The man who never wanted it would be but a poor
kind of man. He whose heart has never burned
within him to do one great thing which should break
the chain which binds the world's sin to the world,
and let the great black mass fall into the bottomless
pit forever; he who has never longed for one sublime
and final act of self-sacrifice which might unravel the
twisted cords of evil in his own soul and set it free ;
he who has never known these great desires has lived
but a meagre life. There are times when it all seems
so possible, so easy. Wilt thou that we go and
gather them up ? We feel a certain chivalrous spirit
in the words. It is the young knight's confidence
in his good cause and his strong arm. It is the
grasp of the victory before the first sword-stroke has
been given. Let us ride out this bright morning and
settle this troublesome business once for all.
Christ loves that spirit we must certainly believe.
When He puts out His hand in hindrance and says
No! it is not that He is displeased. " Nay," He
says, " it may not be," but yet He blesses and ap-
proves the men who want to do it. And then He
proceeds to teach these men how much more diffi-
cult and deeper is the task than they thought, and
to claim their enthusiasm for the harder duty of
patience and delay.
How had Christ learned the world's wickedness
and the inveteracy of its sin ? We talk about the
need of experience. You shake your head over the
22 THE TARES AND THE WHEAT.
innocent man, who has kept his life pure and bright,
and you say, " O, if he knew as I know how bad
life is, what men are doing in the vile places of the
earth." The eager revivalist, hungry for men's
souls, wanting to make men understand that he
knows whereof he speaks, abounds in hints and sug-
gestions of the depths of vileness out of which he
has come to Christ and pardon. Where did Christ
learn the awfulness of sin ? It came to Him out of
His knowledge of the human heart and out of His
infinite pity for the men whom sin was cursing with
its power. Can you not imagine that a thoughtful
man looking at a steam-engine and seeing its enor-
mous power might picture to himself, though he
had never seen it, the fearful havoc which that
strength must make when in the midst of storm and
darkness it should go plunging from the track and
hurl itself down the embankment ? And can you
not imagine that the very sense in which His own
perfectness of what a perfect man might be must
have made Jesus feel the dreadfulness of everything
which hindered that perfection as no other human
being ever has, because no other human being ever
has been perfect ? These are the elements of Christ's
knowledge of sin. This kind of knowledge of the
world's wickedness must be ever deeper and deeper
in every Christ-like man, for it depends not on how
wicked the man has been himself, but on how pure
he is and how deeply he longs for the goodness of
his fellow-man.
However it has come about there is in Christ the
y deepest knowledge of the sin of man. I do not
THE TARES AND THE WHEAT. 23
know that anybody ever doubted that. I do not
know that among all the strange things which have
been said and written about Christ, anybody has
been ever moved to portray Him as an amiable
optimist who thought the world was perfect and
never caught sight of those abysses of iniquity with
which the history of mankind and of the single soul
is rent and torn. If that had been the impression
which He made upon the world He never could
have been the world's Saviour. What would the
souls of men have had to do with Him, if, when
they came up to Him, they had seen nothing deeper
in His face than mere complacency ? How they
would have turned away from Him. " Let easy
innocence find comfort in His presence. He can be
no Saviour for our souls," men would have said.
There would have been a strange feeling of respect
which could hardly have kept clear of suspicion as
they saw His unsympathetic presence move among
them. Can you not almost see the scene in Jerusa-
lem, when this man, perfectly sinless, and perfectly
unaware of sin, walked through the crowds, in the
temple, on the streets. I can see men rebuked by
Him, hiding their faces from Him, I can almost
picture a strong young man hurrying away from the
sight of Him to suicide, smitten to the heart with
the horror of his deed of sin. I can see pride paling
before Him as it meets the fire of the absolute stand-
ard. All this I see, but not the picture which the
Gospels show, not men and women in their sin
crowding around Him, clutching at His garment,
finding His face full of hope, seeing new life open
24 THE TARES AND THE WHEAT.
before them as they gave themselves to His service.
That sight — and that has been the sight not only of
the Gospel pages, but of Christendom — could not be
possible except under the power of the presence of
one who the sinner was sure knew his sin more
deeply and counted its awfulness more awful than
the sinner did himself.
But we must go farther. It is not merely the
sinfulness of man which is well known to Christ. It
is also the mixture of man's sinfulness with his good-
ness. That is what the parable of the tares deals
with. And that any being must know who really
knows man. Simply to know that man is wicked
is not enough. That makes it very easy, to be sure,
and simplifies the whole problem of man's moral life.
But to know that the world and man are both evil
and good, and that their evil and their good are
subtly mingled with each other, that is the really
real knowledge which he must start with who would
deal wisely with the world or man.
That mingling of the evil and the good deepens
and grows more intimate the more we study it.
First, it is merely that bad men and good men are
living together side by side. There are no regions
of saints and regions of sinners with great gulfs be-
tween them. You cannot judge any man by where
you find him. The pure and vile, the brave and
cowardly, the false and true are all confused and
mixed together. But that is only the beginning.
I Not merely every crowd but every man is all con-
' fusion. No man can absolutely characterize his
neighbor. No man can absolutely characterize him.
f
THE TARES AND THE WHEAT. 2$
self. Every man is good. Every man is bad. You
think that you have found your field of wheat,
your perfect man ; but, lo, as soon as you have
known him, or, still more, as soon as he has opened
to you his knowledge of himself, — there are the
tares, harsh, hard, unfruitful in the very midst of
the golden plenty. You think that you have found
your worthless field of weeds, your absolutely good-
for-nothing man and, just as you are ready to give
it to the fire, behold there comes the yellow wheat
in the very heart of the green tares to startle you.
Nor is this all. Not only in the same man but even
in the same deed the good and evil are commingled.
"At least this act," you say, " is pure and simple."
But when you get below the form of the action to
that which is really it, its spirit and its motive, be-
hold there is the same confusion there. The act of
benevolence flecked and stained with pride ; the self-
restraint which has some self-indulgence at its heart,
truth told for false purposes, religion with some soul
of selfishness. No smallest garden where the wheat
and tares do not crowd and twist in with one an-
other. No purification so complete that something
does not linger to show that this special act is still
a poor man's act with all the mixture in it of his
human infirmity and sin.
All this Christ knows. And then, besides His
knowledge of it, the parable of the tares tells us
something else — which is that He is hopeful about
it, that He declares that this state of sin and confu-
sion is not the final thing. We shall see in a few
moments what is the prophecy which He makes
26 THE TARES AND THE WHEAT.
with regard to the time and way of the solution ;
but now the point is that He makes a prophecy.
He declares that the time is to come when the tares
are to be plucked out and the wheat is to be left
alone, when evil is to be extirpated and good remain.
Is not this the first thing we wish to know about
any man who undertakes to deal with the mixture
of right and wrong ? Does he believe in, is he sure
of, the ultimate triumph of the right, the ultimate
destruction of the wrong? If he does not, then
how dreary grow his lamentations. Christ does !
He is so sure of it; it is so utterly taken for
granted in everything He says, that we cannot find
a direct statement of it, but the whole parable glows
with a certainty at the end — the certainty of the
harvest gathered clean of tares, pure and precious
into the great master's barn,
f With such a certainty as this filling His soul there
can be no such thing as compromise with sin. Com-
promise comes from the belief that sin cannot be
' conquered. A man who is convinced not merely
that things are wrong but that they always must be
wrong, is ready to make a bargain with the inevitable
wickedness. " What is the use of standing out for
an impossibility ? Let us make the best terms we
can. Let us fix a line of modified goodness, of
mitigated wickedness, and live up to that." But
I he who hopes and believes in the ultimate conquest
i and overthrow of all wickedness will have nothing
j to do with such arrangements. He defies the yet
unconquered sin and prophesies its downfall. He
says to the towering, arrogant iniquity of the world
THE TARES AND THE WHEAT. 27
about him, " You are weak, however strong you
seem. I have no bargain to make with you. Some-
time I shall see you perish." He says to the sin in
his own heart, " You are not I, some day you, the
intruder, shall be cast out, and then the true I will
appear."
This was the uncompromising absoluteness of
Jesus. It came from His certain foresight of the
victory of goodness over wickedness. He knew
that it would come. As certainly as if He saw it
here already He knew that it would come. What
use for Him to make treaties with a citadel which
to-morrow was to surrender without conditions, and
to be His to level with the dust.
My dear friend, get a certainty like Christ's and
you will have an uncompromising courage such as
His. Thoroughly believe that the Church is cer-
tainly bound to be spiritual, and the state to be
magnanimous, and society to be pure, and you are
armed — or, what is better than being armed, you
are inspired against the unspirituality of the Church
and the sordidness of the state and the impurity of
social life. This is salvation by faith. Thoroughly
believe that the day shall come when these lusts and
falsehoods and meannesses of yours shall be com-
pletely cast out and destroyed, and you cannot
make any base treaty with them such as you are
making now — that they shall have so much of your
life to themselves if they will leave the rest un-
touched. You cannot sign a treaty of submission
to your tyrant to-day if you believe that you are
going to be free to-morrow.
28 THE TARES AND THE WHEAT.
" To-morrow ! " you say; " yes, if it only were
to-morrow — but it is so very far away. Even if I
do believe that it is coming, it is so very far away.
I must make my terms with the enemy meanwhile,
while we must live together waiting for the end of
things." And then the parable of the tares comes
in, and it appears as if that part of it which I have
quoted for my text at first sight taught this very
compromise which we reject. But it does not.
The master of the field asserts the necessity of time.
He says that the tares are not to be torn out at once,
but (here is the point) he does not for an instant let
the tares and wheat become confused with one an-
other, and he makes the day of their certain separa-
tion shine just as clearly in his picture as the interval
in which they are to go on growing side by side.
For every process must proceed according to the
nature of the things which are involved in it. If I
am going to drive a nail into a piece of wood, a
single strong blow of the hammer drives it home,
but if I am going to set a tree into the soil, I cannot
do it in an instant. Only as the slow vital proc-
esses, the reactions between the root and the ground
begin and advance, so only can the tree really occu-
py the ground and be taken possession of by it. If
I am going to get a superficial habit of action out of
a man's life, a single strong blast of scorn or persua-
sion may blow it away, but if I am to set right the
perversion of a man's soul, to extract from a man's
soul the poison which has seated itself there, noth-
ing but the long sunshine of the grace of God, bring-
ing His healthiness with it, can do the work. In
THE TARES AND THE WHEAT. 2g
proportion to the seriousness and intricacy of the
disorder must be the length and patience of the
cure.
Here is the danger of all those prompt and furious
attacks on sin which shake a great community, and
eagerly demand the instant fulness of the new life
in the converted soul. They are very captivating.
They appeal to a noble impatience in us, we cannot -
help knowing his simple faith, his passionate enthu-
siasm when the revival preacher stands with glowing
face and cries out for the immediate purification of
the world, the immediate perfect holiness of the soul. „
We gladly count him a thousand times more noble
and more reasonable than the calm, sophistical phi-
losopher who reconciles himself to sin as a necessity
and only dreams of some far-off celestial revolution
which on the fields of another life shall shake man
and his sin asunder. But the danger of it all lies
here. Lest men, full of the passion of immediate-
ness, shall think not merely that the great blessed \
process is to be begun but that it also is to be fin- ■
ished, here and now. The danger is that the con-
verted man shall think the new life perfect in him — "'
and what then ? By and by one or the other of two
results is apt to come. Either, in order to keep his '
belief that the new life is actually perfect in him,
the man has to bring down his notion of the new life
and make it match the thing he actually is, or else,
finding, more honestly, how far he is from its per-
fection, how full he is of weakness and of sin, he
thinks because it is not perfect that it is not there
at all, and so gives up in hopelessness.
30 THE TARES AND THE WHEAT.
Far be it from me in any way to disparage the
noble work of the revivalist. Great is the man who
in entire freedom from self-assertion, stands up in
the midst of a community like this, all saturated
with self-conceit and satisfaction, and asserts the
awful presence of sin and bids men, here, now,
while he speaks, while the air thrills with repentance
and petition, give themselves to God and begin
another life. I cannot begin to say how sad, in one
sense how contemptible, appears to me the criticism
of such men glibly and flippantly bestowed by other
men who never have known what it is to be bowed
down, to sigh and cry for the iniquities and abom-
inations and miseries of their own lives and their
brethren's ; but just because I honor him, I long to
see the people whom he touches feel what it is that
must be done, what alone it is that can be done here
in this intense and earnest meeting, or there in that
still, solemn chamber whither the penitent goes to
confess his sins and give his soul to God. Glorious,
at first sight, it would seem to be if there the man
could cast himself down just as he is, with all his
sins upon him, before a present Saviour standing
there with the very nail-prints in his hands and feet,
and then rise up not only forgiven for his sin but
absolutely stripped and freed of it forever. More
glorious, as we know man's nature better, does it
come by and by to appear that out of those doors of
blessing the man should come forgiven, hating his
sin, full of hope, full of the certainty of the day
when he shall be free of it forever; but, for the
present, vowed and consecrated to a struggle with
THE TARES AND THE WHEAT. 3 1
it which is to go on until he dies. Soberer is the
face in which that resolution burns, not yet the
angel's face which shone on Stephen when the stones
came crashing which were to break down the wall of
time and open up the fields of the immortal life.
More like the face of Paul as he went on into Da-
mascus, blind, feeling his way, still. saying over and
over, " Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ? " but
yet calm and determined, past all chance of change,
to live thenceforth the life by the faith of the Son
of God. Sober and earnest and determined, rather
than radiant and triumphant, is this new Christian's
faith. His fight is still before him. The fields of
the great future are thick with struggle. But the
power is within him and the hope before him. Old
things are passed away : all things have become
new.
Now, the parable of the tares goes farther than
the statement of this fact — the fact that prolonged
struggle is necessary for spiritual triumph, that the
victory over sin cannot be an instantaneous thing.
It tells us why. It gives us a reason for this neces-
sity. Let us see whether we can understand the
reason and recognize it in ourselves. Jesus says,
Lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also
the wheat with them." Behold, he says, if you
were instantly to obliterate the chance of evil you
would also injure the chance of good. Strange doc-
trine, so it seems at first, but not strange for more
than the first moment to any one who really knows
the nature and centralness of that great thing, the
human will. The will is at the root of everything.
32 THE TARES AND THE WHEAT.
By the will alone is any action good or bad. An
unwilled action has no moral character. No treat-
ment of a man then must meddle with his will or
do any mischief to that central seat of character.
But the will changes not from without, save as it is
touched by motives which enter into it and make
part of itself. Its real motives and changes are
from within. Any action from whatever source it
came which did not act on man through his will,
which treated him as a willess thing, would weaken
his morality, would enfeeble it on every side, in its
power of being good as well as in its power of being
bad. And the desire to pluck out evil from a life
by foreign force, without the life's consent first,
even — which is what every desire of instantaneous
perfection ultimately comes to — is therefore an in-
jury done to the whole will power of the life, mak-
ing it less capable of goodness as it becomes less
capable of sin.
Let me not state it too abstractly and philosoph-,
ically. Here is your ghild. Wrong as all children
are, just because they are human creatures, how
shall you set him right? Is not the whole problem
of your education this — to educate the will and not
to break it. Perhaps it might be easy with all the
tremendous purchase of your parental power to
break your child's will if you chose. But what have
you got, then ? A poor, spiritless, willess creature,
incapable of good as he is incapable of evil, with
nothing to contribute to either side of the great
battle of humanity which is going on about him.
A victim first and then a hindrance. That is not
THE TARES AND THE WHEAT. 33
what you want. To keep the will, to fill it -vrith
more and more life, but to make it so wise that it
shall spend its strength in goodness — that is your
true ambition as the trainer of your child. And
when some friend, disheartened with your slowness
comes to you and says, " Why do you not settle
the whole matter once for all by breaking the child's
will to pieces, and compelling obedience whether he
wants to obey you or not ? " — and you reply, " I
cannot do that — obedience won in that way would
not be obedience. To prevent badness so, would
be to prevent goodness also." What is that con-
versation but the translation into household lan-
guage of the old conversation of the farmer and his
servants. " Wilt thou that we go and gather up
the tares ?" " Nay, lest while ye gather up the
tares ye root up also the fruit with them."
This is the danger of all systems of salvation \
which are repressive and protective, and not stimu- ;
lative and inspiring. They range all the way from '
the mediaeval cloister to the most modern Protestant
system of subduing the rebellious will under the
terrors of the law of God. They all have this same
fault. They all strive to make vice impossible by an
expedient which, if it succeeded, would make virtue
impossible as well. They all forget or ignore the
truth that not to hinder wickedness but to create
goodness is the real purpose of all moral culture —
that the highest goodness in this state of existence
necessarily includes the highest power of being bad.
The most celestial existence stands in danger of the
greatest fall. This is the meaning of the strange
34 THE TARES AND THE WHEAT.
picture of Lucifer, son of the morning, flung from
heaven into the depths of darkness.
Let both grow together." Those words, then,
tell the story of man's present life. But they are
not the last words of the parable. " Let both grow
together until the harvest." Are not these just the
final words we need. They bring in just the intima-
tion which the verse requires. For they declare
that however impossible now may be the separation
of the evil and the good, however necessary it may
be that they should go on thus inextricable, min-
gled with each other, that is not an everlasting
necessity. The time will come when the good may
shake itself free from the evil and go its way, un-
hindered, unendangered, with no prospect save of
ever-ripening and increasing goodness forever.
What would life be without such a promise ? With
such a promise who can exaggerate, who can de-
scribe the richness and significance of living ? Do
you ask me what life is to mean for you, my friend ?
Can you tell me ? " you say. And I answer that
I think I can, because Christ has told us all in this
great parable. Life is to mean for you one long
struggle. You are to do right with the same powers
with which you might do wrong. Never a holy
deed that might not, if you chose that it should be
so, be unholy. Your will is to be trained and
strengthened by choosing to be good where it is
perfectly possible for you to be bad. This is to go
on year after year, year after year, till it has done
in you a work which this, and nothing except this,
can do, and then, not until then, shall come another
THE TARES AND THE WHEAT. 35
condition, which then, and not until then, shall be
possible, in which struggle shall be over, and with-
out a danger of wickedness you shall go on ripening
in holiness in the unhindered sunshine of God for-
ever. That is the harvest, " When will it come;
must I wait till I am dead ? Can it come only in
Heaven?" It must be like all Heaven, O my
friend, fully to be realized only in the perfect world,
but capable of indefinite anticipation and approxi-
mation here. It shall come gradually, and not by
one sudden flash and shock. More and more as the
wheat ripens it must separate itself from the tares.
More and more as the man does right in danger, he
grows out of the danger of doing wrong, until, be-
yond the mystery of death, that which began this
side of it becomes complete, and, garnered into the
barns of God, the wheat knows no more of the tares
forever.
Struggle until, through struggle, struggle is out-
grown. Is there any nobler picture of life which a
brave, strong, patient man could ask than that.
That is what Christ offers in His parable. May He
help us all to feel the beauty and inspiration of that
life, and to attempt it and live it by His grace.
III.
THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION.
" Then Satan answered the Lord and said, Doth Job serve God
for nought?" — Job i. 9.
This question has all of Satan's disposition in it.
For Satan in the Bible is the slanderer. The essence
of his wickedness seems always there to lie in his
suspiciousness and his refusal to allow anybody any
goodness. It is the spirit of simple comprehensive
hatred. He hates God and he hates man. He
grudges them to one another. He will not let God
have satisfaction in man nor man have satisfaction
in God if he can help it. He hates goodness and
he hates the human soul. He would banish good-
ness from the earth and he would starve the human
soul if he could.
We can recognize the true Satanic character of
such a disposition. It is genuine, essential wicked-
ness. It is distinctly different from the hot impet-
uosity of evil into which a soul is carried by some
overwhelming provocation or by some apparent per-
sonal advantage. It is a hatred of goodness because
it is good, and of man because he is man. We
shudder at it ; we say how terrible it is. And yet
36
THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION. 37
the echoes of it are all around us. Happy is the
man who has not felt the echo of it within him.
The preference of evil rather than good. The choice
of the worse construction of a man's life and action
rather than the better. The dislike of thinking good
where it is possible to think evil. These are the
Satan tempers wherever they appear. And who has
not seen them in the faces of men and women walk-
ing on our streets as well as in the subtle and malig-
nant face which looks out from the great poem on
the day when " the sons of God came to present
themselves before the Lord and Satan came also
among them."
But Satan is very clever as well as very wicked,
and so, while we denounce his slandering, each
special slander may well seem worthy of our study.
I am most foolish if I do not listen while my worst
enemy abuses me to see if out of his abuse I may
not catch some intimation of where my weakness
lies and what my faults are. This is the blessing
which may come to us from the men who abuse us.
They may set us to thinking about ourselves. So
we may listen while Satan slanders Job. The great
arch-slanderer insists that Job's religion is selfish-
ness. " Doth Job serve God for naught? " If Job
in Uz had heard what Satan said " before the
Lord," we can imagine that questions might have
been started in his pious mind. " Was there then
selfishness in his devoutness ? " As he looked up
and saw the vast abundance of his wealth, and knew
in his soul that God had given him it all, must he
not have asked himself, "Is it for this, then, that
38 THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION.
I serve God ?" and may he not have almost re-
joiced in the malignancy of Satan since it induced
God to put to proof that which the pious soul was
almost ready to suspect itself.
Then comes the wonderfully rich and subtle
poem. The heart of Job is searched and opened
and learns to know itself. Its motives are dissected
and exposed. The man learns to know himself in
all his weaknesses. He learns also to know himself
in his essential loyalty and love to God. And at
last the poem closes with the picture of a restored
prosperity in which there could be no suspicion, and
Job dies in the last verse, " old and full of days,"
sure that he served God for something more than
flocks and herds, and offering the pattern of unsel-
fish righteousness to all the ages.
The subject which the question of the slanderer
suggests, then, is, " The Motive of Religion." For
us, too, there comes the same question. We listen,
and the Bible teems with promises. We look, and
all experience holds up the prizes of life and says,
" These shall belong to him who serves the Lord."
Health, happiness, and good repute, nay, even, in
the long run, prosperity and wealth are promised to,
are given to, the man who lives uprightly and keeps
his garments clean and his hands busy. The wicked
man is threatened with disgrace and ruin. The idle
apprentice sees himself in imagination behind iron
bars. With many exceptions and suspensions, the
rule is true that all things work together for God's
children. It would be evident beforehand that, this
being the case, the souls of earnest Christians should
THE MOTIVE OF RELlGl'O'N. 39
come to questions with themselves and wonder what
it was that really bound them to their faith. The
more devout and earnest is the soul the more it
often must be troubled. The question is not one
that stays outside and is asked only by the captious
Satan in the street. It finds its way within. Nay,
very often it starts up within and feeds itself on the
soul's best dispositions and desires. It haunts our
struggles and enfeebles them. Surely it must be
good for us to face such a question and give it its
answer. This is what I shall try to do as I speak to
you about the motive of religion.
And the first thing we say is this : that while Job's
whole soul may revolt at the notion of his serving
God for gain, he cannot escape from his perplexity
by denying the fact, or by insisting that he shall get
no gain out of serving God. The fact is that, in the
long run and in the large view, prosperity and the
service of God are bound together. That is the
idea of life. That is what our sense of justice
demands. And no man must deny that fact as it
applies itself to his own life. It is not by burning
his barns and killing his cattle that Job will get rid
of his difficulties and answer the question of his
motive in serving God.
It is remarkable to see how really the Bible has
two classes of utterances. On the one hand it has
such promises as those which I have just been quot-
ing, which offer blessings to obedience and assure
men that if they serve God they shall prosper. On
the other hand there are such words as those of Jesus
in which he frankly told his disciples that in the
40 THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION.
world they should "have tribulation " in proportion
as they belonged to him. It is very interesting to
put these two sorts of utterances together and ask
what will be the total impression which is the result-
ant in the mind of him who believes them both.
No doubt he will decide that what they mean is the
certainty that righteousness will come to happiness
in the end, but will have to pass through much of
suffering upon the way. And, if he be wise, the
practical rule by which the man will try to live will
be the forgetfulness of consequences altogether, the
ceasing to think whether happiness or unhappiness
is coming, and the pursuit of righteousness for its
own sake, the being upright, brave and true, simply
because uprightness, bravery, and truth are the only
worthy conditions of a human soul. Great is the
condition of a man who thus lets rewards take care
of themselves, come if they will or fail to come, but
goes on his way true to the truth simply because it
is true, strongly loyal to the right for its pure right-
eousness.
I say. this first to show that the whole question of
the benefit of goodness is not a fundamental ques-
tion. There is a power of goodness to hold men
quite behind its benefit. He who is good in the
highest way is as unwilling to talk about the benefit
of goodness as about the benefit of friendship.
But, having said this, it is necessary that we
should go on and see that as a fact goodness has its
benefits and to recognize how helpful the right use
of them may be in the development and training of
a soul. We need not fear to use them. Jesus uses
THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION. 4I
them freely. All that we need is to understand how
they may be rightly used ; how a man may rejoice
in all the blessings which come to him from serving
God, and yet not have to own to himself that he
serves God for hire.
The answer to the question, the solution of the
difficulty, seems to me to lie in the way in which the
whole thought of reward is capable of elevation and
enlargement and the way in which, as it becomes
elevated and enlarged, it sloughs off and casts aside
the evils and dangers which belonged to it in its
lower forms and becomes purer and purer and more
and more capable of good, and good alone.
Where does such elevation and enlargement
begin ? Take first the idea of reward in its most
palpable and simple form. Take it in its Old Tes-
tament form, wherein it promises the direct material
recompense here and now of all the good things that
men do. It has its beauty, but its beauty is of the
most crude and primitive sort. It thinks of the
outer and the inner world as if they were in perfect
correspondence and answered immediately to each
other. The field stands watching the faithful man,
and when he does another faithful thing it praises
him with a new wheat sheaf or a new olive tree.
The faithful man sees in the multiplication of his
cattle or the enlargement of his palace the direct and
necessary testimony of his faithfulness. There is
something very attractive because there is something
very true in that idea. It makes the earth a unit.
In the world in which it should be true without dis-
turbance there must come to be a noble sense of
42 THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION.
harmony and peace. Even half-true as it is here,
the gHmpses which we catch of its half-truth are full
of fascination. But we can see also what its dangers
are. We can see why it is good that here, while
man is what man is now, it should be only half, and
not altogether true. So immediate, so infallible, so
correspondent then, would come the echo of blessing
on the deed of duty, that echo and deed might well
become confused in the soul of the duty-doer, and
it might easily appear as if not the doing of the duty
but the getting of the blessing were the final and
important thing. The man himself, expecting the
reward to fill immediately the hands out of which
the tools had dropped might well hear his own heart
saying to him, "Ah, you are well paid for what you
do. Do you serve God for nought ? "
2. We pass on to another motive, when we think
of the Christian as looking for blessing not in this
hfe but in the life beyond the grave. " I shall be
happy in Heaven," says the servant of Christ ; " I
can wait. The glory and the bliss that are to be
revealed are well worth waiting for. I can suffer for
these few years, sure of the freedom from suffering
which I am to have forever and ever." What mul-
titudes of souls have fed upon this certainty. What
multitudes are feeding on it now and gathering great
strength and patience.
And we can see at once that this expectation of
celestial reward has left behind much of the danger
of the anticipation of reward to be received on earth.
In the first place it never can be so distinct and defi-
nite. It cannot take clear concrete shapes to the
THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION. 43
ambitious desires, like houses and lands and bags of
money, and the visible, audible tokens of men's
esteem. Being of necessity less sharp and distinct
before the imagination, the prizes of the celestial life
may well appear more spiritual and the terms of
their attainment may seem less arbitrary, more essen-
tial. Thus they may be the means of higher and
purer inspiration.
And then, again, there is the fact that they are
far away and must be waited for. The goodness
must be here and now. The crown of the goodness
is not till by and by. Self-sacrifice to-day. But
the recompense of self-sacrifice only when the grave
is past and eternity begun. Evidently that sort of
expectation has a power of spiritual education. It
demands patience and hope. It compels the sacri-
fice of the seen and present for the unseen and fu-
ture. It calls for faith, the trust in a promise where
assurance must rest upon the perceived character of
the promiser. There must be self-control and that
communion with God which the child has with the
father whom he perfectly trusts, but who withholds
from him for a time the gifts which he will certainly
bestow on him some day. These are great things
for the soul to have. The discipline which gives
these things to the soul is very rich and bountiful.
It cannot be stigmatized as mercenary; and yet
still it is a service for a personal reward. Still even
of the expectant saint who stands in the midst of
present sorrows and surrenders with his glowing
face lifted and his eager eye fixed on the celestial
joys, — even of him the question may be asked.
44 THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION.
emptied of all its bitterness and jealousy, perhaps,
but intrinsically the same question still, " Does he
serve God for nought ? " Who would not sacrifice
much, yea everything, in these few years of time to
be rewarded with a whole eternity of joy!
3. It is a great step forward which we take when
we pass on to the next motive and come to character
as the essential reward and true ambition of a noble
life. For then we pass beyond all of what commonly
are meant by consequences, and our thought is fixed
upon intrinsic qualities as the true result and re-
compense of struggle after righteousness. " If I do
these brave things I shall be brave." " If I resist
this temptation to impurity I shall be pure."
Bravery and purity as real possessions of the soul;
as real, nay, far more real than houses and oxen and
bags of gold — these make the new ambition. What
has become, then, of the old question ? Is it not
clear that while it has not disappeared, has not ceased
to be asked, it has been marvellously purified and
refined ? The asking of it now does not strike shame
but sends the glow of joyous gratitude into the soul
of the saint conscious of the lofty benefaction which
he has received. " Do you serve God for nought ? "
" Do you not serve God for nought ?" someone
asks almost scornfully of the doer of righteousness,
whose righteous life has brought poverty, and sick-
ness, and friendlessness. " For nought ? " comes
back the answer, " surely not ! For everything!
He pays me in the richest coin and most abundantly.
I cannot take into my hands and hold out for you
to count, the prizes which He gives me. I cannot
THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION. 45
even show you pledges and promises written in a
book signed with His name, assuring me that they
shall be mine upon some far-off day, but they are
mine here and now. I am a better man — that is my
reward for being good." Do you not see how ques-
tion and answer are transfigured. Mounting up to-
gether into the heavenly world of character, they
have shaken the dust and mist of the low earth off
of their wings. Now let the soul number its gains
and count its treasures. They are so fine that they
refine the hands which count them. They cannot
beget pride, for their whole soul and essence is hu-
mility. Still there is selfishness, self-love, but it is
a love of such a deep self that it is a love also both
of all goodness and of all who are seeking to be
good. It tends to sympathy and not to rivalry.
How far away it has come from the first craving for
reward which sought for the recompense of a holy
life in benefits which the ledger could count and the
pocket could contain.
One great and striking fact about this gradual ele-
vation of the reward of goodness is that the higher
it becomes the easier it is to think of it as universal.
The highest and most spiritual blessings are like fire.
They lend themselves and multiply their flame from
point to point without robbery or grudge. One
does not have them less because his brother has
them. He rather has them more. But the lower
blessings are limited in quantity. They are not like
fire, but like gold. The more one has the less there
is for others. This always has appeared. When-
ever the proper rewards of a religious life have
46 THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION.
seemed to be houses and lands and cattle, there has
always been, hovering about, the notion of a chosen
people, a favorite selection of humanity to whom
belonged the privilege of being holy and appropriat-
ing the rewards of holiness. Whenever character
has seemed to be intrinsically, in itself, the recom-
pense of righteousness, the clouds have rolled away
and men have seen the vision of a whole human race
doing the will of God and finding the fulfilment of
its life in that obedience. It is a great token of the
truth of any idea, that it claims universality, that
men who look at it see at once that, if it were ac-
cepted as true, it would not be satisfied with offering
its solution to some one small corner of the human
problem, but would demand the privilege of offering
its key to the whole. And this witness of itself,
this motive of religion, which consists in the essen-
tial value of character, abundantly bears.
4. Have we yet reached the end ? Is there a
higher motive still ? I think there is. A motive,
or perhaps we ought to say a range of motives,
which yet more completely casts aside and leaves
behind the taint of mercenariness while it still pre-
sents a true prize to the uplifted eye of the struggler
with his sins and the seeker for goodness. This
range of motives is inspired by two ideas. One of
these ideas is the honor which man by his holiness
may render to God. The other is the help which
man by his holiness may render to his fellow-man.
You go to your Christian friend, your fellow-student,
your fellow-merchant, your fellow-man. You say to
him, " You are serving God." And he replies,
THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION. 47
" Yes, certainly I am, and I am always trying to serve
Him more and more "; and then you ask Satan's
question, "Is it for nothing that you serve Him ?
Do you serve God for nought ? " And he repHes
again, " O, no. He pays me bountifully." And
then you say, " Tell me what does He give you."
And the answer comes, " He gives me the privilege
of honoring Him and helping my fellow-men."
What then ? It may be that these rewards seem to
be no reward to you. It may be that you look into
his face as if you looked upon an idiot, and wondered
what distortion of the mind could let him care for
things like these. But none the less you see that he
did care for them. They make for him a great
enthusiasm. They are his " exceeding great re-
ward." And if you let yourself go on and ask, not
of him but of yourself, " Will that sort of reward
lead to mercenariness ? " the only answer must be,
" No ! " For behold here the last touch of selfish-
ness has passed away. The man is not even asking
whether he is becoming a better man. He is not
thinking of Heaven. He is certainly not counting
his bank stocks and his barns. He is intensely aware
of God the absolutely glorious and man the actually
needy. He is full of the healthy sense that glory
ought to be manifested and need, ought, to be
relieved. He believes that if he serves God both of
these ends will in some way, in some degree, be
brought about, and so he bends him to his work and
knows, whether he can trace it in its detail or not,
that God is more honored and man less miserable
because of the life he lives.
48 THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION.
Those who have never felt it cannot know how
this great motive takes possession of a man. Think
how it had possession of the Lord. " My meat is
to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His
work." And at the last, " I have glorified Thee."
" These whom thou gavest me I have kept."
Think of the purpose of his coming which the
angels sang, " Glory to God," etc. What shall we
say of Jesus ? " Did he serve God for nought ? "
Truly it was not comfort or wealth which repaid
him. The foxes and the birds seemed, by that
test, more the favorites of God than he. And
though he looked forward with joy to the time when
his weary work should be over and he should go to
his Father's House, it was not as recompense that
that eternal joy offered itself to him. And we do
not know how far he dwelt consciously on his own
growth and the fulfilment of his perfect nature.
But this is beyond all doubt or question — that day
by day he found the impulse and the reward of his
work in the glory of his Father and the salvation
of mankind. Was ever man held by his motive as
Jesus was by His ? It led Him directly to His cross,
but He never hesitated or drew back. It was enough.
Let us never call that a small, or a vague, or an
impossible motive, which has made the pattern life
of humanity — the life of the Son of Man !
These, then, are the advancing motives. These
are the higher and higher, the purer and purer bene-
fits which come to him who gives himself to God to
be His servant. Do you not see now what I meant
when I said that each higher and purer motive casr
THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION. 49
off and left behind something of the quality of pos-
sible evil which had belonged to those below it ?
The loftiness insures the safety. It is not, of
course, that the lower motive passes away. It is
only put in its true place. The man who mounts so
high that his controlling desire is to serve his fellow-
men still thanks God that his most external life is
filled with mercy, and that the world beyond the
grave is bright with promises and that his soul is
ripening under divine culture. All these are with
him as desires and as gratitudes, but, dominating
them all and giving each its true proportion, is this
great dedication. And in its power the other mo-
tives keep their place and lose their danger.
Is there not here a glimpse, such as one delights
to get, into the great future ? The search for earthly
happiness, the sense that happiness and goodness
naturally and appropriately go together is never
going to be eradicated from the life and soul of man.
The craving for celestial bliss will always make one
of the deepest passions of the heart which believes
in eternity at all. The ambition for character must
forever be the mainspring of much of the noblest of
human action. But the first will be kept from run-
ning wild into a mere hunt for luxury, and the
second from filling life with unreality and other
worldHness, and the third from corrupting into
morbid self-consciousness, only as they all are
surrounded and commanded by the great unselfish
wish to glorify God and to serve fellow-man. There
is the only atmosphere in which the pursuit of
wealth and the desire of heaven and the craving for
50 THE MOTIVE OF RELIGION.
culture are kept healthy, sound, and true. There is
the secret of a holy energy in the heart of which all
a man's best activity finds place and stimulus.
There is a reward of serving God which casts the
taunt of Satan back into his face, or rather (shall we
not say ?) which seizes it and carries it as a very
flag of inspiration and of triumph.
" Dost thou serve God for nought ?" O, no!
His wages are unspeakable. Day by day (so the
obedient soul replies), day by day I find in serving
Him the privilege of ministering to His glory and of
helping these children of His who are my brethren.
Day by day the sufficiency of that reward grows
manifest. It is enough. It is so m.uch that all
besides is either included in it or is made unneces-
sary. Without it, all other wages would be woefully
unsatisfactory. To be rich, to go to heaven, even
to be good, what would they be if I could not
glorify God and help my fellow-men. No! I do
not " serve God for nought." His reward not
merely satisfies but overwhelms me with its rich-
ness.
With such attraction let us tempt our souls and
the souls of our brethren. O taste and see that the
Lord is good, blessed is the man that trusteth in
Him. Who will not come to such a service ? Who
will not give his heart and life to such a God ?
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
" And Elisha prayed and said, * Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes,
that he may see.' And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man ;
and he saw : and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and
chariots of fire round about Elisha." — 2 Kings vi. 17.
It is an old Hebrew story. Many people are
fond of exhorting ministers not to preach about the
old Hebrews, to let the sins and virtues of the Is-
raelites go, and to talk to the present century about
its own affairs. No doubt the exhortation some-
times may be needed, but it is often very foolishly
given. What we want is not to let the wonderful
history of that ancient people go, but rather to
study it far more deeply and wisely. We want to
save our present life from being a poor extemporised
thing by seeing how God was teaching lessons for
this age of ours and for every age, centuries ago.
Never was there a history in which God's working
was so manifest, never was there a nation whose evil
and whose good was so suggestive. Long may it be
before ministers stop preaching and people stop
thinking about the ancient Hebrews. It would be
the closing of the sublimest leaves of the long human
storv. We cannot know how much flatter, vulgarer.
52 UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
and tamer these halls of our common humanity
would seem if they no longer felt the tread and
echoed to the voices of the giants of the Old Testa-
ment— Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, Jeremiah.
Our story to-day is of EHsha. Let me recall it to
you in its few facts, and then see what it means,
and how it touches all our life. The king of
Syria was making war upon the king of Israel, and
the prophet Elisha knew and exposed his plans.
The king sent out to capture and destroy the trouble-
some prophet. He sent a whole army, " horses and
chariots and a great host, ' ' and they came by night
and compassed the city about, and when the servant
of the man of God was risen early and gone forth,
behold, an host compassed the city both with horses
and chariots. And his servant said unto him, "Alas,
my master, how shall we do ? " And he answered,
" Fear not, for they that be with us are more than
they that be with them." And Elisha prayed, and
said, " Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may
see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young
man ; and he saw : and, behold, the mountain was
full of horses and chariots of fire round about
Elisha."
There is the story. Would it not be hard to lose
its majestic simplicity, because it is a Hebrew story,
and what it tells of happened long ago ? What
modern story will rise up and take its place ?
And yet the essence of the story belongs to every
time. That is exactly its value. See what it is. A
young man believes in and follows the prophet of
God. He stands by the cause of righteousness and
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS. 53
truth. He does not desert it when it is attacked.
He sees the danger and he fears, but there is no
sign that he wants to run away. ** Alas, how shall
I do ? " he cries, with the great host of the enemy
gathering about him and his master. He is in dan-
ger and he is in earnest. And then, a vision is
given him. He sees what champions are gathered
in the interests of truth. What seemed to be dark-
ness and weakness becomes peopled with forms of
light and strength, and the young man sees that his
beset and persecuted life is really stronger than its
persecutors, and takes courage and stands by to see
his enemies struck with blindness and thrown into
confusion.
There is in every young man's soul something
which is to him what Elisha was to the young man
of our story — something prophetic. The higher
nature through some of its deep needs or lofty im-
pulses is always trying to open the eyes of our lower
and despondent nature to see the divine and hopeful
powers which are at work upon our life. There is
in all our temporariness and earthliness something
which connects itself with eternity and the spiritual
life. This is to the fearful and despondent part of
us what the courageous prophet was to the terrified
young man. In that conflict between hope and
fear, between courage and despair, which is always
going on within us when we undertake any great
work and see its dangers, it seems to me as if we
could hear the better and stronger part of us plead-
ing with God for the worse and weaker part, as
Elisha prayed for his young servant — " Lord, I
54 UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
pray thee, open his eyes that he may see." And
when I see the more spiritual and hopeful temper of
a community or of the world always struggling with
the blindness and fear that presses on it, again it
seems as if the prophet were begging in behalf ot
the duller sight and lower life beside him. " Lord,
open his eyes." If there be any discouragement in
any good task, any fear at the sight of what a mul-
titude of enemies beset every man's endeavor to do
right, if there be dismay or disheartenment in any
soul here, that still is determined to try to serve
God (and I do not believe that you can get so many
people together as there are here without having
many such souls among them), to them I think the
old Hebrew story speaks, and I should be very
thankful if I could so unfold its meaning as to send
them away with a little better hope and faith and
courage.
Our subject, then, is this — the unseen spiritual
helpers. What are the genuine realities that answer
to the horses and chariots that the young man saw
when his eyes were opened ?
In the first and most general sense, then, I think
that spiritual help comes to us when the tasks and
duties of our life show us their real purposes and
meanings. Each of us is engaged in doing some-
thing in this world, and here this morning, in the
church's wide charity, we will suppose that every-
one of us is trying to do faithfully his special work.
There are school-boys and school-girls with their
lessons, and men with their businesses, and men
with their patients and their clients, fathers and
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS. 55
mothers with their children, church officers with
their cares for the church — all of us with our various
connections with one another that burst out every-
where with duties. And I do not suppose that any
of us keep constantly in such sympathetic relation
to our occupations that the form of our occupations
does not often present itself to us as an enemy. It
seems to be trying to crush us, the routine, the
drudgery, the hardship of what we have to do ; we
feel our life slowly being pressed out of us by the
hard tyranny of our work. And then what comes ?
The only thing that can defend us against the
tyranny of the form is the power of the spirit of our
work. If you had a business friend who seemed to
you most in danger of being conquered by the form
of his business life, as so many are, of being made
mean and narrow and machine-like, how would you
try to save him ? Would you not feel sure that
if you could make him feel the most sacred pur-
poses of business life, such unselfish purposes, as
charity, and the public weal, and the culture of
character, you would have armed him against the
lower influences of his trade most safely ? These
are the champions he needs. In every occupation
which a man has any right to be engaged in in this
world there is a spirit that underlies the form, and
it is only by appealing to the protection of the spirit
that we can truly strengthen ourselves against the
despotisms of the form. We grow afraid, I think,
of the form of everything we do, even our worship,
so that the tongue falters at the formal prayer, for
fear lest its act of reverence should be the most
56 UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
irreverent. What shall we do in such a world of
danger ? And then, when the Lord opens our eyes
to see the souls of these hard, formal things, and
we discover how they are always trying to protect
their servants from the oppression of formality, and
so we take courage for our tasks again, is not that,
over again, the blessed vision that the Lord showed
to Elisha's servant when Elisha prayed ? Is it not
as if we saw horses and chariots upon the mountains
stronger than the horses and chariots which we see
here upon the plain ? We learn that the spirit is
stronger than the form, and we take courage. What
prayer could his best friend ask for a young man, in
the sordid dangers of this common life, than just
this " Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may
see always the spiritual meanings and purposes of
the things thou givest him to do ? " If that prayer
is answered, he must go forth with a brave, pro-
tected soul.
But while this certainly is true, it is not the main
thing; it would not come to much if there were not
very much more behind it. When we speak of our
spiritual helpers, we mean most of all those actually
existent beings, those persons living a higher life than
ours, whose life is capable of touching ours and aid-
ing it, the knowledge of whose existence and whose
readiness to help us makes us more brave to face the
dangers that we meet with because we are not facing
them alone. Of all such beings, whether there be
only one or multitudes, who can be made known to
us, one stands above all others, one stands eternally
alone, because all others get whatever help they have
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS. $7
to give us primarily from Him ; they are His instru-
ments and ministers. That one is God. The true
unveiUng of the human eye, the true sight that gives
courage to a human heart, is the sight of the Divine
Father standing above all our struggling life, look-
ing down into it with love, with pity, and ready to
strike down our enemies the moment that they grow
too strong for us. Get what support we may out
of the essential dignity and spirituality of our work
itself, still its great spiritual m.eaning must always
be that it was given us to do by God our Father.
That is its real beauty. That is its true glory. And
so our first discovery of spiritual help was really only
an anticipation of this, the great strength of a soul
which comes to the sight of a father and knows that
it is not fighting alone but God watches and works
for it above. It is the bewildered soldier looking
up out of the dust and smoke and blood, and seeing
his captain standing calm and watchful up there
where he can survey the whole field and manage the
whole battle.
This is the wonder of the life of Jesus Christ.
The incarnation was the close meeting of God and
man. They had been struggling together. Man
had been fitfully reaching out after God. God had
been patiently offering himself to man from the
beginning. In Jesus Christ they met. What was
the issue ? A perfectly strong and brave humanity !
What made that humanity so brave and strong ?
Was it not this, that it was always seeing God ?
We think it strange that Jesus could stand so
bravely before the Pharisees and the Romans and
58 UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
feel no fear. Was it strange if His Father were
closer to Him than Romans and Pharisees all the
while and hid them from Him ; if the trumpets and
the chariots upon the mountain were so loud in His
ears that He could not hear the clatter of the hosts
upon the plain? Our Pharisees are so much nearer
and clearer to us than our Father. The secret of
courage is so simple after all. We do not fear the
danger when we see the defence, so that courage —
anything above the mere animal courage of the sav-
age— is clear-sightedness. And yet men talk as if
the belief in a protecting Father, a true God, were
a mere matter for discussion and debate, and did not
tell right home upon the strength and grace and
happiness of every human life.
But let us be a little more definite. We say that
*' seeing God " is the source and secret of all true
courage. What do we really mean by seeing God ?
As soon as we own that the sight of the bodily eyes
is impossible, we own that there is a figurative ele-
ment in the expression. Let us see what it is. To
see God, then, I think, may be separated into these
three elements. First, it is to recognize His char-
acter as the ruling law of the universe. The quali-
ties of God we know. They are involved in our
very conception of Him. He is righteous, just,
loving, true, pure. Now when your eyes are opened,
you see these divine principles running everywhere.
All history is the story of their development ; all life
is hung upon them. Their imperiousness and love-
liness appear on every side. You look down into
every cleft of life and there they lie under all. You
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS. $9
look in through every shell of life, and there they
work behind all. They are everywhere. God is
everywhere. And seeing them you see God.
And, secondly, to see God is to see God's pur-
poses in everything. The two are one in essence,
but different in apprehension. But when the world
opens to you as a plan of God, when all existence is
vocal with His meanings, when His intentions thread
the universe, so that he who reads human progress,
in its largeness or its littleness, reads God's will;
that, again, is seeing God.
And still more to see God is to be conscious of
our own spiritual relations to Him, to know as a
comfort and a motive that He loves us, to be sur-
rounded with His companionship, to find that what
we do depends not merely upon what He is but
upon His being present with us; in a word, to love
our Father with an active love — that is a life for
which the devout soul finds no adequate description
but that it is " seeing God."
This, then, is what we mean by " seeing God."
It is to have the whole world as we think of it, as
we live in it, full of His character, His purposes, and
His love. Do we not understand, then, what we
mean when we say that Jesus Christ in His incarna-
tion was the prophet by whom such a sight of God
became possible to men. He brought the righteous-
ness of God and made it manifest, a clear fact where
all men could read it. He laid it like a new silver
light across the murky surfaces that we were all
familiar with. He made the lives of fishermen and
publicans the scaffolding on which He hung its ex-
6o UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
hibition. And so, too, He made the purposes oi
God the great important lives along which all exist-
ence ran. He let us see that the course of the
great nations and the current of quiet lives were all
running the way that one supreme and omnipresent
will had chosen. And of the love of God, what
shall we say ? He wove its records everywhere.
He spun it in the color of the lily and made us hear
it in the noiseless fall of the sparrow. He made all
sorrow and all joy its ministers. And then at last
He hung it on a cross so high that no pride could
tower so high as to overlook it, so low that no most
abject humility could fall so low as not to be within
its light. This is what Jesus did. He did not bring
God into the world. God forbid we should think
that ! God had never been out of the world He
made and loved. He touched the world with His
life and made it everywhere a luminous utterance of
God. And then, what else ? He opened the blind
eyes of every man who would become His servant,
and bid him see. He regenerated man. He brought
him back, that is, into the first condition, lost so
long, in which his eyes were open and he could see
the God who was everywhere. " To as many as
believed Him, to them gave He power to become
the Sons of God." He redeemed man. He brought
him back into the Eden of the perfect reconciliation.
Once more he might see God. No longer with the
eyes of sense but all the more clearly to the inner
vision of the renewed obedient soul, the Lord God
walked with man among the trees of the garden of
the Christian life.
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS. 6l
How else shall we explain the courage which is
always coming to the weakest and most timid Chris-
tian hearts ? We are here frightened and perplexed
with the distresses and the enemies, the doubts and
the disasters of our lives; we are beset on every
side. And then we cry out to our master and our
prophet, " What shall we do ? " And He prays to
His Father for us. " Lord, I pray thee, open his
eyes that he may see." He prays His own media-
torial prayer, " Father, I will that they whom Thou
hast given me to be with me where I am, that they
may see my glory which Thou hast given me."
And then God does open our eyes and we see Him
in Christ even as Christ sees Him, and the world
cannot terrify us or make us afraid, for the Friend
we see above is stronger and more real than the
enemy we see below, and we rest in the satisfied
knowledge of His righteousness and will and love,
the satisfied sight of Him.
And now can we not go farther still when we are
talking of our unseen spiritual helpers ? We go
with timid feet, not sure of the ground we walk on
and yet sure that there is ground, and irresistibly
impelled to feel for it and find it. We cannot sepa-
rate ourselves from the great human conviction that
beside the supreme personal life of God, which is the
source of all existence, there are other spiritual be-
ings, of many varying orders, who do His will, who
help His children, and are the emanations of his life
in other worlds as man is here in this grosser world
of flesh and blood. The divine existence multiplies
62 UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
itself. The company of spiritual beings who sur-
round Him with their loyalty and love, the angels
in countless orders sweeping upward from the minis-
ters of man's lower wants up to those who stand
nearest to the throne — all these in some belief or
other have been included in the faith of every race
of men, of almost every man, who had come to the
knowledge of a spiritual world and trusted in a God.
We must not rob ourselves of the strength and rich-
ness that the thought of their existence has to give.
What shall we say, for instance, of the beings
whom the young man saw gathered in the mountain
when his eyes were open ? Were they flesh and
blood warriors like the Syrian army camped there in
the plain below ? Were they mere ideas, visions
that had no objective reality whatever, the mere
pictures of a dream ? If we had not become such
Sadducees in our disbelief of spiritual existence,
we should not find it hard to believe that it was
neither of these but that with his newly-opened eyes
he did indeed see beings of some higher spiritual
order, who are always busy about this world of ours,
only not visible to the dull senses of our ordinary
life.
Certainly there is nothing clearer or more striking
in the Bible than the calm, familiar way with which
from end to end it assumes the present existence of
a world of spiritual beings always close to and acting
on this world of flesh and blood. It does not belong
to any one part of the Bible. It runs throughout its
whole vast range. From creation to judgment, the
spiritual beings are forever present. They act as
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS. 63
truly in the drama as the men and women who with
their unmistakable humanity walk the sacred stage
in the successive scenes. There is nothing of hesi-
tation about the Bible's treatment of the spiritual
world. There is no reserve, no vagueness which
would leave a chance for the whole system to be
explained away into dreams and metaphors. The
spiritual world with all its multitudinous existence is
just as real as the crowded cities, and the fragrant
fields and the loud battle-grounds of the visible and
palpable Judea in which the writers of the sacred
books were living. You take away the unseen
world with all its unseen actors from the story, and
you have not merely made the Bible like other books,
you have set it below other books, for you have
taken the color out of all its life, the motive out of
all its action.
But then the Bible goes farther. It not merely
believes in and everywhere assumes the existence of
spiritual beings. It believes that to certain condi-
tions even of our fleshly humanity these beings be-
come visible. There is an opening of the eyes that
lets us see what is going on in this finer, purer region
round about us all the time. Is not this the idea of
life that the Bible gives us, as if we were blind men
walking in the midst of a great city, hearing its
noise, feeling its jostling, and now and then in some
peculiar moments of our life opening our eyes, catch-
ing one sudden flash of the movement that is going
on around us and then shutting them again and tak-
ing the moment's sight back with us into the dark-
ness, to ponder over, and too often, by and by, to
64 UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
come to doubt about whether we really saw it. So
here and there an eye is opened. A man or woman
in the Bible is found in fit condition and to that
deeper sense it is recorded that spiritual beings
made themselves visible, as if it were no stranger
thing than for the opened eye of the flesh to see the
sparkling splendor of the Temple and the Mount of
Olives and the high priest walking down the street,
and all the familiar scenery of Jerusalem. The
Hebrew maiden is about her pure and simple life in
Nazareth, and she opens her eyes and sees the mes-
senger who hails her as the highly favored of her
Lord ; the shepherds are watching in the fields and
suddenly they see the angels as truly and as clearly
as they see the stars. The women go to the sepul-
chre and there sit the ministers beside the place
where Jesus lay. Paul rides towards Damascus,
and lo ! he has fallen from his horse and hears a
voice which is intelligible to him alone. What shall
we say ? There is no doubt of what the Bible
teaches, and it is what the human heart, taught by
God through its own deepest instincts, has always
guessed at and believed, that this world of fleshly
life is not all, that everywhere there is a realm of
spiritual life close to us, and that there is an inner
sense to which, when it is wakened, these spiritual
beings have often been actually visible and given
words of cheer and guidance and encouragement to
toiling and discouraged men.
Can we believe anything like that ? I am sure as
we portray its possibility, we have some sense of
more enlargement and richness in the universe, at
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS. 65
feast in our universe, in what concerns our life.
The narrow walls of the moral life are rolled back
and there is more room to act, more space to breathe.
The world of the Bible opens with its vast waves of
motive coming in like the breath of the morning out
of the regions of the unseen. The difference be-
tween the Bible with its tides of spiritual life and
the modern novel with its narrow studies of human
character and action as if they were the highest
things in the universe, this difference describes the
dignity of a belief in living spiritual influences as
contrasted with the low and unenterprising Sad-
duceeism to which our souls incline.
But can we believe anything like that ? Have
men ever really seen and talked with beings of a dif-
ferent sort from ours, with spiritual persons belong-
ing to a spiritual region that is always existing
though ordinarily unseen? May not they have been
mistaken and thought that they were talking with
spirits when they really were only talking with them
selves ? That multitudes of people have made just
that mistake there cannot be a shadow of doubt.
Of course the spirit-seeing faculty, whatever it is,
may be deluded just as the outward eye may be
mistaken and think it sees colors when it is only
sensitive to some excitement wholly within itself. It
is not necessary to credit every ghost-story simply
because we know that the dead have been seen by the
living; that Peter and James and John did indeed
see Moses and Elias on the Mountain of Transfigura-
tion. But one such certain story does break open
the seeming impossibility. It does put us where
66 UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
(with all the rareness that we may feel belongs to
such conditions) — none of us can venture to say
that never again shall mortal eye look on the forms
of immortality or mortal ear listen to words uttered
from the lips of spiritual beings who have passed
out of these lower regions by the door of death.
But that is not the chief thing that it gives us.
That is not the blessing that we value, such very
vague expectation of an uttered word out of or a
clear sight into the world of spirits, A true accept-
ance of the whole Bible idea of ever-present spiritual
life would not set us to watching for the apparitions
of the dead or for the sight of angels, but it would
give us the strength which comes to every work and
suffering from the knowledge that this universe is
larger than it seems and that it is all peopled with
spiritual existences who are God's ministers to en-
lighten and to feed our life. The consciousness of
many spiritual helpers must come although they are
not shown to us in any vision. Enough that men
have looked and seen through some break in the
cloud the comforting, defending spirits who are
doing the will of God in man's behalf. The brave
man need not see any celestial form with spear and
helmet by his side, yet he may know as he goes out
to the battle that the spirits of justice everywhere
are sympathising with him and helping him in un-
known ways. The mother may not discern an angel
bending over the bed on which her child is laid, but
still she may know that there are other watchers by
its bed beside herself, spirits whom God has sent to
see that none of his little ones take any harm. The
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS. 6y
soul in its bereavement may not look to see here
again the very presence and features of the friend
whom God has taken, yet still may be sure that
even now companionship with that dead but living
friend is something more and richer than merely
memory of what he was or anticipation of the reun-
ion in some far-off time; that even now, in such
unknown ways as soul may present itself to soul,
his friend is with him, for encouragement and
strength.
Such helps as these the knowledge that there is a
world of spiritual beings interested in and busied
about the things that concern us in this world of
time may give us. And I cannot but think that it
will change our whole idea of death. Surrounded
by this spiritual life and yet seeing it only here and
there through broken gaps of this enveloping mor-
tality, what will it be for us to die ? Only to cast
this mortality away and stand face to face with the
realities that have been close to us all the while.
All that has mocked us with half glimpses, all that
has flashed before our eyes and darkened again so
suddenly that we have hardly dared to remember
that we saw it, all that has haunted our hopes and
clung to us in spite of the cold Sadducee contempt-
uousness of the world — all this real to us, the only
reality, permanent and real forever. All spiritual
companionship, all unknown spiritual protection
that has been blessing us in the darkness opened
suddenly into the light so that we see it all and
enter on the new life that begins with death.
Death, then, is the enlightener. It opens the eyes
68 UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS.
to see the things that are. It is not the carrying
of the soul away to some island-planet or some un-
found place beyond the sun. Whatever be its mys-
tery of place (and that we cannot know till we know
something of what place means to the disembodied
spirit), the essential thing concerning death must be
that it opens the closed eyes, draws down the veil
of blinding mortality and lets the man see spiritual
things. This seems to me to change the question
that we ask about dying, and make it so much
deeper and truer. It is no longer where shall I go
when I am dead ? but, what shall I be ? And so
character and the power of higher vision and higher
education instead of circumstances, condition, and
locality become our study for this life and our ambi-
tion for the life to come.
And now have we not come to this, that there are
two ways to fight the great battle of life — two differ-
ent kinds of fighters? One man fights in the light,
another in the darkness. One man is always cogni-
zant of the principles of the work he is engaged in,
always conscious of God and of the ministries that
God employs to bless and influence his life. When-
ever he is afraid these presences rise up to reassure
him. Whenever the cause looks desperate he turns
to the mountain and there are these hosts of the
spiritual life. The other man knows nothing of it
all ; he fights a despairing battle ; his heart is full of
fear. Tell me, which is the safest, which is the
strongest life? I do not say that the man who does
not see these higher things is all the same as if they
UNSEEN SPIRITUAL HELPERS. 69
did not exist. I am sure that God and His angels
help many a struggler who does not know where the
help comes from. But when we see so many men
cowards who ought to be brave, so many discour-
aged who ought to be jubilant and certain of success,
when we know what a life all these men might be
living if they only really saw these things — who will
not pray for every brother, " Lord, I pray thee,
open his eyes that he may see "? Who will not go
far and wide telling his brethren of the great things
God has to show them ? We are not asking God to
make a spiritual world for us, only to let us see it as
it is. We do not pray God to love us, but we do
pray that we may so see His love that we shall love
Him back again and be saved by loving.
Be your own prophet and pray it for yourself.
Let your highest needs plead with God to enlighten
your lower nature, as Elisha plead for his servant.
Pray for yourself, " Lord, that I might receive my
sight ! "
For there are better things to see if you can only
see them. And the reason that you do not see
them now is not that God hides them, but that our
eyes are blind. Let us cry after Christ the Revealer,
as Bartimeus cried after Him at Jericho, and He
will stop and speak to us, no matter who remon-
strates. " Receive thy sight, thy faith hath saved
thee," He will say, and we shall begin to see the
higher and the deeper things, and to take courage
and be strong. We shall enter on that path of the
just which is as a shining light that shineth more and
more unto the perfect day.
V.
HEAVENLY WISDOM.
" I said I will be wise : but it was far from me." — ECCLESIASTES
»ii. 23.
The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes calls him-
self in our English version "The Preacher." It
would be a more accurate translation if he were
called the Ponderer or the Debater. His book is a
discussion of the deepest things of life, all grouped
around and centering upon his personal experience.
In this verse he looks back and remembers. He is
perhaps an old man as he writes and the days of his
long-past youth come back to him. He remembers
how bravely he set out in the search after wisdom.
" I said I will be wise " ; and then how sadly comes
in the brief and summary record of the disappoint-
ment, " but it was far from me."
How easy the struggle, which afterward ended in
failure, had evidently seemed to the young soul when
it was undertaken. " I said I will be wise."
There is an almost jaunty air about the words. It
is as if he were talking of a holiday excursion, some-
thing that could be carried through with flying flags
and untorn clothes, as if the eye saw the prize hang-
70
HEAVENLY WISDOM. 7 1
ing close by it there upon the goal and started out
to win it with a few quick steps. " I will be wise."
We almost see the hand grasping the garland of
wisdom as he speaks. And then behold ! all changes.
The prize draws away. It becomes distant and
more distant the longer that he reaches for it. " It
was far from me." Until at last he hardly can
believe that he is the same man who once set out
so bravely.
And yet how good he must have felt it to be for
all his life that there had once been a time in his
life when he had felt it easy to be wise. Will you
take your youth, all afire with some great wish, all
keen to run the race of life, and bid him sit down by
your side while you tell him in full just what he will
have to meet before he comes to the goal. That
were the cruellest and most foolish wisdom. It is
a blessed thing that at the start the world looks
easy. If it were not so who would dare to begin.
The parable indeed bids the man who is about to
build to count the cost. It is warning against
one kind of danger, but the man who is in business
and the man who is in life knows that there is
another kind of danger which is no less fatal to suc-
cess. He who begins without counting the cost
comes to sorrow, but he who insists on having every
dollar in his hand before he starts never begins.
The real counting of the cost which the young man
makes is in the feeling of power, in the leap of
blood within his veins. That tells him life is easy.
If he could keep that, elevating it and toughening it
with the accumulations of experience, life would
72 HEAVENLY WISDOM.
be easy to the end. As it is, a very great deal of
life gets done before the man finds out that life is
hard. A good start in the race is run before the
man begins to faint because he sees the course is
long. Alas for any of us if behind the weary,
anxious, half-discouraged struggles after wisdom
which have filled our life there did not lie the
memory of a bright time when we easily said to
ourselves, " I will be wise," as if we were going to
do it before night.
Another thing which strikes us about this wish of
Ecclesiastes is, what an old wish it is. There are
some desires of mankind which are like the old
countries of the world. No man can step ashore in
Greece or Egypt or India without feeling how old is
the atmosphere he breathes and the soil on which
he treads. It has seen so much of human history.
It has felt the beating of such generations of human
hearts, this ancient land, this venerable home of
men. Sometimes it weighs oppressively upon us and
it seems as if we could not breathe the heavy much-
breathed air. Sometimes the whole land is mel-
lowed by its long antiquity and life seems a richer
and a deeper thing there than in our newer lands.
So it is with the old desires of mankind ; for instance
this desire of wisdom. When we think how many
men, how many centuries of men have desired that
desire, sometimes it makes our hearts sink with the
sense of how hopeless it all is. Sometimes it makes
our hearts glow with the delight of sharing in the
wish which all the noblest of our race have felt. In
either way it deepens the act of wishing and makes
HEAVENLY WISDOM. 73
it a more solemn and pathetic thing. It would be a
great thing for a man to find himself wishing for
something which he was perfectly sure that no man
had ever wished before. It would have all the ex-
hilaration of pressing forward into a new discovered
and untrodden country. Columbus-like he would
feel the whole new world before him. But to know
that our wish must have been wished in his own way,
in his own degree, by every man that ever lived,
that no man ever grew to man's estate who did not
seek somehow this thing which we are seeking ; that,
if we are truly human, makes our search far more
rich and attractive. It surrounds us with the accu-
mulated enthusiasm of mankind. It knits us into
human sympathy. It makes us love the very
dangers of the way. It lets us feel that we are
seeking not a mere selfish triumph, but that we are
making our little contribution to what when it is
gained will be the triumph of mankind. Something
of this sort we can feel in all the best seekers after
wisdom.
There is another thought which rises in our minds
when we see a new man stand up and hear him say,
I will be wise! " and think how many men have
wished the same before, and how every one of them
in large degree has failed of what he wished.
What is the relations " we ask, " between a wish
in a man's soul and the reality of things ? " That
there is some such relation men have always felt.
The human soul has always seemed to be such a
mirror of the world, that all which men have found
firmly and constantly depicted in the wishes of the
74 HEAVENLY WISDOM.
human soul they have felt sure must have a fact cor-
responding to it in the universe of reality. The
strong and almost universal craving of man for im-
mortality has always been taken to constitute a true
part of the evidence that man really is immortal.
The belief of man in God has always helped to prove
to men that God exists. Of course we know that
" the wish is father to the thought," and we compel
ourselves to be upon our guard against the disposi-
tion to believe that a thing is true merely because we
and other people wish it were. Our human desire,
before it can seem to be evidence of the existence of
that which it desires, must be very wide and very
unprejudiced by selfishness. Because one century
has believed that there must be some way of turning
all metals into gold or of reading in the stars the
fates of men, that does not show that both of those
ideas are not delusions. But when all men, in every
age, in every land, in every faith, turn with one com-
mon wish one way, not for immediate and palpable
advantage, but with an instinctive movement of
their natures, the conviction is irresistible that
there must be something there which draws them.
There must be an external fact to which this inter-
nal movement corresponds. Where all the needles
turn there must be a pole.
This becomes very impressive when we apply it to
the universal and eternal quest of man for wisdom.
Somewhere there must be this wisdom which the
human mind has always sought. Misconceived, dis-
torted in its reflection in the mirror though it be, still
there is a true wisdom somewhere which the mind
HEAVENLY WISDOM. 75
of man has always sought. The final knowledge and
character of man when they are reached are the
resultant of the eternal wisdom which has come
down from above and been accepted into this nature
made to receive it. Not wisdom alone. That were
too cold and hard and distant. Not the soul alone.
That were too private and personal and sentimental.
But the soul strong with wisdom. Wisdom warm
in the soul, this is the dream that has always haunted
men's wishes and made them forever repeat, in spite
of every disappointment, the old resolve, " I will be
wise ! ' '
But it is time for us to turn and ask more carefully
just what is meant by wisdom for which the search
is so inveterate and universal. If we can have that
clear in our minds we shall be able to understand
better the search and its chances of success. Wis-
dom, then, in general signifies all knowledge and the
intelligent grasp of truth. But there is a special
meaning of wisdom, and it is very common in the
use of the Bible, in which the word signifies the ap-
prehension of some great universal principle which
underlies all things, governs all things, and by which
all things are accounted for. We all know how
deep the craving for such a great principle is. The
physicist seeks for it in nature. He tries to find
some one great ruling law which shall comprehend
all the movements of natural forces and give them
unity. The metaphysician seeks for it in man's con-
stitution. He tries to find some first principle which
shall harmonize and explain the contradictions and
inconsistencies of this mysterious being, man. The
"J^ HEAVENLY WISDOM.
thoughtful observer of his own life seeks for it there,
and is not satisfied unless he can discern around all
the hundred little motives which decide his daily-
actions some one great motive, out of which they
all are fed, around all the miscellaneous force, some
one great force of definite character which identifies
his individuality and m.akes him the man he is.
It is the desire for the perception of some such
first great principle or principles of things which
really constitutes man's search for wisdom. It has
always had, and always must have, strong fascina-
tion for the human mind. All acquaintance with
the details of things, however perfect, must be un-
satisfactory without this larger understanding. It
is the absence of this which the singer in Tennyson's
poem is lamenting when he cries that " knowledge
comes but wisdom lingers," the absence of any in-
sight which shall explain the world and so secure its
best use.
Now wisdom in this sense is what all earnest and
intelligent young spirits crave, more or less con-
sciously, at the beginning of their lives. " What
does it all mean ? Where is the clue to it ? Where
is the sacred, the mysterious word before the speak-
ing of which the closed heart of things shall fly open
and the secret of life be shown? I will not rest till
I have found it. I will seek everywhere and try all
manner of experiments till it is found. I will have
wisdom. I will be wise ! " To very many men's
recollection that resolution stands back at the be-
ginning of what seems to have been a very long
career. It was clear and enthusiastic. Was it not
HEAVENLY WISDOM. ^^
just exactly the resolution of Ecclesiastes ? And
what has come since ? If in the course of years the
incongruities and the complexities of life, the moral
disappointments, the failures of our theories about
people, the fading away of our hopes about our-
selves, have altogether made us give up the search
for any such grasp of life ; if, gradually seeming more
and more difficult to find, it has at last come to
seem impossible for us to find any such governing
and accounting principle for life — and so we have
settled down to the details of living, to doing such
particular act by itself and not as part of any long
coherent plan, not inspired by any one consistent
hope, if this has been our history — why it seems
to me that we might search all literature and join
words together in a thousand ways and we could
not find or make a more complete description of
our lives than that which is in these few short words
of Ecclesiastes, " I said I will be wise, but it was far
from me."
I hope that I make clear the difference between
two lives, one of which is still inspired by, and the
other of which has abandoned, the search for wis-
dom. Behold how different they are. One has a
fire in its eye, a spring in every movement. Each
special act is freed from anxious questioning,
is almost unconscious, because it is absorbed in
and is decided by the larger purpose of the life.
Where the next footstep shall be set is settled
not by the choice of softest ground or greenest
grass to tread on, but by the direction in which
lies the life's recognized and beckoning goal. The
78 HEAVENLY WISDOM.
least things become lofty; the worst disappoint-
ments may be revelations so long as the man is
saying " I will be wise." When that is done, when
the man has begun to say " It is far from me," then
everything falls to pieces. Each bit of life has to be
valued by itself, and oh, how valuable it comes to
look. Yesterday's fact, to-day's frolic, to-morrow's
bargain — what are they worth except as mere be-
guilements of the hour ? We give them artificial
values. We fill the search for them with the spirit
of rivalry to keep its interest alive. Each day has
to begin all over again. Our life has no flow. It
lies in ponds and is not like a river. And, worst of
all, we grow distrustful and scornful about other men
who still think that life has a meaning when we have
once ceased to seek the meaning of our own. We
are ready to say " There is no wisdom," when we
have stopped saying " I will be wise."
And what then ? Somehow or other evidently
this discouragement must get new courage, and the
abandoned search must be taken up again. How
shall it be ? I have not spoken thus far of religion.
I have purposely talked as if there were no such
thing as religion in the world. The search for wis-
dom, as I have spoken of it, is the search for abstract
principles, for a plan to be discerned in the structure
of the universe, in the nature of things. That is all
scientific, not religious. Now when that fails us, or
before that fails us, for we would not talk of religion
as if it were a mere last resort, when science fails us,
or before it fails us, we turn to religion. Religion
means God. It can mean nothing less, nothing else
HEAVENLY WISDOM. 79
than that. Reh'gion cannot be made abstract. It
must be personal. Religion means God. When
a man becomes religious, it is just this. He puts
God before and under and around his life. How
cold and weak that sounds ! When a man becomes
religious he feels the God who has been always
before and under and around his life, and gives
himself in conscious and obedient relationship to
Him. Do you not see then what must come ?
The first principle of that man's life comes to
be God. Instead of looking for a philosophy,
a statement, a law which will comprehend and
harmonize his life, now he looks for a person,
for God. Instead of making wisdom simply an
understanding of something which can be discovered
by the perceptions or reasoned out by the intellect,
now he makes wisdom to be the total acceptance by
his nature of that higher nature to which it gives
itself in obedience and love. " I will be wise " now
means " I will come near to God. I will know
Him."
The old Christian temple in Constantinople, now
the central mosque of the whole Mussulman world,
is called " Saint Sophia." It is consecrated to the
holy wisdom. What does its name mean ? Was it
to the abstract love for principles, the impersonal
search for truth that these stately and glowing walls
were reared in the years when Christian faith was
earnest and alive ? Not so ! It was not a university
but a church. It was to something sacred, personal,
divine, that it was dedicated. It was to the wisdom
which consisted in the obedient and loving service
80 HEAVENLY WISDOM.
of the soul to God ; the wisdom which consisted in
the service which every faculty could pay to Him,
the wisdom which found abundant explanation of the
world in Him ! It was to the wisdom by which
as Solomon sang " The Lord hath founded the
earth"; that wisdom which does not sit in the
schools and argue, but which standeth in the top of
high places, by the way in the places of the paths ;
the wisdom of which the fear of the Lord is the
beginning and the end.
And now with this new, this deeper, this religious
meaning in the words " I will be wise," does the
old search become any more hopeful than it was
before ? Now it is a search for God. But God can-
not be pictured as just standing off there and wait-
ing for the soul to come to Him and find Him. A
theory of the universe, a comprehensive truth of the
nature of things, even that I cannot picture to my-
self as wholly dead. I have to think of it as some-
thing in some sense alive and reaching out with
some sort of desire to make itself known to the mind
that is so blindly reaching towards it. But just as
soon as it is not a theory of the universe but God, a
person, a soul, a love, a Father, then what a differ-
ent thing this life and this outreach toward man
becomes. Everything that being can feel towards
other being, tempting the communication of his life,
is there. Personal love, the desire to communicate
and repeat himself, craving to drive out sin, to fill
imperfection with perfection, to produce character,
to fulfil possibility, all of these unite in one great
stream of effluence which comes pouring forth from
HEAVENLY WISDOM. 8 1
God to meet the soul's desire to be wise. All of
these make the wisdom of God which comes down
to satisfy the soul whose right it is to crave that
wisdom.
The wisdom of God ! We cannot say those words
without remembering that they are used by St.
Paul of Jesus Christ. " Christ the power of God and
the wisdom of God," he writes to the Corinthians.
The Incarnation was the full expression of this
pouring forth of the personal life of God upon
the personal life of man which I have just been
trying to describe. It came, He came, with the
most overwhelming revelation that God loved man,
that God claimed man. After His coming no man
who had caught the real spirit of that great event
could let himself think for a moment that God stood
off motionless and simply waited for the soul to come
to Him. The whole universe, to the soul believing
in the Incarnation, must quiver and palpitate with
God coming for the soul of man.
Oh, what a difference, my friends ! We talk
sometimes as if for a man to come to believe in the
Incarnation was simply for him to add another arti-
cle to his creed, perhaps in sign that such addition
had been made, to transfer his name from one set
of church books to another, and to submit to some
new Christian rite. It is much more than that.
For a man to believe in the Incarnation is for the
world to become to that man afire with God. God
is reaching out to him everywhere. God believes in
him, believes in the possibility of revealing Himself
to him ; nay, of taking up his abode within him.
6
82 HEAVENLY WISDOM.
Impossibility floats off like a melted cloud. All
men become sacred. Whatever else man may find
or fail to find, knowledge, wealth, friendship, power,
he may certainly find God, for God is seeking him.
All this is real to the man who believes in the Incar.
nation. What right has any such man to be dis-
couraged or dismayed ?
Evidently then the search for wisdom becomes
another thing as soon as it becomes religious, as
soon as the wisdom for which we seek is God, It
becomes full of hope, nay, it is filled with certainty.
I know I shall be wise if I can only persevere. But
there is something else. Not merely the hopeful-
ness but the whole character of the search is altered.
It becomes moral. It is a search for character.
And the power and method of it is obedience.
That is an enormous change. To make the method
of man's growth and attainment to be not the acqui-
sition of knowledge but the obedience to a perfect
will, that was an enormous change. It was a trans-
fer of human ambition to a new region. It was the
opening of human possibility on a new side. It did
not exclude thought and study and intellectual
labor. It included them. Only it made them part
of the obedience of the lesser to the greater soul, of
the child to the father, of the man to God.
One consequence of this transfer of the field, this
change of the character of man's struggle after wis-
dom was in the way in which it opened the possi-
bility of that struggle to all men. When " I will be
wise " meant " I will reach the final principles of
things by reasoning and meditation " it was areso-
HEAVENLY WISDOM. 83
lution which only a few choice privileged spirits in
each generation of the world could make. When
" I will be wise " had come to mean " I will obey
God and come near to Him, or let Him come near
to me by my obedience," it was a resolution which
was open to all men, the weakest and the humblest,
as well as the strongest and highest, to make. The
little child just putting a trembling foot on to the
margin of the vast plain of life ; the plough-boy busy
at his work without a rest for thought from morn-
ing till night, from year to year, the practical man
strong in affairs but with no gift for abstract specu-
lation, the poor sick woman with no strength left
but just to suffer — this new change of the Gospel
threw open the gates of wisdom to them all. They
all could be wise. Wisdom not as a luxury, not as
an ornament, but as a transformation, a regenera-
tion, an illumination of their lives — this was within
the power of them all when the road into wisdom
became obedience and obedience itself was made to
be the knowledge of and likeness to the God whom
the soul obeyed.
Wise unto salvation " is the Bible phrase for
this. Think what a significance there is in these
familiar words. Wisdom that shines as a star in the
forehead, wisdom that wraps the form with dignity
like a rich mantle, wisdom that burns in eloquence
upon the lips, these all men cannot have. If these
are the true successes of a human life, then most
human lives must be failures. But wisdom that enters
as salvation into the heart all men may have. Hear
how St. James describes it, " The wisdom that is
84 HEAVENLY WISDOM.
from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and
eas-* CO be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits,
without partiality and without hypocrisy." These
are not easy things indeed, but they are things not
impossible for any man. In the possibility of those
things, fruits of the wisdom which is from above,
for every man lies the profoundest and most trust-
worthy assurance of our human brotherhood.
One noble feature of this universality of the capac-
ity of religious wisdom lies in this : that it makes
men's best and highest side to be also their side of
greatest sympathy and broadest fellowship, and so
ensures that the greater men grow in the truest
greatness, the more and not the less they should
come near to their fellow-men. Many of you will
remember the quaint strong verse which is inscribed
upon the tomb of Shakespeare's daughter, Mrs. Ann
Hall, as she lies hard by the tomb of her father in
front of the chancel in the Stratford Church :
' Witty beyond her sex. But that 's not all
Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall.
Something of Shakespeare was in that : but this
Wholly of Him with whom she 's now in bliss."
The words cling to one's memory when he once
has read them. And what a true discrimination
they suggest. The wit which had in it " something
of Shakespeare " is not as strong an appeal to the
remembrance and sympathy of one who stands by
the worn tombstone as is the wisdom and salvation
which is entirely of God and in virtue of which our
souls meet hers in Him.
HEAVENLY WISDOM. 8$
The" wickedness of folly," says Ecclesiastes in
the verse the next but one to that from which my text
is taken. There again you see we have the same
idea — that wisdom is a moral thing. " Folly," or
unwisdom, is a wicked thing. Surely another con-
sequence of this Bible idea of wisdom must be that
men will learn to seek it with the intensity of their
moral natures. It cannot be a mere dilettante
study. It must be a thing of life and death.
As Sunday after Sunday we come up here, dear
friends, to drink of the water of the fountain and
then go down to another week of work and tempta-
tion, let us pray that the fruit of our coming may
be that the old resolution is fastened more firmly in
our hearts. Let us pray that we may go hence
every week saying more surely, more enthusiasti-
cally, " I will be wise." It is not far from us.
It is close at hand. As close as duty ! as close as
Christ ! May He, according to the great promise,
be made to us ever more and more wisdom and
righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
VI.
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
" But glory, honor, and peace, to the soul of every man that work-
eth good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile." — Romans ii. lo.
The fact of privilege is everywhere throughout
the world. We cannot open the door on any group
of men and learn the most superficial story of their
lives without finding that some of them have advan-
tages even by no effort of their own which make life
seem with them a far brighter and more precious
thing than it seems to their brethren. Two boys
grow up, one with the noble associations of a home
that is full of thought and generous standards ; the
other in the midst of poverty and ignorance, or, what
is just as bad, perhaps worse, wealth and ignorance;
vulgar display or stingy selfishness crowding in upon
and poisoning his life. One soul falls instantly into
a rich abundance of friendships, another goes strug-
gling on its way alone. One man lives in America
and another has to live in Turkey. One is tempted
and perhaps forced to education, another longs for
it and finds no chance. The fact of privilege is
everywhere.
And if we try to make light of these differences
86
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. 87
and to say : O, these are only outward circum-
stances, they do not touch the character, we find
very soon that they do touch the character. Men
have not only better and worse chances to be rich
and to be famous, they have better and worse
chances to be good. Nothing but the most abject
slavery to a theory can claim for a moment that the
child of the gutter has the same chance of goodness
as the child of the pure and holy home, or that it
makes no difference to the possibilities of a man's
character whether he lives in China or in England.
The fact of privilege is not merely everywhere. It
goes deep and touches the most sacred parts of us.
My purpose to-day does not lead me into any
attempt to explain this puzzling fact or to show
how one may come to look at it complacently. I
think there is but one way in which a man can be
truly reconciled to it, and that is by faith in God.
Faith is a method of looking at life which begins
with the personal Governor of life, and, being satis-
fied of His character, accepts the mysteries of exist-
ence as coming from Him, as right because He is
right, as capable of harmony and light in those
depths of His nature which we cannot fathom. It
is an action of the nature perfectly familiar to us in
many of the smaller divisions of life, in the family,
in the schoolroom, in the state, this action which
when we bring it to its largest illustration and see it
working towards God we call religious faith.
But this is not what I am to speak of to-day.
Rather I want to take the simple fact of privilege
indisputably present everywhere. Not to prove it,
88 THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
not to explain it, but to study it, to see what some
of its consequences are, how it makes human Hfe
different from what human hfe would be without it,
this is my purpose. There can be no doubt, I think,
whatever puzzling questions it may bring with it,
that it is the fact of privilege, the inequalities among
men for which they do not seem to be responsible,
which makes a large part of the interest and richness
of human existence. I do not speak simply of the
picturesqueness which it gives to life as compared
with the monotonous flatness which would come with
an absolute equality among men. The country
broken into hills and valleys has a picturesque variety,
a play of light and shade which delights you and en-
tices you along, far different from the weariness with
which you plod across the smooth country where
every footstep falls on the same level with the step
before it and you can see the blank monotony un-
broken to the far-away horizon. But if this pictu-
resque and hilly land is barren while the flat country
teems with fertility, then men will love the flat land
best and live there most happily. It is not for its
beauty but for its fruitfulness that we praise the in-
equality of life. I beHeve the more we think, the
more we become convinced that the instinct which
asks for equality is a low one, and that equality, if
it were completely brought about, would furnish
play only for the lower instincts and impulses of
man. The instincts that spring up with inequality
are deeper ones. Helpfulness, reverence, unselfish
admiration, discrimination of the essential and the
accidental, loyalty, magnanimity, these are what
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. 89
make men great, and these spring up between un-
equal men. Certainly the world's greatest teachers
have not been levellers. Christ never was. Remem-
ber what He said about rulers — His " Render unto
Caesar the things that are Caesar's." Remember
how He promised His disciples that they should sit
on their twelve thrones. Remember how while He
told the wife of Zebedee that she was all wrong
about the kind and the means of the dignity which
she desired for her sons, yet that there was a dignity
which should be given to them for whom it was pre-
pared of His Father. In His Kingdom of Heaven
there was to be a greatest and a least. Nowhere is
there any communism in Jesus. The waste of power
which communism involves would find no tolerance
from Him. All crude and passionate attempts to
make a flat equality in human kind have seized hold
first of Christ and tried to fasten themselves on Him.
But by and by He has failed them, they evidently
did not carry Him with them, and at the end they
have supported Him by some abstract philosophy,
some h priori speculation, that blighting agrarian-
ism which found no sanction or sympathy in the
great Teacher.
This brings me round to the text, of which I have
not spoken yet. The Bible contains one picture of
the universal fact of privilege which in dignity and
completeness surpasses every other. And St. Paul
is commenting on that picture in this verse. God
gives, he says, " Glory, honor, and peace to the
soul of every man that worketh good, to the Jew
first and also to the Gentile." It is a very strong
90 THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
statement, if we think of it. It declares that the
universal laws of spiritual retribution work with
peculiar certainty and effect for one nation. It is
the universal function of righteousness to bring
glory and honor and peace to the souls of righteous
men. That function works everywhere. But it
works strongest and first for these Jews, this people
born of Abraham and living among the hills of Pal-
estine. And we know very well that this idea of
Paul belongs to all the Bible. The reason why it
does not startle us is that it is so familiar. It is
frankly stated everywhere. It is urged upon them
as the first fact, the deepest motive of their life.
Their venerable ancestor is always seen coming over
the hills, away from all the people that belonged to
him, leaving the past behind him, holding in his
hands as he came the promise of a future full of
privilege. He had been chosen. God had called
him. Ah ! my friends, it puzzles us when we state
it calmly as a fact of history, but that story of the
call of Abraham has always been intelligible to mul-
titudes of men, because it fell in so completely with
what they saw in life. It was a scene of privilege,
and privilege was everywhere. That fact of privi-
lege ran down through all the Hebrew story from
Abraham to Paul. " I the Lord have severed you
from other people that ye should be mine." And
this same fact of privilege Paul is declaring to the
Jews at Rome.
The Jews, then, are the very type and flower of
that fact of privilege and inequality which fills the
world. Let us take them as the type and by the
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. 9I
light of their history let us try to get at some
truths regarding the position and duty of privileged
people everywhere, I speak habitually, and I am
speaking this morning to a congregation very largely
made up of privileged people. There are circum-
stances in the lives of most of you, my friends,
which have come there by no merit of your own,
and which separate your lives from multitudes of
others which by no fault of theirs are destitute of
some of the circumstances that belong to you.
Those circumstances do not necessarily make you
happy. On the contrary, they often bring with
them new sources of discontent. I suppose that the
most fortunate lot in life has its full share of grum-
blers and complainers. But a position of privilege
does bring its own responsibilities and chances.
They vary according to the nature of the privilege.
Sometimes it is social position, sometimes it is
wealth, with all the ease and chance of influence it
brings. Sometimes it is education, sometimes it is
religious opportunity, a peculiar richness of the
means of grace of one sort or another. These are
the Judaisms which are perpetual. They separate
people who have them from the people who have
them not, as the Jews were separated from the Gen-
tiles. In them all the virtues and all the vices that
were in historic Judaism are possible. Those who
are destitute of them may be often better, stronger,
more pleasant persons to contemplate and to have
to do with than those who possess them are. So
the Gentiles were often better and more satisfactory
people than the Jews. But still the value of privi-
92 THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
lege remains. Its chances are greatest and its judg-
ments are most severe. I speak to-day to those
whose lives are in any way lives of privilege, and I
want to show them how they may learn to under-
stand and use their lives by the picture of this peo-
ple of privilege, the Jews.
I. I mention first, then, the frank recognition of
their privileged condition which was continually
forced upon the Jews. There was something very
strong and beautiful in the way in which they were
never for a moment allowed to forget that they be-
longed to God in some peculiar way. No voice ever
came out from the darkness in which God abode
that did not tell them once again, before it spoke
the special message, whether of commendation or
rebuke, that they were his people whom he had
brought out of the land of Egypt, out of the house
of bondage, and to whom He had given the land
which he had promised to their fathers. Their his-
tory was always lighted up by the miracles which
God had given to no other people. Whenever they
were tempted to think themselves like other nations
they heard again in the distance the roar of the Red
Sea parting its waters to let them go through, or
saw the fires of Sinai glaring still upon the desert
sands. No forgetfulness, no cowardice, no mock
humility was allowed for a moment to obliterate the
everlasting difference that separated them from the
Philistines and the Edomites. And here is the first
truth, the first duty as concerns all privilege. Here
is what God demands of all his chosen people, of
every chosen man — the frank and unforgetful recog-
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. 93
nition of the privilege that God has given him. If
God gives a man social position or education or
religious influence, He does it for a purpose, and
the cowardice or modesty with which a man some-
times ignores the fact defeats that purpose. There
is a lofty humility in which the true man says " I
have influence, I am rich, I have knowledge " ; with
as simple truthfulness, though with more solemnity,
as he says " I am thirty years old," or " I am tall,"
or " I am strong." O believe me, my dear friends,
we do not make a short and easy end of the tempta-
tion to pride which our privileges thrust upon us by
just denying our privilege altogether, whether to
ourselves or to one another. The true problem is to
acknowledge our privilege, to keep it always in our
sight, never to forget it for a moment, and yet be
humble as the prophets of the Lord, the Jews of
Judaism, were humble, who could say such sublime
words as " The word of the Lord came unto me,"
and yet be so free from pride that they could serve
the meanest of their people.
Through all the world the beauty of simple truth-
fulness impresses us always more and more. That
everything should know itself clearly and declare
itself frankly, the very mention of such a thought
flashes a picture before our eyes, the picture of a
great, rich forest where everything has been dis-
torted and told untrue tales about itself in a thick
fog, now as the fog rises simply revealing every leaf
and trunk and twig and flower just as it is and
growing beautiful with truth. This is what makes
the power of nature always — her perfect frankness
94 THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
and radiant content — no restless aspiration and no
mock humility. The violet says simply " I am
small and beautiful," the oak says just as simply
I am broad and strong and grand." Each tells
its simple fact. But we men are always falsifying
our lives. While we are nothing we are always lifting
up our voice and saying that we are something. As
soon as we are something we cover ourselves with a
thin humility and say " O, I am nothing." The
first falsehood we all condemn. But the second we
are apt to think is graceful and good. But it is not
either. It is ugly and bad. The first duty of every
man whom God has put on any pedestal is not to
crouch down and make himself seem no taller than
the other men upon the ground but to stand at his
full height, and on the pedestal which God, not he,
has built for him to lift aloft whatever torch God
may give him to hold.
2. But go on further. The next feature in God's
treatment of his privileged people consisted in the
way in which He was always forcing absolute stand-
ards upon them. The very fact of their privilege,
as he was always telling them, took them out of the
range of mere comparison with their neighbors and
compelled them to be judged directly by him. The
Jews said " We are no worse than the Moabites. "
" Nay," was God's answer, in some unmistakable
utterance of his right hand, " but the Moabites are
not your standard. Let Midian and Moab test
themselves by one another. You are my people
and I, only I, must be your judge." This runs
through all their history. Their exaltation lifts them
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. g$
up to higher tests. The valleys may compare them-
selves with one another and see which has most of
the dim twilight which is all that any of them gain,
but Mt, Blanc can only test the whiteness of its
snowy dome by the brilliant glory of the sun itself.
And this is true of all privilege. You have a
chance of education — at once your judgment seat
is raised. Your standard of comparison is altered.
It will not do for you, the educated man, to look
around upon the mass of ignorance and say " I
know as much as these men know." You are
separated from them by your privilege. You
must match yourself against absolute standards.
What fraction is that which you know of the entire
truth ? That is the scholar's test. The true scholar
is known by the way in which he accepts that test
and willingly applies it to himself. Or you have
influence. Men look to where you stand for guid-
ance. It will not do tor you to say " I do as much
good in the community as other men." You must
be driven home into the absolute question " How
does the good you do fall short of the best that a
man can do for his fellow-men ? Or you are where
religious opportunity is bright around you. Your
education has made you know Christ from your
childhood. The Bible has been never shut. The
church is always open. Is it for you to say " I am
as pious as most men ? " Must not your privilege
lift you up above all low comparisons and partial
estimates until you meet the word of Christ and
hear him say " Be ye therefore perfect even as your
Father is perfect."
96 THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
I think that this stands very high among the ad-
vantages which are given to a Hfe of privilege. It
has an opportunity of coming, as it were, more
directly to the judgment seat of God. The man of
privilege may disown this advantage. The king
upon the throne may extenuate his cruelty or mean-
ness by comparing himself with the people whom he
rules. You, set perhaps where a social circle larger
or smaller looks up to you and envies you and copies
you, may basely ask of yourself no more than merely
to be equal to the average standards of the multi-
tudes who follow you, but if you do so you throw
away your opportunity. The boy in school who,
climbing to the topmost seat, passes out of compari-
son with his school-fellows, comes in sight of the
higher judgments which prevail among older boys
or among men in the great world for which boyhood
is a preparation. The world is made up of a vast
series of judgment halls, in each of which sits some
judge of some degree of dignity. Each judge in his
own court has his own order of men who are judged
by him. Public opinion sits in one chamber and
judges its public; business success sits in another
and gives its judgments; and so they rise in dignity.
And each degree and kind of privilege takes a man
out of the judgment of some lower court, but it
brings him into the judgment of a higher. Wealth
frees a man from the necessity of business conflict.
He is not obliged to show in the wrestle of the Ex-
change what sort of man he is, but he is summoned
by his wealth to a higher and harder test. He is
compelled to manifest his manhood not by his skill
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. 97
in getting money but by his generosity in using it.
The man born into a host of friends is not tried by
the tests of solitary endurance, but his character is
brought to the severe analysis of multipHed rela-
tions. So everywhere. A man's privileges release
him from one judgment seat only to bring him to
another higher, more absolute, and more exacting.
And at the head of all stands the judgment of God,
the great white throne, to which all lives come at
last, to which the lives of highest privilege come
most immediately, and which no privilege is lofty
enough to fly over and escape.
If this were not true, privilege would grow into
insufferable arrogance. Freed from the lower re-
straint and entering into none higher it would tread
upon the necks of men with brutal insolence.
Wherever privilege has claimed for itself such free-
dom from all judgment it has oppressed the world
and made itself seem hateful. But there have been
privileged men and women, there are such to-day,
whose privilege has made them all the more con-
scious of authority, and their lives are the most
beautiful that we see anywhere. There are men
whom no necessity of daily bread compels to work,
and yet whom no man dreams of calling idle. They
labor in some cause of God, some work of charity or
culture for mankind as faithfully as any drudge drags
out his weary, hated task. There are men and
women whom nothing that we call self-interest com-
pels to court the favor of their fellow-creatures by
civility, who yet are full of gracious courtesy to all
the children of their Father. Such privilege as that
98 THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
does not disgust but wins men. Men do not hate
it. It represents to them true kingliness. It opens
to them the way by which they themselves may rise
to higher standards.
" Ah, great and gentle Lord,
Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint
Among his warring senses, to thy Knights."
So speaks his beautiful, false, and repentant queen
to King Arthur, who is in romance the perfect pic-
ture of privilege that has found its way to higher
judgment seats by the very greatness that exempts
it from the lower. It is stricter as well as loftier in
its obedience as the conscience is more sternly as
well as more nobly ruled by the senses. David's
whole kingdom looks up to him, makes him its
standard, lives or dies by his smile or frown. But
David himself stands upon the summit and cries
directly up to God, " Let my sentence come forth
from Thy presence."
Not that the souls which we call privileged alone
£an thus directly submit themselves to absolute
standards and find out the judgment seat of God.
The humblest and most trampled and encumbered
life may go there freely. The valley may look up to
the sun as boldly as the hill top. Only it must look
past the hill top, and I am only picturing the actual
state of things when I say that it is apt to catch
much of its light from the mountain's reflection
while the mountain must get its directly from the
sun.
O men and women with your lives of privilege,
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. 99
do not disown this which is their best prerogative.
Let the very certainty that your education or your
wealth or your position did not come to you by any
merit of your own make it a solemn thing to you.
All good comes from Him. But the good that
comes by a man's own labor seems to have come
through many hands and to have lost something of
the sacredness of its origin. But your good things
it seems as if you took directly from the hands of
God. His hands touched your hands as He gave
them to you. They are warm with His touch, they
are bright with His look still. Let them be sacred
to you. Let them be symbols to you not so much
of your freedom from low authorities as of your loy-
alty to the highest. Let them signify humility and
faith, and make your life strong and gentle by keep-
ing it in God's presence.
3. But one more truth remains, the deepest truth
about the purpose and the proper use of privilege.
It is the truth that privilege is given to any man not
for himself alone but for the good of other people.
We must go back to our Jews again, our types of
privilege. The struggle of God with that people
was to make them fit for certain offices which they
were to render to mankind. There can be nothing
more ignoble than to think of God as choosing one
nation out of all the world and petting it and making
it his favorite, rewarding it when it was good and
petulantly punishing it when it was bad, as one
might do with a favored wilful child. But there can
be nothing finer than the thought of God taking one
of His nations and moulding it, training it, fusing
ICO THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
its life into transparency so that it might be capable
of transmitting Him and His blessing to the rest.
That was what their privilege was for. "To the Jew
first and also to the Gentile," The Jew failed over
and over again to know God's purpose. He took
the privilege which he was to help other people with
and treated it like a luxury of his own. He was
like the crew of a ship sent to carry provisions to a
sick and starving people over the sea, who on the
way forget the purpose of the voyage and drink the
wine and eat the bread themselves as if they had
been stored there only for their luxurious living.
There is something grotesque about it when we state
it so. There is something tragically grotesque about
all the same misuse of privilege for selfish purposes
as we see it everywhere in life. What is that man
doing who lives there by the wayside in his gorgeous
house and eats and drinks and entertains his friends
and thinks how good it is for him that he was born
without duties or the necessity of work. Why, he
is merely out at sea, floating along before light
winds, merrily or gloomily eating and drinking up
his cargo. What is that religious Sybarite about,
who with the noblest Church, the most exquisite
service, the purest associations surrounding his shel-
tered life, is worshipping God as if he had no mis-
sionary duty, saying " O God, thou art my God " so
earnestly that it seems as if there were no God left
for anybody else. When you think what God made
the man a Christian for, there is something tragically
grotesque about it. He has lost the purpose of his
privilege and is taking for himself what God gave
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. lOI
him to transmit to other men, to His great hungry
world of men.
This truth regarding privilege is shown in the
tendency which every unused privilege manifests to
disappear. The naturalists now are tracing many
of the varieties of physical structure to the way in
which bodily organs which from any circumstances
are not used dwindle and shrivel up and pass away.
And so it is with privileges of whatever sort when
they are not used for the blessing of other men be-
side the possessor. This certainly was true about
our specimens of privilege, the Jews. They were
selfish about their privileges, wanted to keep them
to themselves, and where are their privileges to-day ?
The world has taken the truth out of the hands of
the faithless priest, and goes its way, using the
truth, but leaving the priest helpless and neglected
by the wayside. This is men's belief about the
highest gifts always. This was Christ's story of the
talents. There is a legend of the Irish Saint, Co-
lumba, and a monk who had some precious religious
books. Columba begged that he might see them,
but the monk refused. Then Columba broke out
indignantly, "May thy books no longer do thee any
good, thee, nor those that come after thee, since
thou takest occasion by them to show thy inhospi-
tality. " And the monk's books became unintelli-
gible. " They still exist," says an author of 300
years later, " but no man can read them."
I know how with regard to certain kinds of privi-
lege it will seem as if this were not true. " Look,"
men will say, " here is a selfish rich man who never
I02 THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
uses his wealth for other people and yet his riches
do not fly away. He is as rich as ever." But it is
like the unused limb. It does not disappear at
once. It shrivels and dries up. The life goes out
of it. And so your social position or your wealth
shrivels if it is selfish. The respectability and
pleasure which are their life pass out of them.
They become mere shells which any wind of circum-
stance may blow away. So the best enthusiasm
dies out of selfish learning and all real earnestness
out of selfish religion.
These then are the truths concerning privilege.
Recount them in your minds. All privilege is to be
frankly owned and its responsibilities accepted. All
privilege which lifts men above the dependence
upon fellow-men ought to bring them more clearly
into the sight and the judgment of God. All
privilege belongs to the privileged men, not for
themselves but for other men. Think of the life of
Jesus. It was all full of privilege. A difference
from other men which his oneness with other men
only made more manifest. A superiority which was
so absolute that the common types and symbols of
superiority, money and rank, would have seemed
most impertinent. And see in Him how all these
truths of privilege were evident. He frankly took
His place. He did not make believe that He was not
different from other men. He said " Come unto
me " as if He were the centre of the world. And
the more He stood above men, the nearer did He
stand to His Father. He was always in God's sight
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. IO3
doing God's work. And yet all His separateness
from men was for men's sake. He was the divine
Saviour for the souls of men. He lived and died as
no other man ever did only that all other men, if
they would, might come to live and die like Him.
These are the truths concerning privilege. In
their degree all the greatest souls of our race have
illustrated them. They have frankly accepted their
position of genius or of power. They have owned
God's judgment. They have lived for fellow-men.
Think of Socrates or Milton.
And now, my friends, you, as I said, are very
largely people of privilege. Let me speak plainly
with you. Many of you are rich. Many of you
have social influence. Many of you have educa-
tion, almost all of you have had the Church and the
blessings of religion all your lives. Now sometimes
it seems well to tell privileged people that they must
not think about their privileges. But to-day I beg
you to think about them very earnestly. Own the
great truths concerning them. If you are rich you
must frankly own your wealth and take the position
which it gives with all the duties that belong to it.
If you have been born in the very centre of church
light, you must not make believe to yourself or to
other people that it is all the same as if you were a
heathen. It is as bad for the rich man to make be-
lieve that he is poor and so shirk his responsibilities
as for the poor man to make believe that he is rich
and so ruin himself by extravagance. First own
your place with that frank acceptance of the facts of
life which is the only real humility, and then let
I04 THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE.
your privilege solemnize you. Frankly owned, not
hidden as if it were something of which you ought
to be ashamed, let it bring you into and keep you
in the very presence of Him who gave it to you.
Let it hold you with a grasp that you cannot escape
before the judgment seat of God. And, above all,
know that it is a trust and never dare to make a lux-
ury out of it. Understand that your wealth or your
education, or your religious light is not thoroughly
made your own till you have begun to use it for
other people.
O if the people of privilege all through this city
could get these truths and hold them! How igno-
rant they are about them now. How they behave
like children to whom have been given jewels that
might glorify and enrich the world but who hide
them under a child's awkward bushel made of pride
and shame or use them only to deck out their fool-
ish baby-houses. O for some voice of Christ to
come to them and say " Ye are the light of the
world. If the light that is in you is darkness how
great is that darkness."
It is no feeble and fictitious levelhng of the world
that we desire. Men are not jealous of privilege if
privilege is only worthy of its privileges. You who
are rich and lofty and educated and religious, be-
ware, beware, of what befel that Jewish people who
were once to the rest of the world what you are now
to the rest of the community. They were what you
are. Beware lest by repeating their unworthiness
you come to be what they are. It is possible for
you to be what they might have been, to take all
THE DUTIES OF PRIVILEGE. I05
their promises and find the truth they never found
in them. God says to you as He said to them,
They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of
the firmament, and they that turn many to right-
eousness as the stars forever and ever.
VII.
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
*' He asked life of Thee and thou gavest it him, even length of
days for ever and ever." — Psalms xxi. 4.
The poetry of the twenty-first Psalm is very pic-
turesque. King David is the writer, but the whole
people of Israel are represented as the speakers.
First they address themselves to God and praise
Him for the blessings which he has given to their
monarch. Then they turn to the king himself and
rejoice with him upon the victory over his enemies
and the escape from his troubles which is before him.
And then in the last verse they turn back again to
God and ascribe the glory and power entirely to
Him. " Be thou exalted, Lord, in thine own
strength, so will we sing and praise thy power."
The Psalm is therefore, in most spirited and poetic
form, the expression of David's own gratitude and
hope and devotion.
The verse which I have quoted for our text fixes
our attention on the first part of the Psalm, the grati-
tude of David. The people are singing of God's
mercy to their beloved king. They remember how,
perhaps in some special emergency when his life
106
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. I07
seemed in danger, perhaps in that long aspiration of
youth which is one long prayer for life, David had
begged God to let him live. " He asked life of
thee," and then they record how God was better to
David than his prayer. " Thou gavest it him, even
length of days forever and ever," or, as our Prayer-
Book version has it, " He asked life of thee and thou
gavest him a long life, even for ever and ever." It
is this verse which I wish to study with you. What
does it mean ? Surely David does not dream that
God in answer to his prayer for life had really made
his life immortal. Already as he wrote he must
have felt in eye and hand some of those symptoms
of advancing age which even in the full strength of
maturity prophesy decay. It must have been that
David caught sight of that other kind of earthly im-
mortality which has always fascinated noble minds.
He saw the perpetuation of his influence. He saw
that the spiritual dynasty which was represented in
him was to continue in long power over unborn
generations of mankind. The Christ who was to
come in the fulfilment of that which he prefigured
was to reign forever. This was the immortality
which he heard God promising him. He asked life.
Asked to be saved from death by sickness, or by
the paw of the lion or the paw of the bear, or by
the soldiers of Saul. And God gave him life. And
at first, it may be, he thought that God had given
him no more than he had asked for, only the imme-
diate escape from dying. But by and by he found
that the life which God had given him was a long
and deep and mysterious thing. It was vastly richer
I08 THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
in character and destiny than he had dreamed of.
Slowly it opened to him and he saw that it was
something with vast connections, something whose
power touched spiritual forces and never should
decay, something belonging to the unending life of
God. It was eternal life which God had given him.
" He had asked life and God had given him a long
life even for ever and ever."
It is thus that these words of David have sug-
gested to me the subject of which I wished to speak
to you to-day. I have wondered whether I could
make you see how that same deepening sight of life
which came to David may come to us, does come to
many men who get below the first appearance, the
mere surface of life and see its deeper meaning. We
too ask God for life. Every struggle for self-
support ; every shudder at the thought of dying,
every delight in existence is a cry for life. We may
not mean it for a prayer. We may not turn it God-
ward. With us, as we utter it, it may be a mere
vague cry into the darkness, but God hears it as a
cry to Him, just exactly as if you walked upon the
beach at night and heard a drowning man shouting
in terror, his shout would be in your ears a prayer
to you, although he did not know that you were
there, and only shouted in the vagueness of his ter-
ror. So every struggle that we make to live is a
prayer to God for life. And the continuance of our
existence is God's answer to our prayer. But when
we first take the life which He gives us we do not
know what it is. Its depth, its richness only opens
to us gradually. Only gradually do we learn that
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. IO9
God has given to us not merely the power of present
being and present enjoyment, but that wrapt up and
hidden in that He has given us the power of think-
ing, feeUng, loving, living in such deep and lofty
ways that we may be in connection with the great
continuous unbroken thoughts and feelings and
movements of the universe. The life which He has
given us is in its capacities not merely a thing of this
moment. It is a part of the life of the universe.
It is eternal life.
We can understand it best perhaps if we look back
to the very beginning of life and follow the human
spirit in its development. It is possible for our
imaginations even to picture the soul praying for life
before it has begun to live. We all remember those
verses from Pope's Messiah which are made into one
of the hymns of our hymnal. The poet is singing
of the kingdom of God that is to come, the new
Jerusalem and its inhabitants:
" See a long race thy spacious courts adorn,
See future sons and daughters yet unborn,
In crowding ranks on eveiy side arise
Demanding life, impatient for the skies."
The cry of the unborn for life ! That is the sound
which fills the poet's vision. By and by comes
God's answer to that prayer. The unborn come
to the birth and life is given. We all know how
that life seems to be merely life, life in its first and
simplest form at the beginning, and so it goes on
through all the earliest years. The unconscious
infant lives in a mere animal existence, and later
no THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
when the strong and healthy boy begins to grow
conscious of the delight of life, it is pure life, life
simply as a fact, life not with reference to the
deeper powers it contains or the far-off issues with
which it has to do that gives him such hourly de-
light in living. There comes back to many of us, I
am sure, the ringing verse in which Browning has
made this very David, when he was a boy, sing in
the presence of King Saul of this pure consciousness
of joy in the mere fact of being alive.
*' Oh, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree ; the cool silver
shock
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, — the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal — the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine
And the locust's flesh steeped in the pitcher ! the full draught of
wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy."
" Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it
is for the eyes to behold the sun." So Ecclesiastes,
the Preacher, sings the same truth, the truth of
man's, the healthy man's, pure delight in life, long
before he has looked down into the depth of life to
ask what treasures are hidden there, or looked out
along the distant vista of life to ask what he shall
do with it. In his placing of a bright, unquestion-
ing boyhood at the beginning of every man's career,
does it not seem as if God had meant to indicate
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. Ill
that this sense of life as a blessing in itself must be
the basis out of which all the sense of the special
blessedness of special events in life must grow, as if
He meant to have us take life as a whole and thank
Him for our creation before we looked deeper and
saw what were the true purposes of life. But by
and by the time for that deeper look must come.
Not always can David be content with the leaping
from rock to rock, the plunge in the pool and the
sleep in the dry bed of the summer brook. The
thoughts and anxieties and duties of a man come
crowding up into the life of the light-hearted boy.
Care for things to which he once was all indifferent,
hopes of things about which he once never dreamed,
ambitions and desires of influence and power, the
delight in half-discovered faculties, and as the crown
of all, conscious religion or the realized relationship
with God, the love of and the obedience to Christ,
all of these become his one after another. One
after another life comes to mean these things. And
now what shall we say ? How have these things
come to the man. See him at forty rich in all these,
the earnest, thoughtful, religious man, full of associa-
tions with the world and with his fellow-man and
God. This is the same being with the boy who
played in simple health and thoughtlessness thirty
years ago. How have all these things come to him ?
Have angels come down one by one, each bringing
one of these new gifts and put them one by one
into his life. Have they not rather opened one by
one out of that life itself, called out by God, urged
out by the half-blind desire to be all that it had
112 THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
within itself the capacity of being, but certainly
coming forth out of the very substance of the life
itself, and therefore having been in the life from the
beginning. There never was a moment when the
hand of God touched Shakespeare's lips and bade
him be the poet. Never a time when as a new en-
dowment a breath from Heaven gave to St. John
the capacity to be a saint. Never a day when the
nature of Raphael was filled with genius. These
things were in these men from the beginning of their
lives. When as in Pope's imaginative picture their
spirits prayed for life, and when God gave them life,
this was what God gave them. This poetry, this
genius, the sublimeness was all wrapped up in that
first gift of life when God said " Let this man be."
All that has to do with His own unending life was
there. The eternal life of these men, this God gave
to them. All that was to open out of their being
forever, all that they were to be on to the endless
end, all this God gave them when He answered the
prayer of their unborn spirits. They asked life of
Him, and He gave them a long life, even forever
and ever.
We talk of Raphael, and Shakespeare, and St.
John. But we might talk of any men. We talk of
them only because their illustrious excellence makes
glorious and clear what is true of all mankind. In
all men the life which God gives has in it the capacity
of all which the man forever hereafter is to be. In
all men, the first life that appears, that which we
commonly call life, the mere vitality, is the founda-
tion of the entire life, the basis upon which must
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. II3
rest all the structure of the growing character. How
interesting this makes the beginning of a life appear.
Some day I walk along one of our streets and men
are laying the foundations of a new house which is
going to be built. It is interesting in itself, — the
driving of the piles, the laying of the massive stones,
the exercise of power and of skill. But the true
interest of what they are doing lies in the conscious-
ness that this is a foundation. The lines on which
these great stones are laid mark the dimensions and
partitions of the coming house. I look up and the
air already seems to be quivering with the yet un-
built walls. He who is laying these stones has the
walls in his brain and is already building them.
That makes it interesting. But let it stop, and then
you feel instantly how destitute of value the founda-
tion is in itself. A foundation that has never been
built upon is the saddest sight upon a city street.
A crumbling foundation on which a building which
is now burnt down once stood is sad. Still it has
the memory of having once done its true work. But
a foundation that has been well laid and then
stopped short and had no house built on it is the
most sad of all. At once it suggests its human
parallel, " This man began to build but was not
able to finish," we say. "So is he who layeth up
treasure for himself but is not rich toward God,"
The first life that has stopped short and never gone
on to complete itself in the higher lives, mere vital-
ity which has advanced and opened into no great
character and usefulness, these are the human paral-
lels of the foundation stones upon which the bank-
114 THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
rupt or discouraged or fickle-minded builder never
has gone on to build his house.
You have only to add one element to our simple
metaphor and it becomes complete. You have only
to conceive of the foundation stones becoming con-
scious of themselves and knowing what is happening
to them, and then they represent completely that
earliest, rudimentary life upon the basis of which all
the other lives rest and which finds its value in its
power to carry and develop them. Let the founda-
tion feel the unbuilt building, and what joy must fill
it as it finds itself growing more compact and solid.
Every blow of the hammer which makes it more fit
for what it is to carry rings like a bell from the
steeple that is some day to pierce the sky. Surely
there is something which corresponds to that in the
human life. Surely the mere vitality, the mere ani-
mal living, if we choose to call it so, may be a differ-
ent thing in the young human animal from what it is
or can be in the young animal of any other kind,
because of the premonitions, however dim and vague,
of the life of intellect and of love and of religion
which are to rest upon it. And when the years pass
and no house is built, when only the foundation
stands, must not that, too, if we imagine into it a
consciousness, be disappointed and full of the sense
of failure in a way which will find its parallel in the
life of every man whose life lingers as the years go
by in the first rudimentary conditions and never ad-
vances to any of the higher uses for which it was
made. O the unused foundations of character
which stand along our human streets and make the
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. IIJ
city of our human life so tragical, O the men here
who are nothing but grown-up boys, who have never
built upon their boyhood any real manly life. O
the bodily vigor that has never been put to any
strong work for God or fellow-man ; the quick senses
that have never been put to any higher employment
than the shooting of a bird ; the observation of our
brethren that once was healthy sympathy but has
developed into no true interest in our brethren's best
good and so remains to-day only in the wretched
shape of the old man's or the old woman's taste for
gossip and scandal. O the fresh spontaneity which
never having found its true task wanders still in dilet-
tante dissipation among a thousand fancies. O the
first crude imaginations about God, which never hav-
ing been refined and elevated by careful and loving
thought about Him have settled down into the bigot-
ries and idolatries of middle life. These are the
specimens of what I mean by the primary, rudi-
mentary life becoming sad and miserable because it
does not go boldly and freely on to fulfil itself in the
higher lives. The temporal life which is not allowed
to open into the eternal life becomes corrupt and
feeble in its temporalness. The man who does not
carry forward his care for himself and complete it
with a loving care for God and for God's children,
loses the best power of self -care. He who having
asked God for life does not take the deeper and longer
life which comes in answer to his prayer loses the
best joy of the life which he does try to take.
I have prolonged these definitions and illustrations
because I was very anxious to make clear even by
Il6 THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
much reiteration how there are these two Hves in
every full grown man, the life for which man asks
and the deeper life which God gives ; and how these
two stand always related to one another, as the house
to the foundation on which it is built, or, perhaps
better, as the pattern to the stuff into whose sub-
stance it is woven. And I have done all this because
I wanted to get at this further question which seems
to me to be very pressingly important. What effect
upon our treatment of the lower life will such a vision
of the higher life which ought to be built on it pro-
duce. At first it might seem as if the mere physical
life and all that belongs to it would seem contempt-
ible and only worthy of neglect to one who had
caught sight of the diviner purposes of living. But
very soon we see that that is not so. It gives us
new ideas about the mere fact of life when we thus
discern the loftier purposes of life, but it does not
make life contemptible or insignificant. Let us see
what one or two of such ideas are.
The first of them is obedience. Any man who
knows that his bodily life and all that immediately
belongs to it has its real value as the scene of expe-
rience and the material of operations which belong
to the mind and the soul, must of necessity seek for
some power to whom the mind and body belong
and ask of Him to make the body ready for the high
and mysterious functions of which it can itself be
most imperfectly aware, for which it can but most
imperfectly prepare itself. To give ourselves into
the will of God that He may do in us that which
He made us for, which we ourselves but dimly
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. II7
understand, that is the only true completion of our
life. O how we talk of submission to God as if it
were the hard concession to necessity or else as if it
were the last refuge of despair instead of being what
it is, the fulfilment and consummation of our life.
As if you took the chisel which had been trying to
carve by itself and put it into the hand of Michael
Angelo, so only infinitely higher is it when you teach
your soul to say " O Lord, not my will but thy will
be done. " It is no cry of a defeated man. It is the
soul seizing on the privilege and the right of having
itself completed after God's pattern. The parable
of the prodigal son has the whole story in it. The
man submitting is the man completed. O if our
brave, self-confident young men only knew this.
Full of pure joy in life as life, full of the delight of
" mere living," they look forward and the dream
comes to them that sometime or other life may break
and then they will go to God for repair, sometime or
other (so they shuddering feel) they may fall into
terrible sin and then they will go to God for forgive-
ness. But to go to God now for completeness, to
go and lay life into the obedience of God as a dia-
mond lays itself into the sunshine that the mere
surface brilliancy may deepen and region behind
region of splendor be revealed below, that does not
seem to come into their thought. The cry " sub-
mit, submit," " obey, obey," seems to them to
mean " come down! come down! " But it really
means " come up! " Let God who has given you
so abundantly the earthly life, the life of time, give
you into and through it, the life of Heaven, the
eternal life.
Il8 THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
2. Again our doctrine enforces most impressively,
I think, the need of purity in the Hfe of the body
for the soul's sake. Here are you, let us say, just
where King David was when as a boy he lived in
that bright, sunny, superficial life which Mr. Brown-
ing describes in the verses which I quoted some time
ago, the life of the mountain and the fountain and
the river bed, the life of physical spirits and the joy
of mere existence. Not yet have opened the deeper
depths to you. Not yet have you begun to hunger
after truth, to puzzle over the problems of the world,
to seek for spiritual holiness. But you know the
time for all those deeper lives must come to you.
You would not bear to think of yourself as possibly
going on forever living thus only on the outside.
You mean to be religious some day. Of course the
true, the only true way is to be religious now. Now
is the real time to open these deeper lives which you
do mean some day to live. But till you open them,
while you are lingering and hesitating and living still
in the fresh delights of the external life, it is good
that you should feel already the influence of that
deeper life which is to be some day, begging you to
keep the life in which you are living even now pure
for its sake. O if I could let you see the men who,
when they come to the great effort to be Christians,
find a terrible remonstrance in the dulness and heavi-
ness of their whole being brought on them by years
of dissipation or of idleness. Here is the young
man who is not a Christian yet. He might be.
Let him not think for a moment that it is only for
old men to give themselves to the gracious service
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. II9
of the Son of man. Thank God, there are some
boys among you who have learned better than that
the chances and privileges of our human life. But
this young man is not a Christian yet. Can he do
anything even now ? Surely he can ! If ever he gives
himself to God's service it must be with these hands
that he will do the will of the Lord whom he will
then love with all his heart. Therefore let him keep
these hands pure and make them alert and strong.
If ever he seeks for the signs of his then acknowl-
edged God in all creation, it must be through these
eyes and through all these senses that the rich, over-
whelming witness must pour in. Therefore let him
guard those senses from the least taint of impurity,
from the sluggishness and obstruction which falls
like a curse upon the body in which a man has lived
a dissipated life. If this young man ever, made a
Christian, is to enter into the deep and helpful asso-
ciations with his fellow-men which are the delight and
duty of the Christian life, it will be by the profounder
opening and the broader extension of these social
relations in which he is living now that that new
social life will come, therefore let him keep these
social relations scrupulously clean and true. This
is the way in which you may be faithful already to
whatever unguessed deeper life God has in His in-
tentions for you. No man is living worthily who is
not faithful already to the future life which he does
not yet understand, but which he knows must come.
" Your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost,"
says Paul. Before the God has occupied the temple,
the temple must feel the influence of his promised
I20 THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
coming and keep its empty courts clean for Him.
Are there not some men here, not yet devoted to
the highest life which is Christ's service, who are yet
conscious enough of some mysterious richness of
experience of life before them, to make them ready
to listen when one begs them to keep their whole
present life, their whole bodily life pure and true
and active, so that whatever may claim them in the
days to come shall find them with natures so fresh
and sound that they can answer to its claim.
I know indeed that it is out of the very substance
of our sins that God's unbounded and ingenious
mercy can make the new life. I know that into the
shattered structure of a misused and degraded body
He can pour His spiritual strength. I know that on
the tattered canvas of a profligate life he can weave
the glorious patterns of His grace. But truths like
these, confirmed by multitudes of notable histories,
must never make us think so base a heresy as that a
man must go through wickedness to get to goodness,
or that a pure youth does not display a fairer theatre
for the work of grace than a young life all torn and
stained with sin. Every man's youth, be it as pure
as it may, will offer enough for God to forgive,
enough from which the soul, come to its conversion,
can gather the fruits of humble penitence. But it
will always be the hills which lift themselves the
highest in the dark and look most frankly toward
the quarter from which the promising must come
when it does come ; it will always be these hills that
will first and most easily and most richly catch the
glory of the rising sun. Therefore keep your life
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. 121
pure that some day God may make it holy! Be
faithful already to the faith which shall be yours
some day.
3. Let me say one single but most earnest word
about the necessary sacredness and inviolability
which this truth of ours when it is thoroughly
accepted gives to our physical life. Nothing, I be-
lieve, can give a man a sure, reliable conviction that
under no circumstances of pain or disappointment
has he a right to cast away his life, nothing can give
and keep to a man a true and manly certainty that
he is bound, no matter how he hates it, to stand at
the post where God has put him till the God who
put him there calls him away, except the clear per-
ception that this physical life is but the material and
condition of deeper spiritual life which is the only
finally valuable thing. The man whose whole na-
ture is steeped in and pervaded by that truth will
stand in spite of everything, while God in any way,
through the pain of the body, if need be, calls up
the soul and bids it live its life, and makes the man
by suffering which he will not run away from, a
spiritual man.
Every now and then a strange phenomenon ap-
pears which shows how the sacredness of life depends
upon the preservation of clear ideas of the deepest
purposes of life. Every now and then some physi-
cian or some other man whose eye is fastened prin-
cipally on man's physical structure stands up with
the plea that if a man is sick with an incurable dis-
ease and doomed to hopeless suffering it is the right
and even the duty of science to relieve him of his
122 THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
sufferings by gently taking away his life. It is ar»
atrocious insult to the essential and inalienable
sacredness of life. " There is nothing but suffering
for this poor creature," cries such an arrogant doc-
tor, " therefore let him die! " Nothing but suffer-
ing ! As if God were not every day using the body's
suffering to cultivate the soul's eternal life. As if
just as soon as there was a hard lesson to be learned
you ought to kill the scholar. One trembles as he
thinks what pictures of human patience, what vis-
ions of ripened character which have been revelations
and inspirations to generations of mankind, what
spectacles of the spiritual possibilities of humanity,
nay, what sights of refined and exalted happiness in
the triumph of the spirit over the flesh, must have
been lost to the world if doctors such as these had
had their way from the beginning. No ! The life
of the human body is a sacred thing, because in it
and through it comes the deeper life. Man must
stand by his post, and no other man must drive him
from it, because so only can God give man His best
revelations and use him for His most effective work.
And so we come back to King David and our
text. The old, old prayer for life. How the whole
world has rung with it! In what various tones it
has gone up to God. Not merely from sick beds
where hfe seemed to be just slipping away out of
the grasp of desperate men. Not merely at the foot
of thrones where wretches begged their tyrants not
to cut short their wretched days. But all the stir
of living is a cry for life. All the struggle of busi-
ness is an appeal of man to live. All industry, all
THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. 123
enterprise, all thought, echoes with the dread of
death, the prayer for life ! And God hears it and
gives the world, and gives to you and me, day by
day, the life we ask. But oh, that as He gives it to
us day by day we may know the full richness of
what He gives. Every morning He puts into our
hands anew the mystery of our existence. The
chance to think true thoughts, to do brave and kind
deeds, to love him, and to help our brethren — these,
the great chances of the soul, these, the eternal life,
the "long life even forever and ever" He gives us
day by day when we ask for life. O may He give
us something more, the gift of His own sight that
we may know as He knows all the depth of this life
which He gives to us, and live it obediently and
purely and patiently, and so come in it and by it
always nearer to Him who gives it to us.
VIII.
THE GIFTS OF GOD.
•• Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none, but such as I
have give I unto thee." — Acts iii. 6.
It was the first miracle which the apostles wrought
after Jesus had left them. Peter and John, full of
their new power and with the mystery of their new
life all stretching out before them, went up into the
temple at the hour of prayer. They passed through
the crowd that always was gathered there, and at
the door, just as he might crouch beside any church-
door to-day, there sat a crippled beggar. And per-
haps seeing something in the faces of these two men
which he did not understand but which made him
hopeful, he asked Peter and John for charity. They
gave him no money. They had none to give him.
Poor men themselves, they were as destitute of the
one thing on which his heart was set as he was.
Silver and gold they had none. But they had some-
thing better. Full of the spirit and the health of
Christ they had the power of giving health to him,
and Peter took the cripple by the hand and lifted
him up, and his feet and ankle bones received
strength, and he, leaping up, stood and walked and
entered into the temple, walking and leaping and
praising God.
ta4
THE GIFTS OF GOD. 12$
Such is the beautiful story. The goodness of God
by these His two disciples was so much richer than
the poor beggar dreamed of. Little he thought
that morning as he left his house and crawled up to
the temple of what was coming to him before the
night closed in. To gather a few pennies as on
other begging days was all he hoped for ; but this,
to come back home a straight, strong man, this he
had never pictured to himself. It was a good in-
stance of the way in which men live with one an-
other, the hard and rigid way in which we touch
each other's lives. It is only in certain appointed
forms, only through certain conventional mediums,
that men come near to one another and give each
other the help that man ought to give to man. Out
of the manifold points in which we ought to come
in contact with one another, this or that is arbi-
trarily selected, and if we cannot meet there we stay
apart, and so it is often sad to think how much of
the best which we might get from one another we
must be continually losing. This poor man ex-
pected money. If any one of the crowd had money
and would give it he could help him, but he looked
for nothing from anybody else. And so we expect
help and comfort in working out this human life of
ours from certain people and in certain prescribed
ways ; and if we are in the position to give certain
kinds of help we are willing to accept the duty, but
all the time it seems as if there must be other doors
open through which help and ministry might flow
back and forth between us.
For we all know that the best help that has been
126 THE GIFTS DF GOD.
given to us in life has not come from those who gave
us money or anything which money could represent.
Prominent as money stands in all our thoughts of
charity we owe more to-day to those who h?ve never
given us, perhaps who never could have given us a
penny, but who have given us something that is far
more valuable than money — the Peters and the
Johns who in some need have said to us as we looked
up to them, " Silver and gold have I none, but such
as I have give I unto thee," and who then have
touched some dead and withered part of our nature
and by their strong character given it back its
strength.
I want to dwell a little while on this. I want to
speak of the invaluable gifts that it is in the power
of man to give to man — that is to say, using the
word literally, of the gifts which cannot be valued
or estimated. Not the gifts of money or influence
which make the receiver so much richer, but the
more spiritual gifts of life and character, whereby a
man may be benefited not merely by the lowest and
grossest but by the finest and highest which his fel-
low-man possesses. I have various reasons for choos-
ing my subject : I would make the rich man feel that
he cannot do his whole duty by any brother by gifts
of money, however lavish they may be; I would
make the poor man feel that his poverty by no
means shuts him out from the very noblest privilege
of charity ; and I would try to make everybody feel
that there is a lofty and dignified dependence in
which we may always be looking up to other people,
not with a mean expectation that they will give us
THE GIFTS OF GOD. 12/
money but with a generous hope that they will be-
stow upon us their intelligence, their inspirations,
their comfort, their religion.
I honor the influence of money. I excuse no man
from the duty, I except no man from the privilege,
of bounteously and wisely giving it to whom it has
been intrusted, but there are higher things to give
than money, and any man who really wants to give
something may find something to give, though his
purse be as empty as the purses of the two apostles.
To what shall we apply, then, what we have been
saying, in order to make it clearer and more defi-
nite ? I apply it in a very few words first to ideas,
then to moral inspirations, then to sympathy, and
then to religion. A man may be able to give any of
these, and yet be very poor in silver and gold.
I. First, then, about the ideas or the knowledge
that comes to us in anj' way. They are beyond all
value in mere money terms. It does not need a very
high attainment to be able to say " More than all
the money that I have made in life is the knowledge
that I have gained." Many a poor student, looking
about him, is able with a perfectly honest heart to
say, " If I had my life to live over again I would
not choose differently. I would give it again to
winning knowledge, not to winning wealth, for
knowledge is more to me than wealth is." But
while the clear sense of the superior value of knowl-
edge is thus no uncommon thing, the feeling of
responsibility about knowledge as something that
a man has no right to keep to himself is much less
common than it is about money. Many a man has
128 THE GIFTS OF GOD.
a blind notion of stewardship about his property,
but very few have it about their knowledge. We
all feel that it is disgraceful for a man to be very
rich and give nothing away, but we look compla-
cently enough at the man who makes his culture a
mere selfish luxury. One grows tired of seeing cul-
tivated people with all their culture cursed by selfish-
ness. But surely to give a man an idea is better
than to give him a dollar, unless he is starving and
needs something to eat upon the spot. And if you,
among my hearers, who have no money to give
away but have been trained to careful study, to
serious and thoughful lives, only knew it, you have a
power of charity that no millionaire possesses. Not
in some special form, not by mounting the preach-
er's pulpit or the professor's chair, but by steadily
bearing in mind that what you know and think, you
know and think not for yourselves alone but for
others, you may become the centre of a little green
spot of intelligence in the midst of this arid wilderness
which we call society, as a live tree gathers the mois-
ture and keeps off the sun for a little circle of grass
that grows bright and rich under its branches. It is
better than silver and gold. The dollar is spent and
the man again is hungry, but the idea is implanted,
the intelligence is stirred, and the man is richer and
happier forever.
2, This is one sort of charity which is far above
money. But take another. Higher than intelli-
gence or knowledge, as a gift from man to man, is
moral inspiration. It is good to give a man a new
idea, but surely it is better to give him a high mo-
THE GIFTS OF GOD. 1 29
tive. The motives of the noblest actions are lying
all about us all the time. Men are too dull and
gross to find them. As a man's nature becomes
finer it becomes capable of transmitting pure and
loftier impulses, and finding for them an entrance
into the lives of other men. Thus it is that into a
community that is all discouraged and demoralized
there comes some bright, pure, simple-hearted man
who believes in honesty and loves principles, and by
and by the low tone of the men he lives among is
shamed by him, and men catch his moral spirit and
try to live like him. Has he not given them some-
thing better than money ? Or a poor broken man
comes to you when your purse is empty, and you
are just going out to earn something for yourself,
and you succeed in making him feel that it is better
to earn than to beg; you succeed in touching the
rusty key of his independence, and he goes back
with a refreshed manhood, determined to help him-
self. Tell me, is there any comparison between
what you have done for him and what you would
have done if you could have filled his pockets with
gold, and feasted his hunger off of silver dishes ?
And so to reawaken the sense of purity in a gross,
licentious nature, breathing over the hot and lustful
manhood a fresh, cool breeze out of the long-deserted
mountains of his youth, to stir the impulse of honor
in a crawling sycophant, to make a coward coura-
geous or a scoffer reverent — these are greater gifts
than money. These are greater even than the cur-
ing of diseases or the strengthening and straightening
of cripples such as John and Peter met. And think
I30 THE GIFTS OF GOD.
what poor people they are who may give gifts Hke
these. Poverty itself gives the chance often for that
fortitude that inspires other men to bear their trials.
It is the broken windows out of which these lights
shine. It is the look of a little child that often calls
back purity or honor to a degenerate old man. It
is not necessary to have anything, often it is not
necessary even to do anything. It is only necessary
to be good and brave and true and patient and we
give our brethren gifts far beyond all value, great
generous impulses and strong true principles.
3. And then, thirdly, comes sympathy! We
know that there are times when any gift which can
be measured by money-values becomes totally
worthless. There are the times when you are in the
deepest perplexity or the profoundest sorrow, when
it would be insult and mockery for anybody to come
to you and overwhelm you with the most enormous
fortune that the country has to show. A man goes
on heaping up his fortune, money seems to be his
only craving. He works for it all the time he is
awake and he dreams of it all the time he is asleep.
He lives for it, and by the way in which he lavishes
his health in its pursuit it seems as if he would die
for it. And then all of a sudden some great sorrow
comes to him, and how everything is altered! His
child dies, and how the values of things are all con-
fused in an instant ! Money — his chest so full that
he can bury and bathe his hands in gold — what is it
worth ? Men who can tell him nothing except how
to make more money, what does he care for them ?
But out of utter obscurity comes someone — a pau-
THE GIFTS OF GOD. I3I
per, perhaps, whom he has helped, a servant, it may-
be, who has crept unnoted about his house, a friend
whom he has looked on with something like con-
tempt, so utterly destitute was he of the power of
wealth — and he brings the unutterable, the invalu-
able power of sympathy. He lets that stricken man
know that one heart is bitterly sorry for his suffer-
ing, and by the strength of love he casts some light
into the dark mystery that lies behind the sorrow.
This is the power of sympathy. It includes both
the other gifts of which we spoke. He who truly
gives sympathy enlightens the intelligence and
restrings the enfeebled moral nature of him with
whom he sympathizes. But he does something
more than this. He makes some personal bestowal
of himself, of his own strength, his own life, into
the weakness and deadness that he tries to help. It
is indeed a wondrous gift for man to give to
man.
4. But this is not all. A man gives to another
man his ideas, his inspirations and his consolations,
but if he is all that a man may be, then there is
something more that he can give. If he has God,
if he has taken Christ into his nature so that his life
is a continual following of the Lord's, then see what
a power of benefaction that man may have. It re-
quires nothing great or exceptional in him. Cer-
tainly not great wealth. That has nothing whatever
to do with it. Not great ability or knowledge, that
has hardly more. Only the power to know God and
to tell about him. The little Hebrew maiden is so
humble that she may not even go to the great Syrian,
132 THE GIFTS OF GOD.
captive herself. She tells his wife, and the wife
repeats it to her husband, " Would God my Lord
were with the prophet " ; and Naaman goes to God's
prophet, and comes back with his new health again
almost as if the proud man had taken it out of the
maiden's little hand. History delights in the little
insignificant people who have turned the world's
tides; and religious history has nothing of which she
so delights to tell as the way in which the little
have been able to lead the great to Christ. For re-
member the Christian religion is Christ's friendship.
We cannot come to any truer friend as we cannot
find a simpler story to tell of it than that. The
Christian who comes then with glowing face and
says, " I wish that you would believe my Christ,"
has to bear witness to me only of one thing — that he
has a human heart, and that that heart has found
its satisfaction in the Christ to whom he invites me.
His glowing face tells me both of these. All that is
new in him bears witness that he has really found
the great Renewer. I, wanting to be made new,
arise and go and find Christ, and He does His
blessed work for me. I cannot take that friend's
faith for my own. When, finally, I stand with
Christ and call Him mine, it is like those people of
Samaria who said unto the woman, " Now we be-
lieve, not because of thy word but we have seen
Him ourselves " ; but nevertheless do you think
these men never thought of the woman as the one
who had done for them the greatest thing that one
human creature can do for another? She had intro-
duced them to Jesus, and whoever does that for any
THE GIFTS OF GOD. 1 33
fellow-man, whoever by a Christian word he speaks
or by a Christian life he lives, brings a new soul to
see the perfect life and take the perfect grace, has
poured out of his full hands a blessing on his brother
that leaves utterly out of sight any gift that riches
can bestow on poverty. It is terrible f )r a rich man
to go through life and never have helped a poor man
once out of his plenty, but it is far more terrible for
a Christian to die without having brought any other
soul to Christ.
See then what great gifts they can give who have
no silver and no gold. See what bounty the souls
of very poor men may lavish upon one another.
Intelligence, inspiration, comfort, religion — these
are the things which men are needing everywhere.
Ignorant, spiritless, wretched, Christless lives are all
about us. To help them, to give them what they
want, we do not need to be rich. As much as these
needs of theirs outgo their need of wealth, so much
does the bounty that supplies these needs surpass
the bounty that should simply spread their tables
and fill their purses. O poor man, you who want
to be charitable and seem to be shut out from
the great privilege by your poverty, look up, take
courage! Here is what you may do. Here is what
you may give. Out of the free presence of God,
out of that costless mercy of Christ which is yours
always, you may gather these boons with which to
satisfy your brother's wants. What a new life we
should have, what a new world we should be if all
men really were living to give these precious things
to one another
134 THE GIFTS OF GOD.
It is not hard to see what it is that gives their
superior value to these higher bounties. It is that
the giver necessarily goes with them. Of all the
worshippers who passed into the temple many a one
may have dropt his bit of silver into the cripple's
hand, but the silver was not the man, the man need
not go with the silver. But when Peter and John
came, and Peter gave him his health, that was not
something that could be given like a bit of silver;
Peter's own self, his heart, his soul, had to go out
to the poor suppliant. We cannot but believe that
he felt something of that mysterious experience
which the great Healer uttered once when the poor
woman touched His robe and He said, " Virtue is
gone out of me."
And always, there can be no really precious gift
either to giver or to taker, with which the self of
the giver does not go. You remember, I am sure,
the story that our poet has written of the young
knight who rides out after the holy Grail, and as he
goes flings a gold-piece to the beggar who sits be-
side his gate, and the beggar will not lift it from
the dust, because it is only " worthless gold." But
years pass by and when the weary Sir Launfal
comes home, old and haggard, there sits the leper
still, and then as the knight breaks his single crust
and fills his wooden bowl out of the frozen stream
and gives the beggar food and drink, the blessing
comes to him ; the holy Grail, which is Christ's Pass-
over cup, is found, is the true act of charity, and the
leper speaking with the voice of Christ — * ' the voice
that is calmer than silence " — says, " Who gives
THE GIFTS OF GOD. 1 35
himself with his gift feeds three, himself, his hunger-
ing neighbor and me." It is sad indeed to think of
how much money has been lavished which was only
" worthless gold " because the self of the giver was
not in it.
I think this lights up much about religion, about
the gifts, that is, which God bestows on man. If it
is true that man cannot give man his highest gifts
unless he gives himself with them, then the same
must be true of God. And every conception of
religion which thinks of God as standing off and
handing men from a distance bounties, however rich
they might be, and does not make everything of the
giving by God of Himself, His character. His love,
with and in His gift, is radically wrong, is not the
gospel. It is not that God gives us meat and drink,
it is not even that He gives us forgiveness for our
sins as a mere forensic and judicial act, it is not even
that He gives us heaven as a mere place of delight,
— these are not what bind us to Him and make us
His. If He could give us any of these without
giving us Himself, if He could spread our tables
heartlessly, if He could forgive us, as men have
sometimes talked, because some one had borne our
penalty and forced forgiveness from His justice, if
He could open the gates of pearl and not stand
Himself with living heart to welcome us, none of
these gifts would make us perfectly and perma-
nently His. And if He could give us Himself and
not give us some of these things, as sometimes He
does give His very heart of hearts to a poor child
of His who is struggling and starving, that gift
136 THE GIFTS OF GOD.
would satisfy the soul in lack of every outward bless-
ing. No, it is true of God as it is of man,
'• That is no true alms which the hand can hold,
He gives nothing but worthless gold
Who gives from a sense of duty."
And such representations as many of our theolo-
gies contain of mercies and gifts extorted from God's
reluctance by a hard necessity of justice, however
they may be trying to tell one side of the story, can-
not and do not picture the glory and the power of
the Gospel, God's free gift of Himself to man.
The Incarnation was the great announcement of
this truth. God had been giving men gifts through
all the ages. He had dropped His bounties thick
through all His people's history. Men had taken
His bounties and thanked Him for them, but through
them all they had not reached the certainty of God
with them, of God giving Himself to them. And
so He came. By every sacrifice, by every identifi-
cation of Himself with the life that they were living,
He gave them Himself. He was not satisfied until
He was the gift, the very God given to man. Mys-
teriously, perfectly He put Himself into their
nature.
And when He had come this same desire was
always evident. Men often failed to reach it. They
wanted gifts. "Give us bread," they cried, as they
followed Him from place to place. " Nay, I am
the bread," He answered, "take and eat me"!
Give me water," begged the woman of Samaria,
** that I need not come to the well to draw." " The
THE GIFTS OF GOD. 1 37
water that I shall give him shall be in Him," Christ
replied. He gave no money anywhere. What we
call charity He could not give, silver and gold had
He none. But knowledge, such as He gave to Nico-
demus, inspiration such as He bestowed on the apos-
tles, comfort such as He brought into the cottage
at Bethany, the way to the Father as He opened it
wide to the multitudes in the temple, these He was
always giving. Himself, His divine self. He lav-
ished on all who would receive Him.
And, brethren, the Incarnation is the Gospel still.
We grow disappointed sometimes, perhaps, when
we ask for God's gifts and they do not come. We
ask for health, and God withholds it. We ask for
wealth, and we go struggling on in poverty. We
beg for pleasant homes, and the family life is broken
up and scattered. We want long life, and death
stands blankly in our way. We send up our prayer
for peace, and anxieties come thickening around us.
Let us remember always that these are God's gifts,
but they are not God. Himself — His company. His
love. His spirit — these are what we may be sure of.
This is what He never will refuse. If any of the
others stand in the way of this, He will brush them
all ruthlessly aside that He may give Himself com-
pletely to the soul which, below and above all other
needs, needs Him.
That Incarnation, my dear friends, must be our
hope and blessing. But it must also be our pattern.
O let us riot think that we cannot share the self-
sacrifice of God. What was it ? It was the giving
up of self-centred, isolated joy in order to bestow
138 THE GIFTS OF GOD.
Himself on man. The Son was in the bosom of the
Father. The perfect Hfe was his. Each infinite
power in all its infinite delight knew no deficiency.
All knowledge, all happiness, all love was there.
What can we say but this, that He was God, and
then He came to be a servant ? He " was anointed
to preach the Gospel to the poor, He was sent to
heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to
the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to
set at liberty them that are bruised." Can we know
anything of that ? Can we do anything like that ?
Filled with his love and spirit, can we in any far-off
way repeat that in ourselves ? Wherever any man
leaves his own self-contained life to go forth into
the life of others, wherever any saint leaves his
closet to go and tell the story of the Saviour, in-
stead of merely pondering its sweetness by himself,
wherever any scholar lets his self-culture go that he
may lift a corner of the cloud of ignorance off of
some benighted soul, wherever the missionary makes
himself homeless that he may gather some of the
Father's children into the eternal home, — there is
the soul and spirit of the Incarnation. " As my
Father hath sent me, so send I you," He said.
We, too, may enter into the lot of other men as
He entered into ours. He was not satisfied just to
be God, he must give God. And whenever we are
not satisfied merely to be wise or happy or holy,
but must give wisdom and happiness and holiness,
there is the soul and spirit of the Incarnation. It
would have been so easy for God to open His hands
and shower his bounty on the world, so that every
THE GIFTS OF GOD. 1 39
field should overrun with harvest and every mouth
be fed with bread ; and it is so easy for us to open
our money-bags and give our money, but to come
Himself and to be to men wisdom and righteous-
ness and sanctification and redemption, nothing but
that would satisfy Him. To go ourselves, to be
one with the sufferer that we may help his suffer-
ing, one with the darkened that we may lighten his
darkness, this is the only Christliness, the only com-
plete living of the life of Christ.
We might follow it farther, we might say that as
the true Godhood of the Saviour with all its holi-
ness and joy was not lost by His entrance into
humanity, so the self-culture and the happiness out
of which you seem to depart in order to enter into
the ignorance and misery of other men, is not in
truth surrendered. Your own soul gathers a ripe-
ness which it could not have had abiding alone,
and the joy that you seemed to surrender is multi-
plied tenfold when you begin to seek not yourself
but other men. " He that loseth his life finds it."
He that gives up himself for the service of his
brethren finds himself in the service of his brethren.
Some of you know this by experience, — oh that all
of you would really try it ! For however it may
puzzle us sometimes to apply it to the lower, the
promise is always true about the higher things,
" Give, and it shall be given unto you."
I have tried to open the door of charity to some
to whom it has seemed to be shut tight. I am sure
that there are many who as they go in and out at
I40 THE GIFTS OF GOD.
the beautiful gate of the temple of a happy life are
deeply oppressed at the sight of the many who lie
crippled and miserable outside. They would like,
they long to help them, but what can they do ?
Silver and gold they have none. I have tried to
show that there are other things to give. Your
intelligence, your principles, your comfort, your
religion — in one word, yourself. The ways will
open before you if you really want them. The first
and deepest of all ways is to have a self, a strong,
good, positive character. To be our best not
merely for ourselves but for each other, that is a
noble impulse ; that, if it were fully carried out,
would be the world's salvation. No man can really
be strong and good without helping the world —
" Not to scatter bread and gold.
Goods and raiment bought and sold,
But to hold fast his simple sense
And speak the speech of innocence,
And with hand and body and blood
To make his bosom counsel good :
For he that feeds men serveth few,
He serves all who dares be true."
Let us be very thankful that no man is con-
demned to go uselessly through life, or to come
before God at last without some souls that he has
helped towards their Father.
IX.
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
♦' In demonstration of the Spirit."— i Corinthians ii. 4.
To every clear and sincere mind a demonstration
is a most welcome thing. The moment which brings
it is full of light and joy. To have it made abso-
lutely certain that a thing is true, to have a fact set
clearly in the mind's domain, never thereafter to be
questioned or dislodged, that brings a sense of solid-
ity and peace. The eye sparkles, the heart leaps,
the feet are planted firm and strong when, at the
end of a long process, the lines gather in to a con-
clusion, and the result is grasped and set firmly
among the treasures of the mind. That fixed cer-
tainty becomes a new starting-point. The future
opens out of it. Demonstrations which are yet un-
reached loom dimly in the distance. That which
has been held loosely in the hand, not truly believed
because we were not sure that it was sure, grows
solid as we hold it, and out of its heart, when once
we are assured of it, beat meanings which it could
not give us while it was yet in doubt.
We all are holding propositions which yet wait for
the hour of their demonstration. We think that
141
142 THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
they are true, but we cannot give full and final
reasons for our faith either to ourselves or to each
other. It is like watching the east before the sun-
rise comes. At last the sun leaps from the horizon
and the sky is bright. Then the clouds disappear.
The darkness scatters. The eyes no longer wander
here and there. They are fixed certainly on this
new certainty. A new day has set itself firm in his-
tory. The proof is there round and red and radiant.
The demonstration is complete.
But there are various kinds of demonstration ac-
cording to the different kinds of truths and persons.
St. Paul intimates this in the verse from which my
text is taken. The whole verse reads thus: " My
speech and my preaching was not with enticing
words of men's wisdom, but in demonstration of the
Spirit and of power." He says that there was one
method of demonstration which he had not used to
make the Corinthians believe his truth, and another
which he had used. The one which he had not
used is clear enough — " Not with enticing words of
men's wisdom," he declares. He had not been a
teacher silencing dispute with arguments, compel-
ling assent by the complete answer of every diffi-
culty, leaving syllogisms in his hearers' minds by
which they might convert any man they met upon
the street. Something more subtle, more spiritual,
more personal, than that had been his power. If he
had had the choice of methods, he had chosen to
make his message not an argument but a force. In-
deed he feels as if he had had no choice. The nature
of his message and the kind of his belief and the
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. I43
needs of those to whom he came had made this the
only possible kind of approach. And so he had
come to them with what he calls the "demonstra-
tion of the spirit of power,"
These three elements are what determine the
character which every demonstration must assume.
The nature of the teacher, the nature of the learner,
and the nature of the message. And of the three
the last is most despotic. A teacher may teach in
various ways, a learner may be open upon various
sides, but the message decrees its own method of
impartation and will be imparted in no other. A
problem in mathematics, for instance, is devoid of
feeling. It presses on from its statement to its
solution by a process purely of the reason. It de-
pends entirely upon the clearness of its statement. It
has no atmosphere. It is independent of times and
places. It is precisely the same in the times of
Euclid and in the times of Pierce. It might be
spoken through a phonograph and would be as con-
vincing as if it issued from the dearest human lips.
A problem of natural history is proposed to the stu-
dent who has been busy with his mathematics, and
immediately he feels a difference. Here is another
kind of subject, a new material, and, however it
may seem to need only the powers of observation, it
must inevitably suggest something of the mystery
of richness of the nature which lives in such pro-
found connection and sympathy with man. A
question in human history involves still other ele-
ments. Man in all his complexity comes in. The
doubtfulness of records, the doubtfulness of motives.
144 THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
the prejudices of the speaker and the hearer — all
these have to be taken into account, and though at
last, as the result of all, the demonstration may be
perfect and the conclusion may be irresistible, it has
been reached in different ways and is of different
value from the conclusions about mathematical truth
or the phenomena of nature. I am as sure that
Christ lived and was crucified in Jerusalem as I am
of the sum of the angles of a triangle or of the earth's
revolution on its axis, but my certainty comes to
me in a different way, and is a separate and special
possession of my mind, clothed in its own value,
kept in its own treasury.
Every man's mind, because it is a distinct and
individual thing has, of necessity, its choice among
the various kinds of demonstration, and it is hard
for almost every man to thoroughly believe that
other kinds of surety are as absolutely sure as that
in whose processes his own mind happens to delight.
The mathematician accepts the naturalist's conclu-
sions, but does not feel that they are quite as per-
fectly proved as are the formulas which he has
worked out on his slate. The historian supposes
that the metaphysician is right, but is puzzled by
the absence of old chronicles which are the founda-
tions on which his truth is built. But mankind as a
whole is larger than any man, and humanity holds
its various truth on various evidence, yet holds it all
securely. It may feel sometimes that all demonstra-
tion has its weakness and its limits, that nothing is
absolutely demonstrated in all the realm of truth.
But in the actual conduct of life, however it may
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. I45
be with men, man holds that there are various kinds
of demonstration which bring various kinds of truth
with practical certainty before the mind, and justify
it in bidding the active powers go forward boldly
and confidently upon its belief.
Let us beware of that especial bigotry which con-
sists in giving value only to that particular kind of
demonstration which appeals to our peculiar minds.
Let us keep open, let us, if need be, force open all
the doors through which truth comes to the human
mind. Those doors all exist in every one of us,
however it may be that only some of them have ever
yet been opened in each man. Others there are,
fixed fast with rust or overgrown with vines, and
looking like a portion of the solid wall, yet capable
of being opened and of letting in some truth of
which our souls have need.
With all this clear in our minds, our next step is
to recognize that, while every kind of truth has its
own kind of demonstration, there are yet great gen-
eral lines, running through the whole mass of truth,
and dividing it into groups, to each of which in
general some method of demonstration will belong.
The kinds of truth which I have used as illustrations
appeal either, as in the case of mathematics, to pure
reason, or, as in the case of history, to human testi-
mony. There are, however, other kinds of truth
which for their demonstration and acceptance de-
mand something different. They ask for spiritual
conditions, for a certain spiritual atmosphere through
which the evidence of their truth can be sent and
received. They demand personal qualities in him
146 THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
who utters them and in him who hears. Let me
remind you what some of the truths of this sort are.
1. Take first the truth of beauty. " This statue
is beautiful," we say. How do we know that ? No
argument can prove it to us, so that the conviction
of its beauty becomes really our possession. No
authority can make us sure of it. No man can tell
us it is beautiful and by his mere telling make our
hearts believe. It must tell us its own wondrous
tale. It must speak itself directly to our souls. It
must find perceptions in us and claim them. Argu-
ments may come in afterwards to analyze and justify
our love. Authority may reassure us by letting us
know that other men have felt the power that we
feel. But the essential demonstration must come
directly from the beautiful thing to our power of
perceiving beauty. The spiritual must be spiritually
discerned.
2. Or, take the truth that any particular course of
action is right or wrong. The real, vital demonstra-
tion of that truth must spring like a sunbeam di-
rectly from the heart of the action to our moral
sense. You cannot prove it in the literal and ordi-
nary way. Any attempt to reduce its demonstra-
tion to a syllogism degrades its character. The
authority of every living man may pronounce the
action to be right, and yet my moral sense may tell
me absolutely that it is wrong. It is spirit speaking
to spirit, the spirit of the action to the spirit of the
man. Into the stirred conscience falls the shadow
of the deed, and the conscience instantly declares its
verdict ; and the man is sure.
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. 147
3. Or, take the truth that any character is noble
or ignoble, fine or mean. Prove me that this your
friend deserves your confidence, state me the argu-
ment which justifies the flashing eye with which
you kindle at one of the spell-working names of his-
tory. Who told you that that deed of the hero was
a glorious thing ? How your soul scorns all such
appeals! " I know it," you declare, " I know it as
I know the sun. That is enough. There is that in
me which catches and holds such nobleness as the
eye catches the landscape, as the hand grasps the
stone. It is mine because I am I and it is it."
4. And, what is still more striking, think of the
subtler fact of the affections. Who ever reasons to
himself that he should love ? Or, yet more, who
ever lives upon authority, because some one who
knows has told him that this fellow-life is lovable ?
It is life bearing direct testimony of itself to life
that makes the demonstration. The nature and
conditions of the two lives are all-important ele-
ments, and affection leaps from one to the other as
fire leaps from wood to wood.
In all these illustrations what we see is this — that
there are kinds of truth which make demonstration
of themselves not by the pure reason nor by author-
ity, but by direct spiritual testimony, borne imme-
diately from the nature of the truth to the nature
of the receptive and believing man.
The first thing of which we have to assure our-
selves is that this is true demonstration. We may
not institute comparisons and say whether it is true
or less true than other kinds of demonstration which
148 THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
are appropriate to other kinds of truth. Enough
that this kind is genuine and real, a sohd, strong
foundation on which a genuine beHef may rest.
And then we are prepared to turn to Paul and see
how exactly it is on this foundation that he says he
has built his claim that the Corinthians should take
his gospel. " Not with enticing words of men's
■wisdom, but by demonstration of the Spirit." " By
demonstration of the Spirit " ! Could any words
more perfectly tell that which I have been trying at
such length to describe ? Paul says that what he
brought one day into the bright gate of the brilliant
city was not an argument to which convinced reason
must give its assent, and not a commandment to
which the tyrant's authority should compel obedi-
ence, but a new presence which should claim their
spirits, a soul which their souls should recognize
and love. We may almost see it stated in the terms
of the successive illustrations which I used just now.
He brought a beauty which appealed to their spirit-
ual perceptions and demanded and received their
recognition. He brought a righteousness which
their consciences knew and stood up upon its feet
to honor. He brought a character into whose eyes
they looked and felt the essential nobility of life.
He brought a Friend whom their hearts loved.
How the description takes us back to the old van-
ished city. It is all gone. There on the isthmus
between the two blue gulfs stand a few columns of
a Doric temple which alone are left of the great
splendid city. A modern town of squalid huts has
taken the place of the old palaces. Above, to the
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. I49
blue sky, soars the great hill, the Acrocorinthus,
which seeks in vain at its feet the gorgeous metro-
polis that it guarded so long. It is all gone, and
yet how the life which souls lived there comes back !
Behold, here it was that the great Christian apostle
came " with demonstration of the Spirit." Men
met him on the street and their souls stirred in their
sleep. He spoke a few words of his Christ and their
closed doors flew open. Here men and women
came to life. Here the Christ who stood in the
person of His servant was " received," and to the
man who received Him — some poor forgotten dead
Corinthian — gave the glorious " power to become
the Son of God."
And are we ready now to take the next step ?
Nay, have we not already taken it ? When Paul
declared how he came to the Corinthians, he was
not merely telling a bit of his biography, he was
declaring also the perpetual and universal method
of the Christian faith. As he came into Corinth so
the Gospel always comes to men. " In demonstra-
tion of the Spirit," whatever else we know or fail
to know about it, we must know this first truth of
the character of the demonstration which the Gospel
makes, or we are all wrong. Because so many men
have not known this they have been all wrong when
they have talked about the Christian faith and its
acceptance or rejection by mankind. " In demon-
stration of the Spirit." The other demonstrations
have their place and their relation to it. The dem-
onstration of argument and reason has its work to
do as it establishes the facts of Christian history,
I50 THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
declares the character of the great Christian Book,
and finds the relations in which Christian truth
stands to all the truth which man knows everywhere.
Authority comes in and testifies to the acceptance
of those truths in every age. But when the work
of reason and authority is complete, what have they
done ? They have built a platform down which
comes a moving presence, strong, gracious, imperi-
ous with love, majestic with holiness — the Christ
coming to claim the soul. He can come over the
rudest and most fragmentary evidence, over the
most trembling and unobstructed testimony. Nay,
He can come, we believe, without argument and
without testimony, manifesting Himself essentially
even to souls which have never heard His name, and
which can offer neither description nor vindication
of His power. Even so He can come, and, as a
nameless influence, a friend felt but not known, can
teach and help and save the soul. But He must
come. The best-built platform does but make His
coming easier and more complete. It cannot make
His coming needless.
Because this has not been made and kept always
clear Christianity has suffered in every way. Let us
make it perfectly clear to our souls if we can. Your
friend approaches you with all the proof of Chris-
tianity entirely complete. There is not left a single
doubt. You are perfectly convinced. Are you a
Christian ? No! You believe as Jesus terribly said
that the devils do. Another friend comes to you
and in some rich way opens your soul to Christ.
With multitudes of questions about Him still unan«
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. 151
swered, with a strange incapacity to sweep a defi-
nition round His life, Christ, the great spiritual
presence, is with you through something which that
friend has done. Are you a Christian? Yes! Be-
yond all doubt. You will be more a Christian when
through the opened spiritual nature more of Christ
comes in to you. But you are a Christian now !
Nothing can make you more a Christian except what
comes in through your spiritual apprehension. No
amount of truth believed which is not transmuted
into spiritual life and power enriches your Christian
character. The soul, the soul alone it is which is
capable of Christian life. Whatever does not reach
the soul falls short. And nothing but soul can
reach the soul. Therefore it is always, as it was in
the days of St. Paul, in demonstration of the Spirit
that the Christ must come.
There are two representations of what I have been
saying — or, perhaps, it Would be more proper to call
them two inferences from it — which we want most
distinctly to discern. They are not part of our doc-
trine. They are wholly foreign to and inconsistent
with it. The first of them is the idea that, since
the birth of Christian life comes only by the meeting
of soul with soul, therefore everything else, all the
external facts of Christianity, are insignificant and
unimportant ; which is very much as if one said that
since the railroad tracks never yet made a journey,
therefore they were of no use and the engine might
go its way and reach its destination as well without
as with them. The facts of Christian history give
their direction to the spiritual power. He who
152 THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
knows what Christ has done knows what Christ is.
And he who knows what Christ is, is ready for
Christ's power on his soul.
The other idea is that all this teaching reduces the
whole matter of Christian evidence to the soul's
choice and whim. If nothing can be received as
true but what the soul accepts, it is easy to go on and
say that whatever the soul accepts may be received
as true, and then to add still further that the only
reason for accepting any religious truth as true is
that the soul desires it. "I know that this is true
because I want it to be true." What shall we say
of such a method. Strangely enough, there is a
certain truth in it, as there is in the most erroneous
error. It always has been recognized that what the
human soul deeply and permanently and universally
desires carries in the very fact of that desire a cer-
tain presumption of its really existing. The being
of God, the immutablity of the soul — these great
beliefs have always found part of their warrant for
their truth in the way in which the soul of man
everywhere has claimed a Father, and the human
nature has refused to think that it must die at death.
It may be that if the human soul could be certainly
known to be free from all obscurity and prejudice,
entirely and purely itself, and if its testimony were
absolutely unanimous and universal, the witness it
might bear would be enough for any truth to rest
upon. But now it can set forward no such claim.
We do not hold the truths of our faith to be true
because we want them to be true. We hold them
on their proper and sufficient evidence. But they
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. 1 53
are of such a nature that we could not hold them
upon any evidence if they did not find and satisfy
our spiritual natures. That is a difference which
any thoughtful man can surely understand.
We talk about ourselves — we talk about St. Paul
— but who are we or who is he that in any one less
than the greatest we should seek and find the type
of Christian power? How was it in Jesus ? Was it
not absolutely and manifestly true that in Him the
power of God was not an argument and not a com-
mandment, but a spiritual force. " The wind blow-
eth where it listeth, so is every man that is born of
the Spirit." Those were His words to Nicodemus.
Why did Peter and John believe Him when He
stood by the lakeside in the clear morning and
called them ? Why did the Magdalen believe Him
when He bent over her bowed agony and pitied her ?
Why did Lazarus believe Him when through the
grave clothes which bound the poor dead face the
voice came piercing with the summons to arise ? It
was because He was a force. It was by demonstra-
tion of the Spirit.
O Peter, Magdalen, Lazarus, that force, that
divine spiritual force is in the world to-day ! The
wind still blows out of the treasuries of God. The
Christ still touches souls which will be touched to
life. Only (and this is the outcome of what I have
been saying to those who are the receivers of the
influence He brings) the soul must be confederate
with the force, or even the divine force is helpless.
You may muffle yourself in worldliness and yet
understand an argument. You cannot muffle your-
154 THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
self in worldliness and yet be responsive to a love.
Oh, it is terrible, the way in which men and women
stand wrapped in their selfishness and say, " Why
does not Christ soften and convert me ? " He can-
not, so long as you hide yourself in your selfishness.
He can and He will the moment that you tear your-
self open and want Him, and want what He wants.
Then to you who receive Him He gives the glorious
power to become the child of God, It may be that
that is being done here now. If it is, this is indeed
a holy place, a holy hour.
And who are you who wish and pray that you
might be the medium through which the Christian
life may come to some one who is needing it, per-
haps needing it all the more because he does not
know his need ? What you require to know (and
this is the outcome of what I have been saying to
those who are the givers of the influence of Christ)
is that it is through the spiritual life that your influ-
ence must move. How great a strength there
comes with that assurance! You say, " I cannot
argue down these strong objections; I am not wise
enough to prove that I am right. That of which I
am spiritually sure I cannot argumentatively sus-
tain." What then ? In quietness and confidence
must be your strength. If you cannot argue, live!
Conviction comes through argument, but life comes
through life. Fathers and mothers with your chil-
dren, students among your fellow-students, clerks
in the great store, men and women in the great
world, this is what lies open to you all — the demon-
stration of the Spirit. Be true and pure and lofty
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. 1 55
and devout, and He who ever seeks the souls of
men shall find His way to some of them through you.
Among the Christian doctrines the one which
many Christians find it harder to give an account
of to themselves than any other is perhaps the
doctrine of the Holy Spirit. They hear about the
dispensation of the Holy Spirit, — that we are living
in it now, that it is to go on, growing and growing,
until it shall take possession of all life. I should be
glad to think that what I have said this afternoon
might do a little something to make clearer what
the dispensation of the Holy Spirit is. Can you pic-
ture to yourself a world where every soul should
bear direct witness of itself to every other, the great
communication being that which the soul of God
bears to them all, — their own communications to
each other being indeed only the reflections of His
utterance, as the colors with which objects shine on
each other are but expressions of the light with
which the sun shines on all. Every nature is spoken
to directly by the perfect nature, and every nature
spontaneously and naturally tells its best messages
to all the other natures. It is like a room through
whose heated atmosphere fire leaps instantly from
fuel to fuel, and the flame springs everywhere at
once. In such a world two things are true, — the
will of God is felt everywhere as the moving spirit
of it all, and what one soul possesses of strength
and truth becomes the true possession of the whole
— openness and sympathy ! In such a world, when
it is complete, there is no jealous hoarding of the
good which any nature has ; nor, on the other hand-
156 THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
is there a frenzied eagerness and restless craving to
express, as if expression were an unnatural thing;
but steadily, certainly, calmly, each soul bears wit-
ness of itself by its very being, as a star shines, and
in the demonstration of the Spirit the power of good
influence distributes and reduplicates itself on every
side. That is the dispensation of the Holy Spirit.
In such a world the power of evil influence repeats
itself as well as the power of good. The baleful
flame leaps through the heated air as easily as does
the fire of God. And so the struggle of the evil and
the good with one another grows more tense and
terrible. And therefore nearer draws the day when
the good, because it is divine, shall conquer and cast
out the evil.
Are we indeed living in the dispensation of the
Holy Spirit? And is it ripening towards the full-
ness of its power ? We must not take our judgment
from a few short years. We must look widely over
all the long reach of Christendom ; and when we do
look so I do not see how we can help discerning
these two great spiritual qualities, openness and
sympathy, — openness to receive influences from
above and from below, and sympathy to make the
wealth of one the wealth of all ; — discerning, I say,
these two filling all Christian history as they have
never filled the history of heathen times. There is
a great community of life. There is a spirit of the
time. There is a sense of mutual responsibility,
and there is a fierceness of conflict between spiritual
forces, which makes Christian history so critical, so
splendid, and so terrible.
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. 1 57
All that is destined to increase and grow. The
dispensation of the Spirit is to deepen as the years i
go on. The demonstration of the Spirit is to /
become more rich and universal. The strifp/
of good and evil is to become more furious. The
atmosphere of life is to wax more intense. What
any one man is will grow more and more critical for
other men. The individual and the race will tell
more and more immediately and powerfully upon
each other. And into this opened sympathetic life
God will pour His power with more rich profusion
and a freer and freer bestowal of Himself.
In such a world it is a privilege to live. In such
a world — let this be the closing earnest exhortation
of my sermon — in such a world it is a more and
more dreadful thing to be a trifler. It is a more
and more blessed thing to be brave and sincere.
O my brethren, live nobly in these noble times! It
matters little whether your field of activity be great
or small. Only, do not be mean ! Do not be cowards !
Do not be false ! Love God. Serve God. Make
your life such that He can shine through you. There
is no little. There is no great. But everywhere there
is a good, there is a bad. God save us from the
bad ! God help us to the good, and give us all the
right to say humbly at the last that which His Son
our Saviour said, " I have glorified Thee on the
earth!"
X.
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY.
"But let your communication be 'Yea, yea; 'Nay, nay': for
whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." — Matthew v. 37.
This is the Quaker's verse. It is associated
always with the spirit and the habits of that inter-
esting company of men and women who have
devoted themselves to the cultivation of simplicity,
and have enthroned quietude and peace as the gen-
tle and mighty monarchs of their life. And yet it
must not be their verse alone. No grace and no
condition can be given up to any one group of men
as if it belonged to them exclusively. No doubt, as
Christendom divides itself at present, it is true that
each of the groups or sects into which it is divided
is notable for the preeminence of some one quality,
or ambition, or form of Christian thought, but evi-
dently it holds that special treasure by no exclusive
charter. It holds it in trust and charge for all the
rest. It is almost as if each of these groups were
a peculiar garden into which each new plant that
was to be acclimated and appropriated into the great
kingdom of the Christian life were brought for
special cultivation. There it is made much of, and
surrounded by the best conditions, and guarded
158
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY. 1 59
from the dangers which most easily beset it. The
walls are built to keep away the winds which this
plant dreads. The streams bring it the water which
it most loves. The gardeners of that special garden
studies its peculiar character and habits. In every
way that garden devotes itself to that one plant, but it
is not because the plant belongs to that one garden
and to it alone. It is the property of all the kingdom ;
and by and by, when the nursery has done its
work and the plant is thoroughly naturalized and
acclimated, it is sent abroad and blooms on every hill-
side and in every valley through the land. So it is
when a particular quality or a particular truth is com-
mitted to a certain church or to a certain age to culti-
vate. It belongs to universal life — to all the churches
and to all the ages. It is but trusted to this special
group for special cultivation. All the time that it is
being specially cultivated there it is flourishing also
as it may in all the larger world ; and by and by the
special cultivation sends it out into the larger world
to be the property and portion of the whole. There-
fore it is not for itself alone, but for all Christendom
and all mankind, that Quakerism has made its asser-
tion and cultivation of simplicity.
I want to speak this morning about the glory of
simplicity. All life continually tends to complica-
tion. It is so with the individual life as it grows up
from youth to manhood. It is so with the corpo-
rate life of men as it grows more and more highly
civilized. Where is the man who does not look
back to his youth and think how few were the things
which he had then to do, how uncomplicated were
l60 THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY.
the arrangements which he had then to make, com-
pared with the intricate confusion which fills his life
to-day ? And where is the community which does
not look back with longing to the primitive stand-
ards and natural habits in which history tells it that
its fathers lived only a few short centuries ago ?
When Jesus came into Jerusalem He found this com-
plication flourishing abundantly about Him. Elabo-
rateness was everywhere. Great, tedious ceremonials
occupied the temple service. Long lists of rules and
arbitrary laws had overspread the simplicity of the
ten commandments. Society was a most intricate
system of castes and classes. Thought, as the
Rabbis guided it, turned and twisted and retwisted
on itself in endless subtleties. Every hair had to be
split and split again. Every definition had to be
defined and re-defined a thousand times. Now
^ there are various indications in the Gospels that the
Jews wanted Jesus to accept this system of things,
and to come in among them and join in their hair-
splitting, and be a Rabbi like themselves. But the
glory of His conduct, the testimony of His divinity,
was that He refused. He struck this whole mass of
complication and elaboration aside, and set a few
big, broad simple truths and laws in the place
which they had occupied, and bade them reflect
the broad sunshine of God ; and so He saved the
world.
What He did all the great teachers and saviours
of the world have done. They have all been simpli-
fiers. The second order of the world's helpers has
been largely made of those who brought in some
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY. l6l
new bit of helpfulness, and so added to the compli-
cation of which the world is full. But the first order
of helpful men, to which but few of the greatest of
mankind belong, has been made up of those who so
asserted and illuminated and glorified and made
powerful the eternal, elementary truths and forces
that they stood out sufficient and alone, and burnt
up, as it were, all the half-lights and pale reflections
of themselves of which the sky had become full.
How passionate sometimes in the midst of the
most beautiful and interesting of complicated life
becomes this craving for simplicity ! What strange
forms of exhibition it assumes! The youth leaves
impatiently the gilded and cushioned luxury where
he was born and bred, and is found by and by in
the depths of the prairies herding his cattle like a
true son of Adam. - The man of many learnings
casts his many books away and goes to some man-
ual toil which seems to bring him back to the hard
primitive things by whose touch he reclaims the
earth and identifies himself as man. The king dis-
appears from the throne, and his voice is heard
chanting in the cloister. The woman turns from
the complicated whirl of society and becomes the
sister of charity The connoisseur sweeps all the
accumulated bric-k-brac of a lifetime away and sits
down to ponder on one single statue or to fathom
the secret of a single picture, or takes refuge in the
loveliness of nature which lies behind all the pictures.
Everywhere this craving for simplicity is at the bot-
tom of all complication. The barbarian is at the
heart of every son of civilization. The fresh morn-
l62 THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY.
ing is within the hot bosom of every noon, filling it
with dim aspirations and regrets and hopes.
But all is not said when we say this. Still, sing
the praises of simplicity as loudly as we will, the
question comes most urgently *' What kind of sim-
plicity is possible for a man or for a race which has
once left the primary simplicity behind and devel-
oped into the elaborate conditions of ripened life ? "
It cannot be the old simplicity back again just as it
used to be. The full-blown rose can never fold
itself into a bud again. The world is never going
to tear down its cities, and dress itself once more in
bearskins, and take to the wigwams and the woods
again. And if a man or two leaves the study for the
workshop or the palace for the monastery, we are
almost sure that they find they have carried within
them the complication away from which they ran ;
and that while their hands are busy at the primary
toils of man, their hearts are tossed and crossed with
the old problems and contradictions which they
brought with them out of the heart of their puzzled
books or of the tumultuous world. No, it is not by
any mere reversion to a long-past childhood that the
man's life or the world's life is to be simplified again.
That is all past and over. It never can return. And
by the same token it cannot be by mere excision and
exclusion till, interest after interest being lopped
away, only one or two interests are left. That will
not do. You do not truly make life simple by mak~
ing it meagre. It is as if you tried to simplify a tree
by cutting off its branches. You either kill the tree
and it is a tree no longer, or else, if it still lives, it
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY. 163
instantly puts forth new branches and the old com-
plication is there again before you know. Not so !
Not so ! It is not by excision and rejection that the
simplicity of life is gained. The unity which comes
by meagreness is far too dearly bought and is not
really unity.
And how, then, can it come ? Is not its method
felt in those deep words of Jesus, " Seek ye first the
kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all
these things shall be added unto you ? " Seek ye
the centre and ye shall possess the sphere.
There is a great principle, a great truth, large
enough, elementary, absolute, universal enough to
enclose and enfold all the fragmentariness of living
and make life one. " The kingdom of God and His
righteousness," so Jesus calls it. It is the fact of
the power and the goodness of God, the fact that
the good God is king, which is able thus to embrace
all life and make it one. Take a king out of a king-
dom and it falls to pieces. He is at once its centre
and its envelope. By his force within it and his
pressure round it he holds it into unity ; and all its
parts within it freely play without disturbing its
simplicity.
What is the meaning of this religiously to us ? If
we believe in God, if God is a reality to us, our life
is not distracted whatever be the multiplicity of its
details. You are a score of things, and life seems
to be pulled a score of ways by the conflicting claims
of the score of things you are. Your family pulls
you one way and your business another, and your
ambition another, and by and by one fragment of
1 64 THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY.
you is working here and another there; and your
self, that core and heart of you which cannot be torn
apart by any distraction, is flying and rushing here
and there, and trying to regulate and rule these
tumultuous kingdoms, and failing always. What
then ? Can you believe in God ? Do you know
that He loves you ? Do you know that you are
His ? If you do, the moment that you do, it is as
if a great hand was put underneath and around all
this complexity and distraction, and — without any
.true part of your life being crowded out, all being
kept complete — the whole was gently, strongly
pressed into a whole, a unit. One motive fills all
these parts of life, and they become harmonious.
One love pervades them and they love each other.
The simplicity of a system asserts itself — a simplicity
like the God's from whom it comes — so that as we
declare of Him, in the same way the harmonized
parts of us declare of us, " In Him we live and move
and have our being." Each man is a true universe,
a cosmos, an order all the more simple for its com-
plexity of parts.
Do you know what this means ? Indeed you
must know, or else you have got to do one or other
of two things. Either you have got to strip piece
after piece, interest after interest, of your life away
until you attain the meagre simplicity of the unor-
ganized atom ; or else you have got to give up the
hope and thought of all simplicity, and just lie loose
and dejected — a score of pieces of a man, each run-
ning independently and spasmodically, but not one
man at all. You cannot do either of these things,
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY. 165
and so you must come to the simplicity of the child
of God.
Thus I have tried to describe the only method of
simplicity which lies open to the life of the busy and
thoughtful man, the man who cannot starve his life
into meagreness, and at the same time cannot be
satisfied with mere multitudinousness of life which
has no principle of unity.
And now let us see how such a simplicity as that,
when it has entered into a man's life, satisfies and
fills and rules it. Here is a growing and expanding
nature. It is always reaching forward, always desir-
ing to be more and to do more to-morrow than to-
day. Now the question of that nature's activity
will practically be this : whether it shall expand itself
by leaving the old and going abroad to find new
things for its possession, or by more and more com-
plete possession of the things it has. The first is
the method of ever-increasing complication. The
second is the method of perpetual simplicity. The
first is full of restlessness, the second is all calm.
Do we not know the difference ? How many of
our lives are feverish with the perpetual search after
new things when the things which we have now have
not begun to be exhausted. We are like children
with our houses strewn with half-read books and
half-played games and half-eaten fruit ; who stand
at the doorway crying out into the open world for
more instead of giving ourselves to the richer uses of
what we have already.
The reason of such a state of things must be either
that what we already have is not large enough and
-/
l66 THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY.
rich enough, or that its largeness and richness have
not been enough apprehended by us. We have not
found our simplicity in God. If we had we should
never dream of exhaustion.
The clear illustration of this I find in the New
Testament. Christ comes and preaches, the new
teacher, the great revealer of the truth of God to
man. I think that all men have been surprised
sometimes at what seemed the simplicity, almost
the meagreness, of the teachings of Jesus. There
are such multitudes of questions for which every
philosopher has had his answer, but which Christ
never touches. There are such wide regions of
curious speculation where all our feet insist on
wandering, but which He never enters. Think of
what we should have expected. " He is coming
to us direct from God. Now we shall know every-
thing. He will tell us everything. " But, on the con-
trary, how was it ? How calmly the old truths fell
from His lips! What richness and novelty opened
in them as He spoke them ! How, to those who
heard with ears worthy of the lips with which He
spoke, the old truths — the truths of God and the
soul and immortality — became enough, so deep they
grew as He proclaimed them ! What need was there
for Him to go afield for far-fetched truths, when right
here at His feet the old world was so rich ? It is
His simple " Yea, yea," spoken of the eternal veri-
ties which the world has always seemed to know,
that has flooded the world with new light and salva-
tion.
Wonderful is he who takes us by the hand and
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY. 1 6/
leads us into regions of whose very existence we had
not known before. This wonderfulness there is cer-
tainly in Jesus. More wonderful still is He who on
the old ground where we stand bids the mine open
and the diamond shine, bids the fountain burst and
the waters flow; and it is this wonderfulness that
makes Jesus truly and entirely the Saviour of the
world.
Again, think how men use their Bibles. There
are so many of the Bible students who are forever
finding obscure, difficult, out-of-the-way passages,
and treating them as if they had the marrow and
substance of the Gospel in them. Some mystic
verse in St. John's revelation, some occult compu-
tation from the prophecy of Daniel, has often so
taken possession of a man or of a sect that all the
great remainder of the Bible seemed to fade back
into insignificance. It was as if these readers had
exhausted all that the great, simple, healthy Gos-
pels had to say, and had nothing left to listen to
except this enigmatical and dubious voice speaking
out of the darkness in a language which no man
could understand. Very often it has seemed as if
" knowledge of the Bible " consisted in the posses-
sion of theories regarding such comet-like texts
which shoot across the sky of Revelation, rather
than devout intimacy with the majestic simplicity
of the revelation of God and the revelation of man,
which are the tranquil stars that burn always and
lighten all the heavens.
Indeed, one of the strange things in the whole
history of Christianity has been the way in which
l68 THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY.
many souls have seemed not merely to miss but to
prefer to miss its great simplicity. What an amount
of reverent and devoted study has been given to
strange doctrines, such as the doctrine of the historic
fall of man, or the doctrine of the second advent of
the Saviour, or the doctrine of the correspondence
of the types of the Old Testament with the events
of the New, or the doctrine of the imputed right-
eousness of Christ. Men's minds have hovered
around them with a strange, unhealthy fascination.
Theories have risen from them like mists out of dim
fields, often very beautiful, as beautiful as they
were thin and unsubstantial ; while all the time the
great solid truths, of man's divine lineage and God's
much-manifested love and Christ's redemption of
the soul by sacrifice have lain, not denied, but un-
opened, unsounded for the depths of unfound rich-
ness that is in them. I am sure that much of the
character of a Christian's faith may be tested by its
simplicity, by whether he finds abundant richness
in the great, primary fundamental truths or whether
his mind wanders among fantastic doctrines, and
values ideas not for their naturalness but for their
strangeness; not for the way in which they satisfy
and feed, but for the way in which they startle and
surprise the human soul.
There is no region in which all this is more true
than in men's speculation about the life which lies
beyond the grave. Nowhere does the difference
between the healthiness of simplicity and the un-
healthiness of complicated and elaborate curiosity
so visibly appear. People who hardly believe that
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY. 169
there is such a thing as a future life at all will specu-
late on its details, will sit holding their breath while
mediums who have no touch of common sympathy
try to bring souls together in carnal manifestation,
whose intimacy is too sacred for any but themselves
to share. It is not this that brings comfort and
peace. It is not this that lifts the souls on earth to
live already the divine life which their kindred souls
are living in the celestial world. No morbid dream
of knowledge which is not for me, no fancied sight
into the detailed occupations of the spiritual life —
only the great, broad, simple certainty that the
friend I love is in the perfect company and care, is
held fast in the tender and majestic love of God —
only this I want to satisfy my soul. The Bible tells
us one thing — only one — about the dead who have
passed out of our sight. They are with God. How
simple that is! How sufficient it becomes! How
cheap and tawdry, as we dwell in it, it makes the
guesses and conceits with which men try to make
real to themselves what the dead are doing! They
are with God. Their occupations are ineffable. No
tongue can tell their new, untasted joy. The scen-
ery in the midst of which they Hve speaks to the
spirit with voices which no words born of the senses
can describe. But the companionship and care, —
those are the precious, those are the intelligible
things. The dead are with God. O you who miss
even to-day the sound of the familiar voices, the
sight of the dear, familiar faces, believe and be more
than satisfied with that.
There is no sign of ripening life which is more
I70 THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY.
gracious and more beautiful than the capacity and dis-
position to find richness in the simplest and healthiest
associations. Have you never had an experience like
this ? Have you never had a friend whom you have
long known, in whom you found much to enjoy and
to be grateful for, but whom at last you seemed
to have exhausted and outgrown ? You went abroad
to natures which fascinated you more. You felt
the power of some man in whom there was some
sort of one-sided and fantastic power, in whom
there was more violence of light and shade, in
whom the very manifestness of defect made certain
promontories of possession peculiarly picturesque
and attractive. You revelled in his strange un-
healthy power. Something, it may be, almost
weird came out in yourself to answer his romantic
inspiration. But by and by he too failed you and
did not satisfy. Some morning that which had
been so dramatic looked only theatrical to you.
His high lights and great gulfs of darkness wearied
you. And then have you never turned back to the
simplicity of your first friendship, and found to your
amazement how unexhausted, how inexhaustible it
was ? There stood the deep, quiet nature on whose
surface you had scratched and fumbled, but where
profoundness lay yet all untouched. His healthi-
ness refreshed you as if you came out of a torch-
lighted cavern into the sunlight and the breeze.
His calm " Yea, yea ; nay, nay," truthful and
strong, swept all the frantic extravagances and over-
strained exaggerations out of your soul, and you re-
joiced in a great cleanness and freshness. Giving
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY. 171
yourself to him again you found him opening to
you treasures which you never found before, — as
men come back with the tools of civiHzation in their
hands, and work great wealth of gold out of the
mines which their barbarian ancestors thought they
had exhausted ages ago.
Sometimes the truth about God and His relation
to our human life seems to shape itself exactly into
this, that He stands waiting, in infinite patience, till
His children out of their restlessness and wanderings
come back to find the satisfaction of their souls in
Him. We just touch Him in our childhood; our
first implicit faith gets just the surface blessings of
His love, as the childish savages gather the grains of
gold which lie shining on the surface of the ground.
Then we go off, fascinated by some eccentric, tumul-
tuous utterance of power, and we give ourselves up
to some passion for the distorted or unreal. We
make long journeys in search of bags of gold which
spirits tells us that the genii have hidden in the holes
of rocks across the seas ; and all the while there lies
the mine with its good, hidden gold. All the while
there waits God with His great satisfaction for the
soul of man ; and some day we come to ourself and
say " I will arise and go to my Father." Some day
the false lights fade, the partial shows its partial-
ness. Out of the depth of the earth where the
gold is hidden the call sounds, " Come unto me."
Out of the healthiness of the divine life our hearts
recognize the summons as we come back to the God
we thought we had exhausted, forsooth, when we
left Him in our nursery, and find in humiliation and
\y
172 THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY.
in joy that He is the strength of our life and " our
portion forever," that which eternity itself cannot
exhaust.
God is so healthy. That is indeed the meaning
of His holiness. In Him no part or quahty grows
tyrannical over the rest. In His timeless existence
the present cannot be sacrificed to the future, nor
the future to the present. The eternal necessities
are in Him, so that He does not submit His will to
them; they are His will. His Yea and Nay are the
creations and distinctions of the world. When He
says to your disturbed, distracted, restless soul, or
mine, " Come unto me," He is saying, come out of
the strife and doubt and struggle of what is at the
moment where you stand, into that which was and
is and is to be, — the eternal, the essential, the abso-
lute. Let go the fascination of the unhealthy and
the exceptional, come to the everlasting health, the
great natural and normal life which lies under the
fretfulness of living as the great sea underlies the
fretful waves, — " Come unto me."
Even in regions which we do not call religious, we
recognize this power of the absolute and simple to
call souls to itself ; and we see how the truest souls
are they who answer to the call, and how the souls
which answer to the call become the truest. The
healthiness and simplicity of the highest genius is
remarkable. Genius of the second rank may be fan-
tastical, complicated, living in regions of its own,
lighted by fitful stars of morbid fascinating brilliance ;
but genius of the first order, the few very highest
souls — Shakespeare, Plato, and Homer — live in the
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY. 1 73
universal light and air. They speak intelligently to
their fellow-men. They shine with a true, colorless
light. They move upon the world like the true air
of heaven. Their " yea " and " nay" are inex-
haustible because they are the essential affirmations
and denials of the universe; they are the positives
and negatives of the eternal truth. Therefore it is
that we come back to them for peace and highest
inspiration out of the turmoil of excited literature
which eddies and foams about us, and tosses us to
distraction. Therefore it is that men of their qual-
ity, however small they may be, have always life-
giving and peace-giving power; and men turn back
to the man who is simple, broad, healthy, and true,
as the sailor who has rejoiced in the contortions and
distractions of the sea, turns, when the twilight
comes, to the peace of the deep-rooted shore and
the rest of the meadows where the flowers grow out
of the unmeasured depth of fruitful earth.
Thus we talk of the simplicity of God, thus we
talk of the simplicity of the profoundest and truest
men. It is the exhibition of both of these sim-
plicities which we behold in Jesus, and which makes
His healthiness, His holiness. One of the noblest
signs of how true our human nature is at the
bottom is the way in which, notwithstanding all
the fascination which the unhealthy forms of power
have had for men, the strongest hold that ever
has been laid upon the human heart has been laid
there by the simple, healthy Christ. It is not His
miracles, it is His nature which holds the world and
will not let it go. Men are shouting and scream-
174 THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY.
ing all about Him with their partial truths, their
temporary standards, their intoxicated joys, their
frantic and galvanic shows of power. You are won-
dering to which fanaticism you shall give up your
life, which form of unhealthy thought or action you
shall make your own, since it seems as if only in un-
healthiness was power or joy to be attained ; and
just then, when you are all ready to throw yourself
into the fire of some frenzy, Jesus steps before you
and says, " Give yourself to Me " ; and then, look-
ing into His face, you see that there is your true
master. For look, what it will be to serve Him.
He never will ask you to distort a truth even for
the very highest purpose. He never will ask you
to do wrong to-day that you or other men may do
right to-morrow. He not merely will not tempt
you. He will not allow you to bring the high stand-
ards of living down to what seem the powers of your
life. He will bid you trust your fellow-men and not
suspect them ; assuring you that it is better to be
cheated a hundred times and to be imposed upon
continually than to fail to help one soul which you
might help, or to shut the door of the better life in
the face of any child of God who is trying to come
in. Above all, He will open to you the great simple
sources of truth and power, and make them the ex-
haustless feeders of your soul. These things He
has done wherever souls have got genuinely and
thoroughly at Him. Sometimes His church has
not done these things for men. Sometimes she has
done just the opposite of these things. But wher-
ever His church has really brought Him and men
THE GLORY OF SIMPLICITY. 175
together, and wherever He and men have ever really
met, this has been always the result. He has done
for them all these things, and the great outcome of
it all has been that their lives have grown healthy
and grown natural. The fantastic has been cast out.
They have felt and known themselves in as true
relations to the earth they lived on as its mountains
or its trees. And so peace has come to them, and
with peace, power.
My friends, the world we live in, the time and
town we live in, are full of unhealthiness. There
are exaggerations, affectations, complications, thin
frenzies, theatrical excitement, fashions of passions,
conventionalities of unconventionalities, till our
souls grow sick and tired of it all. Where is the
escape from it ? Only in what St. Paul calls " The
simplicity which is in Christ." Go up into the
mountain of His love and service, and you shall
leave all these mists and fogs below. Drink of the
water that He shall give you, and " it shall be in you
a fountain of living water, springing up to everlast-
ing life." That is the true health of the soul. May
we all come to it by Him !
'^^V.'^.V yf
•-X •
XI.
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.
" Thus saith the Lord, Though I have cast them far away among
the heathen, and although I have scattered them among the coun-
tries, yet will I be to them a little sanctuary in the countries w^here
they shall come." — Ezekiel xi. 16.
The prophet stood, as it were, upon the heights
of Hebrew history and pointed to the disastrous
exile. Yet into the cloud of the exile he sent the
sunbeam of a promise. We may try to realize and
understand that promise, not as it issued from the
prophet's lips, but as the exiled Jew laid claim to it
in his necessity and distress in Babylon. The child
of Israel has left Jerusalem behind. He has travelled
far away from the holy city. As he took his depart-
ure he paused and lingered on the Mount of Olives,
and looked back on the great temple which he was
to see no more. There it stood in all its sacred
splendor. It was the holiest spot of all the earth to
him. It was the seat of his Jehovah's presence.
By rite and symbol, by decoration and image, the
sign was given everywhere in it that God was there.
We see the exile as he gazes with strained eyes and
breaking heart, and then turns wearily away, and
day after day, week after week, plods eastward across
176
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE. 1 77
the desert. Every heavy step takes him farther
from the shining sanctuary. And at last the sum
of all his heavy steps brings him to Babylon. He
enters into the heathen city and his whole heart
sinks, for there is no sanctuary of Jehovah here.
There are fantastic temples which bewilder him.
He hears strange hymns upon the foreign air. He
sees faces kindling with ideas which he cannot under-
stand. Gods with mysterious names bewilder him,
but no one knows his God. His soul sinks within
him. Has he then been carried into a region where
Jehovah's power does not reach ? Has he left his
God behind him as he has lost sight of the great
sanctuary on the sacred hill. And then comes to
him Ezekiel's promise: " Thus saith the Lord, I
will be to them a little sanctuary in the countries
where they shall come." Before he has compre-
hended its exact meaning, he has caught its spirit.
It brings him comfort. It makes the air less for-
eign. He is not totally in exile. And so he gath-
ers courage in his heart.
As we stand off and look at the exile and his
acceptance of God's promise, two facts are very dis-
tinct, and they must go together. One of them is
the centralness and undisturbed supremacy of Jeru-
salem. It still remains the great sanctuary. This
which is given in Babylon, whatever it may be, is
the " little sanctuary." The sacredness which the
Jew had always felt in the city of his fathers is not
abolished. It is not declared that places are indiffer-
ent, and that this Babylon is just as truly the seat
of the life of God as is the town of David. Sacred-
178 THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.
ness is not spread in simple indiscriminateness over
the earth. And yet — this is the second fact — it is
declared that God's presence cannot be confined in
one small place. The sacredness is too mysterious,
too subtle, too personal, to be shut up. It must
go forth wherever those who needed it and could
receive it went. However it might hold fast to its
fountain, it must flow abroad, the same water of
refreshment, and make itself reservoirs wherever
there were thirsty lips.
These were the two truths — the unchanged sep-
arateness and centralness of the sacred city, and also
the power of extension and expansion by which,
wherever there was a child of Israel, there was a
true presence of the God of Israel, wherever there
was a devout Jew there was a little sanctuary of
Jehovah.
Something which lets us understand this is famil-
iar to our modern thought. Wherever there is an
American, there is America, we say. In foreign
lands, in despotisms, and in deserts, stands the citi-
zen of our free land with its protection over him,
and, more than that, with its genius in him, and he
is still American. Still back across the ocean is the
country which he loves ; still he remembers how
its shores sank down into the west as he sailed out
into the sea. He knows it is still there — the great
America without which these little Americas in
which the exile and the travellers live could have no
reality. But they are real, and he who lives in them
lives in the double fact that his country is definitely
set here in the world's map, and also that her power
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE. I79
and her spirit reach wherever her children go. So
where the civilized man goes, there is civilization ;
where the artistic man goes, there is art ; where the
free man goes, there is freedom burning in the
depths of his free soul. Still each of these great
interests has its own central home and shrine. Still
there are parts of the earth where if one of these
interests should perish, the flame would sink and
tremble if it did not quite go out through all the
world. But of them all the two facts are both true.
They have their fixed homes and their power of ex-
pansion. They are supremely here, and yet they
cannot be exclusively and solely here ; wherever
humanity in its wanderings builds them a channel,
they will go, still feeding themselves to their remot-
est reaches from the fountain and the source at
home.
Does not this let us feel how it was with the Jews
at Babylon ? One of them there remembered in his
desolation the promise which had fallen on his ears
as he was passing out of his beloved Jerusalem. As
he remembered he looked up, and lo ! a little sanc-
tuary built itself about him ; subtle, impalpable,
invisible, so that no Babylonian's eye could see it,
so that the scornful heathen who jostled the poor
stranger on the street did not feel its walls. The
despot who insulted his wretched slave never
dreamed of the peace in which his slave's soul was
enshrined and perfectly protected from his insolence.
But it was there, this little sanctuary, built after the
pattern of the great one in Jerusalem, and full of
the same conscious, realized presence of God. When
l80 THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.
he had once found that, the bitterest bitterness of
exile was gone for him.
And now let us turn from him to our own lives,
and ask ourselves what there is in them which corre-
sponds to that which Jehovah promised to his people
by the mouth of Ezekiel. What I have said will
indicate, I hope, my meaning when I speak of the
little sanctuaries of life. There are in life, just as
there were in the great East, certain regions which
are definitely and absolutely sacred. In them relig-
ion and the certainty of God's presence are at home.
There all highest thoughts and motives naturally
abound. And then, outside those regions, there are
outlying tracts of life, what we are apt to call secu-
lar, which seem to be destitute at least of the con-
sciousness of spiritual interests. Into them our
circumstances, like Babylonian conquerors, drive us.
And the discovery which changes everything is that
in them, in what seem to be the heathen, hopeless
countries, the soul may have its company with God,
its spiritual homes and foods. Those are its little
sanctuaries. Still the peculiarly distinctively relig-
ious region stands apart. The hour of prayer, the
place of worship, the study of the Bible, the quiet
meditation, — they make together the great sanctu-
ary ; but the home, the shop, the work, the study,
the social circle, — these are the little sanctuaries, in
each of which the spiritual life is real and rich. It
is of them and of the spiritual life in them that I ask
you to think this morning.
We must remind ourselves what it is that the
word " sanctuary " means. It is a place made
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE. l8l
sacred by the realized presence of God. Everything
else is accidental ; that is essential. The architec-
ture and decoration, the mysterious lights and shad-
ows of the holy of holies in the Jewish temple, were
not what made its awfulness. It was that Jehovah
was there. There He shone in the Shekinah.
There He told His will. There He forgave sins.
There He bestowed His blessing. There He gave
His commandments. We need not go into the
question of how all this was related to His universal
presence. We need not even stop to remind our-
selves that God could not be more actually present
in the Holy place than He was on any breezy height
of Galilee or in the crowded streets of Babylon. It
is of His manifested and felt presence that we are
speaking. The Jew knew Him there as he knew
Him nowhere else; and it was that supremely mani-
fested presence of Jehovah there which made that
place, as no other place on the earth could be, ?
sanctuary.
Is there not, in the life of every man whose life
fulfils itself, something which perfectly corresponds
to this central sanctuary of Jerusalem. There are
hours when God is no more truly present with us
than at other times, but when we claim and feel His
presence we shut the door and pray ; on bended
knees we tell our soul's wants directly into the ear
of the all-hearing love. Up from our soul's depths
come welling into our consciousness the profoundest
needs. Promises issuing from the Holy Book, or
no less certainly communicated to us from our
knowledge of the necessities of the divine nature.
1 82 THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.
come down to meet the need and fold themselves
about it. Visions of what we are in God's idea of
us, and of what we might be in the entire fulfilment
of that idea, — certainties, absolute certainties, of
God's unaltered and unalterable love, deep com-
munion with Him, — all these lie at the centre of the
spiritual life. Nothing can do away with the neces-
sity and blessedness of these. Nothing which God
can do for the soul in its less conscious hours can
supersede the necessity of these times, supremely,
absolutely lived with Him.
We fear sometimes that these days of the great
sanctuary have grown less common with many souls
than they once used to be. Let us remember that
we cannot live without them. Do you ever shut
the door and meditate ? Are you ever humbly and
filially alone with God ? Do you ever pray ? If
not, you do not know what the richest richness of
existence is. Oh, before it is too late, before the
power is lost, before the hinges of the sacred door
are rusted so that it will not open, appeal to your
own soul, demand of your own soul that it shall
know its privilege and insist that it shall claim its
right and power of separating itself from everything
beside and keeping company with God.
But when one has done that — when a soul has
these hours of rich communion — then the question
comes. What shall be done with all the rest of life ?
How is it with the hours when the church and closet
must be left behind, and, in the Babylon of the
world, the man must be living the common life of
men ? Then comes the doctrine of the little sanctu-
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE. 1 83
aries built by the expansive influence of the divine
and more sacred times.
Here is the home Hfe. How many fathers and
mothers, heads of households full of children, full
of cares, see in their houshold life only a Babylon.
The self, with its deep needs, is swallowed up in
the confusion of the busy days. The countless
plannings and devisings make any one great plan of
life impossible; which is very much like saying that
the effort to go from Albany to Buffalo makes us
lose the road from Boston to Chicago. The par-
ent's religious life is wasted in the perpetual desire
to make the children good ; which is very much like
saying that the tree is killed in order that the leaves
may grow.
What shall we say of this ? Must we not say
that the trouble lies in the conception which per-
vades many homes, that the home-governors, the
home-rulers are to be Christians and live spiritual
lives, not in virtue of but in spite of their home
occupations and household cares ? If they can get
rid of that idea — if they can expect to see God com-
ing to them not over nor around but through the
home relationships which He himself has built —
then Babylon is transfigured, and in the very tumul-
tuous heart of the overcrowding worry the little
sanctuary springs to life.
The household truths are justice and love — not
separate and standing off and fighting one another,
but blending into one rich composite quahty which
has such a chance to make beautiful manifesta-
tion of itself nowhere else on earth. Everything
1 84 THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.
which goes on within the four walls must spring
from and must educate that noble quality of just
affection and of loving justice. What then ? To
father or mother, brother or sister, who lives in the
spirit of that quality, must there not come times
when it lifts itself from its lower to its higher exhi-
bition, when the just love and loving justice of God
become real to the soul by very reason of this ma-
chinery of the household which seem to shut them
out. The divine home, the domestic peace of God,
the strong, warm holding of the life in the great
hands, are brought near and rescued from their
awful distance by that which is going on in this
lower household every day. The father, looking
up and saying, " My Father," finds a little sanctu-
ary in the prayer.
There seems to be an even bitterer exile when
the soul leaves the closet and the shrine, not for the
home but for the shop. How many Christian mer-
chants there are who are always expecting and
counting on the time when they can shut the office
door at night, and go home and be Christians again
after the day's necessary worldliness. How many
of their lives are always anticipating the years when
work will be over, and they can sit down and care
for their souls in quiet. Those years perhaps will
come, perhaps will not. The exile may or may not
return to Jerusalem, and live wholly there ; but
surely there is something wrong if the active years
have not their own nearness to God which they and
they alone can give. The active years, the years
of work, the years of used and ever-ripening powers !
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE, 1 85
Do you remember what Jesus said, " My Father
worketh and I work." Rich were the moments
when He lay upon the mountain top, and the great
peace of God gathered around Him in the darkness,
but there was another sense of His Father's pres-
ence which came to Him elsewhere than there. In
work, in obedience, and cooperation came the rich
company of each with each.
You sit and hold communion with your friend.
You match your thoughts; you shars each other's
confidence ; and then the clock strikes and working-
time has come, and you rise up together and go
out. The same tasks greet you both. You build
the wall, you plough the field, you drive the engine,
or you bargain in the trade together. Is there not
another union between you which no depth of medi-
tative communion could have made ? Two men do
not know each other till they have worked together.
To have faced the same difficulties, to have rejoiced
in the same success — that makes each present to the
other in a new and living way.
If then the work of shop and office can be indeed,
and can be felt to be, working with God, certainly
in that cooperation there may be a little sanctuary.
Does God want those things done which you are
doing every day ? Does He want the railroad built,
the process of civilization maintained, the family sup-
ported, the laborer supplied with work ? Does God
want those qualities which the best doing of business
involves, — integrity, energy, mercy, intelligence,
maintained upon the earth ? Are the operations of
your trade as legitimate outputtings of true forces
1 86 THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.
as are the movements of the planets or the blowing
of the winds ? If they are, then he who does these
things may dare to think of himself as God's co-
worker, and down the medium of their common
work the presence of the great worker may flow and
surround his fellow-laborer.
It is not work, but work done ignobly, done undi-
vinely, that separates the man who works from God.
Do not desert your work, but pierce into its heart,
exalt it to its loftiest conception if you would be
more holy. Strike God's iron on the anvil, see
God's goods across the counter, put God's wealth
in circulation on the street, teach God's children in
the school, — so shall the dust of your labor build
itself into a little sanctuary where you and God shall
dwell together.
If there is any labor which we should be apt to
say would make the life of the laborer undivine and
separate his soul from God, perhaps it would be
politics. But, on the other hand, if there is any
work which ought to make the worker feel God's
company and get the inspiration of that feeling, it
is politics. Politics as a selfish rivalry of personal
interests, as a race of partisanship, is as far from
God as darkness is from light. It wraps the poli-
tician round with a dense robe of selfishness, through
which no sacredness can penetrate. But politics as an
application of great principles, as the securing of the
operation of eternal laws, is God's work, and he
who works in it must work with God. If the un-
devout astronomer is mad, the politician who dis-
owns the divine forces with which he deals is a blind
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE. 1 8/
fool. And in this country we are all politicians.
To know the best that we can learn of what is good
for these sixty millions of the children of God, and
to do what we can by our ballot and influence to
secure it, — this is to work with God ; and he who
does it faithfully finds his political thought and labor
a little sanctuary wherein God speaks to him, and
gives him richly of His spirit.
Suppose a man wants to be a minister, and to
give himself directly and entirely to sacred things;
and suppose that circumstances or some inexorable
demand of troublous times compels him to give up
that privileged career, and to devote himself to poli-
tics. I can almost see the longing with which he
looks back. He is not then to live with God.
There is to be no divine communion for his soul.
Alas for him if at least sometimes in the midst of
his perplexities and struggles there does not come
a better and a nobler thought about it all, so that
he says, not as the rhetoric of a campaign speech to
a crowd, but as a message from on high to his own
soul, that since what he is working for is what God
wants, therefore he is with God and God is with him
in his working, and so he may take courage and ex-
pect to be kept pure in the midst of corrupt machin-
eries and pest, in the dust of numberless details. If
that consciousness never comes to him, surely he
ought to be much afraid that what he is doing is
not the work of God.
Among the Babylons into which men's lives are
led it is not possible for us to forget that which is
ordinarily called society, — the world of fashion and
1 88 THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.
of conventionally established and arranged inter*
course of people with each other. It is a hard and
barren world. It is not rich in character nor in abil-
ity. It crushes individuality and makes enthusiasm
seem ridiculous. Each winter in our great cities
makes its silly despotism seem more terrible. Into the
borders of that world there comes some fresh young
nature, full of belief in good and God, eager with
youthful piety, keen in the wish to grow to its own
best and to help other natures to their full develop-
ment. What an old story it is of how there comes
first the disappointment, and then the demoraliza-
tion. First the pure standards are shocked, and
then they yield. First they say " This is dread-
ful," and then they say, " Who can see anything
dreadful about this ? " Where is the salvation ?
Where it always is. In brave insistence that the
very power which is trying to crush our life shall lift
it and inspire and fulfil it. When the young man
or woman in society keeps clear and strong the
sense of individual existence and the craving for the
opportunity to help the lives whose deeper possibil-
ities are visible through all their tinsel, there is sal-
vation. And that sense and craving can be kept
by, and help to keep, the certainty of God's pres-
ence.
There are in every thickest crowd of frivolity and
selfishness some pure souls who walk with God.
Nearer than those who touch them nearest, is He.
Others may come and go, but He is constant.
Through the close envelope of His invisible com-
panionship no blow or poison can assail them. For
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE. 1 89
them there is no need to run away from society.
They are away from it in its very midst. Their
personal Hfe is intensified by their companionships,
and the desire to be helpful feeds itself out of the
very selfishness by which it is surrounded. Thus in
the heart of society a soul may enshrine itself in
God.
The same is true of study and scholarship. Will
you lose God among your books, O scholar! In
the fascination of the search for truths will you let
go out of your soul the certainty that there is at the
heart of everything one truth, one beating, throb-
bing, living soul whose name is not truth alone, but
love ? I feel two tendencies in the world of thought
and study. One of them is to cast God out alto-
gether, as incapable of being known, if not incapable
of existing; the other is to keep God apart as if He
could not live with learning, and to pay in some
obscure corner of the brain a worship which can
have no warrant and no meaning for the intellect,
to make, as it were, hurried little journeys back to
Jerusalem in order to find for a few minutes the
God who has been left there, and for whom Babylon
can find no place.
Neither of those two things will do. It is in schol-
arship and learning that the God of truth is to be
found. It is as the sum and heart of all knowledge
that He is to be known. O you young scholars who
come crowding back in these autumn days to school
and college, are you leaving the sanctuary behind
you in the homes where you are loved, and in the
fields where you have breathed the air of God ? Is
190 THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.
there no special meeting of your soul with His
which is possible for you among your books, which
is possible nowhere in the world beside ? Believe
that there is, and how good is this great autumn
trooping of students through the open doors! Be-
lieve that there is not, and it is a sad, a tragical pro-
cession. Let the heavens be darkened and the sun
withdraw its shining as they come. But there is.
In the heart of all true study God makes Himself a
little sanctuary, and enshrines the true scholar in
Himself.
But it is not necessary to multiply situations,
conditions of exile in which God comes to man and
builds His presence round them like a sanctuary.
Everything which seems at first to separate a man
from God, but by and by shows that it has a power
to bring God and man together in some rich way of
its own, illustrates what I have tried to preach.
What multitudes of sick rooms there are where God
has built His little sanctuary round the sufferer,
and surprised him with a new kind of peace of which
he never dreamed in health! What mountains of
temptation where the struggling soul which thought
itself alone has found itself alone with God ! What
doubters who in their wilderness of doubt have felt
gathering around them the walls of a peculiar and
most steadfast faith ! * ' Oh, if I had time to rest
and pray," you say; " Oh, if this pain would stop
a moment and let me think and worship," " Oh, if
this pressure of other people's needs would relax
and let me care one hour for myself!" Those are
the cries of the exile for his lost Jerusalem. And to
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE. I9I
each, if the man has ears to hear, there comes the
answer, " Thus saith the Lord God, I will be to
them a little sanctuary in the countries where they
shall come." Then the business and the pain and
the service of others' needs grows more than toler-
able, grows beautiful and gracious to the soul.
In the great cathedral of the world there is the
high altar of perpetual, visible religion, where the
worship is forever going on. There all men meet
and own themselves, in conscious and deliberate
devotion, the sons of God. And then there are
the chapels, each with its special altar, where they
who have their own peculiar work to do find that
of God which in that work can give itself to man.
But one great roof covers them all. He who goes
from the high altar to the chapel does not go outside
the church. The worship is all one, whatever be
the strain in which the music sounds.
Here is the unity of life — the diffused presence of
God, which no man in any exile can outgo — which
makes of the whole world the universal Church.
Be sure, my friends, that both at the high altar of
the distinct Christian experience and also in the
chapel of your own peculiar life you find God. So
only do you fulfil the particular with the universal,
and make the universal strong and clear with the
particular as well.
To go down from the high altar to the chapel is
not to go away from God. To pass out of the great
inspiring thoughts into the personal duties is not to
cease to be religious. It need not be, at least. It
may be the clothing of religion with reality, the
192 THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.
grip and grasp on truth and God and light. There,
in the little sanctuary, He who in the great sanctu-
ary our careless souls have missed may make us see
Him, and believe Him and love Him and take Him
for our own.
So may it be with you. You need God for the
very things which seem to separate you from Him.
You must seek Him in the very places where the
misery of life seems to be that He is not. You
must question the stoniest paths for springs of
water. You must stand in the midst of doubts and
look for faith.
What does the miracle of Jesus mean but this ?
" Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ?"
and lo! the Saviour is a Nazarene. " Can any man
provide food here in the wilderness ? " " And they
took of the loaves and likewise of the fishes as much
as they would." " He saved others, Himself He
could not save," and ** behold forth from the Cross
shone the glory of the Son of God."
Some day the exiles shall go back to Jerusalem.
They shall enter into the city where everything is
visibly and manifestly holy. They shall be in the
unhindered sight of Him that sitteth on the throne
and of the Lamb forever. While they abide in
Babylon may He give them grace to see that He is
with them there, and to rejoice in the " little sanc-
tuaries " which He makes, which He is, for them in
their land of exile !
XIL
STORM AND CALM.
" And there was a great calm." — Matt. viii. 26.
How strongly and satisfyingly these words come
in at the close of the story of the storm upon the
Sea of Tiberias. Jesus and His disciples are sailing
across the lake together. " And behold there arose a
great tempest in the sea insomuch that the ship was
covered with the waves : but He was asleep. And
His disciples came to Him and awoke Him, saying,
Lord, save us, we perish! And He saith unto
them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith.
Then He arose and rebuked the winds and the sea.
And there was a great calm." There is the noise
and hurry and fight. The wild winds and clouds
overhead, the wild waters beneath, the panic-
stricken hearts within the boat. One moment all is
tumult and distress. The next moment Jesus has
risen from the pillow where He is sleeping and
looked around, and said a word, and made a gesture,
and all is changed. " There is a great calm."
The beauty of the story is in the way in which the
change all comes from and belongs to Jesus.
When He rises the storm stops. The calm that
comes is from the power of His presence. As if 3.
103
194 STORM AND CALM.
strong, quiet man stepped in majestically among a
crowd of noisy brawlers, and his very appearance
made them ashamed and hushed their noise. So
Jesus steps in among the elements, and they are
still in a moment. It is a picture of the peace that
He bestows. However feebly we understand it,
the story at least is luminous to every loving eye
with this — the majesty and beauty of Christ and
the way in which peace flows out abundantly wher-
ever He is truly present. A thousand thousand
saints have felt that. These stories of the Bible,
these stories of Jesus, are so full of His spirit that
they scatter it everywhere, and the calm that fell
upon the waters of Gennesaret has been renewed in
the peacefulness and rest that have fallen upon mul-
titudes of hearts that have read or listened to the
narrative.
And how the same words tell the story of some
point or crisis in a Hfe. A period of tumult comes
and passes. The storm of feeling is excited, and
when it has fought itself out in its fury, it goes
down and there is peace. A struggle for life, for
bread, is pressing for a while and then the life sails
out into smoother water; peace comes where there
used to be suspense. There is a great calm. It is
what the most eager and excited experiences are
always looking forward to, — not to be forever dis-
tressed and harassed, but some day to feel things
growing smooth and easy, to find a calmness and
repose. Some men do find it far more easily than
others — indeed, some lives are placid by their very
make and nature — but I think that it comes to us
STORM AND CALM. I95
all, at least in vague misgivings, that there must be
a calmness and repose consistent with the fullest life
and the most faithful duty and the most earnest
thought, of which almost all men almost entirely
miss. As we are whirled about in our maelstrom
we are aware, or at least we picture to ourselves,
that there is quiet water close beside us. Our
ship grazes its placid surface, and then is swept
back into the tumult and the storm. Is it a reality
which we see, or only a picture which our fancy
draws ? I should like to try to speak this morning
of the calmness that God really gives to people's
lives. It seems to me to be something that we
are all so vaguely desiring and seeking that it can-
not but be well worth while to try to understand
a little of what it is and how it comes.
In the first place, then, the quality of which we
speak is not a matter of original temperament. We
know how different men are. We know how se-
renely some men bear, by the very constitution of
their nature, experiences that overwhelm the sensi-
tive brethren beside them. It is an open question
which life is best. No man can say whether the
passionless serenity of the calm man's life loses more
in the lack of strong enjoyment than it escapes in
the absence of keen suffering. But, at any rate,
that is not the difference that we refer to. Nor is it
the mere placidity of outward circumstances, — the
even flow of life that slips without a ripple on from
experience to experience, from year to year. That
is so often merely external, so apt to be deceptive.
There is the chafing and restlessness that goes on in
V
196 STORM AND CALM.
the quietest lives, and now and then we are taken
by surprise when we are able to look down through
some break in the most restless and excited career
and see in what perfect repose of soul the man is
living underneath it all. Men try sometimes to calm
the tumult of the inner life for themselves, or for
one another, by merely making the outward circum-
stances calm and peaceful, but it does no good. It
is only dressing the maniac in a quaker's clothes.
They may hush and awe him for a moment with
their serene composure, but after the moment's
hush is over he will be as wild as ever, and tear his
uncongenial dress to tatters.
Neither the calmness of temperament nor the
calmness of circumstances, then, is what we mean.
Both of these, of course, are gifts of God. No hand
but our Father's tunes and disposes the subtle adap-
tations of His children's characters, or arranges with
the fitnesses of harmony or contrast the scenery in
the midst of which they are to pass their lives. It
is God who lays His hand upon a new life just going
out from His creative presence and gives it a peace-
fulness and calm which it brings back to Him when
it returns for judgment. But it is striking to see
how much more easily we think of what comes to
us by education and experience than of that which
comes to us in our original constitution as the gift
of God. It seems to be in some higher sense appre-
ciable as a gift when it enters in through our con-
sciousness by His discipline than when He sows it
among the seeds of our unconscious being before
we are born. And so it is the calmness that comes
STORM AND CALM. I97
from our own thoughtful, fruitful experience of life
lha.t we want most to consider and be thankful for.
I am assuming all along that calmness is a bless-
ing. Are we ready to assume that absolutely ? It
is strange what two ideas are current, and how im-
perfectly we reconcile them with one another. One
idea is that tumult and excitement is bad, the other
is that nothing can be worse for a man than absolute
calmness and serenity. We hold to both ideas by
turns. We cannot settle down to either. As soon
as our life begins to attain its longed-for peace we
begin to fear it and to reach back after the disturb-
ance which we tried so hard to escape from. All
this seems strange, but it is not to be disregarded.
It is not unaccountable. It shows us clearly enough
that mere calmness, indiscriminately, will not do.
It must be of the right sort. It must come from
the right source. It must be lively and not deadly.
It must keep and not lose the best blessings that
belong to tumultuous life. It must be the calm-
ness of perfect action and not of mere stagnation.
Indeed it is evident enough what a difference there
is in different men's composure. Two men are wait-
ing for their execution. Compare the stolidity of
one with the quiet, patient faith of the other. Paul
and Silas are in prison at Philippi, " And at mid-
night they prayed and sang praises unto God."
How different from the dreary silence of despair
with which perhaps some poor wretch in the next
cell waited for his doom. Yet both were calm. See
two men as they lie upon their death-beds. One
like a brute, one like a saint, they both are calmly
198 STORM AND CALM.
waiting for the end. Such scenes as these show us
plainly enough that there is a higher peace and a
lower, a good calmness and a bad. Do they not
throw abundant light upon those words of Jesus,
" Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto
you. Not as the world giveth give I unto you."
And now let us come and consider what the calm-
ness is which, brought out by the discipline of life,
may be really accepted as God's gift. The truth
.seems to me to be this : that the calmness to which
God is always leading us consists in a perfect poise
of tasks and powers. And this idea is valuable be-
cause as we follow it out it explains both the attain-
ment of calmness and the loss of calmness which
occur in every growing life, and shows how they are
consistent with one another. Let us look into this.
Take the lowest life, the life of the vegetable. We
easily attribute to it a perfectly calm existence. Its
tasks and its powers are in perfect poise. Its work
is to grow, and the power of growth is present in the
plant. But just as soon as life advances another
stage, as soon as you come up to the brutes, little
as we know of their existence, we have a misgiving
that the repose is lost. The poise is not so perfect.
Here are desires that the powers cannot gratify.
We have entered into a world of passion and unrest.
Then come to man, and you have all the higher
range of tasks, each calling for its power, each mak-
ing clamor and disturbance till its power comes to
match it. Now see what the course is. Here is a
life at low rest (as we may say). It acknowledges
few responsibilities and finds in itself the powers to
STORM AND CALM. 1 99
fulfil them all. Now let a new duty press itself
upon that life, a new emotion, a new experience of
any kind, before untried. The first result is a dis-
turbance. The demands and the powers are thrown
out of poise. But by and by the power comes up
to meet the new task. The two are harmonized
upon a higher level. There is a loftier calm attained.
But still it is not the highest — another need appears.
Once more the balance is disturbed ; and only when
the nature equals this new demand is it restored. So
it goes on. So it goes up. Each higher calm pro-
vokes a new disturbance, and only so a calm a little
higher is reached. Each in its turn is the healthy
condition of the growing soul. Before us all, as the
consummation, far off is seen the perfect rest in God
when task and power shall be eternally equal to one
another but for the imperfect being seeking perfec-
tion, it is in this constantly alternating attainment
and dislodgment, this calm and tumult following
each other that the happy and healthy life consists.
This is the general truth I want to teach. But I
can show its meaning best if we take various special
problems and difficulties of life and show how in them
men come to a calmness that is given them by God.
I, Here, for instance, is this endless problem of
the condition of the world we live in. Any man
who has eyes cannot help gazing at it sometimes;
and can any man look at it calmly, mixed as it is of
sin and sorrow, pain, deceit, hindrance, hate, all
confused with the divine things that are in it all
the while ? Well, see how it illustrates our princi-
ple. Some base, low-minded man, some mere
200 STORM AND CALM.
indifferent spectator, some purblind mole of selfish-
ness, looks at it and declares, " Oh, it is all right " ;
" There is no trouble. " He sees no problem. His
coarse gaze finds no mystery. There is no puzzle,
and so no struggle ; and so on he drifts in the com-
placent serenity of his self-satisfaction. Close by
his side is a nature which the blind problem of the
world perplexes through and through. Here is a
man whom the apparent injustice of the universe
stirs to the very core. He cannot keep calm. He
lives in a continual indignation. His life is full of
outbursts of discontent. He sees things wrong, not
right! What shall we say ? Has not that man ad-
vanced ? Is not this disturbance a higher condition
than the old stagnant calm ? Let us not blame
the last or praise the other. Let us thank God
when He lets us break loose from the first calm in
which the lower natures live, and break out into
vitter hatred or contempt of meanness, utter impa-
tience at the deep-felt moral contradictions of the
universe, even although it may convulse us to the
bottom and break our calmness all to pieces. Let
us be afraid if we find ourselves growing incapable
of such noble excitement and disturbance ! But,
once again, what then ? This is not final. The dis-
turbance has come from the intrusion of a higher
demand. The calm has been broken! How shal-
it be restored ? Only when the powerful sense of
God's government is brought to meet this spectacle
of prevalent disorder, only when behind all the un-
rest and distraction that we see our souls are certain
that there is a power of order and beneficence at
STORM AND CALM. 20I
work, capable perfectly of controlling the disorder
and bringing peace out of discord, — only then do
we rise to the second and higher level of calm, where
task and power once more are in poise. We begin
with the serenity of clearly-seen conditions ; we pass
into the perplexities of apparent confusion ; and we
come at last to the higher confidence of faith.
This illustrates the law I tried to state. There
are three conceivable conditions of our thought and
feeling with reference to this apparent confusion in
whose midst we Hve, — placid acquiescence, which is
bad, and vehement questioning and remonstrance,
which is better, and serene trust in a living God,
which is the perfect condition of a human soul. Do
we keep this always clear ? Are we not constantly
mistaking the first condition for the third — placid
acquiescence which is too spiritless to ask any ques-
tion for the serene trust which has found the answer
for all its questionings in God ? Do we not often
think that when a man passes on from the first con-
dition into the second, from placid acquiescence into
vehement remonstrance, he is going backward and
not forward ? And yet this is the progress by which
God leads our souls. There will be sad and fearful
moments in it, in which it will seem as if all were
lost; but they will be only the tumultuous moments
of spiritual youth which come between the unthink-
ing placidity of childhood and the thoughtful seren-
ity of manhood. They are healthy and natural.
They are the storms of spring that bring the sum-
mer, the revolutions out of which comes by and by
the peace.
202 STORM AND CALM.
2. Then take another illustration. In the region
of personal character the true relation of calmness
to disturbance is equally manifest. There is a cer-
tain typical growth that hundreds of men go through
that brings them from a lower out into a higher life.
The lowest life where they begin is calm enough.
Task and powers are in perfect poise. Men do not
feel the pressure of any higher needs than food and
drink and ordinary cheap society. They are quite
capable of supplying themselves with these, and so
they go placidly along. There are no high ambi-
tions, and so no discontents. How calm those days
go by ! There is no murmur in the sky. The earth
is solid underfoot. The man is equal to all the tasks
he apprehends, goes regularly to his business every
morning, enjoys the dinner that he honestly pro-
vides, is happy in his social joys, and faithful to his
social duties. Task and power just balance each
other in the still summery atmosphere of his con-
tented life. But by and by a better thing has come.
The spiritual nature is aroused. Something in that
man that was made for a divine association is crying
out for the divinity that it was made for. The soul
wants God. Is it a lower or a higher state on which
the man has entered when that which once satis-
fied can satisfy no longer, when the man seems to
be standing awestruck and fearful before his own
awakened soul, which is demanding of him its proper
food ? He offers it the best he has, but it will not
be appeased. He spreads before it all his social
refinements, all his prudential moralities, but the
soul turns off from them all. It wants God, and
STORM AND CALM. 203
the man has no God to give it. That soul of his
presses him with vehement desires that he cannot
gratify. He cannot satisfy himself. Has the man
gone up or down in leaving his calmness and coming
into this disturbed, tumultuous region of spiritual
desire ? This is the region that all the stories of
conversion are always trying to paint. They make
much of this phase of life, and they are true to at
least one constantly recurring experience. The man
goes about restlessly. He asks his friends, he reads
his Bible, he haunts the church, to see if anywhere
there can be found the power that can match this
new demand and so the lost poise of his life be re-
stored. Is it a higher state ? We know it is! The
man has left his old content behind as the pine tree
leaves the clod when it shoots through the ground,
and, with its tense vines tingling and aching with
life, goes up to seek the sky. It is better, this spir-
itual need and ache and struggle — better, but not
the best. By and by, as all stories of conversion
love to tell, suddenly or gradually (they love to
make it sudden in order that its divineness may be
the more picturesquely evident), there comes into
the man the power of God to satisfy this soul's in-
exorable craving. He offers Himself to the soul
that He has made. He will forgive it ; He will sup-
ply it; He will teach it; He will give it Himself to
love. Words of the richest meaning, figures teem-
ing with the sweetest suggestiveness of peace, have
been sought everywhere and heaped together to
utter the new calmness of this higher life on which
the soul enters when the soul has thus found its
204 STORM AND CALM.
satisfaction. Tumult is past. Danger is all forgot-
ten. Responsibility is no longer heavy. All is
serenity in that high region where the human life
abides with God, identifies its life with His and
shares in His peace.
Again, see how in the growth of character this
law of ours has found another illustration. Out of
calmness that it may enter into a sublime calm.
Losing his life that he may find it more abundantly,
that is the progress through which the man passes
who is worthy of it. Again we have the three
conditions — the indifference, the struggle, and the
reconciliation — the worldling, the seeker, and the
saint. The unrest of the second is better than the
calmness of the first, and both are only preparatory
for the complete rest which remaineth only for the
people of God.
3. I venture upon one more illustration because it
is one in which I feel a very deep interest, but I will
give it to you very briefly. I think that the history
of very many of us, with reference to religious belief,
is described under the law of progress which we are
dealing with this morning. How many of us began
with an easy implicit faith in the religious truths
which we were taught ? We conceived them nar-
rowly and grasped and held them with no difficulty.
We were quite at rest. We knew what was true;
we were able to believe all that demanded our belief;
we were perfectly placid in our traditional religion.
But by and by with many of us came a time of pain-
ful, terrible dislodgment. The truths which we had
held so easily rose, grew, became too great, too
STORM AND CALM. 20$
awfully important for us to hold with hands like
those. Then doubt came. Could we say that we
believed what seemed slipping away from us so ? It
may have been that the truths seemed incredible; it
may have been that we seemed to ourselves merely
too poor and small to have anything whatever to do
with truths like those ; at any rate doubt came. To
those of us who can look back on such a time as
something past, how does it seem now ? Was it not
better that such thoughts came to us ? Was it not
God who sent them, or, at any rate, was it not God
who made us such that they must spring up in our
minds when we came to think as He had made us
to ? And then, if afterwards we have been led on,
as we believe, until in deeper personal sympathy
with God through Jesus we are able to lay intenser
hold upon the real spiritual essence of our faith than
we ever could lay on its formal statement, shall we
not thank God that He led us up to the better land
even through tangled and dark woods that covered
pathlessly the mountain side ? Again, we have the
three conditions — traditional acceptance, hesitation, v/
spiritual faith. The dogmatist, the doubter, the
believer. It is a going forward and not a going
back when God leads us from the first into the sec-
ond. Our care should be that, having come thus
far, we may go on and not return. It is easy to slip
back from doubt to dogmatism, and think that we
are marching forward into faith. Let us beware of
that, for the broad mountain top with its sunlight
and free air is possible to all of us if we choose to
struggle on and reach it.
206 STORM AND CALM.
Like the disciples pulling calmly on and thinking
they could cross the lake, the Christ in their boat
lying asleep, is the mere dogmatism that rests in
its own sufficient grasp of the truths of our religion.
Like the disciples all helpless with fright in the
storm, and expecting to perish before they reached
the shore, is the doubt which finds how helpless its
own self-confident belief has been. Like the disci-
ples, with their Lord awake again, sailing over the
smooth waters into port is the faith that has come
from personal apprehension of Christ. No religious
calm is safe in which the personal Christ sleeps and
we think that we can do without Him. It is a
blessed storm, however hard it blows, that makes us
wake Him. It is a blessed doubt that does for us,
what doubt has done for so many, driven them from
holding truths to hold the truth, from believing
Christianity to believing Christ.
I hope that these illustrations have given us some
idea of what the place and value of calmness really
is, of when and where it is desirable, of how there
are many portions of our lives in which it needs to
be broken up in order that we may go on to a calm-
ness that is higher.
I think some things must have become apparent
which it is well for us to notice. These are :
That calmness being a true proportion between
tasks and powers, it is a thing of absolute fact and
not of mere emotion. It is not the way we feel
about things but the way things are. And yet we
are always making calmness a mere word of feeling.
STORM AND CALM. 207
There may be no peace in our lives and we go about
still crying, peace, peace. There may sometimes,
on the other hand, be the profoundest peace below
and yet strange unrest on the surface. Who of us
does not know men whose tasks and powers are in-
deed truly mated, and are doing their work smoothly
and well, who are yet always dissatisfied ; and others,
only too many of them, who seem calm as a sum-
mer's morning while all their life is at loose ends
and fluttering with confusion ?
And, then, from this it seems to follow that since
calmness is not a thing of mere surface emotion, but
must go down to the deepest condition of our lives,
it can come not from any mere smoothing of the
ruffled surface which we ourselves could do, but only
from that harmonizing of the disturbed spiritual ele-
ments on which God must work. We cannot say,
just, " Go to now, I will be calm." We must cry
with Paul, " Now the Lord of peace give us peace
by all means."
And still from this it seems to follow that no per-
fection of highest inner and outer calmness, no
heaven here or hereafter is impossible for any poor
vexed soul, or for the poor vexed world, since into
the hands of Omnipotence has fallen back that task
which man has struggled at in vain ; and the calm-
ness, the heaven which we cannot make for our-
selves, we may take out of the free gift of His love.
When in the midst of all the restlessness of
earthly life we talk of calmness our thoughts go
forth to God. We think of Him as infinitely, eter-
2o8 STORM AND CALM.
nally calm. No passion sweeps its cloud across His
life. He is above, where indignation and impa-
tience never reach. What do we think of as the
meaning — what is the root and reason of His calm-
ness ? Is it not this — the perfect poise of task and
power? It is infinity meeting infinity; the infinite
duty and the infinite ability; no over-plus of task
awaiting its power; no unused power that cannot
find its task. In all that is included in the deep
Scripture phrase which says that man was made in
God's image, I can see nothing deeper or more
beautiful than this — the intimation which I find
there that for man also such a state is possible ; in
him, too, there may be this perfect poise of task and
power, and so he may be as calm as God. There is
a perfect state conceivable for our humanity, in
which there shall be no disturbing element, and yet
none of the danger of stagnation that results from
being undisturbed. We may be free from indigna-
tion, and yet never fall into feeble tolerance. We
may be above doubt and yet hold vigorously every
truth. We may be free from passion and yet full
of feeling, — without haste, without rest, and yet
abounding in life and work. The picture of such a
condition of humanity as the first idea of God, is
kept in the sweet story of the garden where the man
and woman lived in the peaceful sunshine of the
earliest days ; and it renews itself in the other garden
where the redeemed are to walk in white garments
by the river of the water of life, with the Lamb who
has brought them back to Himself — calmness at the
end as at the beginning of the book of life.
STORM AND CALM. 209
And how is it in this middle life that lies between
the paradises ? I think there can be no clearer indica-
tion of what a mingled life of calm and excitement
this present human life of ours is meant to be than
in the life which the Son of Man lived when He was
representing to us all the very pattern of a human
life. Look at the Incarnation. That there was un-
derneath, in the deep soul of Jesus, a strong abiding
calm we verily believe ; that many of the things that
trouble us passed by and left Him unmoved we may
be sure ; but who that reads the Bible does not feel
thankful that that perfect human life of Jesus was
not one unbroken, placid, emotionless monotony ?
Who does not rejoice that his divine Master could
be manlikely indignant ? Who does not glory in
those burning words of hot impatience with which
Jesus showed that He could not abide the meanness
of canting Pharisees and sophist Sadducees ? Who
has not heard the whip of small cords sing through
the close air of the superstitious temple and clear
the atmosphere as thunder does ? Who has not
been led into new thoughts of manly life by hearing
Jesus rebuke Chorazin and Bethsaida, as well as by
hearing Him console and forgive the adulteress ?
We must not let these scenes go out of the life of
Jesus. If we do we shall forget to be indignant
with meanness and oppression. We must not let
them go and set up a colorless Christ to copy, or
our lives will grow pale and wretched. No, my dear
friends, the world may come, is surely coming where
we shall be capable of indignation that is not fiery
and scorn that does not burn. But with the pattern
210 STORM AND CALM.
of the man of Nazareth to copy, that is not what we
are to look for now. I complain of our present
state, not that we are too restless and excited, but
that we are restless and excited about the wrong
things. I complain not that we are not calm
enough, but that our calm and our excitement do
not know their places. We fret if a trifle is wrong
about our dinner, if a rival gets before us in the
hunt for notoriety, if a companion does not pay us
what we think the due respect ; and we are calm as
statues and smile on in perfect satisfaction while the
laws of God are violated and the poor are wronged
right by our side. We worry if we violated an eti-
quette yesterday, and let the sins of yesterday go
unrepented. We are indignant with other men's
vices and tolerant about our own. Our storms blow
in the wrong places. Our calms come just where
we need the healthy fury of a storm. We want to
pray not, " Lord, take away the power of excite-
ment," but " Lord, let our excitement like Christ's
be always true and timely — let it glow against all
meanness and all sin, especially our own. And let
every passion prepare us for a higher calm! "
I think what I have said to-day is true and most
important, and yet, now as I look back upon our
text and all the story out of which it comes, I fear
that I have not said what you expected, what you
had a right to expect that I would say when I an-
nounced it. I can fancy, I am sure, that there must
have been some, who, conscious of perplexed and
bewildered lives, hungered to hear something of how
STORM AND CALM. 211
the soothing calm which they were longing for could
come. They wanted rest. How should they get
it ? I have not seemed to speak especially to them,
and yet in what I have said there is the answer to
their question. You want peace and relief. Well,
there is only one worthy principle by which to hope
for it. Peace must come to you not by the lifting
off of the burden, but by the pouring in of the
strength that shall make you able to bear your bur-
den. That is the only true and brave man's peace.
Is it bereavement that is troubling you ? The calm
must come back to you not by the restored presence
of your dead friend, but by the new presence
of Christ, who brings with Him in His spiritual
access the spiritual companionship of all of ours who
have gone to Him. Is it your sin ? Only Christ
the forgiver can give you peace. Is it your friend-
lessness ? Only the friend of the friendless can help
you. Is it your felt ignorance ? Only the wisdom
of God can hush or comfort you. Everywhere the
calmness that we look for, all the calmness that we
have a right to. He will give us. And if we all
knew how near He was to us and how ready, who
need go on perplexed, excited ? Look back at those
disciples upon Galilee. The boat goes tossing and
filling, but why do they not call Jesus ? They think
they can sail it safely home themselves without
Him. If they keep on so too long their boat and
they will go down into the foaming waters. But no !
At last, see, they have found out their weakness.
They are turning to Him, — " Lord, save, we
perish." How readily He wakes! How mightily
212 STORM AND CALM.
He speaks! How graciously and perfectly into the
souls that have come to Him for the power to
match the tasks of life there comes the great calm,
the peace that passeth understanding.
XIII.
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
" The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich and He addeth no
sorrow with it." — Proverbs x. 22.
There is always a peculiar feeling in our minds
when we listen to Solomon talking about happiness.
We are sure that he knows what he is telling us
about when he declares where happiness is not to be
found. A man of such exuberant and enterprising
life as few men have, he had determined to be hap-
py, and the result had been a most unhappy story.
Much that was bright and pleasant he had found,
but yet the sum of life for him was vanity. All the
time he had been haunted by the knowledge that
there was something better which he might have if
he would. It is out of all this experience that he
bursts forth with this proverb, " The blessing of the
Lord, it maketh rich."
You can see where the pathos of the proverb lies
as Solomon utters it. It is in those last words,
" He addeth no sorrow with it." Plenty of riches
Solomon had found, but always there had been a
sorrow with it. The charm, the glory of the riches
which the blessing of the Lord should give was that
there was no sorrow in it. There is where lies the
3x3
214 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
deepest feeling of the verse, in those quiet words at
the end which are Hke a deep pool in which a run-
ning stream gathers its stillest and profoundest
waters. And it is with special reference to these
words that I want to speak about the verse to-day.
For we all have enough of the great king's experi-
ence to understand him ; we have all felt the trouble
in life which he felt. It is not that the world has
not its blessings which bring their riches to us, but
that every kind of riches comes dogged with its own
kind of sorrow. Still the riches is attractive enough
to make us seek it, to spend our lives, to give away
our lives in seeking it perhaps ; but always the feet
are hindered in running to it, the hands that we
have stretched out to it hesitate and are almost
drawn back just as they are on the point of grasping
it, because we know that with the joy we certainly
must take a sorrow. " No rose without its thorn "
sings the old, threadbare proverb, and if we think of
it there is something deeply pathetic in the fact that
such a proverb as that should have grown thread-
bare in the hands of men. The experience which is
embodied in that proverb looks out from history to
greet each new generation of men as it grows up,
like a solemn, sad face painted years ago out of the
soul of some great master on the walls of the mar-
ket-place of some Italian town, in sight of which all
the people of that town have grown up from boys
and girls to men and women for centuries. We can
see the power of that experience everywhere. All
human life in its perpetual pursuits is full of eager-
ness which yet is very seldom hearty and f uU-souled,
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 21 5
but trembles with a hesitation which, while it does
not make men cease to seek the prizes of the world,
weakens their heart and chills their enthusiasm in
their struggles.
Think how this consciousness appears in several of
the kinds of wealth which the world offers. First
there is literal riches, the actual money which men
seek so earnestly. It comes — sometimes it comes
abundantly — but how rarely it comes without sor-
row ! How often the man has had to soil his con-
science a little in order to secure it ; or, if there is
not that, how immediately the fear of losing it be-
gins to beset the joy of having it, — how the simplic-
ity of life grows complicated with many cares, how
the fear lest men shall not recognize our wealth and
do us honor haunts a vast number of the rich men's
hearts, how the jealousy of other men's wealth
comes in with the possession of our own, and how,
to men of too high a nature for these lower sorrows
to affect, the limitations of the wealth which they
have won, its powerlessness to create moral charac-
ter, to make men good, seems to make its posses-
sion a worthless and unsatisfying thing. These are
the sorrows that the world gives when it gives
wealth. There is no need of any vulgar abuse of
money or any foolish denial of the privileges that
it gives. Only this is as sure as is the happiness
that it brings, that with the happiness comes sorrow.
And so it is with a far better thing than money,
so it is with learning. There, too, are the two great
hindrances, the two great sorrows that come with
increasing knowledge and haunt the scholar's study.
2l6 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
— first, the sense of limitation, the vast outlying
region of that which knowledge cannot do. Neither
can knowledge any more than money make men
good or noble. And, second, the pestilence of jeal-
ousy, the fear or the dislike of other men who have
learned more than we have, or whose learning has
carried them to different conclusions from those that
we have reached. These are the two spectres that
haunt all man's gaining of knowledge, the sense of
incompleteness and the jealousy that comes of
selfishness.
The same is true of social influence and fellow-
men's esteem. It, too, brings its sorrows with it.
You win the place that you have sought for in your
brethren's regard, and immediately the knowledge
of how slight your influence is and the fear that the
fickle will of those you touch may turn them any
day from your influence to some other which is
wholly different, gathers round you and will not let
you enjoy your coveted popularity in peace. And
so of fame. It is all full of spots of defamation, and
a hundred hands are eager to pull down the idol of
the hour from his pedestal. So even of friendship,
the choicest and purest of earth's treasures. The
earth gives you your friend and thenceforth all your
life is bright with a new brightness ; but the earth
gives you sorrow with your friend. The insuffi-
ciency of the best hfe to satisfy any other life, the
pain with which you take your friend's weaknesses
and faults, as it were, as an addition to your own,
the suspicion and jealousy with which you watch the
answering love, the constant dread of the great break
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 217
of death which is not wholly dreadful for any man
until he dreads it not merely for the mysterious pain
that it will bring himself, but for the woe that it will
bring to some one who is dearer to him than him-
self,— all these are the sorrows that the earth gives
a man always with one hand when with the other
she holds out to him the most precious thing she
has to give, a friend.
We dwell upon these various particulars and we
see the mysterious mixture everywhere. But perhaps
it is not by dwelling on particulars, but by stand-
ing with a sensitive and sympathetic nature in the
midst of the great general tumult of human life, and
letting it express itself upon us, that we get most viv-
idly the impression of this truth of how sorrow comes
like a shadow behind — or perhaps rather like a subtle
and spiritual essence in — all the good things that the
world has to give us. What is the great feeling of
men about human life ? Here is the great tireless
struggle to keep alive, the deep and universal dread
of dying, the determination that they will not die.
Here are men revelling in life, finding the sun dear
every morning, turning to recruit their living powers
with new strength every night. Here are men
standing beside the grave of their brother who has
died, and pitying him. And then in the midst of all
this some voice breaks out, more or less earnestly,
in an article in a review, and asks, " Is life worth
living?" and instantly you see that the question
has touched some latent and unowned misgiving,
has often stirred the deepest suspicions in just the
lives that seemed the happiest and fullest. What
2I8 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
does it mean ? Is it not simply this — the deep abid-
ing conviction that Hfe is good, and yet the perpetual
conviction, growing out of long experience, that the
good life will always bring sorrow in its hand ? The
bright and hopeful souls trust, in the face of a thou-
sand disappointments, that the bliss will shed the
sorrow and shine out clear and serene ; the souls
that are less sanguine go on thinking that, on the
whole, life is well worth taking even with its inevi-
table pain ; but all alike keep underneath a sense of
joy in living, an expectation of disappointment and
alloy which is always present and which is constantly
finding itself an utterance.
We talk of all this, but I think that Solomon
knew it all better than any of us. He had tried life
on every side. He was no secluded saint who had
lived above temptation — that unfound being at
whom men of the world are always sneering, when,
instead of that, if they could find him they ought to
stand before him in reverence, with the shoes off
their feet — Solomon was not that. He was a man
who knew what the world could give and how its
gifts came always backed and haunted by a sorrow.
And then came the words of his proverb. He knew
something else. He knew what God could give.
He knew how God's gifts differed from the world's
gifts. " The blessing of the Lord it maketh rich
and He addeth no sorrow with it." Do we not see
now how much these words contain ? It is the
purity, the freedom from mixture and alloy, the
absoluteness and simplicity of God's blessings, that
seems beautiful and precious to him. And oh, how
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 219
often that is what seems so precious and beautiful
to us ! Not to be very rich, but to hold what wealth
I have so purely that it shall do nothing but good to
me or to my brethren ; not to sweep across the world
with my influence, but so far as it does reach, in the
little circle which it does cover, to have it an influ-
ence absolutely for blessing and not a curse to any
man, — that is the kind of desire which I think grows
strongest in the true man's heart. Not greatness,
but purity; not a vast range, but a complete sin-
cerity,— these are what we want. And when Solo-
mon says that these come only by God's gift, I think
there are two different regions in which we can con-
sider the truth of what he says. First, there are the
things which men take from the world, and find
to be haunted by sorrow. These same things, taken
from God's hand, are robbed of their sorrow and
become sources of pure joy. Second, there are the
things which the world cannot give at all, which God
must give and which, therefore, must bring only
happiness. Let us look at both.
It would be easy to run once more through the
different kinds of riches which I specified, and see
how each drops the element of pain which we saw in
it the moment that it is taken as God's gift. Think
of mere money. If I learn to hold it as God's stew-
ard, what has become of the trouble that it used to
bring me when I thought that I had won it by my
shrewdness and must hold it by my strength ? I
cannot be haunted by the fear of losing it ! May
not He take it away who gave it to me ? I cannot
be anxious to display it! It is really His, not mine^
220 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
and He will let it be seen as He thinks best. I Citn-
not be jealous of my neighbor who has a little more
than I have! It is only that God distributes His
gifts among His children as seems best to Him.
There is nothing left, no sorrow, no anxiety except
only this deep anxiety that I may use the wealth
that He has given me as He, the Giver, would have
wished; and that anxiety His constant presence is
always making a joy because it keeps me in per-
petual sympathy and consultation with Him. When
we think of the dignity of that conception of the
rich man's life, how vulgar all the ordinary ways in
which our rich men live appear. And so of learn-
ing. If it be God's message and not my discovery,
there, too, the discontents and jealousies which
haunted it are gone. The incompleteness of it only
carries my thought and heart up to the dear hand in
which the part that is withheld from me is kept.
And the rivalry of my fellow-student is only as if
two brothers stood at different points to hear what
their father spoke to both of them, and yet were
near enough to speak across to one another, and
what each heard became the portion of the other,
and out of the united hearing of the two their
knowledge of his will was gathered. Still more of
friendship, that which I called the most precious gift
of man. What many and many a friendship needs
to clarify it, to take out the suspiciousness, the jeal-
ousy, the fretful sense of limitation that is in it, is
the simple and certain sense that behind the choice
which each friend made of the other, God put the
two together. That, you know, is the consumniate
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 221
sacredness of marriage, the safeguard of its purity,
the warrant of its permanence. And what your
friendship with your friend needs to have put into
it is the notion of divine gift. If it had that, the
human friend would be supplied, as it were, by the
abundance of the divine friend, the utterance of
whose love he would have become.
I am anxious that you should see what I mean by
this notion of taking everything as God's gift, which
so robs life of sorrow. It is no foolish attempt to
get rid of second causes. It is no fantastic effort to
make believe that money is not to be won by indus-
try and knowledge gained by study and friends by
friendliness. But it is the everlasting feeling of the
fountain behind the stream. It is the sense of the
first cause behind the second cause. Your dinner is
on your table. If you put it there, and only you,
then as you taste its sweetness, the very taste sug-
gests the wonder whether you will always be able to
provide a dinner, and you are wondering how your
neighbor feeds compared with you ; or, if you are a
nobler man, you find the pleasure of the senses
always suggesting how much there is beyond the
senses that is not fed. The plentiful food for the
body wakens the hunger of the hungry soul. All
that is changed, all those besetting troubles disappear
the moment that God spreads your table for you,
the moment that you know that it is God who
spreads your table. Then it is like the manna in
the desert which brought to the Israelites none of
the sorrows which our self-earned dinner brings to
us. Every morning as they found it on the sands
222 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
they took and ate it, not doubting that to-morrow
morning they should find it there again, not grudg-
ing their brother Israehte his supply who stooped
and gathered by their side, and always led on to the
thought of spiritual need and spiritual mercy as they
collected the body's food that seemed to be yet
warm from the almighty hand. Or, if we dared to
look yet higher for our illustration, the meal which
lies upon your table as the gift of God, has some-
thing of the abundant and unmixed joy which must
belong to the mystic feast of heaven of which the
book of the Revelation tells, the marriage supper
of the Lamb. " Blessed are they which are called
to that marriage supper," says the book. They
shall sit down in peace. No sign of doubt or fear
or sorrow can be upon their faces or their hearts.
They take the sacred food out of the very hand of
God. For them the old proverb of the king is per-
fectly fulfilled, " The blessing of the Lord maketh
them rich, and He addeth no sorrow with it." And
an anticipation of that unmixed joy is in the way in
which every soul that really believes in God takes
the things of ordinary life from Him, and is thrilled
with the touching of His hand in taking them.
The two elements of sorrow in the joys which are
given to us in this world are imperfection and jeal-
ousy. It is because our own possession of them is
incomplete, and because we grudge our brethren
their possession of them, — it is for these reasons that
they give us such imperfect pleasure. The incom-
pleteness cannot be done away with, cannot be made
complete, but, coming from God's hand, it may be-
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 223
come to us the interpretation of the way in which
His completeness shall be given to us just as fully
as we can receive it. The jealousy cannot be lifted
off by any assurance that we and we alone shall have
God's richest gifts, but it may be drowned and lost
in a sincere delight that all our brethren may have
them as well as we. Our own possession of them
may only make clear to us the abundant possibility
of other men. When those great changes come
then the sting that lay at the heart of our dearest
and most precious things is gone ; and those great
changes must come when any man, given to God
himself, feels God giving Himself to him in every-
thing.
But we want to press on and speak of the other
class of blessings which come to us from God, those
which come to us direct from Him, which the world
cannot give to any man even as a second cause.
These are the riches of the soul ; they are the relig-
ious blessings which surpass all others until they
seem to be the only valuable things to the man who
really has them. What are they ? There is one
noble comprehensive description of them in the New
Testament which tells their whole story. St. John
calls Jesus the only begotten of the Father, full of
grace and truth. " Grace and truth." That is
what God gives to any soul which He makes fully
rich. And what is grace ? It is at once a character
and an action. It is the nature of God passing over
by an act of God to become character in us. I think
that in this word, grace, which is at once the name
of a nature and the name of an action, we have a
224 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
very striking indication of how perfectly nature and
action are at one, are at perfect harmony in God.
When I say grace, I mean first the very substance
of the being which God is. When I say grace, I
mean, again, the forgiveness which God in His mercy
gives man for his sins. When I say grace, finally, I
mean that new life in man which begins in gratitude
for God's pardon, and grows on and up into greater
and greater likeness to the God it thanks. How
rich and full the great word is ! And so with truth,
religious truth — that, too, if we follow it well out to
its idea, is not mere knowledge imparted. It is
God's own being shed by love into the being of His
children. " I am the truth," said Jesus. Truth,
religious truth, is light which is first a quality in
the sun, then an action reaching all the way from
the sun through space to earth, and then a quality
in the earth making it lustrous and sunlike. And
these two words, grace and truth, describe the riches
which God gives to the soul on which He bestows
Himself. Forgiveness and enhghtenment ! The
soul of poor blind Lazarus, the soul of great and
mighty David, the soul of the poor stumbling child,
the soul of the great. Christian scholar, the soul of
the patient sufferer at perfect peace in his dark
room, the soul of the strong hero going forth with
leaping heart to battle in the sunshine ; — just as soon
as you fold back the robe of accident and find the
heart and soul of what his Lord has done for each of
them, you find it still the same, forgiveness and
enlightenment, grace and truth! The thing for
which man searches the face of his beloved fellow-
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 22$
man most eagerly, throwing his whole soul into his
earnest sympathizing gaze, is to see whether in that
face he can discover the assurance that God has
given to that friend of his the new life of forgiveness
and enlightenment, grace and truth. As the mother
searches the face of her first-born to find the signs
first that there is life and then that there is reason
there, so does the man who knows that there is no
real life without the forgiveness and enlightenment,
the grace and truth of God, seek for them in his
friend's face, and refuse to be satisfied until he finds
them there. When he has found them he rejoices
over his friend's new birth.
And now about these deepest and holiest gifts of
God — grace and truth — is that true which Solomon
wrote about all His mercies ? When God sends these
riches does He send no sorrow with them ? At once
there start up, as we ask the questions, memories
of much in our own lives, and stories that other men
have told us of their lives, which make us wonder
whether the proverb has not perhaps exhausted its
truth before it comes to this profoundest kind of
blessing. How is it with forgiveness ? When God
sends that, does He not send sorrow with it ? The
shame! the humbleness! the miserable consciousness
of ingratitude ! the hard tearing away of the sin
which had rooted itself into the deepest places of
our souls! the self-denials! the self-disgusts! No
sorrow! Is it not all sorrow, this hard and bitter
labor of repentance ? And then of truth ! Does
God give that to any man except through pain ?
What shall we say about the long and bitter doubts ?
226 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
the horror of great darkness that is on many minds;
the bewilderment among false lights on every side
that distracts others ? What of those days when,
with the growing certainty that we cannot live with-
out truth, there seems to be likewise a growing cer-
tainty that we shall never find it ? The plucking
out of old prejudices and errors which have come to
be part of our life, the misconceptions of our breth-
ren, the distrust of ourselves, what shall we say of
all of these ? Has it not grown to be the very com-
monplace of spiritual history that it is by suffering
that God makes His best soil ready for the seed that
He is meaning to sow in it ? How thick the ques-
tions spring up as we think about it ! And yet to
all these questions I think there are two answers
to be given. I do not say that they are satisfactory.
I only think that they indicate the direction in which
satisfaction lies, and help us to see that, in spite of
all appearances, God does not, if we could see Him
fully, send us anything but joy, — that the sorrow
which comes with His spiritual mercies is something
which we add to them ourselves.
The first consideration is that the spiritual treat-
ment and the suffering which comes with it are
always separable in our thought from one another.
The treatment is essential. God could not make us
what it is of all importance that we should be made
without it. The suffering that attends on the recep-
tion of the treatment is an accident. It belongs to
the condition in which the spiritual treatment finds
us, — we can conceive of the same treatment finding
us in other conditions and giving us nothing but un-
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 22/
mixed joy. For instance, God has given me a truth,
which is to me a source of endless peace and happi-
ness. In order that it might completely reach my
heart that truth had to break and tear its way
through obstinacy and a settled faithlessness. God
gave His truth such force, so winged it with His
own convincingness, that it could conquer for itself
that entrance, and in its victory over me I was hurt
and suffered. Now what shall we say ? Shall I
declare that God sent the sorrow with the truth.
The truth was unmixed joy. If it had come to an
open, willing soul it would have slid like a sunbeam
into its life, instead of crushing in like a cannon-ball
as it did into mine. It would have ridden in at the
gate like a king over flowers, instead of bursting in
like a soldier through the broken wall. Can I say,
then, truly that God sends the sorrow which is an
accident of the condition in which His truth finds
me ? Can I lay the pain on Him ? Is it not as if
His bright stream struck some feebly built house on
the sand, and swept it down to ruin ? I may say
that the sorrow started with the river where it sprang
out of the fountain, and came hurrying down with
it through all its course. That makes the river's
gay laughter, as it crept through the thickets and
the fields and caught the shadows of the flowers on
its bosom, a dreadful mockery. May I not say more
truly that the stream brought no sorrow with it, but
only brought out evidently and sealed with visible
ruin the sorrow which it found waiting for it in the
disguise of happy safety on its bank ?
And the other consideration is that the sorrow
228 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
which accompanies the reception of God's best bless-
ings, His forgiveness and enlightenment, His grace
and truth, shares subtly in the very nature of the
joy that causes it. It is not wholly sorrowful. The
pain of giving up a dear prejudice to make place for
a truth is radiant already with the joy which that
truth is to give me. This sort of transfiguration is
familiar to all the best experiences of the highest
lives. You and I may not understand it, but all the
shining moments in the history of the human soul
bear witness of the reality that is in it. The martyr
stands at his stake, and we dare to pity him ; we say
" Your truth and faith are glorious, but how sad it
is that you could not have them without this !" But
he replies, " They have become glorious to me in
this as I could never have seen them otherwise."
Did the three children in the furnace, with the
" One like unto the Son of Man" walking beside
them in the flames, think that the flame was terri-
ble ? Except for it they could not have seen Him,
and so it was a portion of their joy. And if when
your forgiveness comes to you out of the hand of
God, the repentance, the humility, the self-surrender
through which you take it make it far dearer and
more beautiful and precious to you than it could
have been without that pain ; then is not the pain
itself a pleasure, and does not the soul, finding the
heart of its suffering full of joy, forget the mere
rough outside in which that heart of joy is folded,
and triumphantly declare that when the Lord sent
His forgiveness He " sent no sorrow with it ? "
I think that such considerations, while they can-
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 229
not answer our question perfectly, do yet show us
something of where the answer to our question lies.
And all this becomes clearer if we turn from our poor
attempt to describe it and see it perfectly illustrated
in. the life of Jesus. In that wonderful life all that
we have said came to its perfect exhibition. The
blessing of His Father made Him rich beyond any
conception of ours. We waste poor pity upon the
poverty of Jesus. There is something almost insult-
ing in the way in which we dwell upon the priva-
tions of His earthly lot. He never dwelt on them
Himself. When He said that the foxes had holes
and the birds of the air had nests but He was home-
less, it was no weak self-pity. It was no appeal for
sympathy. It was the simple fact of His life told
to a scribe who had offered to follow Him, — told in
order that the soul of the new disciple might be
tested, that there might be no misunderstanding nor
mistake. " Alone and yet not alone, because the
Father is with Me," — that is the way in which His
life looked to Himself.
And now, how was it with this richness that His
Father gave Him — did He, as our old proverb
promises, " add no sorrow with it " ? Sorrow
enough there certainly was. The outward pain and
inward struggle have been ever since the wonder of
the world. He was the man of sorrows. The
suffering of the body culminating in the agony of
the Cross, the wounds of ingratitude, the wearing
misery of delay and disappointment, the daily bruis-
ing of the sinless nature against sin, the burden of
men's and women's troubles on his sympathy, the
230 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
separation from His Father — how all this was min-
gled with the richness of His Father's gift, with the
joy of His own holiness and of the work that He
was doing ! And yet I think that as we read the
dear old story deeply, there grows up in our minds
a conviction that each of these truths was supremely
true about our Lord which we have seen to be true
also of His disciples. For Him, too, the pain was
separable from the joy. The joy was of His Father's
giving — the sending of the willing Son to seek His
brethren. The pain that mingled with the joy was
born of the meeting of the Son's holiness with the
world's sin, which the Father did not make. If we
can conceive of an Incarnation which, manifesting
God to a perfectly sinless and obedient world, should
have had no trace of suffering about it, should even
have added a new delight to the already perfect
happiness of Deity, — then we can see how separable
in the soul of Jesus may have been the joy of His
Messiahship from the suffering which His Messiah-
ship involved ; how, even in His greatest agony
upon the Cross, feeling that God had given Him the
privilege of Saviourhood and seeing that essential
privilege separate itself and stand apart from all its
accidents of woe in its own intrinsic gladness. He
may even then have lifted up His failing heart and
cried, " I thank Thee! Thy blessing has made me
rich, and thou hast added no sorrow with it." And
when you add to that the other truth, that in the
pain itself was a deep heart of joy, that inasmuch as
only by suffering with them could He come close to
these brethren of His, and to come close to them
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 23 1
was His one longing desire, therefore the suffering
itself was joy. When you add that, then is there
not some light shed through the everlasting mystery,
and can we not see how it was that out of every
darkness the soul of Jesus always cleared itself into
the light, how peace came after the temptation, and
after Gethsemane, and the Son never ceased to
thank the Father for His tried and tortured life.
And in the way in which Christ received His
Father's gift is there not, O my dear friends, the
constant picture of the way in which we must receive
Christ ? The soul that takes the Lord and His ser-
vice is sure to take pain and distress. Temptations
gather round him as he timidly lets the signal of his
new faith be seen. Men's misconceptions fill his
ears — above all and behind all his own sins dismay
him the moment that he has set out to escape from
his sins through Christ. But yet he knows, or grad-
ually learns, that the Gospel is all joy. The sorrow
comes not from what God is, but from what he is.
And even in the sorrow there is hidden a new joy
because by it he may be more faithful, more hum-
ble, more patient, more utterly given to his Lord.
Oh, let me picture to myself some poor bewildered,
struggling soul hidden somewhere among these pews
this morning. It is a picture of my imagination
only because I do not know behind which of your
faces that soul sits. But that such a soul is some-
where here is no imagination of mine but is a certain
fact. That soul has heard Christ's invitation. The
marvellous offer of the Lord has won its way to
your acceptance. ' ' The bread that I will give is my
232 THE BLESSING OF THE LORD.
flesh which I will give for your life," — so He has
spoken and so you have heard. You have taken
Him, and not for all the world would you let Him
go. The blessing of the Lord has made you rich.
But then — but then you hesitate. Has He not
added sorrow with it ? Does it not seem as if He
had deliberately made it hard for you to be a Chris-
tian ? Perhaps it is all right. It may be all for the
best that it should be hard, but surely the fact is
clear. He has made it hard, not easy! O my
dear friend, that is not true! The hardness has not
been in Him, but entirely in you! In Him there
has been nothing but love, nothing but the desire
that with as gentle and as smooth a journey as
possible you should come to Him. Not the
Father's hand puts obstacles in the child's way to
Him; not even that the child may value Him the
more when he shall find Him, does He so obstruct
his path. The value of Himself, which the Father
would have His prodigal children learn, is not the
value that comes by long denial of the prize, but
the preciousness which the Father's love wins as the
child learns how long it has been waiting for him,
how it has struggled in every way to show itself, and
how it has labored to remove every hindrance and
give itself away.
I beg you, O my dear friends, to whom Christ has
come and who have come to Christ, to find the
deepest preciousness of your new life in its perfect
freedom. Do not expect your religion to be hard.
If there be hardness in it, count that hardness to be
of your making, not of God's sending. Be sure that
THE BLESSING OF THE LORD. 233
God would rather have you believe than doubt,
rather have you hope than fear, rather have you
show your humility by the complete trust with
which you take His mercy than by the distressed
perplexity with which you wonder whether it is
possible for you to take it.
XIV.
JOY AND SORROW.
" Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave.
It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it." — John xi. 38.
The moment which this verse describes was
doubtless one of the saddest in the life of Jesus.
His friend was dead, and the Master stood in the
midst of the overwhelming sorrow which his death
had brought. There was the pain of bereavement
in His own heart ; there was pitiful sympathy with
the poor sisters ; and there was also the clear sight
of the sadness of human life. It was impossible that
the Son of Man should stand in the close presence
of this one sorrow, and not feel all the great sea of
sorrows, of which this was a single wave, beating
upon His heart out of all the lands and all the ages !
He saw the great cloud of misery overshadowing the
world ; He heard the great chorus of lamentation
going up from the human heart ; all this was in the
deep groan which we can hear to-day, as millions
have heard it before us, which burst from His lips
as He went among the weeping family to the tomb
of Lazarus of Bethany.
Is human life a joyous or a gloomy thing ? This
is the question to which the picture of the Son of
234
JOY AND SORROW. 235
Man in His sorrow may naturally lead our thoughts.
Strange enough it is that, after all these generations
and centuries of human living, men should still ask
themselves that question and differ from themselves
and from each other about its answer. It is a very
pathetic sign of what a confused, entangled thing
the world's life is, that men cannot decide whether
it is a melancholy or a splendid thing to live, and
that he whose judgment runs either way shows at
once his eagerness to believe, and his doubt whether
his belief is right, by the way in which he denounces
and almost hates the man who judges differently
from himself. The man who praises life detests the
man who darkens life with blame ; and the man who
blames life despises him who praises it. There is no
battle Hke the battle of the optimists and pessimists.
Surely it must be a mysterious thing on whose
essential quality men who are always so intimately
dealing with it cannot decide. Surely there must
be some deeper method of answering the question
than that which depends on the whim of the
moment or the temperament of the man who gives
the answer. Let us see whether we can make any
progress towards an answer in our study of to-day.
Our time is remarkable, among many other things,
for the frequency and the urgency with which the
question whether human life is intrinsically joyous
or sorrowful is being asked. That question has
always rested on the heart of man; it has always
broken from his life, but we think never as to-day.
So much of the first boyish, unquestioning sim-
plicity of life is lost, so complicated and self-
236 JOY AND SORROW.
conscious and self-watchful has the human heart
become, that it is not possible to say to this full-
grown human being as you might once have said to
humanity in its childhood, " It is not right to ask
the question. Do your duty and ask nothing about
happiness." The question of happiness, if not our
own happiness, yet our brother-man's, reaches
everywhere. It infects even the idea of duty. It
must be answered. It is getting its answer, wisely
or unwisely, in every heart. Therefore it is good
for us to study.
You will see from the text which I have chosen
how I would approach the question. It is through
the consciousness of Christ. It certainly will be
much to us if we can know how the world looked to
Him, whether the color of life was dark or bright to
those clear deep eyes which looked on it so humanly
and so divinely. Who would not give anything to
ask Him if we could find Him on our streets ? For
all men who have seen Him have felt sure that,
looking into Him, they looked into the very con-
sciousness of God, which is the final fact of things.
The sum of all the world's complicated doctrines
concerning Christ is this — that in Him man finds
both himself and the God to whom he belongs, and
so is able to read that truth which exists in the
essential relation of the human life to the divine.
Therefore it is that he who can learn how life ap-
pears to Christ will learn how it appears to God,
and how it really is, behind all its appearances, to
man.
It is good for us to verify and to correct our own
JOY AND SORROW. 237
judgments by those of other men, of larger, wiser
men, and, wherever we can get glimpses of it, by
the judgment of that universal humanity which is
wiser than the wisest of the human beings whom it
includes. Not even that judgment, when we have
found it, can violently dispossess our own and take
its place ; but it may — if we are broadminded and
true, it must — enrich our judgment into its likeness,
fulfil us with itself. This is what it does for me
when I see Christ's thought, which is both human
and divine. His thought does not kill my thought
and set itself into its place. It changes my thought
into itself. It turns out what is false in my thought
and develops what is true ; and so I come to think
like Christ because other thought becomes impos-
sible. So let us seek Christ's thought about the
happiness and the unhappiness of human life. As
soon as we ask the question there comes up to our
memory, out of the Gospels which tell His story,
two classes of His acts and words. One class is full
of the sense of the joy of living. It begins with the
wonder of a chorus of angels welcoming His birth.
It goes on with the picture of a healthy, happy
boyhood, of the first keen appetite for knowledge,
of brave, enthusiastic young friendships, of the
chance and desire to do good, of sympathetic inter-
course with nature, of rapt intercourse with God, of
great visions into the future, and at last of a com-
plete triumph over death, — all of these blossoming
out into rich words of joyousness, of trust, of hope.
No man can read these pages of the life of Jesus
and not know that life was joyful and beautiful to
238 JOY AND SORROW.
Him. And at the same time, while anybody reads
this life, he is all the time aware that it is not all.
There are dark passages along with the bright ones
everywhere. The songs of the angels at His birth
are lost almost immediately in the cries of the child-
martyrs who are murdered out of hate of Him.
Then come the persecutions and the misconceptions
and the awful scenes of sorrow, and the perpetual
appeals of wretchedness for help. Then comes the
betrayal by those whom He had trusted and the
weakness of those whom He would fain make strong.
There is the blow and blank of death. There is the
sin which makes life worse than death. All of these
pressed in upon a sensitiveness surpassing in ex-
quisiteness what any other being ever carried. At
the very outset, at the very first sight this is clear —
that neither side of our human life had hid itself
from Jesus. Each side of it had pled its cause before
Him. Its joy had said, " Behold, how good it is to
live." Its pain had cried, "Behold, how life is hor-
rible!" Evidently the judgment which this Jesus
makes must be made with the sound of both of these
voices, and must include the truth which each of
them tells. He cannot be ignorant of either. He
cannot judge life as a pampered weakling who knows
only its luxury, nor as an embittered savage who
has known nothing but its pain. They will both be
there. His judgment of life will be large enough to
hold them both.
But then we come at once to something else.
This Christ, the more we think concerning Him,
impresses us with a sublime unity of nature. What-
JOY AND SORROW. 239
ever various elements combine in Him cannot exist
in conflict. They must be in some deeper harmony
with one another. It cannot be that any being can
permanently live with two ideas, inconsistent with
each other, ruling in succession, first one and then
the other holding possession of the life. It cannot
be that now the thought of life as misery and now
the thought of life as happiness should rule — one
holding the other, its rival, under foot. Both must
be always true. Only one must be permanently
master, and the other must be always subject.
Which shall be which ? Shall life be wretchedness,
with strange, unaccountable, tantalizing, exasperat-
ing flashes of happiness flung here and there upon
its darkness, making its great stretches only more
dark ? Or shall life be one great deep stream of joy,
ever and anon darkening and ensnarling itself in
suffering, but always unsnarling and brightening
itself again, and always keeping its great course un-
turned, its great song unsilenced, below every hin-
drance or discord which may disturb its bosom ?
Which of these two — for one or other it must be —
which of these two is Christ's idea of human life ?
Can there be any doubt ? Consider the very names
He loves to bear. He is Jesus. He is the Saviour.
He is Christ, the anointed one. His work is a re-
demption. What do those words mean ? Do they
not of necessity involve the truth that in behind and
up above and down below all life there is one great
unchanged purpose of good, that every evil is a
departure from that purpose, that out of the soul
of that purpose He has come, that to restore all life
240 JOY AND SORROW.
to that purpose is the hope and unchangeable inten-
tion of His soul ? These are the first necessary
meanings of Jesus. They are not merely the truths
He teaches but the truths He is. It is in virtue of
their being true that He is here at all. What then ?
The soul which carries in itself these truths has but
^ne view of life possible for it. For it the good was
before the evil, and will be after it, and is beneath
it all the time. And therefore joy and the certainty
that life means joy, — joy darkened and puzzled a
thousand times, but never extinguished, joy always
present as the fundamental consciousness of life, — is
the only possible condition for that soul. And that
soul supremely was the soul of Christ.
This is what Christ must have been by the neces-
sary conditions of His being. And this is what He
actually was. It is impossible to read His story
with clear eyes and carry away any other picture.
All His sorrow gets its intensity from the interrup-
tion which it makes to His joy. All His disappoint-
ment is dark by the shadow which is cast by His
inextinguishable hope. His hate of evil is deep in
proportion as His love of good is high. He expects
man to be happy and never recovers from the horror
of the fact that man is sad.
The world has always felt this character in Christ.
It has said, " How could He feel so ? " but it has
never been able to doubt or to deny that He did
feel so. One effort it has made to reconcile His
sense that life was good with its own misgivings and
belief that life was bad and sad. It has imputed to
Him some notion of election. It has tried to make
JOY AND SORROW. 24 1
out that it was to some small select privileged minor-
ity of human kind that He promised such special
blessings as made it worth while for them to live ;
while to the great majority He left life a weary
waste of woe, only touched here and there with
mocking and delusive images of happiness. Men
have imagined such things of Jesus, but their imag-
inings have always failed to hold. They have fallen
away from Him, and left Him, what by the neces-
sity of His nature, He must be, — the life, the praise,
declaring that life is good, and protesting with all
His soul against the misery and evil which have in-
vaded and infected and disguised its goodness.
But there is more than this. This would seem
almost to depict Jesus as changing constantly; now
mourning over the world's evil, now triumphing in
the world's good; and only reassured by the un-
changing certainty that the good was before the evil
and should be after it, that God was stronger than
the devil. This were mere dualism, dividing the
world between two masters, one stronger than the
other, but each certainly sole ruler of his special
kingdom. More intimate in the experience of Jesus
is the connection of the sorrow and the joy. More
perfect is the unity of His experience. Not merely
in the same Hfe but in the same thought, in the same
deed the two, the joy and sadness, are united. After
such union they have always been struggling in the
minds of all serious men. Some men have tried to be-
lieve that, after all, the good and evil were but one,
that in their essence was no difference. " Evil is im-
perfect good, good in the making," they have tried
16
242 JOY AND SORROW.
to say. But against that teaching the human con-
science always has rebelled. And Jesus, whose
conscience always was as clear as crystal, never be-
lieved or taught like that. Two things, however, He
did teach regarding the connection of the evil and the
good. One was, that they took shape from the same
universal circumstances of human life, and so that
the same identical causes produced sorrow and joy.
It was the same perpetual relationship of man with
man, the same persistent free will which belonged
to the first idea of humanity, the same physical na^
ture with its passions and desires, which gave occa»
sion alike to the sublimest heroism and to the basest
self-indulgence, to the purest of human pleasure and
the most exquisite of human pain. The other truth
was that evil, though really evil, may be turned in
its results to good. By discipline, by the revelation
which it brings, pain may become the seed of joy,
and even sin become the door to holiness. These
are profound parts of the life and teaching of the
Lord which every Christian deeply knows. By
them these two discordant portions of the world are
brought together. They must not be confounded
with any base and blundering ideas of men that
good and evil are not intrinsically different, but only
seem different in the thought of men, or that evil
may be done for the sake of good results. There is
nothing of these ideas in Jesus; but the two truths
which I just tried to state, and which are always in
His mind, make joy and sorrow always parts of the
one same world, and keep them always in relation to
each other, while they never lose the inalienable
JOY AND SORROW. 243
kingship of good and the great right of joy to rule
the world.
It is the constant presence of these two ideas, I
think, in Jesus which makes the freedom and direct-
ness and simphcity of all His dealing with mankind.
He sees a man bad and unhappy. He knows full
well how large a part of that man's wickedness and
sorrow is bound up with the circumstances in which
the man is living. He will set the reforming power
of His Gospel at work to change those circumstances.
Perhaps He will bid the man himself change them
immediately, as when He commanded the rich
young man to go and sell his property and give it
all away. But He knows these two things: first,
that the same eternal causes and circumstances
which are making that man bad and unhappy may,
if he treat them rightly, make him good and happy ;
second, that out of the very heart of evil, by the
power of a new life in the man's heart, rich good
may come. It is evident that to anyone who is in
the power of these two truths, circumstances cannot
be of the first importance. It is good that they
should be altered and improved, but the new life
must not wait for their improvement. The man is
everything. Here is the directness and simplicity
of Jesus. Here is the clearness and power with
which He strikes directly at the wicked nature and
the unhappy soul, and says, " Be holy, in spite of
every temptation ; be happy in spite of every disap-
pointment; and so, in time, about the new heart
the new life certainly shall grow."
Is it not clear enough what influence the perpet-
244 JOY AND SORROW.
ual holding of these two truths must have had upon
the way in which the misery of human hfe pressed
on the soul of Christ. They saved Him from de-
spair. They let Him feel the whole weight of the
world's suffering and yet be filled with hope. This
is what seems to many people to be so hard as to be
quite impossible; it seems to be almost an insult to
the world to be hopeful of it. It seems to be a sign
of imperfect, insufficient sympathy to be able to
expect the ultimate breaking away of the clouds and
breaking forth of the sun. We have all known sick
people whose feelings were hurt if you ventured to
tell them that some day they would get well. It
was a sign that you did not know or care how sick
they were. And so men say, " Ah, if you felt the
misery of life as I do, if these cries were in your ears
which ring in mine, if these sights haunted your
eyes which I never can shut out, if your heart were
as tender and exposed as mine is, you could not sing
your cheery song of hope, or dream that life ever
could be cleared to sunshine." I do not know! I
think it probably is quite impossible to make any
comparison of the way in which the world's sorrow
weighs on any two human souls. The difference is
too much one of kind as well as of degree. But this
must always be most significant — that He who past
all doubt felt the world's pain and bore its burden
on His soul most heavily, was at the same time
supremely full of hope. It was because these truths
were always present to His soul: First, that the
causes which make evil may make good ; and, sec-
ond, that out of evil good may come.
JOY AND SORROW. 245
Remember a single instance of His hopefulness.
Think of poor Mary of Magdala. Men called her
hopeless and abandoned. Who had abandoned
her ? They who had not depth or faith enough to
hope. She came to Jesus, and He saw two things
concerning her, — that the same passion with which
she had sinned might have been in her the power of
triumphant and enthusiastic goodness ; and that she
might be all the stronger for her weakness, all the
purer because of her past impurity. In the power
of these two truths His soul was filled with hope
which passed over into her soul and saved her. And
at the Cross and by the tomb and in the resurrection-
garden, she was nearest to the Saviour and first in
the privilege of the new life.
This, then, at least is clear about the power which
the world's life had on Jesus — that the pain and the
happiness, both of which it certainly brought, were
very closely mingled with each other. Let shallower
souls live in perpetual attenuation of joy and sor-
row. To Jesus there was no joy which had not in
it the power of sorrow ; there was no sorrow which
had not at its heart a beating possibility of joy. I
think there can have been nothing which He did,
and nothing which He saw, in which both were not
present. A child was born and the splendor of the
sunrise filled Christ's heart, and at the same time the
perils of the perilous hours of a human existence
must have made His eyes run down with tears. Did
He rejoice in man's power of free-willed indepen-
dence ? He must at the same instant have shud-
dered when He remembered the power of wickedness
246 JOY AND SORROW.
which it involved. Did He see a group of men
gathered together on the street, or a family assem-
bled in their home ? The beauty of the social in-
stinct warmed Him and threw its light around Him,
and the pains of partings and the mischiefs of evil
influence threw their darkness on His sunshine like
a cloud. He saw men working, and the exaltation
and the drudgery of labor both took possession of
His thought. He saw men die, and, with one single
throb of His heart, the fulfilment of the vanished life
in the higher world which it had entered and the
awful dreariness and desolation which its vanishing
had left behind it in the broken home, — the two
together, not separate but as one single emotion,
compact of triumph and pity, richened his ever-
richening human life. He came at last to die Him-
self, and who shall separate as they blend with each
other in His soul upon the Cross, His sorrow for the
world's sin which needs redemption and His thank-
fulness for the privilege of redeeming it ? There is
nothing which can more reveal Christ to us in His
completeness than this mysterious and intimate min-
gling of joy and pain with one another in His every
act and experience of life.
Do we not know something of it in ourselves,
dear friends ? In every deepest moment of our life
have not joy and sorrow met in closest and most
bewildering union ? When your friend died, what
a strange vision of the immortal world, shot through
with the shafts of desolation and bereavement and
the unnaturalness of dying! When you saw heroic
poverty making character shine in the hard struggle
JOY AND SORROW. 247
with contempt and need, could you separate your
pity from your thankfulness ? Was there ever a
great success of your life which did not make you
sad and sober ? Was there ever a great disappoint-
ment of your life which, even while you felt its
weight pressing upon you, did not begin to turn
that weight to wings and inspire you with the sense
of a new freedom ? Has the home ever been broken
by sickness, that some new light has not come in
through the chinks ? It is not mere consolation of
pain by pleasure, nor paying off of pleasure with
pain, nor rhythmic beat and necessary ordered suc-
cession of the two to one another; it is the mystery
of a life disordered and yet full of healthy action, in
which each act must feel the full condition of the
life of which it is a part ; where no gladness can be
wholly glad nor any sadness wholly sad because,
though sin is in the world, it is God's world still.
The world has had its centuries of sorrow and its
centuries of joy. There have been ages in which
history has gone burdened with the awfulness of liv-
ing and the weight of sin. Then there have been
other ages which have tried to forget all that and
know nothing in the world but light and music.
The trouble is that the two kinds of ages have kept
aloof from one another. Their spirits would not
mingle. The light-hearted Renaissance came only
when the frightened Middle Ages were creeping off
into the darkness. It was not till the gloom of
Puritanism disappeared that the revel of the Resto-
ration seized upon English life. Some day an age
must come in which the seriousness of living and the
248 JOY AND SORROW.
joy of living must blend with one another and make
something richer than either can be by itself. In
the best character of our own century it sometimes
seems as if we could feel its coming. When it has
come the world may be less gloomily despairing and
less wildly gay than it has sometimes been, but it
will be a healthier, wholesomer world to live in. It
is the poet's dream of the future:
" Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age
More fortunate, alas ! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.
Sons of the world, oh, speed those years !
But while we wait allow our tears."
In the Bible, the Old Testament has clear-cut,
sharply distinguishable pictures of misery and joy.
The wretched is apt to be all wretchedness and the
delightsome all delight. But in the New Testament
there is in every scene the subtle meeting of joy and
pain, which makes it the true book of life. Who
can tell whether the parable of the prodigal son is
more full of sadness or of gladness ? Men have
called the Old Testament optimistic and the New
Testament pessimistic. But each is too great for
those partial names. And the New Testament as
the great book of God and man holds together in
its clear transparency the deep sorrow and the deeper
joy of the life which man lives in his own weakness
always unfolded in the strength and love of God.
And the heart of the New Testament is the soul of
Christ.
And now what shall we say ? Have we at all
JOY AND SORROW. 249
done what we wanted to do, and seen at all how this
strange puzzle of a world looked to the eyes of
Jesus, and what impression it fixed upon His soul ?
I think, in some degree, we have. I think I can
look into His eyes and see how He regards it.
Never are those eyes shut for a moment on its dark-
est tragedies. The wrongs and sorrows and per-
plexities, the cruel taunts of the oppressors, the
deep sighing of the prisoners, mingle with every
moment's music. He escapes no suffering by refus-
ing to see and hear. He gains no complacence by
indifference. At every moment He is conscious of
the evil and the sad. But at every moment also He
is conscious also of immortality and God. Therefore
in all that mingled life, hope and joy are supreme.
Despair is impossible. It is a world worth living for,
worth dying for! And the life goes on its way, not
thundering a chorus of light-hearted triumph which
would have seemed to mock men's hearts, but sing-
ing low and strong a strain of hope and certain faith
which has given courage to souls less clear-sighted
and more ready to despair.
I said at the beginning that what we found Jesus
to be we must ourselves become, not simply because
He was it, but because the sight of it in Him became
to us both revelation and power, showing us that it
was the only thing for us to be content with being,
and helping us to be it. Shall not the image of the
divine soul of Christ responding to the world full of
sorrow, open some deeper and healthier possibilities
and hopes in us ? What shall they be ? Let me try
to tell you as I bring my sermon to its end.
250 JOY AND SORROW.
First, we will never shut our eyes or ears. We
will not say that all is right when we know that very
much is very wrong. Better almost despair than
wilful self-indulgent blindness. Better to be over-
whelmed than to stand on the firm shore with unwet
feet, with our backs to the great sea of misery and
sin which rolls and welters in its helplessness.
But. second, we will never let the two sides of life
be separated from each other. Riches and poverty,
failure and success, sorrow and joy, evil and good,
shall be parts of one life and feel one another's pres-
ence. So shall all happiness be kept earnest with
pity, and all unhappiness be kept patient and brave
with hope.
For, third, it shall be in a world which is always
God's world that the two stand in the presence of
each other. The evil shall not have an equal chance
with the good. Mercy and immortality — a divine
power and a long abundant time — shall keep the
good and the happy always in the place of advan-
tage, always really master of the field.
To him who thus looks at the world and its dis-
tresses, what a chance of growing character and
what an impulse of undiscouraged work are always
abundantly supplied.
O my friends, you must not be careless and you
must not despair. Your hearts must grow as
Christ's did, but your steps must not turn back from
the grave on which the stone is laid. For God is
omnipotent and man is immortal! Therefore be
patient and work! The end shall certainly be joy,
not sorrow. The stone shall roll away and the dead
JOY AND SORROW. 2$ I
come forth. Alas for him who in this world of sor-
row dares to be a trifler ! Alas for him who in this
world of God ceases to hope! The end shall cer-
tainly be peace. God help us all to hasten that
great end by patient, faithful, cheerful service !
XV.
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
" For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free
from the law of sin and death " — Romans viii. 2.
This is Paul's cry of triumph over the great eman-
cipation of his Hfe. It is very interesting to see the
remarkable variety of ways in which the great apostle
describes his conversion. It was so real to him that
it was new every morning. As his life shifted and
advanced the relation to that critical event of his life
when he became the disciple of Jesus Christ was
always changing. There could be no better study,
I think, of the real nature of conversion and regene-
ration than a collection and comparison of the vari-
ous aspects in which the change of his own life
presented itself to St. Paul, and the different de-
scriptions that he gave of it. It would at least im-
press us with the idea of the largeness and the life
which that experience possessed in his eyes, so that
no one description could comprehend it all. I do
not propose any such great study to-day ; I only
want to take one of the richest of his accounts of his
new life, and see how far we can get at and appro-
priate its meaning. Hear it again: "The law of the
252
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. 253
spirit of life in Jesus Christ has made me free from
the law of sin and death."
The statement is not theological, except in the
best and broadest sense. It is not technical or ab-
stract. It is the real story of a real man's experience
told in what to him was the simplest way. And it
is universal. It is the story of something that is go-
ing on here in our midst, of something that has come
or may come in the life of every soul I speak to. I
wish we could all feel this at the beginning. Unless
Paul's life was such as yours and mine might be, if
all this slavery and freedom that he tells about was
special and exceptional in Paul, all our best interest
in Paul evaporates. If he is a curiosity and not a
type, why should we preach about him ? But he is
a type. This experience of his is the possible expe-
rience of everybody, has been the actual experience
of thousands. It has in it the deepest secret of
human life. Let us see if we can find it out and
understand it.
" The law of the spirit of life has set me free from
the law of death." Those are great words. They
touch this truth first : That only a law can really set
a man free from a law. Only a better law can deliver
a man out of the power of a worse law. See how
true that is. A law is simply a power in orderly and
continuous action. We use the word most compe-
tently, as if we understood all about it, but really
that is all we know. The law of gravitation is sim-
ply the orderly and continuous working of that
unknown force that draws every atom to every
other. The law of the sunrise is only the orderly
254 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
and continuous operation of those powers which,
combining, send the glory daily up the east. A
single falling apple, a single sunrise is not a law. It
is a miracle. The power must repeat itself with
steady and orderly continuance. Then comes the
law.
And the same is true of moral laws. We say that
industry is the law of a man's life. That does not
mean that once or twice, here and there, he has
yielded to the necessity of work, or even labored
with enthusiasm, but it suggests the constant obedi-
ence to the continual impulse, the steady pressure
on his life of a well-regulated, unremitting power.
If a man's law is sensuality we have in his life the
ever-present power of lust working its terrible results
according to its nature. If a man is under the law,
in the dominion, of theft or drink, he is not the man
whose life, ordinarily sober and honest, occasionally
gives way, breaks down before a shining piece of
booty or a tempting glass of liquor; he is the man
in whom the power of dishonesty or intemperance
works orderly and continuously, crushing him under
its never intermitted weight. This whole impres-
sion of steady, unbroken pressure from a force
behind is the impression of law. It is not fitful ; it
is fateful. The man is not simply vexed by it ; he
is held by it ; he is its slave. And now what can
release a man from such a pressure ? Evidently only
something as steady and continuous as the pressure
itself. A mere temporary resistance cannot do it.
A mere check in the order does not destroy the
order. You do not free the stream from the great
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. 255
law which is forcing it down to the sea by merely
throwing a dam across it, which only hinders it and
chafes it. By and by the water that you tried to
fence away has broken through, and, all the more
violently because you tried to stop it, the stream is
tumbling and foaming along the old channel. You
must make a new channel. You must slope the
ground with steeper declivity another way. You
must bring a new power as orderly and as continuous
as the old ; in other words, you must make a new
law before your stream is really free from the old
law and runs a new way as freely as it ran the old.
I dwell upon this because it seems to me impor-
tant. Only a new law can give a man freedom from
an old law. And yet every day we see men ignoring
this truth. Every day we see men trying to get
loose from the old despotic laws of their life, not by
the establishment of any new law but by some one
spasmodic struggle which is a mere log thrown
across the stream, and had no real power over the
current. You see a man whose law of life is idleness,
any one of the men of wasted faculties who are sown
along all through our society and weaken our social
structure from top to bottom. There is hardly one
of them who once in his life at least has not had a
burst of energy, scarcely one who in some moment
of shame has not determined that he would be free
and gone and thrown himself headlong into some
hard work in a way that startled and amazed his
friends. Almost all the idle men who are really
good for anything have done this once in their lives.
How is it that they come back again into the ranks
256 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
of idleness and live again in the weary bondage of
doing nothing ? It was because they set up no new
law, no law of industry. No orderly scheme, made
up of motive, method, and anticipated result, no
reasonable habit of industry was taken and fastened
on their lives. One violent struggle was made, but a
settled law laughs at a violent struggle. Any set-
tled government makes little of mere furious ebulli-
tion, and is only afraid of consistent and organized
purpose. This is the reason of these failures. Be-
fore you can get free from the law of falsehood that
rules you, you must adopt and submit yourself to
the law of truth. Before you can shake off the law
of lust you must be willing to accept the law of pu-
rity with all its hard denials and severe disciplines.
No struggle sets a man free more than a struggle can
set a nation free. For both, nothing but a law can
break the bondage of a law.
And this seems to me almost as important on the
other side. There are good laws of life against which
the evil parts of us are always trying to rebel. It is
good for us to know — it is often just what we need
to help and encourage us — that no outbreak of evil
sets us free from the dominion which the good has
been establishing over us. Not till the evil becomes
a law does it really break up the law of goodness to
which we have been trying to submit ourselves.
The distinction between the spasmodic outbreak of
evil passion, however violent, and the deliberate
acceptance of evil principle is a distinction that
every system of morality must draw and every soul
must recognize. The Bible, that wonderful book of
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. 257
human life, is full of the distinction. This last, the
deliberate acceptance of an evil principle, is what it
calls the sin against the Holy Ghost, so deep as to
be almost unforgivable, almost irrecoverable.
Suppose some one of you has come here this morn-
ing with just this burden on his soul. You have
been trying to be good. Not merely to do certain
good things, but to have goodness established itself
as the law in your soul. You have felt that your
trial was succeeding. More and more that strong
and gentle power was working in orderly and contin-
uous action upon you, more and more the sweet and
pure dominion of holiness was treating you as its
servant, — but yesterday, perhaps, it all broke down.
You did some flagrant deed, you spoke some brutal
word that seems to you to have undone everything.
You seem to have wrenched yourself out of the gra-
cious law that has been ruling you. Alas, if such be
any man's history it is very sad, it is very bad, but
do not fail to see just how bad it is. No sudden
volcanic eruption, however it may interrupt, can
break and cast away the law. If only you have not
deliberately chosen the evil and are not choosing it
now, if only there is no new law of wickedness set
up in your heart, my dear friend, the old law is not
broken and you need not despair. You may come
back penitent and humbled, less confident and per-
haps, therefore, all the more strong, to put yourself
anew under the great sway of the law of righteous-
ness from which you are not cast out, for only a new
law can really break an old law off.
And now with this understanding of the terms
»7
2S8 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
which he uses we come back to St. Paul's statement.
He is accounting for his own life, and he says that a
new law has set him free from an old law, the law of
life had released him from the law of sin and death.
He had been living away back then under the law of
sin and death. Remember what we said that a law
was — a power in steady and continuous operation.
It need not be violent. It need not make a noise.
How silently the laws of nature work day after day,
year after year, in building up or gnawing down the
mighty structure of the planet. Power in steady
and continuous operation, that is all. And so the
law of sin and death under which Paul has lived,
what was it ? Nothing flagrant certainly. It does
not describe the life of any outrageous ill-doer
whose outbursts of iniquity had shocked and scared
his brother men. Only the steady, unremitted, con-
tinuous pressure of a downward force upon the life,
only the slow but certain disintegration of its nobler
parts, the unseen and uninterrupted crumbling away
of the truth, the purity, the lovingness, the religious-
ness of the nature, wickedness in not unpleasing
shapes, selfishness and self-deception like disease
eating out the moral healthiness, — only this is the
picture of his life as he looks back upon it, the steady
continuous work of evil passions killing out the
noblest capacities, — the law of sin and death. How
the statement stops short with the simple fact. It
is terrible in its simplicity. It does not philosophize
nor explain. It does not say where the law came
from nor who made it. It only remembers the sim-
ple fact. The soul of the apostle seems to shudder
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. 259
as he looks back and describes it. Men might ex-
plain it as they would. He only told the fact and
seemed, as he told it, to feel still the hard, cold,
fatal pressure of that law of sin in which he had
been held so long. It was as if one of the people
who went down in the sinking steamer last winter
and came up again, and was saved, should tell you
of the moments when he felt himself grasped tight
in the terrible embrace of the ocean, fast held in the
law of the water. He would not philosophize. He
would use no vehement or excited words. He
would not explain. Only once more it would seem
to him, and he would make you feel as if the terrible,
close, solid, quiet pressure of the water was on the
heart and the head, the world shut out, the sky lost
forever, and the man sinking deeper and deeper into
the endless depths. That is the way in which Paul
talks about the time when he was a slave to the law
of sin and death.
You must think, as I speak, who the man is who
said this about himself. It is St. Paul, and he is
speaking of a time in his life when there was no
young man in Jerusalem more highly considered,
more respectable than he. He is speaking of the
time when he was Gamaliel's disciple and first among
the young students of the law. The higher in-
spiration had not yet entered into his life, but he
was earnest, ambitious, devoted, and personally
pure. This is the young man who afterwards, look-
ing back upon his early life, knew that in all these
well-seeming years he had been the subject of a
steady process of moral and spiritual deterioration.
26o THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
Does it not startle us when we hear such a man say
such things about himself ? Does it not make us in
imagination lay our life down by his and ask, If that
is his account of himself, what ought we to be think-
ing of ourselves ? May it not be that we are in the
same terrible grasp that was holding him ? May it
not be that he is simply the clearest-sighted and
most serious-minded among a company of light-
hearted slaves, — or rather he is a slave who has
escaped, and comes back, and stands outside the
walls inside of which we have lived so long and so
contentedly that we have forgotten they are a
prison, and tells us there how the old slavery seems
to him now, and what the new liberty is like. May
it not be that we are still under the law of sin and
death, and that this is the real explanation, the dis-
satisfaction and restlessness which we have tried to
I soothe with games and cure with sweetmeats ? My
' dear friends, it is not for men like us to say that a
man like St. Paul was exaggerating when he de-
■■ scribed our human life. It is rather for us to see if
his be not the only true description of it, whether
these calm and commonplace lives of ours have not
in them really all the tragedy that was so terrible to
him!
We may look at this more in detail. And I beg
you to set your conscience free to act upon it freely
1 as I speak. Every bad law under which we live has
; its three kinds of bad effects: it tells upon the char-
! acter, and upon the standards, and upon the desti-
\ nies of those who live under it. It is impossible for
a state to live under a bad law without being de-
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. 261
moralized in its character and perverted in its judg-
ments and injured in its prosperity — all three. And
now, if we are really living under a power of selfish-
ness which is really, however silently and placidly,
getting us more and more into its power and crum-
bling out our moral life, it will tell in all these three
ways : we shall be its slaves in our characters, in our
judgments, and in our destinies. Let me take the
average man of perfect respectability. To charge
that man with flagrant vice would be absurd. His
hands are pure of other men's money. His word
may be trusted and his thoughts are pure ; but if we
could talk quietly and without prejudice and very
freely together — talk as hardly any man living has a
right to talk to any other, but as one may speak to
a company of his fellow-men together, as earnestly
as if he spoke to them singly — if we could talk thus,
I would try to get that man to look at his own life
calmly.
Consider yourself. How has it fared, first, with
your character ? Are you a better man or a worse
than you were away back, ten, twenty, years ago ?
Is your moral fibre firmer or feebler ? Are you
more or less likely to do an unselfish, self-sacrificing
thing ? Are you as purely, simply true, as truly
simply pure as you were when you were a boy ? Do
not tell me that you are just the same. That cannot
be. You must be moved by some influence. You
must be subject to some law. If you know that
you are growing weaker and not stronger, narrower
and not broader, worse and not better, there can be
no doubt you are under the law of sin and death.
262 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
And then think of your judgments. How is it ?
Can you speak up boldly and pronounce upon the
moral character of the actions that are done about
you with a fearless and unhesitating voice ? Is
there nothing, no power of venerable tradition, no
fear of biting ridicule, to make you disguise and
pervert and color the straight, clear standards of
your soul ? Can you call the bad man bad, the
mean man mean, the hypocrite a hypocrite, and
the unpopular saint a saint ? If not, if the false
standards all around you distort your judgments and
frighten your courage, what can you say about your-
self in your weak conformity ? Are you not a slave
to the law of sin and death, to the evil tendency
that is working in the world? And then think of
your destiny. Is it not true that you are suffering
mow the consequences of sins that you did long ago?
Your past sin as well as your present has you in its
power. What means that ache in your body, what
means that foul association in your mind ? Are you
the same that you would be if you had begun to live
and sin this morning, and had not lived and sinned
for years, with fathers and mothers who have lived
and sinned before you ? Ah, my dear friends, do
you not see that it needs no violent, excited words.
Every time we look into our characters, our judg-
ments, or our conditions, — every time we rise and
try to stir into a better life we find the law of sin
holding us back So long as the drop flows with
the current it seems to be free ; so long as we arc
satisfied with our life it seems as if there were no
slavery about it. The moment one drop tries to
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. 263
breast the current it finds its helplessness. The
moment we try to escape out of our worldliness and
selfishness, there tightens about us the hard, close
grasp of the law of sin and death.
And now we must pass on. This is the law of
death which Paul remembered. But from this law
he had been set free, and in these triumphant words
he tells us what had delivered him. The law of the
spirit of life hath set me free from the law of death.
See, in the first place, how true what we said before
is : only a law can set the man free from a law.
Nothing less radical, less persuasive, less continuous
than the power that enslaves can be the power to
free. No mere shock of galvanic movement can
stop the law of death that is working in the moral
nature. What can stop death ? What can go un-
derneath the tyranny and universality of decay and
undermine and conquer it ? Nothing but that which
is the old and triumphant and beautiful enemy of
death everywhere ! Nothing but the spirit of life !
O that eternal struggle that pervades a universe
which is always dying and yet ever living anew!
The struggle of the spirit of life with death ! In
every growing tree, in every constantly decaying,
constantly renewing body, in every strange vitality
of nations and of institutions, everywhere there is
the struggle of the spirit of life with death. It is a
positive, strong power everywhere grappling with
the monster that tries and sometimes seems to rule
the world.
And if there be any consistent power of goodness
able to cope with and conquer the ever-present
264 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
power of wickedness — that in the moral world will
be what this mysterious vitality is in the world of
physical things, the law of the spirit of life which
can set men free from the law of death. Then take
St. Paul again. O my friends, read with your hearts
as well as with your eyes, hear with your hearts as
well as with your ears, as he goes on to tell us where
he found this ' Law of the spirit of life." " The
law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ," he says,
" has set me free. ' Ah! he is back now where he
belongs, and we are back, out of all abstractions and
speculations, in the very mention of the name of
Him of whom it is the joy of the Christian minister
to preach. It was in the example and the redemp-
tion of Jesus Christ that St. Paul found the power
which alone was able to meet and master this force
of moral degradation and deterioration which he saw
in the world and which he felt in himself. He had
felt in himself and he was looking to see in the
world, the power of a personal Christ, everywhere
believed in, everywhere loved, become the power
of a new freedom, become a spring-time for the
winter-bound humanity.
It is the old story, as you see. How old, how
ever new it is — Christ the freedom, Christ the life !
Paul says that Christ has set him free. History, if
we bade her open her solemn mouth, would tell us
how largely the world has been set free by Christ,
and how He will yet break all the fetters that are
left. But most important for us, if any of us realize
the slavery that I tried to describe a while ago, will
be one question, — Can Christ set us free ? Can He,
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. 265
and will He, and how ? Indeed He can and He
will, and so simply ! We must go back to the three
forms of the slavery that I described. First of all,
what does Christ do to free the character from the
power of sin ? That, of course, is the deepest,
hardest, most essential thing. Unless He can do
that, of what avail is anything else that He can do ?
What benefit would it be to have every consequence
of sin taken off, and every false standard about us
rectified, if all the while the heart stayed bad and
bred new badness out of its own unchanged nature ?
That is the superficialness of many half-forms of
Christianity. But Christ comes and says: " No! a
new heart you must have, and a new heart I will
give you," It sounds mysterious, but with all its
mystery it is inspiring. It suggests and prophesies
just what we want. '' You must be born again.
You must have a new life," He says; and then He
says, " I am that new life " ; and still again, when
we ask how we are to get hold of Him, the new life,
and make Him ours. He says, " If any man love me
he will keep my commandments, and I will come to
him. " That is the old story, so old and yet so
always new. It is love for Christ that is to be the
regenerating power. From love through obedience
into communion, — that is to be the course of the
regenerated life. Here I am held in the law of sin
and death, — held, that is, by the steady and contin-
uous power of moral evil, slowly, steadily, degenerat-
ing, pressed down away from goodness into sin. No
sudden struggle, no spurt of rebellious repentance,
is going to save me. Again and again, indignant
266 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
with myself, impatient with the growing earthliness
of my life, I have leaped up and broken loose, but
it was useless. I could not get free so. It was a
law that held me. As well might some bold wave
that had flung its spray up against the clouds think
that it had escaped from the universal law of the
tides. Another law must come in, another power
just as positive and steady and persistent as the
power from which I want to get free. Then Christ
comes — He puts Himself before the heart. There
is something in that heart that is made to love Him.
Superficial, on the top of the heart, lie those passions
with which it loves wickedness. Deeper down, un-
stirred as yet, lies the diviner faculty of loving Him,
the perfect goodness. By and by as He stands there,
patient, expectant, those powers that were made for
Him begin to feel Him, buried as they are, just as
the little buried seed feels the sun which has come
and is standing in the heaven over it, waiting for it
to rise. Then there must come a great upheaval,
a great reversal in the soul. That which was under-
most must become uppermost. The heart in its
own way becomes changed. There is more or less
of conscious tumult. That does not matter. But
the result is something definite and positive. The
old law of selfishness has given place to another
power, just as positive, just as persistent, and the
soul is obedient to the new law of the love of
Christ. The life which it now lives in the flesh it
lives by the faith of the Son of God, a faith that
works by love. This is the freedom of the charac-
ter, the law of sin and death broken through,
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. 267
broken to pieces by the law of the spirit of Hfe in
Jesus Christ.
And with this freedom once established the other
freedoms follow easily. When the character is really
free in Christ the mere bondage of the standards
and circumstances about us cannot long imprison us.
Many a Christian, becoming gradually, strongly cer-
tain of the love of Christ, has looked about with fear
and said, ** O if I could only take this sweet new
life off into a wilderness and live it there ! O if I
could only carry my new heart into a new world that
was not full of the traditions and conventionalities
of sin! But here! what can I do? What chance
has my poor piety among the venerable habitudes
of worldliness in the midst of which it has got to
live ? What possibility is there that it can stay
pure and unperverted ? " Many a Christian has
asked the question anxiously, almost despairingly ;
and the answer has come to many a Christian with
unexpected convincingness as his new life went on.
He found the power of the new law of righteousness.
He found that when he once was free in himself it
was a wonderfully easy thing to tread across the
prejudices and conventionalities which outwardly
tried to bind his freedom. The new law of the new
life was stronger than the old law of sin and death.
Law had met law and conquered. I think there is
nothing that one would say with more entire confi-
dence to the young Christian, whose soul was really
growing full of the love of Christ, but whose first new
joy in the Saviour was clouded with anxiety as to
the fate of this new experience in the midst of the
268 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
worldly world in which it would have to live, than
just this. — "Do not fear, you need not fear for that.
You have really no idea how weak to a man whose
heart is full of manly love for Christ appear the
temptations that seemed before so terrible. The
outward tyranny of sin breaks easily when once its
inward power is gone. It seems to you as if it
would be a terrible thing to be ridiculed, terrible to
have men point the finger at you and say, * There
goes the Christian.' Be a Christian, and the terror,
is all gone. The only sting that will be left in the
ridicule will be shame that you deserve it so little."
This one might say with perfect confidence. There
will be struggles of the world still to retain its slave,
and very often it will seem to have got him, but it
never can really hold him and bind him and crush
him so long as he is really, inwardly, the servant of
Christ. If the Son has made him free, he shall be
free indeed.
And then there remains only one other part of the
bondage of sin — namely, its consequences. How-
ever free I am now, there is the past, there are the
sins of my youth and the transgressions that have
filled my riper years. What shall I do with them ?
I need not tell you out of what deep instincts of jus-
tice in the human soul that question rises to the
human conscience. It is no artificial fear. It comes
out of no mere fiction or religious terrorism. The
human soul feels the sin of its own past binding it,
without one word of revelation save that which is
written in its own nature. And from that sin of its
past what can deliver it, except the clear free for-
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. 269
giveness of Him against whom the sin was com-
mitted,— the opening of the great hand in which
that past is held so that it is dropped down, down
into the gulf of oblivion to be seen no more forever.
" Forgiveness " is the golden word of this last lib-
erty. ' Your sins and iniquities will I remember
no more! " The liberating work of Christ is perfect
when having filled the heart with the new love of
Himself, He says to it, '" Go, and forget the past
except for gratitude and warning." " I forgive
you." These words, simple and deep with all the
majesty of His nature, reach back and sweep a
mighty hand across the blotted record of the past,
reach in and spread a peace over and through the
troubled conscience, and the man is free. No past
sin holds him any longer; no consequences terrify
him. Not merely the obstacles before him and the
reluctance within him are broken ; the chains behind
him are broken too ; he is regenerated and he is for-
given. It is the perfect liberty of the child of God.
I know that I have not justly described the new
life that the Saviour gives. No man can tell it
worthily, for it is infinite ; but just as one man may
say to another, " Do you see the ocean or the sun-
set ? " and the words may open before that other's
eyes a glory that no words can tell, so to souls which
stand close to it, which perhaps are within its light
already, the feeblest word may open the richness of
the new life of Christ. I am only anxious that you
should know how real it is, — no fancy, no theory,
but the true story of human life. Is it mysterious ?
Who dares look at the mysterious life of man and
270 THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.
feel that anything but an account that is full of
mystery can satisfy that life ? Is it sad ? What
can be sadder than this life, divided between hope-
less apathy and hopeless struggle, which millions of
men are living. O how sad it is! Does it break
into a bewildering splendor of promise ? What
promise can be too splendid for the child of God to
whom His Father promises Himself!
Only believe that this is the possible story of your
life, and then take it up and realize it. Only see
the possibility of freedom as clearly as you feel the
present slavery. Then, in the Lord's impartial
love, there is no reason why your voice should not
join in with Paul's and all the rest whom we hear
singing their freedom in the New Jerusalem on
which the Bible opens, — " Worthy the Lamb who
hath redeemed us." " The law of the spirit of life
in Jesus Christ has made us free from the law of sin
and death."
XVI.
THE SECRET OF THE LORD.
'* The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him."— PsALM
XXV. 14,
Every living thing which is really worth the
knowing has a secret in it which can be known only
to a few. The forms and methods of things lie
open to whoever chooses to study them, but the
essential lives of things are hidden away where some
special sympathy must find them. We can all rec-
ognize how true this is of men. A certain shrewd
observation of mankind soon lets us into the ordi-
nary laws of human working. A careful watching
of any fellow-man soon lets us understand his laws,
and we can say pretty surely how he will act in any
certain circumstances; but behind all such shrewd
observations and all that they discover there is
something that every man holds back from us ; and
the more of a man he is, the more conscious we are
of this reserve. It is this secret of men that gives
them their interest. They are not mere machines
whose mechanism you can completely master. The
man is in behind and deeper than his actions.
Many a man's actions you comprehend, but only
271
2/2 THE SECRET OF THE LORD.
with a very few do you feel that you have really got
hold of the secret of the man. You know the out-
side of a hundred houses in town, but only of your
own and one or two others do you know the inner
chambers.
The more of a man a man is, the more secret is
the secret of his life, and the more plain and frank
are its external workings. A small and shallow man
tries to throw a mystery about the mere methods of
his life, he tries to make his ways of living seem ob-
scure. Where he goes, how he makes his fortune,
whom he talks with, what his words mean, who his
friends are, — he is very mysterious about all these,
and all because the secret of his life is really weak,
because he is conscious that there is no really strong
purpose of living which he himself understands. It
is a shallow pool which muddies its surface to make
itself look deep. But a greater man will be perfectly
frank and unmysterious about these little things.
Anybody may know what he does and where he
goes. His acts will be transparent, his words will
be intelligible. Yet all the while everyone who
looks at him will see that there is something behind
all, which escapes the closest observation. The very
clearness of the surface will show how deep the
water is, how far away the bottom lies. There is
hardly a better way to tell a great man from a little
one.
Whether we can discover such a secret of life in
other men or not, every one is more or less aware of
it in himself. We all know how little other people
know about us. The common saying that other
THE SECRET OF THE LORD. 273
people know us better than we know ourselves is
only very superficially true. They do see certain
tricks in us which we are not aware of ; they do see
the absurdities of some of our behavior which we
think is dignified ; but, if we are at all thoughtful
and self-observant, they do not get at the secret of
our life as we know it. They do not know the
mainspring, the master-motive as we do who feel it
slowly unwinding and moving all the mechanism.
It often arms us and puts vigor in us to be sure of
this. Our light behavior may be regulated by a
reference to men's superior knowledge of it, but no
man can live strongly who is not sure that after all
he understands himself better than any other man
can understand him. His own conscience, his own
consciousness he must not despise. He is only a
miserable weathercock if he does.
Such is the secrecy of a man's secret. But still
there are with all of us some men who possess our
secret more or less. The secret of a man's life I
have made to consist in its purpose. It is its spirit,
its intention. Any man may know what I do, but
hardly any man can know as I know myself what I
know by doing it. It is the same with every living
thing. Nature with her great life has her botanists
who tell us what she does with wonderful accuracy,
and she has her poets who catch her meaning and
her spirit. The institutions of our land show their
workings to every keen-eyed politician, but they
open their heart, their genius, only to a few philo-
sophic statesmen.
Now with regard to men, we can see something of
18
274 THE SECRET OF THE LORD.
what is necessary before one can read another's
secret. Who is it that can really get at the motive,
the genius of your life ? What must his qualifica-
tions be ? It is not mere curiosity, — we know how
that shuts up the nature which it tries to read. It
is not mere awkward good-will ; that, too, crushes
the flower which it tries to examine. What is it ?
It must have certain elements in it which Ave all
know. And the first, the most fundamental, the
most necessary of them all, is respect. Just think
of it. You cannot show the real secret of your life,
the spring and power of your living, to any man who
does not respect you. Not merely you will not, but
you cannot. Is it not so ? A man comes with im-
pertinent curiosity and looks into your window, and
you shut it in his face indignantly. A friend comes
strolling by and gazes in with easy carelessness, not
making much of what you may be doing, not think-
ing it of much importance, and before him you cover
up instinctively the work which was serious to you
and make believe that you were only playing games.
So it is when men try to get hold of the secret of
your life. No friendship, no kindliness, can make
you show it to them unless they evidently really
feel as you feel that it is a serious and sacred thing.
There must be something like reverence or awe
about the way that they approach you. It is the
way in which children shut themselves up before
their elders because they know their elders have no
such sense as they have of the importance of their
childish thoughts and feelings.
Now it is just this respect, this reverence, I take it,
THE -SECRET OF THE LORD. 2/5
that is expressed in my text by the word fear. You
must believe that there is something deep in nature
or you will find nothing there. You must have an
awe of the mystery and sacredness in your fellow-
man, or his mystery and sacredness will escape you.
And this sense of mystery and sacredness is what we
gather into that word fear. It is the feeling with
which you step across the threshold of a great
deserted temple or into some vast dark mysterious
cavern. It is not terror. That would make one turn
and run away. Terror is a blinding and deafening
emotion. Terror shuts up the apprehension. You
do not get at the secret of anything which frightens
you, but fear, as we use it now, is quite a different
emotion. It is a large, deep sense of the majesty
and importance of anything, a reverence and respect
for it. Without that no man can understand
another. And so " The secret of a man is with
them that fear him. ' '
And now we pass over to our text. David speaks
of the " Secret of the Lord." Have we not
reached some sort of notion of what he means by
that and by what he says of it, that it "is with
them that fear Him " ? God's works are every-
where. The world is full of them, and any man
with open and observing eyes may know a great
deal about God from all His works. It is not hard
to read His power. His wisdom shines upon us
from a multitude of adaptations. But all the time
we know these are not God. Somewhere behind
them all, somewhere within them, moving them all
and yet infinitely greater and more spiritual than
2/6 THE SECRET OF THE LORD.
all of them, there is He, the Maker and the Guidcr
of the whole. He has His inner character. He has
His dispositions towards us whom these works of
His touch at last. He has His purposes and inten-
tions in them all.
And some souls we can see that seem to have
attained to and to live in all this. How clearly it
marks the difference between two classes of believers
in and servants of God ! One knows God's methods
and tries to do His will, sees what He wants and
catches it up and tries hard to accomplish it, works
on from task to task, taking each as it is given but
not knowing in the least what it all means, only
knowing that God has ordered it. That is one sort
of life. We will not dare disparage it. It stirs up
our enthusiasm as we gaze upon it. But there is
another which we know is better. Another soul
does understand what God means by it all, does
enter into God's idea. It sees the love which lies
behind every commandment and, continually cogni-
zant of the perfect divine nature, it feels at once
how far it is from that nature, and knows that the
one purpose which God has concerning it is to draw
it towards and shape it into Himself. The making
of man like Himself by the power of love, — that,
in one word, is the purpose of God which this soul
sees, feels everywhere, enlightening, interpreting
everything. That is the secret of the Lord !
My dear friends, do not say that such an idea as
that can really make no difference, that one man may
have possession of it, and another may not have it,
and yet their lives be just alike. Rather think how
THE SECRET OF THE LORD. 2//
different your life would be if you had everywhere
and always this secret of the Lord. What is your
life ? Is it this circle of actions that men see ?
Perhaps it might not alter. Perhaps you might go
on rising and sleeping, eating and drinking, and
doing business, just as you do now. But if your
life really is the way you do these things, the com-
fort and the culture that you get out of them, the
good you do to others and yourself by doing them,
would not that all be altered if in every one of them
you knew and felt the presence and power of God
loving you tenderly, and by His love making you
like Himself. The hammer strikes the iron that is
on the anvil, and if the iron knows only the power
of the hammer it yields doggedly and hardly to the
blows. But behind the power is a purpose. In
the fine and gentle brain of Him who holds the ham-
mer is a thought of beauty, an untold, unembodied
fancy, a secret which He is purposing to work out
into expression in this stiff, black iron. Let the
iron grow conscious of that purpose, let the secret
of the worker be with the material on which he
works, and will it make no difference ? The enthu-
siasm of the worker enters into the work. It strug-
gles itself towards its destined shape. Every blow
that falls on it is a delight. The rigid vine tries to
curl itself in leaves and round itself in fruit. All life
has entered into it with the secret of its Lord.
It seems as if, looking back in history, we could
see certain ages which evidently had, and certain
other ages which had not, the secret of the Lord.
There have been times when the general heart of
278 THE SECRET OF THE LORD.
men seemed to be impressed with the spiritual pur-
poses of God, times when the Hfe was more than
meat to multitudes of men. The certainty that
God meant something spiritual by it all has run
through everything; it has inspired the king upon
his throne, the general at his army's head, and the
women at their work. Blunders enough such times
have to show, more blunders than the times which
smoothed all the great deeps of purpose out of the
world and thought that God had no secret. It is
not strange that hard and clumsy hands should make
their blunders just in proportion to the fineness of
the things they handle. But still these spiritual
times, such times as those of the great Reformation,
stand out forever in their difference from other ages,
touched with a diviner color, and lifting up their
heads with a more humble and majestic dignity.
We know in our own lives, I am sure, something
of such a difference. Some times there have been
when God's secret has been with us, when this divine
purpose, the making of us into a holiness like His
own, has shone out everywhere. It has startled us
when we least expected it. It has lurked in our
pleasures and our pains; we have unfolded some joy
which chance seemed to have dropped in our way,
and there it was; we have taken up some burden
that lay in our path, and there it was again. We
have followed out a friendship, and by and by we
have seen how through that friendship God was
bringing us to Himself. Again, a friendship has
snapped and broken, and in its ruin we have found
the same purpose manifest ; we and our friend were
THE SECRET OF THE LORD. 279
to go by different roads, but both to go still to the
same end, to holiness in God. Sometimes, it may
be, such a perception of God's purposes, such a hold
on the secret of the Lord, has been with us for a
long time ; and then perhaps we have lost it ; it has
seemed incredible that there was any spiritual mean-
ing in life. Mere duties, duties, duties, hard and
objectless, waves out of a mysterious ocean of divine
authority, which brought no word from the divine
character, which said nothing intelligible to us, have
beat monotonously on our life. But we could never
quite forget the sight that we had seen ; we never
could deny that there was a purpose though we had
lost sight of it, that God had a secret though we had
lost it.
Let us not think that this strange, painful alterna-
tive comes of God's design, God's secret is not kept
secret by any arbitrary cruelty of His. He does
not tantalize or taunt us. He shows all of us always
all of Himself that He can. That is the basis of all
faith about Him. Without believing that first of all,
we could believe nothing. And the Incarnation was
the opening of every door into this secret of God, —
this deep abiding spiritual purpose of His nature.
Whoever really knows Christ knows God's secret —
" that men may be perfect even as He is."
It is strange indeed as we look back to see how
men have cheated themselves with strange beliefs
about the way in which God, the great Father, gave
the knowledge of Himself to His children. " There
was a secret of the Lord," — that men understood
full well, a close and loving friendship which let man
28o THE SECRET OF THE LORD.
into the deep purposes of God — and some men had
this secret and delighted in it, and other men, wish-
ing perhaps that they had it, went through Hfe with-
out it. What made the difference ? And it was
natural for men to think of favoritism, to get some
idea of arbitrary preference, of some election, by
which God gave to one choice child what He denied
to the rest. There is always this tendency to make
that arbitrary which is essential. It seems as if it in
some way relieved the burden of thought and re-
sponsibility. But any idea of election is really at
war with man's primary thought of God, and ulti-
mately makes men sceptics. The only tenable idea
is that God will give Himself just as largely and as
speedily to man as is possible. Live in that idea as
the first certainty of your religion, always, I beg
you. And the possibility must depend on man's
receptive power. The impossibility, if there is any,
must be not in God, but in man. That, too, is sure.
Now it is just this receptive power which is described
here under the great word, fear. Apply to God all
that we said of man, and we shall know what fear
means here. It is that large awful sense of God's
nature which opens our nature to His coming in. It
is not that fear which love " casts out," but a fear
which abides with and makes part of and is essential
to entire love. Tell me, can you ever love any per-
son perfectly whom you do not also fear, for whom
you have not some such reverence as makes you
dread to hurt or to offend them, whose anger you
are not afraid of ? Men call it love sometimes when
these are absent, but love without respect has lost
THE SECRET OF THE LORD. 28 1
the substance and the essence of itself, and is mere
passion. Men say, " I cannot love God if I have to
fear Him." My dear friend, I always want to say,
you cannot love God unless you fear Him, that is
the true truth.
There is indeed something Old Testament-like in
the specification of fear as the quality to which God
can reveal Himself most deeply. But the Old Tes-
tament and the New Testament are not in conflict.
At the bottom they are really one. They show the
brazen and the silver sides of the same truth. And
very often now I think we feel the need, both for
ourselves and other people, of the Old Testament
side of truth. We cannot overestimate the love of
God. We cannot say too often to ourselves, " God
loves us." But there is something — have we not all
felt it as we have read the religious books and lis-
tened to a good deal of the preaching that is most
in vogue ? — there is something of an easy familiarity
with God, which loses His secret. The frightened
devotee who stands afar off and in mortal terror
sends his prayers through a multitude of intermedi-
aries to a God whom he dare not approach, he cer-
tainly is not learning deeply of God, the secret of
God is not with him. But, on the other hand, the
ready zealot, who pours his gushing prayers into
the divine ear as he would talk to his own boon com-
panion, neither is he understanding the Almighty.
Always there is before us that figure of the publican,
who would not lift up so much as his eyes to heaven,
who beat upon his breast. There was fear, but there
was love certainly, and there was knowledge cer-
282 THE SECRET OF THE LORD.
tainly. One misses very often, in our modern feel-
ing towards God, that exquisite mingling of reverence
and familiarity which we see in the apostles' inter-
course with Christ. As soon as religion becomes
trustful and affectionate, it is apt to grow weakly
sentimental and fondly garrulous. The mediaeval
nun talking of Christ like a mortal lover, or the mod-
ern exhorter singing of Jesus as if He were to be
won by fulsome epithets and pathetic tunes — in
these we feel the lack of something solid and serene
and simple which was in Peter and in John. What
was that something ? How can we name it except
thus, that it was the fear of Jesus ? As we read all
their life with Him, and see them calmly gathering
more and more of Him into themselves, it seems as
if those words told the whole story. The secret of
their Lord was with them because they feared Him.
Sometimes we can seem to see such a Christianity
now. Earnest without excitement, loving without
familiarity, a man or a woman is always near to
Christ and yet never touches Him, never speaks His
name, without awe. None of the first sacredness
has melted away with time. The prayer to-night is
fuller of the sense of what a stupendous thing it is
to pray, than was the first faltering petition. Duty
by which the soul expresses itself to God is quiet
and not feverish, but full of deep delight and sacred-
ness. Love deepens every hour, but reverence is
always deepening with it, and to this ever-deepening
reverence and love the nature and purposes of God
are always opening; and so in such a life, not far
off in the apostolic ages, but walking here among us
THE SECRET OF THE LORD. 283
now, the same truth is fulfilled again, and the
" secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him."
How, then, can we know God ? Men bring their
different directions, and we take them all and see
some good in almost all of them, but after all we
come to this, that the only good in any of them
must be in the power they have to bring in us a
loving fear of God, to which alone enlightenment
can come.
One man says, " If you want to know God, you
must be punctilious about religious duty ; you must
go to church ; you must omit no form ; you must be
where God is; so you shall see Him." Yes, just so
far as rite or sacrament does really show you His
majesty, just so far as all these things do really make
it a more terrible thing to you to do what God dis-
allows, just so far they are rich in revelation. Not
in themselves ! They are mere windows ; keep them
pure and hold them Godward and then through them
you shall see God.
Another man has quite another thing to say. To
know God you must go among His works; His
world will tell you of Him. Not in the church but
in the woods; not out of the Bible but out of the
sky you will read what He is. Again, remember, if
that be the religion to which you are most drawn,
that no flush of delight in nature, no exaltation in
the opening spring or sober seriousness of autumn
days, does really bring God's secret to you unless it
really gives you a personal fear of Him, a dread of
wronging Him, a jealous, loving watchfulness over
yourself for His sake.
284 THE SECRET OF THE LORD.
I know that Christ Himself had this. The fear of
God, a fear that is sublimely compatible with love,
— we talk of it, we try to picture what it is, but look
at Him and see it perfectly. Was not He always
fearing God ? Was there a dread in all His life like
the dread of doing what God would not wish ?
And yet what love! Into that loving fear flowed
the whole secret of the Lord, that knowledge of the
Father that made the Son's perfect unity with
Him.
Both in the temple and in the world of nature
Jesus gathered this fear and all the knowledge that
it brought. From both of them we may gather it
too, but most of all, above both these, we are to
gather it from Him. There is the final answer to
one question which I most wish to leave with you.
How shall I have God's secret ? By fearing Him!
How shall I fear Him ? By most clearly seeing
Him! How shall I see Him ? Here, where He is
manifest in Christ. Really know Him. Get truly
face to face with that Person. By true obedience
understand what He is, and then the fearfulness of
God, the greatness of His nature and His love will
take possession of you, and in that atmosphere the
secret of the Lord shall come to you and be with
you. Can you understand that ? Is there anything
in your experience already to interpret it ? Have
you indeed found that, as you knew Christ more,
God was more full of majesty and more near to you
both at once ? Then keep on! Heaven at last will
be the perfect sight of Christ. To them that see
THE SECRET OF THE LORD. 285
Him perfectly the fear of God will come, a fear full
of love and glory ; and then through the fear will
come the knowledge, and the secret of the Lord shall
be with those that fear Him more and more perfectly
forever.
XVII.
THE GREAT ATTAINMENT.
** Worthy to stand before the Son of man." — Luke xxi. 36.
There is all through the Bible as there is all
through the best and most earnest thought and life
of men the vision of a great attainment. That man,
the individual man and the universal man, is what
he is only in preparation for something far vaster
and more perfect that he is to be, — this is the prac-
tical doctrine of all earnest and religious men. It
appears in all religions. It appears in all the earnest
life which will not call itself religious — this doctrine
of the great attainment, this belief and the lofty
something which it is possible for man to become,
although no man, purely man, has become it yet.
What would the world be without that belief ?
How the hearts of men have fed on it and lived
by it ! It has kept them from despair and been their
light in darkness, the soul of their life-long struggle.
In the religion of Christ the doctine of the great
attainment puts on its full glory and takes its central
place. Always there is something which humanity
in general and which this man and that man by him-
self is struggling to become. It is not wholly clear.
286
THE GREAT ATTAINMENT. 287
It cannot be because no man has reached it and
measured it and brought back the report. No re-
port which the man who had reached it could bring
back would be intelligible to those who were still far
away from the completeness of which they were
told. But dimly as it has been known, its real ex-
istence has been the central truth of Christianity.
And the Christian teachings have viewed this great
attainment from many sides and have given to it
many names. Sometimes they have simply called it
" being perfect," sometimes they have seemed anx-
ious to bind it more closely to Christ and represent
that it was only attainable in Him. And then they
have used such phrases as this which Jesus uses in
our text, the phrase of which I want to speak to
you this morning.
Jesus bids his disciples to watch and pray so that
they " may be accounted worthy to escape all these
things which are to come to pass, " and " to stand
before the Son of man." He has been telling his
disciples of wonderful things which are to come.
" Signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars,
and upon the earth distress of nations with perplex-
ity, the sea and the waves roaring. Men's hearts
failing them for fear and for looking after those
things which are coming on the earth, for the pow-
ers of heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they
see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power
and great glory." The great result and consumma-
tion of all the mighty changes which are to take
place in the earth is to be " the coming of the Son
of man." And then Jesus looks his disciples in the
288 THE GREAT ATTAINMENT.
face and says, " Watch and pray that ye may be
counted worthy to stand before this Son of man."
As I look at these great words and try to under-
stand them, I think there are three questions which
we want to ask and answer:
1. Who is the Son of man who is to come ?
2. What is meant by His coming ?
3. What is it to stand before Him when He
comes ?
Let me say something upon each one of these
questions.
I. Who is the Son of man ? There cannot be a
doubt in the mind of any one who stands there in
the Jewish temple, and hears these words spoken
by Jesus, that He who speaks is speaking of Him-
self. He is the Son of man. But the words have
a history. In the Old Testament there are certain
passages in which all men are called the sons of man.
The Scripture never shrinks from that broad truth,
though it is always ready to go beyond it and declare
that there are certain men to whom the sacred name
peculiarly belongs. David says freely, " Lord, what
is man that thou art mindful of him, or the Son of
man that thou so regardest him ?" There every
man is a " son of man." But by and by, in a more
restricted way, we find the name given peculiarly to
men who are representative men, to men in whom
the qualities and functions of all men seem to
be especially embodied. Thus it is given to the
prophets, those men among men, who spoke for
all humanity to God and to whom God spoke for all
humanity. Eighty times the prophet Ezekiel is
THE GREAT ATTAINMENT. 289
addressed by God under this title, " Son of man."
Then next the name was taken up and used for one
of the titles of the Messiah, that mysterious, ever-
expected utterance of God in human life which never
left the Hebrew's mind. " Behold one like the Son
of man," says Daniel, " came with the clouds of
heaven, and came to the ancient of days." Every-
where in the Old Testament the " Son of man "
tends to become the expression of manhood in its
highest representative, where it comes nearest to,
where it touches upon divinity. All the while as
this divine identity of manhood comes forth into
utterance, the truest manhood is finding its expres-
sion, and it is this truest humanity made truest by
being most deeply filled and fired with divinity, this
it is which wherever it is found is called the Son of
man.
No wonder then that when the New Testament
opens, and the Incarnation comes, the old words
should be taken up by the Incarnate Son of God and
used by Him as one of His favorite descriptions of
Himself. He uses the words of Himself, but others
do not use them of Him. No one but Jesus Him-
self ever calls Jesus the Son of man. It is the decla-
ration of His own consciousness that because His
nature was the human nature inhabited and inspired
by the divine, because of that fact, it was supremely
the human nature. He was the truest man whose
feet had ever trodden on the earth. Because He
knew Himself the Son of God, He loved to call
Himself the Son of man.
Are there not, then, two answers to our question,
»9
2gO THE GREAT ATTAINMENT.
Who is the Son of man ? The Son of man is Jesus
Christ. The Son of man is the complete, the rep-
resentative, the ideal humanity. And yet these
answers are not two but one. The Son of man is
the complete ideal humanity set forth in Jesus
Christ. It is the struggle of all human life recog-
nized as reaching its great attainment in Him in
whom the human life has touched and joined itself
to the divine. Children heard the name and caught
something of its meaning as, looking into His gra-
cious face who blessed them, they caught sight of
the goal of their humanity far, far away. Young
men felt their human souls stirred by His life as by
a bugle-call. Men in this middle tumult of their
active years felt His presence as the element which
brought them intelligence and peace. The Son of
man, — the world has loved the name and Him who
bore it because it answered the conviction of its own
heart that somewhere there was a perfect man, and
that the perfect man was the true man !
2. And then our second question follows — What
is meant by the coming of the Son of man ? Here
is the world, this theatre of life. Upon its stage
come men and generations. In itself it is nothing
but a scene for action. The action of man which
goes on upon it gives it its dignity and meaning.
Man has been coming and going in all the acts of
the long drama. And now see what is meant by
the tidings which sound through the air and make
the whole creation start and tremble with expec-
tancy. " The Son of man is coming!" it declares.
" The Son of man! " That is the perfect man, the
THE GREAT ATTAINMENT. 29I
very manifested soul and essence of humanity, man
full of divine influences, showing forth the divine
nature that is in Himself, This higher man, this
perfect man, this Son of man is coming.
Again I pause a moment just to think what a sig-
nificant meaning there is in the phrase " The Son
of man " as representing the flower and perfection
of humanity. The son always is the flower of the
father's life. The son draws forth into himself the
essence of the father's being. The father looks into
the bright face of his eager, fresh-hearted son and
says, " There is myself without the base things
which have fastened themselves to myself, without
my habits, my prejudices, my hatred, and my
doubts. There is my pure self. There is what God
made me to be." A million disillusionings will not
forbid the father of to-day to look in his boy's face
and see there the flower and perfection of himself.
The son of any man is that man showing himself his
real belonging to a higher life. And just exactly so
the Son of man in general is man in general show-
ing himself, his intrinsic divinity, his real belonging
to God !
We all believe in human progress. Let us ask
ourselves whether there is a more beautiful or a
more intelligible description of the progress which we
all anticipate than, understood as I have tried thus to
define it, is the expression, " The coming of the
Son of man." It declares at once that the advance
and improvement of the world is to have its source
and soul in the condition of its human inhabitant.
Not in the clearing of its forests and the unfolding
292 THE GREAT ATTAINMENT.
of its subterranean treasures and the exploring of its
icy fastnesses and the redeeming of its arid plains,
not in the bridging of its rivers and the great flights
of ships like flocks of birds across its oceans ; not in
these, nor in any material victories like these, does
the real progress of the world consist. Only in the
coming of the perfect man, only in the Son of man,
the true human outcome of all the generations of
humanity, leaving all that is corrupt and base and
bad and therefore unhuman behind, bringing forth
into clear utterance and power all the intrinsic God-
likeness of humanity — only in that, only so, in the
coming of the Son of man, is the perfection of the
world to come.
Let us give wings to our imagination for a mo-
ment and picture to ourselves how, in one or two of
the departments of life, this coming of the Son of
man is needed ; and the need is felt more perhaps
to-day than ever with a hopeful expectation. Look
at government. What is the meaning of the Demo-
cratic impulse which everywhere is taking possession
of the nations ? It is the conviction that in the
government of man by man lies the true salvation of
the world. The government of man by man ! Not
by this man or that man, the choice of chance, the
accident of birth, not with any reasonable presump-
tion uttering the better nature of the men he rules,
but the government of man and man, of the coarser,
ruder, more brutal body of a nature by its finer soul,
by its best men, set up to rule not because they are
intrinsically different from the nature which they
govern, but because they are its true self! This is
THE GREAT ATTAINMENT. 293
the meaning of Republican institutions. This is the
coming of the Son of man in the world's politics.
And look at learning. There are two great de-
mands with regard to learning which, I suppose, we
can all hear wandering about, now louder and now
fainter, but never dying out, in the halls of our col-
leges and in the conferences of the men who talk
about education to-day. One is the demand that
learning should be useful; the other is the demand
that learning should be free — that is, not arbitrarily
confined to any chosen caste. It must be useful,
and it must be free. Not as the ornament or luxury
of a favored few must those truths of the universe
be monopolized. Almost as if a few men had dug
all the coin which the earth contains to build great
statues for their palaces, or gathered in all the for-
ests off of all the hills to keep their vast halls warm,
so does it seem now to the world when it is told of
how in other days wisdom and knowledge were
assumed to be the appropriate possession of a
learned class and not the rightful possession of all
men. Very vaguely, very basely, very narrowly,
the usefulness of knowledge no doubt often is con-
ceived— but the idea is there. It is the human
idea; man, all men, in contrast to the natural world
on one hand and to the interests of a few chosen
men upon the other; knowledge, the servant and
the food of man, of all men — that is the idea of
modern education. The progress of that idea marks
the coming of the Son of man in the world of
learning.
And then, again, look at our social life, at all
294 THE GREAT ATTAINMENT.
which man has to do with fellow-man. I dare not
undertake to compare the present with the past.
One so easily seems to become enthusiastic and
optimistic when he ventures to say how much purer,
how much loftier, how much more unselfish the
relations of men with one another, taken at large
throughout the world, are in our generation than
they have ever been in any generation before this.
But let us simply think how in every age the best
minds, the best souls have always come to one deep
certainty about mankind — the certainty that only
in unselfishness, only in forgetfulness of themselves
and service of their brethren, could men come to
their own best completion. That is a wonderful
conviction for all the best souls in all ages to have
reached. It involves certain great convictions. It
involves this conviction certainly — that the world's
completion is to come about, not by the complete-
ness of the single soul, but by a broad elevation of
the whole life of mankind, in ministering to which
each single soul will gain its own best completeness,
yet not as an end but as a means. What is that
but the coming of the Son of man in social life ?
When there the Son of man shall have come ; when
in our homes and churches and communities there
shall have come forth, out of the turmoil and confu-
sion of our imperfect living, the perfect pattern of
humanity, the true social self of man, what shall we
see ? Ah ! there have been, there are now, glimpses
of it which are clear enough to let us answer the
question. We shall see — when the Son of man,
when the perfect man shall have come in our social
THE GREAT ATTAINMENT. 295
life — we shall see such an unselfish and intelligent
devotion of each man to the good of each and all as
shall make him forget himself, and in his self-forget-
fulness shall win for him the best and noblest char-
acter; each losing himself in unselfishness to find
himself in the unconscious growth of his conse-
crated manhood, so that, as the result of all, the
great self of society and the subordinate selfs of
which this great self of society is made up are all
complete in mutual ministries, — this is the coming
of the Son of man in social life.
In government, in learning, in society, the coming
of the Son of man is the standing forth, suddenly or
slowly, of the perfect man, from the midst of all the
fermentations and corruptions, the mistakes and the
delays, the sins and sufferings, of human history.
" A glorious picture! " you say. " The dream
of all the ages. The hope of all philanthropic and
poetic souls ever since the world began ! " But then
you hesitate. You turn back to the pages of your
Bible with a troubled air. " What has all this to
do with Christ ? " you say. " I thought He was the
Son of man. I thought that some day riding upon
the glory of the eastern sunrise or issuing from the
splendor of the evening sky, Jesus, the Jesus who
went years ago into the heaven which stooped over
the Mount of Olives to receive Him, was coming in
the clouds of heaven with hosts of angels for His
company. This is what I have been looking for, and
now you promise me the gradual improvement of
mankind. Is it not an awful disappointment ? Is
not the vision all faded and colorless when you thus
296 THE GREAT ATTAINMENT.
read it down into the platitudes of the platform
orator of human progress ? "
I know the feeling which such words express. I
know how eagerly we cling to the picture of the
opened sky, so eagerly that often we are in danger
of not thinking what it must mean upon the earth
for Christ to come. But the spirit that is in such a
protest we must never lose. God forbid that we
should ever come to think of human nature as a
great system, with its own power of development
within itself, just working out its own perfection.
God forbid that we should forget for a moment that
it is only by touching the fire of God that the fiery
life of man can burn. Man is capable of greatness
only because he is God's child. Man becomes great
only as his childhood to God becomes a living fact.
Man and God, child and Father, must meet. They
do meet in Jesus Christ.
Therefore, and here is the truth about the matter,
the vision which our eyes are looking for in the
heavens, and the new improved life which our souls
are longing for in the government, the learning, and
the social Hfe of the world, belong together. They
are not two and different ; they are one and the
same. I do not know — who does know, and who
can know ? — what the actual visible phenomenon
will be — what glories of the opened heavens, what
gathering of the angelic hosts, — but this I am sure
of, that there is no perfection of humanity possible
which shall not be the entrance into and the occu-
pation of humanity by Jesus Christ, the bringing of
the Son of man to be the real spirit and standard of
THE GREAT ATTAINMENT. 297
this earth ! When that regenerated Hfe, that per-
fect humanity in government, in learning, and in
Hfe shall come, it will be Christ that comes, — Christ
the completion of humanity in its union with divin-
ity, Christ the life of men because Himself the true
man, — Christ who came once to show man what
man in God was, and who is coming again to make
that manhood in God the standard of the world, the
only recognized judge and pattern, to which men
shall offer their lives for its approval.
Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly! — that is the
cry of all earnest hearts. Come, and make the per-
fect man, the divine man, be counted the only true
man. The world waits, every good cause lingers,
expecting the coming of the Son of man.
3. And so, if we understand at all what is meant
by the coming of the Son of man, then we are ready
for our third question — What is it to " stand be-
fore Him." Must not our answer be, to" stand
before the Son of man " is to have such a charac-
ter, to live such a life, that when His asserted and
established dominion comes, those lives and charac-
ters shall blend with it, help it, and be helped by
it, and not be swept away as something hostile
or useless, something which has no further place
or right now that the complete condition of the
world has come.
Suppose to-day the Son of man should come in
government. That meant, as we saw, the recogni-
tion and establishment of the true principle of gov-
ernment. Government exists solely for the good of
the governed, and its success lies in the expression,
298 THE GREAT ATTAINMENT.
the development, the education to self-government
of the men it rules. Let government be set upon
that basis, let that great first truth pour in like a
flood on all the nations of the earth, and what will
be the result ? All that is in harmony with that
idea will stand before it ; all that is in contradiction
to it will go down before it. All the inhuman
thoughts of government, all conceptions of govern-
ment as existing for the benefit of the governors,
all selfish or corrupt politics must be swept away.
They cannot stand. But all true thoughts of gov-
ernment, all unselfish, devoted, human thoughts
will blend with this true revelation of what govern-
ment ought to be. They will say, " This is what
we have been guessing at and waiting for." They
will gather up their courage and anticipate success.
This is the way in which they will " stand before
the Son of man."
The same is true of learning. Let the Son of
man come in our schools and colleges, and there are
some of our scholars who must disappear as dust
before the wind ; and there are other scholars who
will stand before Him and know themselves in Him
with a delightful reassuring knowledge. If you
have dared to think of knowledge simply as personal
luxury, if you have let yourself, the more you
knew, be separated all the more from your fellow-
men and not be drawn the closer to them, that must
be all exposed. All pedantry, all pride of learning
must disappear. The selfishness, the baseness of
such learning must be swept away. If you have
studied morally and humanly, if as a student you
THE GREAT ATTAINMENT. 299
have been ever more and more a man, seeing ever
goodness beyond truth, seeing always something for
humanity to be as always the purpose of what hu-
manity can know, then, however much you may
have gone astray and made mistakes, yet when the
Son of man comes and says, " I am the truth. This
is life eternal to know me," then you shall stand
before Him. The substance of all honest and un-
selfish thought and study shall ultimately be taken
up by the great stream of truth, and shall not per-
ish, but shall live in it forever.
And so of social life. Christ comes to-morrow
and regenerates society. Diviner purposes, diviner
spirits, fill its life. A purer manhood, a purer
womanhood, issues out of its confusion. Every man
feels the change. But will not different men feel it
differently ? One man says, "It is all over with
me now " ; another man lifts up his head and sees
close at hand the fulfilment of his dearest hopes.
The man who has lived on the degradation of soci-
ety, what chance is there for him now that society
is purified ? Where will his dishonesty, his selfish-
ness, his impurity have any chance ? The coming
of the Son of man, the setting up of the standard
and promise of the perfect man, has been his ruin.
But the earnest, the pure, the souls eager for good-
ness in themselves and in the world, they are at
once awake, alive, and full of hope. Look how
they gather round this Son of man and " stand
before " Him. See how they come! Each with
his poor, pathetic little piece of struggle which has
looked so hopeless while he was fighting it out in his
300 THE GREAT ATTAINMENT.
own obscure corner of the world, — see how each
comes and sets his bit of solitary struggle deep into
the great victory of Christ, and knows that he has
his true part in Christ's fulfilment of the human Hfe,
the complete establishment of God's idea of man.
I think that there can hardly be any thought of
life more encouraging and ennobling than this. A
young man labors on alone at some task which he is
sure that it is good for him to do. He works in
silence; men do not notice him, or if they notice
him they despise him. Perhaps a few simple souls
love him and praise him, and their love and praise
make him seem all the more insignificant and ridic-
ulous in the eyes of the world, whose standards he
totally fails to meet. He works on, quiet, patient,
cheerful, happy. He can hardly give you a clear
account of why he goes on working at his lonely
task, but it is almost as if he felt sure that the great
spirits of good were with him. He has no word of
reproach for misconception or of complaint for hard-
ship. He is perfectly patient, busy, happy. And
then some day the world makes a distinct step for-
ward. It turns suddenly a corner which it has been
long approaching, and there, advancing down the
road towards it, is a new, a higher type of human
life. It is a loftier attainment of humanity coming
in to occupy the world. It is a coming of the Son
of man. And then this quiet worker lifts up his
head and a light comes in his eyes, and he calmly
goes and takes this stranger by the hand. He goes
and " stands before the Son of man," and he is
" counted worthy to stand " there. The Son of man
THE GREAT ATTAINMENT. 3OI
turns and looks at him and knows him, and without
a question takes him for his ally and his friend.
Is not our question answered ? " To be worthy
to stand before the Son of man " is to be living such
lives that if a greater day should dawn, a nobler,
purer life be opened on the world, a new demand be
made on our humanity, we should be ready for it.
We may be hoping for it or despairing of it. We
may seem even now to hear the footfall of the comer
or we may, after a hundred disappointments, have
grown desperate and said, " No, He will never
come." That does not matter. To be living such
lives that if He did come we should go to Him and
take our places by His side sure that that was where
we belonged, so we are " worthy to stand before the
Son of man."
In a deep sense, as it concerns the highest things,
every soul is worthy of that of which it is capable.
A soul that is capable of being forgiven is worthy of
being forgiven. A soul that is capable of going to
heaven is worthy of going to heaven. So to be
worthy of standing before the Son of man is to be
capable of standing before Him ; it is to have such a
nature, it is to live such a life that when we see Him
we shall know that our place is by His side and shall
go up to the judgment of His presence without a
fear.
Again I find myself wondering whether I do not
melt away into abstractions that which the Bible
likes to keep in such clear, personal distinctness.
We talk about the coming of standards of higher
living, of a new and more glorious type of human
302 THE GREAT ATTAINMENT.
life; the Bible talks of the coming of the Son of
man. We sigh and cry for purer government, for
more spiritual learning, for more unselfish social life ;
the New Testament with its last verse sends throb-
bing out through the ages its passionate appeal,
" Even so, come. Lord Jesus! " I would fain hope
that our study of this morning has opened somewhat
to us the depths of reasonable meaning which are
included in that cry to Christ and have enabled us
to hear in it all the great cry of humanity for a bet-
ter life, of which the world is full. But as we close
let it become very personal, let it have all the inten-
sity and warmth of personality. A thousand things
the poor world wants, but it wants only one Person,
only one Saviour. In Him, in Jesus, all that it
really needs must come to it. Peace instead of war,
unselfishness instead of selfishness, hope instead of
fear, holiness instead of wickedness, — all of these
must come when Christ comes to be the world's king.
And He is surely coming. The world has been
given to Him by His Father, and shall certainly be
His. Oh, may we be such men that when He
comes we may gather up our lives, which have tried
to obey Him even when they saw Him very dimly,
and go and stand before Him — worthy to stand
there because we are able to stand there by His
grace. With that readiness in us we can patiently
wait His time, for the soul that is ready to welcome
Christ and live with Him at His coming has wel-
comed Him and is living with Him already.
XVIII.
THE JOY OF RELIGION.
" And as for the prophet and the priest and the people that shall
say, The burden of the Lord, I will even punish that man and his
house. Thus shall ye say every one to his neighbor and every one
to his brother, What hath the Lord answered ? and What hath the
Lord spoken ? "—Jeremiah xxiii. 34 and 35,
There must have been a very sad state of things
in Jerusalem when Jeremiah the prophet wrote these
words. The people were reluctantly religious. They
believed in God as Jesus said that the devils believed
and trembled. They went to worship Him and to
ask His will because they were afraid not to go.
They would gladly have stayed away from the tem-
ple, and shut all religion out of their houses and their
hearts, and been rid of the whole thing if they had
dared. They did not dare, and so their religion lay
like a heavy cloud upon their city instead of filling
its houses and its streets like sunshine. The people,
when they talked with one another, called it " The
burden of the Lord."
Jeremiah felt how angry God must be with this.
He knew that the heart of the Father could not value
any such enforced and frightened service of His chil-
dren. Another picture filled his imagination wholly
303
304 THE JOY OF RELIGION.
different from that which he was seeing every day.
He pictured to himself the hosts of people all flock-
ing to Jehovah as their dearest friend. He heard
the streets all alive with the questions which the
people were asking one another about the last utter-
ance of God. ** What hath the Lord answered ? "
"What hath the Lord said ? " he heard them eagerly
inquiring of one another. Then he turned back
from his dream, and lo ! there was nothing in the
real Jerusalem except this slavish obedience to a
Master whom the people did not dare to disobey.
No wonder that the word of the Lord came to him
and he spoke. " As for the people and the priest
and the people that shall say The burden of the
Lord, I will even punish that man and his house.
Thus shall ye say every one to his neighbor and
every one to his brother, What hath the Lord an-
swered ? and What hath the Lord spoken ? ' '
The prophet simply hears issuing from the lips of
God such a remonstrance as must come from the
heart of any generous friend whose friendship is
accepted as a burden and not welcomed as a joy.
The father whose son obeys him out of servile fear,
the teacher whose lessons are learned in dogged and
ungrateful submission, the generous ruler whose sub-
jects hate him, and would rebel against him if they
dared, — these all interpret to us the feeling which
Jeremiah expresses from the heart of God. How
modern it all sounds! How it lets us see that the
men in old Jerusalem were like the men to-day. It
is modern because it is universal. It belongs to our
time because it belongs to all times. Always there
THE JOY OF RELIGION. 305
have been men who did not dare not to be religious,
but who never got at the heart and soul and glory
of religion because their religion never came to be
an eager, delighted, impatient seeking for the will
and help of God. I think that there can be no pres-
entation of God to us more pathetic, more full of
gracious dignity and living majesty, than that which
shows Him earnestly remonstrating with His chil-
dren upon this false and base relation which they
take towards Him, which makes it impossible for the
richest of His life and help to flow over into them.
Let us try to understand this condition of the
people of Jerusalem which is also the condition of so
many modern men, this strange phenomenon of re-
luctant religiousness, this service of God which all
the time that it is being done still counts itself a
burden.
We begin by recognizing the way in which God has
built the world so that the healthy and legitimate
exercise of every power ought always to be a source of
pleasure to its fortunate possessor. How that law
runs through everything! Our imagination seems to
feel its presence even in unconscious things. The
first poetic instinct thinks it almost hears the pine
tree shout upon the hill top with the joy of growing,
and catches a sense of satisfaction from the rhythm
of the machinery with which the factory beats out
the music of its work. When we come up to living
things, we do not need the effort of imagination.
Everyone can see with what enjoyment the bird flies
and the dog hunts. The horse as well as the rider
is happy in the rush of healthy action. Even the
306 THE JOY OF RELIGION.
lowest creature who floats on the pool's surface or
Hes and basks in the sunshine feels, we are sure,
some dull, half-conscious pleasure in the mere act of
living, in the normal activity of each organic func-
tion which is the witness of its place in the great
universe of God.
When we mount higher still and come to man,
then it is still more certain. The test of health in
man is that joy follows action. You lift your arm,
you draw your breath, you think your thought with
pain, and you are instantly aware that something is
wrong with you. There is some pebble in the stream
of life that jars its current and makes it, in so far,
not life but death, not flow and progress but stop-
page and interruption. All your associations with
your fellow-men, bringing out your powers into
action, making you use your capacity of living,
trusting, persuading, obeying, helping, and being
helped, all of these ought to bring unmixed delight.
The same things which we do in these earthly streets
often with reluctance and complaint will bring un-
mixed delight when we do them on the streets of
the New Jerusalem. There it will be possible to test
the truth and healthiness of every action by its joy.
" It hurts me," or " I do not want to do it," will
be the soul's testimony that the thing ought not to
be done. There will be the safety and the peace of
heaven.
* Serene shall be our days and bright,
And happy shall our nature be.
When love is an unerring light.
And joy its own security."
THE JOY OF RELIGION. 307
We are very far away from that now. " I know
it is my duty because I hate it so," is very apt to
be the cynical expression of the condition in which
men feel that they are living, but yet it is a noble
sign of how our nature cannot fall entirely away
from its design and first idea that the human soul
always keeps the double sense that it was made for
happiness and goodness both, and that when it comes
to its completeness it will find them both in har-
mony, that in the end righteousness and peace shall
kiss each other.
It would be very terrible if it were not so, if the
intrinsic condition of activity were pain. That
would be incredible as a general fact of human life,
and it would be incredible also, I think, of any one
human power taken by itself. If our experience of
man found that there were any capacity of man
whose natural exercise, apart from all deranging cir-
cumstances, brought distress and misery, how we
should stand perplexed and almost dismayed.
Plenty of powers there are which, under present
conditions, as we are living now, we cannot put into
exercise without pain, — we cannot work without
weariness, we cannot trust without disappointment,
we cannot think without feeling the thought which
we send out striking almost immediately on some
obstacle which turns it out of the course in which
we sent it to find the perfect truth. But all of these
we know are accidental pains. To work, to trust, to
think, are, in their essence, self-indulgences. The
soul seeks them with appetite, seeks them even in
spite of the painful experience with which they are
308 THE JOY OF RELIGION.
now constantly associated, and so bears witness of
its belief that in themselves they are sources of joy
and not of suffering.
Let us try to keep such a healthy faith as that.
Let us be clear-souled enough to see through and
behind the present connection of life and pain, and
know that in its essence life is not pain but joy.
We are sure that it must be so with God in His com-
plete existence. The omnipotence of God and the
bliss of God must belong together. In the infinite
range of His power lies the infinite completeness of
His joy. He cannot act without happiness any
more than the sun can shine without light. It is not
only a joy in the result of action, we cannot think of
God without believing that there is joy in action
itself, that every outgoing of power is answered by
an inflowing flood of delight. And what we think
must be in God, we believe must be, we find to be
potentially in man His child.
And now among the powers of man, lo ! there is
one highest power which has always been bearing
witness of itself, which has always refused to be
ignored or denied. Men have tried to deny it and
injure it. They have said to it, " Be quiet; you
are not a true part of us. You are only a tempo-
rary, morbid form of exhibition of some powers of
us which are real and which will leave you, their
temporary exhibition, behind as they come to their
complete life." But still the power of religion, the
power in man of counting himself the child of a
heavenly Father and of looking up to that Father
for commandment and for care, has always answered
THE JOY OF RELIGION. 309
back confidently to all such denials of its existence,
" Nay, but I am. You know I am, in spite of all
your eager saying that I am not." And man,
whether he were the savage finding the knowledge of
God at the bottom of all things or the sage finding
the knowledge of God at the summit and crown of
all things, has in the long range of his consciousness
owned the existence of this power of being religious
among the powers which made up his manhood.
And more than this, he has answered that if this
power of religion be in man then it is the greatest of
his powers, it is the king among them. This no man
will deny. Even he who says that there is no power
in man of recognizing, loving, and obeying God will
freely say, I think, that, if there were, that power
would be the Lord of all man's life, would give man
his supreme dignity, and would deserve and ought
to have his most careful care.
And now does this religious power also fall under
the law of all our powers which I was trying to de-
scribe ? Our first conviction surely is that it must,
simply because it is our highest faculty. " It cannot
be," so runs our simplest thought, " It cannot be
that all my lower powers are meant and made to give
me joy, but this my highest power has no joy to give.
It cannot be that I was made so that my thirst
should run to the river, and my curiosity to the
book, and my friendship to my friend, and yet that
my soul should hold back and hesitate when it is
offered the chance to go to God. It must be that
in my supreme faculty the law of all my faculties
will be supremely realized, and that I shall find joy
3IO THE JOY OF RELIGION.
in loving and obeying God which no other indul-
gence of my nature ever has attained."
And no one who looks carefully at the history of
man can fail to own that in general such enthusiastic
expectations have beeen satisfied. Among the
enjoyments which have brightened men's lives since
men began to suffer and enjoy, the enjoyment which
has come to men from an assured belief that they
belonged to God, and that He loved them, and that
they loved Him, shines with a lustre which is all its
own. The happiest moments which have been passed
upon this earth have probably been moments in which
consecrated human souls have intensely realized their
nearness to the soul of God ; and the most passion-
ate desire which the world has ever seen has prob-
ably been the desire of eager hearts who had tasted
of divine communion to come yet nearer to the God
to whom they longed to give, in whom they longed
to lose their life.
This, I believe, this, I am sure, is true; and yet
no doubt the other fact is also true that there have
always been Jeremiah's men upon the earth, that
multitudes of men have always looked at the knowl-
edge of God and obedience to Him as sad necessi-
ties. Men who have called themselves religious
have had at the bottom of their hearts a terrible mis-
giving that they were religious only from fear, and
that, if they dared, they would cast all religion to
the winds and go their way unhaunted by the spirit-
ual cares. There is surely something very strange in
such a combination of phenomena. Surely it may
well make us ask whether it is possible to understand
THE JOY OF RELIGION. 3 II
the causes of this reluctance, this shrinking back
from that which, when it has its full power, is the
strongest passion that can occupy the soul of man.
Why is it that to so many men religion is a burden
and a toil instead of an inspiration and a joy ? Let
me try to give several reasons, all of which have their
effect.
The broadest and simplest, perhaps also the most
powerful reason, as it seems to me, is that men fail
to get hold of the truth that religion is natural to
man, and think that it is something strange and for-
eign. You and I do nothing with the heartiest
readiness except what we feel that we were made to
do. All other things are either amateur side-issues
of our life, or else they are bondages fastened upon
us by some outside despotism. The time when he
discovers in his nature some strong natural fitness is
the moment when a young man's nature wakes to
enthusiasm and settles itself down to the determined
pursuit, the gradual delighted attainment of some
great end in living. Now how is it about the knowl-i
edge and obedience of God ? Partly because the
human soul needs higher help in order to attain this
loftiest ambition, partly because, surrounded by the
things of earth, many men seem to satisfy their souls
with simple earthliness and so the men who seek for
and attain to spiritual life appear to be exceptions, —
for these and other reasons religion comes to seem
to many souls an importation, something unnatural,
something to be sought after and attained only with
a struggle. A man comes into a savage island and
there settles himself down and begins, let us say, to
312 THE JOY OF RELIGION.
paint. The landscape glows upon his canvas. The
soul of all this yet uninterpreted nature becomes
translated by his brush. The savages gather about
him and admire. He seems to them a creature of
another kind. His art is something transcendent,
unimaginable. And then suppose that som^e voice
speaks to them and says, "All that which you see is
not miraculous. It is not superhuman, not extra-
human ; it is simply human. It is in every one of
you to do what that man does," — how perfectly in-
credible that would sound. And if the voice went
farther and compelled every poor savage to under-
take as a duty what it declared to be a possibility,
then what complaining there would be. With what
reluctant fingers, ashamed of their own clumsiness,
those unbelieving savages would take up the brushes
which they thought that men like them ought not to
touch. Somewhat like that I think it is with many
men about all spiritual things. You say to your
friend, " See, is not that beautiful, that Christian
life ? Look, how that servant of the Saviour walks
above the world. Behold how, satisfied with Jesus,
he can do without the world's indulgences. Behold
how, obedient to Jesus, he can resist the world's
temptations. Is it not beautiful?" Your friend
replies, " Indeed it is! " and stands and admires, as
much enraptured as yourself. But when you turn
and bid him live that same life, how he recoils.
" Oh, not for me! " he says. " I am a weak and
common mortal. These extraordinary flights, these
high experiences, are not for me. ' ' And if you force
his conscience to the task the power of this lurking
THE JOY OF RELIGION. 313
unbelief infects and poisons every effort that he
makes. He cannot because he thinks that he can-
not. What does he need ? A larger thought of his
own life, a deeper knowledge of himself, a broad out-
look over uncultivated, unappropriated regions of
his own nature, a stir and wakening in him of the
knowledge that he is God's son. Let all this come,
and with it must come courage and hope ; and what
a man does with courage and hope he always does
with joy.
Another reason why the Christian life and Chris-
tian duties are clothed for so many people with the
aspect of difficulty and reluctance, instead of being
full of invitation and delight, seems to me to lie in
this — that the Christian religion, by the necessity of
the case, presented itself first to the world as a means
of rescue and repair, and that that side of it has
almost entirely absorbed men's thoughts of it ever
since. The world was full of sin when Jesus came.
The world is full of sin to-day. When Jesus came
into the world, when Jesus comes to you or me, His
first work must be to rebuke our sin and bid us leave
it. " Repentance " is the first cry. " He that
repenteth and forsaketh his sin, he shall find mercy."
Now, that is negative ! And that is by necessity
full of the spirit of fear ! And to do negative work
fearfully can never waken the most ardent enthusi-
asm, or make the pulses leap with the most buoyant
joy. To be dragged up out of a pit into which we
have fallen, to be plucked away from a fire which
seems to be racing on to destroy us, to be forgiven
for sin for which we have been expecting to be pun-
314 THE JOY OF RELIGION.
ished, — that stirs the profoundest gratitude and fills
us with a peace all the more blessed and complete
because of the remembered danger and distress with
which it stands in contrast. But still all that is nega-
tive. The moment that the face is turned away
from the dead past, and looks toward the living
future, a new power comes. Then all is positive.
" Thou shalt not " is swallowed up and lost in the
more mighty, the more divine, "Thou shalt." Then
the soul feeds on promises. It no longer is con-
tented just to hold its own. Hope is awake, and
hope is infinite.
Now, as I said, the first presentation of the Chris-
tian Gospel to the world was of necessity as a
message of rescue and repair. It was a gospel of
forsfiveness. The world was old and sick with sin.
Christ came as the physician, and had at once to lay
His hand upon disease. That need has not yet
passed away, can never pass away so long as men are
sinners. But it may well be doubted whether the
Christian faith has not too narrowly confined itself
to this its first necessary presentation. The Gospel
has been made too exclusively a Gospel of forgive-
ness. We are surprised sometimes when we look
through the New Testament to see how very much
there is positive, not negative at all. Even if man
had never sinned, still there might have come to him
the great assurance of how vast was the possible range
of goodness and strength to which he might attain if
he would claim the help of God. Of that assurance
the New Testament is full. The forgiveness of sin
is but the setting free of the soul that it may realize
THE JOY OF RELIGION. 31$
that assurance. If a man can hear that assurance,
through every promise of forgiveness, deepening it,
giving it its fullest purpose, he cannot help but listen.
There is an eagerness with which the prisoner listens
to catch every word of the pardon which is to set him
free. But with a healthier and more earnest eager-
ness the freed prisoner, outside of the jail gate, hangs
on the lips of the wise friend who tells him how he
may become a strong, respected man again. And
so Christianity becomes a new thing to you when in
it you feel the power not merely of forgiveness and
escape from penalty, but of a manifold new life, of
higher thoughts, braver struggles, nobler society with
brother-man, profounder character — in a word, of a
whole new life. With all that in expectation think
what new zest must come into the faith of Christian
men. How men would listen for God's word, and
ponder it and try to get at its depths! How they
would say every one to his neighbor, and every one
to his brother, " What hath the Lord answered ? "
and " What hath the Lord spoken ? "
I want to speak of one more of the causes which
rob religion of its joy. It is the superficialness and
partialness of our religious life. Very many of the
best and greatest things are dull and burdensome
upon the surface, and they only lay hold upon us
and enchain us when we get within the power of
their hearts and souls. The study which is holding
its profound student enraptured and sleepless with
delight is the same study over which the school-boy
yawns and groans. Once, it may be, he who is now
the enraptured and delighted scholar was the yawn-
3l6 THE JOY OF RELIGION.
ing school-boy. At that long-gone day when he sat
over his hated task, there were two possible ways
of relieving his weariness and disgust. He might
have cast the dreary study aside altogether and gone
out to his play, or he might have pressed on into the
heart of his study and found it full of fire and enthu-
siasm. This last is what he did, and now there is no
joy for him like questioning his science for its deepest
secrets and delving or waiting till the answer comes.
And here, then, is the man of whom we have been
speaking this morning, the man who is reluctantly
religious. He does religious duty, he thinks relig-
ious thought, but it is weariness to him. " The
burden of the Lord," that is the true name for his
experience. Is it not the fact that for him also there
are two possible ways of escape from the dreariness
of a reluctant religion ? It is conceivable that he
may turn his back upon it all, and give himself up
totally to the world as if there were no God, no soul,
no heaven, no hell. Or he may press on deep into
the knowledge of the eternal and the infinite until
he is all absorbed in them, and temporary and finite
things lose every value except what they get from
the reflections of the infinite and the eternal which
appear in them.
You are right in the midst of the clatter of the
world. The tumult of society is in your ears.
Through it, piercing it as the lightning pierces the
stormy sky, there comes some word of God. He
tells you that your soul is sacred, that selfishness is
death in life, that judgment is coming. You turn
away and will not listen. You plunge again into the
THE JOY OF RELIGION. 317
strife of tongues. Perhaps you can escape that voice
of God; if you can, it is dreadful. If by a blessed
incapacity you cannot escape it, then there is only
one thing to do — to listen to it, and obey it, to
question it, " What hath God answered ? " " What
hath God spoken ? " To open your heart to the
living word of God, to be His servant and to do
His will.
O my dear friend, if you have tried to be relig-
ious and have found your religion a burden, what
you need to relieve its burdensomeness is to be not
less but more religious. If prayer is a task and a
slavery, you must not spring up from your knees
and rush back into the open fields of self-reliance ;
you must press forward into deeper and deeper
chambers of God's helpfulness. You must desire
greater and greater things, things so great that none
but God can give them. So, and so only, can you
come by and by to eager prayer, to waiting at the
door of grace with deep impatience till the answer
comes. If self-sacrifice exhausts and embitters you,
the refuge is not in self-indulgence but in more
self-sacrifice. If the little amateur work which you
do for your Master, done in the leisure moments
which are left over after your work for yourself is
done, is all unsatisfactory, what you need is a brave
giving over of your whole life to Him and the doing
of everything for His blessed sake. If the little
truth which you believe frets and distresses you,
you must send out your wonder and your faith to
compass the completest knowledge which a soul like
yours can win.
3l8 THE JOY OF RELIGION.
So always, he who goes up to conquer peace and
righteousness must burn his ships and trust his
whole life to the land which lies so rich before him.
Oh, the poor, weary, half-way Christians, who play
upon the fringes of the religious life, and are never
quite sure that they will not turn back again and
leave it all behind ! Some day they must feel the
great strength of Christ taking possession of them
wholly. Then, totally consecrated to Him, the
learning of His truth, the doing of His work, the
growth into His image, shall fill and satisfy their
souls.
I have not spoken of the baser reasons which
make sometimes the struggle for a higher life a
burden and a pain to him who undertakes it. If a
man is living in sin which he will not give up and
yet is trying to keep a hold upon religion, then of
course to him it is all weariness and woe. But I
have chosen to speak to-day of men of better sort.
These causes blight their faith and rob it of its
freshness and delight. Their religion is not natural
enough. It is not positive enough. It is not
thorough enough. When I look in upon the lives
of those who in all times have most found their
service of Christ a perennial joy, I find in them
always these qualities. They have counted their
service of Christ the crown and consummation of
their humanity. They have sought in it not simply
rescue, but attainment. And they have given
themselves up without reserve into its power.
It is good to feel deeply that Christ Himself is
always urging His disciples on to such a faith in
THE JOY OF RELIGION. 319
Him as this. He glorifies our human life until it
claims completeness in obedience to the divine. He
is not satisfied to forgive any soul without trying
to carry it forward to a positive, gradually perfecting
life. He demands the whole devotion of the soul
He saves.
Therefore whoever comes into the service of
Christ at all gets within sight of the supreme re-
ligion. Therefore whoever is trying to do Christ's
will even in bondage is close upon the borders of the
glorious liberty of the children of God. Therefore
one wants to cry to every weary and discouraged
Christian, " Oh, keep on! keep on, however hard
the work appears to be ! This is not the real light
of faith, but it is close upon its borders. Be obedient.
Do the will of God, however bitter it may be, sure
that there is sweetness at its heart, and never rest-
ing till you have found its sweetness."
When you have found it, then your whole life
listens at the lips of God. To hear Him tell His
will by any of His wonderful voices is your perpetual
desire. Your ears are always open. " What hath
He answered ? " " What hath He spoken ? " you
go asking of neighbor and of brother. And to such
eager listening as that the word it listens for surely
comes. May we so listen for it that it shall come to
us!
XIX.
THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
" Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we
go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life." — John vi. 68.
It seems from the Bible story that at one time —
and no doubt at many times besides — many of
Christ's disciples went back and walked no more
with Him. Then Jesus turned to the twelve and
said, " Will ye also go away ? " And Simon Peter
answered, " Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast
the words of eternal life." It appears almost as if
these impetuous words really showed a novel feeling
in the mind of Peter. It seems as if, constantly
keeping company with Jesus, it never had occurred
to him to think of separation. All of a sudden the
retreating crowd and Jesus' question put that
thought before him ; and then he became aware that
Christ had grown to be absolutely necessary to him.
He could not live without Him. There was no sub-
stitute conceivable, no other that could do for him
that which his Lord was doing every day. And this
sudden, almost surprised conviction breaks out in
the strong words, " Lord, to whom shall we go ?
Thou hast the words of eternal life."
320
THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 321
If this be all true, then we are sure that afterwards
Peter's firm hold upon Christ must have been firmer
than ever. After he had discovered how indispen-
sable his Saviour was, after he had realized that no-
body could take that Saviour's place to him, his
faith must have had a new assurance in it. That
moment's recollection must have made his denial
harder and his remorse more bitter and his return
more eager. For there is always a sort of assurance
of a thing's value which comes from the perception
of that thing's indispensableness. When we find
that nothing else can do what one power has hope-
fully undertaken, and are fully convinced that what
that power has undertaken is something which must
be done, it always strengthens our belief in that
power's capacity to do it. Let me pass in this way
from the special experience of St. Peter to the law
which I wish to apply to religion generally to-day.
If any army learns to believe not merely that its
general is brave, but that he is the only man in all
the land who can lead them on to victory, they will
rally round him all the more enthusiastically. It is
one of the strongest arguments for the most perma-
nent and universal human institutions that they have
no substitutes. Nothing can take their place. Men
grow impatient of government, and they attempt to
give it up and try to live in anarchy. Men are dis-
satisfied with the family and they throw it aside for
the community. They stand aside and wait — those
two great necessities, the family and government —
sure that men cannot do without them. They stand
and wait in their quiet dignity, till men too find how
322 THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
necessary they are and come to them, and bring
them back in honor, and recrown and rethrone them
and are loyal to them with a new loyalty.
I want to-day to plead this same argument for
religion. Is it true that for religion there is no sub-
stitute, that there are certain things which men must
always hold essential which she can do, and which
she only can do ? If there are — if we are sure that
for eternally necessary works she has no substitute,
if all who offer themselves to take her place are evi-
dently insufificient — then we are sure of her, sure
that however her throne may seem dishonored, — •
nay, though sometimes it may seem as if men were
ready to banish her out of the world, still and forever
she is queen and must come back to a sceptre that
none but she can wield. This is no abstract argu-
ment about the prospects of religion in the world's
future. It comes close to men's experiences. It has
helped many of us when the interests of the faith we
loved seemed dark. It is capable of giving strength
to many a soul whose confidence in religion as a sav-
ing power is shaken by some loud, temporary phe-
nomena of irreligiousness. It makes such a soul
strong to know that for the power which men seem
to despise there is no substitute, that it and it alone
can do for man those highest and most precious
things which it is inconceivable that man should ever
cease to desire.
But we must spend a few moments first in defini-
tions, that we may be sure we know of what we are
talking. What is religion, and what is it that relig-
ion undertakes to do ? I answer to the first question
THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 323
that religion is the force which inspires man's actions
by a love for God in gratitude for what God has done
for him. Service of God out of a grateful love of
God — that is religion. " We love Him because He
first loved us," and " If ye love me, keep my com-
mandments." That is religion. " Ah, yes," you
say, perhaps — if you have caught the new talk which
is very current nowadays — " yes, that is the Chris-
tian religion, that is Christianity, but Christianity is
not the only religion. Religion is larger than Chris-
tianity." There may be a religion without a Christ,
— nay, some people are beginning to say — a little
bewilderingly — there may be a religion without a
God ; yet still I claim that in these two great Chris-
tian utterances we have the fundamental truth of
what religion is. I own in full the spiritual power
which there is in every attempt of heathenism after
God, but though there be other religions than the
Christian, surely the full notion of religion is not to
be gathered out of their imperfection, but out of the
more perfect faith which does what they try to do
and is what they try to be. If a man asks me what
4 tree is, I will not send him to a stunted, frost-
bitten bush high up Mount Washington, but to the
oak or elm which under the best conditions has
opened the tree life into fullest glory. If any one
asks me what a man is, I will not show him a Kaffir
or a Hottentot, but the best specimen of manhood
which Europe or America can bring. And yet the
mountain shrub is certainly a tree, and the Hotten-
tot is certainly a man. So if anybody asks me what
religion is, I will not point to Mohammedanism nor
324 THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
to Buddhism, though they surely are rehgions; I
will go to Christianity and in its central motive take
out the real central force of all religion. Christianity
sets men to trying to do God's will because of the
Redemption which God in Christ gave them from
the Cross. Religion is the service of God out of
grateful love for what God has done for us.
And now what does this religious motive try to
do ? Again, there cannot be a doubt about the an-
swer. The effort of religion is to perfect the man,
to bring this rich and manifold life of man's in every
part of it out to its perfectness. There cannot be a
doubt but that that is her mission as she comes
down with her great, new, strong force. When I
speak of religion, as I said just now, I speak of
Christianity. Christianity comes to you — a man
with great, strong powers, with a great, strong na-
ture, half-awakened, working away vehemently in
some parts of it, torpid and dead, entirely uncon-
scious of itself in other parts of it — the religion of
Christ comes to you and says, " See, what I have to
show you ! " It holds up the Cross and says, "God
loved you so that He did that for you to save you
from your sins and bring you back to Himself. See
how He plans for you. See how He suffers for you.
See how He loves you. Now, to thank Him and to
show Him that you love Him in answer, do His will.
Here is all righteousness, all goodness; be and do
all this! " What is Christianity aiming at when it
does that ? You say, the forgiveness of your sins.
No, the forgiveness of your sins is not her end ; it is
only her beginning. She would give nothing to have
THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 325
you forgiven and cleansed, if you still remained un-
changed and undeveloped. You say it is to get you
into heaven, — talking about heaven as if it were a
place beyond the stars. But no, religion is not set
upon places, she is not busied with the mere geogra-
phy of the universe. She would not care for you in
heaven if you were still in heaven what you are here
upon the earth, all open and active upon the sensual
side of you, all closed and dead upon the spiritual
side. No, there is only one thing worthy of this
power of religion to attempt, and that is the thor-
ough perfection of your soul. With a serene ambi-
tion she sets her eye upon that. She sees you — you
a man or woman engaged here in common worldly
things called by a common worldly name, putting
out the exertion of a few of the simplest, perhaps
the lowest powers, — she sees you holding within
yourself all the time immense capacities, untouched
powers, springs all wrapped up tight, clinging with
the rust that is upon their unused coils, passions,
desires, hopes, fears, capacities of loving, doing,
suffering — all these this eye of Christianity sees
waiting inside of your life and character. Can you
conceive of Michael Angelo waiting outside a house
in which were paints and brushes and great walls to
paint on, gazing into the window and saying, " If I
were only in there I would make a picture." So
Christianity looks in on your nature and says, " If I
were only in there I would make a man. I would
bring that being to his perfection. I would make
him come up to and fill out his very best, spiritually,
intellectually — yea, physically — if I could take po?
326 THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
session of him and set him to loving God because
God first loved him," This is her one object. She
will sacrifice everything to this. She will make the
man suffer very often, but she will fulfil his life ; she
will make him perfect, make him like God by bring-
ing him into God's kingdom.
That is the end at which religion aims. Is such
an end desirable ? To ask the question is to answer
it, I think. I take it for the sign of a lofty and in-
telligent man, indeed of a real and true and healthy
man, that he is dissatisfied and anxious if he sees
anything falling short of its complete self, of the
best that it might be, whether it be a state or a
plant, a statue or a character. Everything desires
and seeks its highest. A true man is conscious of
pain when he sees anything miss its highest. Most
of all when that thing is man, the being capable of
the best perfection, the being for whose perfection
everything else is laboring. We must reconstruct
our thoughts of the purposes of everything in the
world before the perfection of human character, the
making of the perfect man can cease to seem the
aim of all things, "the consummation most devoutly
to be wished " of all of which we can conceive. One
often wonders how it seems to many of the men who
love and honor their humanity and yet who seem
willing to see religion pass away as a power among
men, whether sometimes there does not come a mis-
giving and a fear, lest if it went, there should be some
parts of this humanity of ours which would no longer
find any true culture, and so the hope and prospect
of the perfect man be lost forever.
THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 327
This, then, is the power of religion. The reHgious
man is he who does right because it is the will of a
God to whom he owes so much that all which he can
render in return is but a mere acknowledgment, not
a repayment of the blessing for which he is thank-
ful. Here is a force of life that knows no limit short
of the infinite limit of what God has done for man.
It never can exhaust itself till man has paid back the
unpayable debt of God's salvation. It reaches every
part of his nature and tries to conform it perfectly
to the will of God, — an endless spiritual force at-
tempting the vast spiritual task. Let me see this
spiritual force at work and I know just what is going
on. I see a religious man, and how clear it is !
Here is a man who knows that God loves him
That has been made clear to him with all the em-
phasis of the suffering of Christ. He is thoroughly
grateful for that love. His gratitude is at the root
of every act he does. And in that life of service, out
of gratitude the fulness of his character, the com-
pleteness of his humanity, is being gradually accom-
plished.
Now take the question with which we started.
This is what religion tries to do. This is the sort of
life that religion as a force and rule of life creates.
And now is there any other force beside religion
which can make for a man such a life as shall bring
him completely to his best ? Is there any substitute
for religion ? Can any other motive power besides
gratitude to God thoroughly regulate the life and
fierfect the character ?
As I look around among men I find really two
32» THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
attempted substitutes for religion. When men have
got to be more than brutes, when they have learned
that their passions must be restrained and that they
must have some regulating power of their lives, I
seem to see two forces or impulses which to many
men appear to be quite enough, even without a
grateful, humble love of God, to do the work of life
with. One of these forces is expediency and the
other is honor. These are the two forces that men
try to put in the place of religion. Let us look at
them a moment and see if they are fit to do her
work.
I. Look first at expediency as a motive of good
living and a means of human development. We all
know how frequently it appears and what power it
very often has. We are told that a good life is the
best life, the safest and the happiest. ** If you do
what is wrong, no matter what may be the present
pleasure of it, you certainly will suffer. If you do
what is right, no matter how hard the struggle to
which it sets you now, you certainly will prosper.
Therefore, it is not well, it is not prudent, it is not
expedient to be wicked. ' ' The doctrine is immensely
true. Its certainty is emphasized by all that we
already know of human history, and misgivings of
still more terrible assertions of it stretch forward
into the other world. And the doctrine certainly is
lofty, inasmuch as it asserts that right and wrong are
not mere whims and fashions, but essential and eter-
nal things, that they have to do with the very struc-
ture of man and of the world, that both man and
the world are built so that the wrong finds its pun-
THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 329
ishment and the right its reward. And certainly it
is a doctrine which does to a very great extent con-
trol the actions of mankind. Some people will even
call it religion. Some people will make religion to
be nothing but a great system of expediency stretch-
ing out into the world beyond the grave. But I
hope that you have seen how clearly this is not
religion. The religious man says, " This is right,
and I will do it because God wants me to and I love
Him for the great love wherewith he has loved me."
The prudent man says, " This is right, and I wiH do
it because it will be best for me." They are two
different things. The first is religious and the sec-
ond is not religious, only prudent.
And now what are the faults of this system of
expediency ? How does it fail when it tries to put
itself into the place of religion as a sufficient force
to guide the lives and perfect the characters of men ?
You have seen already how tame and dull it sounds
beside the strong motive which it tries to supplant,
how utterly it lacks the enthusiasm of which the
other is full. But the essential objections to it are
two. One that it is limited in its range. The other
that it is selfish and low in its spirit. It is limited
in its range. If the reason why I will not do what
is wrong is that I shall suffer for it, will there not be
a tendency for the duty of resistance to concentrate
itself upon those acts whose evil consequences are
most manifest and certain ? I shall be anxious not
to do that which I know will instantly bring its
vengeance, and I shall be eager to do that which I
know will immediately bless me with its reward.
330 THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
Can we not see it so ? The prudent moralist, the
moralist whose motive power is prudence, will not
do the acts of wanton dissipation which will tell to-
morrow or a few years hence in tottering footsteps
and a bewildered brain ; but the duties of spiritual
culture, of chivalrous self-denial for the sake of
others, of humility, of self-surrender — although they
certainly will bear their fruits far off under the warmer
skies and in the richer soil of eternity — by their very
remoteness lose their hold upon him. The notion
of duty grows narrow and confined and fastens
itself on those tasks which lie in the most restricted
range and manifest their consequences.
And certainly the spirit of duty done from the
mere motive of expediency must be borne down by
selfishness, and so the power of such duty to elevate
and cultivate the character must be defective. I
look at the man who through a long life has done
what is right, because he felt satisfied that each
right act would help him and advance him, who has
resisted many and many a temptation to do wrong
because he knew that he would suffer if he did it; I
see the path his feet have walked from the beginning
to the end of life. It is wonderfully straight ; it has
escaped disgraces in a wonderful degree. The pit-
falls of temptation it has left on either hand. It is
a path to point young men to, that they may see
how straight a conduct-line may run. But the man
who has walked it and who at the end of it is taking
the competence and the reputation that his upright
life has won him — has he attained to the full richness
of a human character ? A lofty selfishness, but still
THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 33 1
a selfishness, has been behind it all. If you suddenly
bring him another duty which involves apparent
entire self-surrender, is he ready for it ? Is not the
very presence of self-consciousness at all a hindrance ?
Are there not parts of the nature whose wild and
extravagant action you often see and are often
tempted to admire in very bad men — parts of the
nature which are evidently essential to it and capable
of very lofty and pure exercise — which do not show
themselves at all in him ? — capacities of self-forget-
fulness and generosity and uncalculating devotion ?
Christianity is beyond all doubt the most expe-
dient thing. But no man can take the service of
Christ for its expediency. Unless we lift it to a
height which carries it beyond itself, unless we make
selfishness so high that it covets for itself the mere
pure satisfying pleasure of giving itself away in grati-
tude to Christ, the power of selfish expediency fails.
It does not perfect the character. Nothing but
complete devotion out of earnest love can do that ;
and such a devotion to God is religion.
2. But turn now to the other power which men
attempt to substitute for religion as the ruler and
inspirer of life. I called it honor. It is that feeling
which is in the heart of almost every man, the sense
of self-respect which makes him say, " It is beneath
my dignity to do a mean or wicked action." Poor
indeed is the man who does not know what that
feeling is. You offer a man a temptation to steal.
He turns away and will not steal because he is loyal
to his master, God. That is religion. He draws
back and will not steal because he knows that
332 THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
" Honor is the best policy," that is expediency.
He turns indignantly upon you and says, " Do you
take me for a thief ? " That is honor. What this
great instinct of honor has done, it is hard to over-
value. It has been the overruling power of whole
sections of society, almost of whole periods of his-
tory. It has shone with splendid lustre in the eyes
of many men, till it seemed to them all that human-
ity needed for its full consummation. It has had its
martyrs who have given up their lives under its in-
spiration. It is romantic. It is the power of chiv-
alry. There is hardly an age of history so dark that
it may not be found burning there. It is a strong
and, as it seems to many people, a sufficient power
here to-day. There are many who would substitute
the principle of honor for the principle of religion,
many who think that the self-respect of the gentle-
man is enough without the loving consecration of
the servant of God.
But what is this honor that shines so splendidly ?
Is it conscience quickened and filled with pride ? Its
very principle of life is pride. It is a man's supreme
consciousness of his own value, so strong that he
recognizes the obligations which rest upon one so
valuable as he is. His nobility obliges him. The
deficiencies of it seem to be premised in this very
definition, and they show out all through the his-
tory of its influence on men.
(i.) It is partial in the duties it selects. It is
ready to inspire men for those tasks which ordinarily
feed men's pride. It can make them resent injuries
or refuse to be guilty of a meanness, but it is rare
THE PREfiMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 333
that honor grows so deep and fine that it will make
a man forgive an injury or submit with meekness to
a slight. Honor can manage pretty well with the
second table of the commandments, but it can do
really nothing with the Beatitudes.
(2,) Again the principle of honor has not stability
enough. It has no fixity of standards. It is apt to
take the fleeting fashions of the hour for its rule of
right. It grows fantastic and unsound. We can-
not ever forget that for ages the great achievement
of the principle of honor was the brutal and unreas-
onable practice of the duel.
(3.) And again, it brings no spiritual elevation.
Pride is always a source of weakness and degrada-
tion. It has no power of benefit to character. In
humility only does the soul lie open and take in
spiritual life.
(4.) And again, the power of honor, of mere per-
sonal dignity, is not universal. It belongs only to
certain men and certain moods. It never has been,
and it is hard to believe that it can be, the inspira-
tion of all men at all times.
(5.) And yet once more, it is cold, — bright, but
not warm. It does not fire the soul in which it
dwells, and call out all its best activities. Its mar-
tyrs do not kindle the world with their stake-fires.
One faithful saint has more enkindling power than a
whole generation of mere self-respecting gentlemen.
All these defects the principle of honor has with
all its great nobility. We would not for a moment
pray that it may fail or die away. It is immensely
higher than the power of expediency. Indeed it
334 THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
trembles often on the brink of being something
greater than itself. It is often almost religious.
But always there is this clear difference : The man
of honor is proud ; the man of religion is humble.
The man of honor respects himself. He thinks of a
certain dignity settled in his being the man he is.
The man of religion no less respects himself, but it
is a self-respect that is wholly consistent with humil-
ity,— nay, it is a self-respect that has its root deep
down in his humility. He values himself not for
the greatness that he finds in his own nature, for he
has found in his own nature weakness and sin. He
has brought that nature, ashamed of it, to God. It
is because God has taken it up and done for it won-
derful things, that he sees it now lustrous with the
value that the Cross has given to it, and worthy of
being dedicated to Him in whose service it can find
perfection. That is the self-respect of the Christian
— the humble reverence in which the servant of the
Saviour holds the soul for which the Saviour lived
and died.
These, then, are the two substitutes which men
are trying to put in the place of religion and compel
to do its work, I have dwelt upon them long; I
have taken up almost all this morning's sermon with
their description, because they are not mere figments
of the preacher's brain. They are real things.
They are the things which many of you who listen
to mc are trying to put into your lives in the motive
place, where religion ought to be. I do not speak
to those who are mere slaves of passion. I have
preached to those in whose hearts there were real
THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 335
desires to do right. Why do you wish it ? Is it
expediency ? Is it honor ? They are the forces of
many of the struggles, the real hard struggles with
sin, out of which you, my friends and people, come
here Sunday after Sunday, to which you return
after our service together here is over. I know how
far these forces will carry you, — to respectability, to
rectitude in every dealing, so that men shall honor
you while you live and praise you when you die.
But I know there comes a point beyond which they
cannot carry you. They never can renew your life
and character. By them you never can be born again.
They never can set you on the broad ground of en-
thusiastic duty stretching out into eternity. They
have good words to say to you about this life, about
the regulation of your daily behavior, but the disciple
of religion hears in them no words of eternal life, no
programme of existence embracing infinity, full at
once of peace and inspiration, such as he finds in the
service of his beloved Lord.
This is the reason why every prudent and honorable
man here needs to be religious. I bid you ask your-
selves, are these things substitutes for the power of
grateful consecration to God ? Can they do the
work for a man which that can do ? You are a
young business man ; all life lies out before you ;
what will you do there ? You will do right, because
so only can you prosper, because it is unworthy of
you to do wrong. Ah, there will come a time when
to do what is right will demand of you to tread your
evident prosperity and advantage under your feet.
There will come times when every standard of dig-
336 THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
nity and honor about you will bid you do some
brilliant act which you know is wrong. Worse than
that, there will come times — times of failure, of
bereavement, of sorrow, of despair, almost — when
you will seem to have gone quite out beyond these
powers; their strength will seem to be exhausted.
In some great hour of pain you will not seem to care
whether you prosper or not, and your own dignity
and honor will be crushed and scattered as the jewels
are scattered when a sword crashes through a sol-
dier's helmet to his very brain. In those days what
will you do ? Then you must have some " words
of eternal life." Then nothing but religion can
hold you. Then will not the words you need be
just these everlasting words of Jesus, " If any man
love me let him follow me, and where I am, there
shall also my servant be, — in my peace, my confi-
dence, my love."
O my dear friends, there is no substitute! The
peace, the hope, the quiet confidence, the humility,
the new manhood, cannot come except by religion,
cannot come except by Christ. " Who are these in
white raiment," the thoroughly white raiment of a
new eternal life ? Only " those who have washed
their robes and made them white in the blood of the
Lamb." Only those, that is, the motive of whose
new life is the grateful love of their Redeemer.
He died for all that they which live should not
henceforth live unto themselves but unto Him who
died for them and rose again ' ' ; for all, that all
might live to Him, — for you and me, that you and
I might live to Him, and so come to our own best
life and enter into His glory.
XX.
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
" And Moses said unto him, As soon as I am gone out of the city
I will spread abroad my hands unto the Lord ; and the thunder shall
cease, neither shall there be any more hail, that thou mayest know how
that the earth is the Lord's. But as for thee and thy servants I know
that ye will not yet fear the Lord God." — Exodus ix. 29 and 30.
Moses, the deliverer of the Jews, was talking
with Pharaoh their oppressor, the King of the
Egyptians. Again and again the servant of God
had demanded of the monarch that he should let
God's people go; again and again as the monarch
scornfully refused, God's punishments had come,
the terrible quick blows of seven of the plagues. In
the midst of all the dreadful discipline, there Pha-
raoh had stood with the captive people held tight in
his relentless fists. The more God's blows beat that
closed hand, the more obstinate it seemed to grow.
At last the proud king cries for mercy and declares
what terms he will make with God. Let God change
His whole treatment, let Him spare instead of pun-
ishing, let Him lift off His heavy hand, and Pharaoh
will yield. " Entreat the Lord (for it is enough)
that there be no more mighty thunderings and hail,
and I will let you go." And then comes Moses'
338 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
answer, which I read, — God will change His treat-
ment of you; God will take off His hand; " The
thunder shall cease, neither shall there be any more
hail." But that change in Him will not bring the
change in you that you desire. The milder method
will not bring of itself what the severer method
failed to bring. The method shall be changed if only
to show that God has many methods and will use
them all, " that thou mayest know that the earth is
the Lord's. But as for thee and thy servants, I
know that ye will not yet fear the Lord." No
change of treatment of itself can bring a change of
heart. Let the heart be right and any treatment of
God can interpret Him to His child.
The future proved that Moses spoke the truth.
" The heart of Pharaoh was hardened, neither would
he let the children of Israel go." That was most
natural. Indeed the whole story is full of human
nature, so full that it is really a parable of what is
happening all the time. It is this value of it which
I want to use this morning. I want to make it my
text while I try to point out the danger of the new-
est religious life of our own time. If I am not mis-
taken, this story of Pharaoh and especially these
words which Moses speaks to him, contain the truth
which they are much in danger of forgetting, and in
much need of remembering, who rejoice most loudly
in those changed aspects of the Christian faith which
belong to these present days.
The general character of the change which has
taken and is taking place in Christian faith is plain.
Under many forms as it applies itself to many
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY. 339
special doctrines it is one in spirit. It is a desire to
escape from the severer, stricter, more formal, more
exacting statements of truth and duty, and to lay
hold of the gentler, more gracious, more spiritual,
more indulgent representations of God and of what
He asks of man. I shall have occasion to say before
long how deeply I sympathize with this great change
in the aspect of faith, how truly I believe that in it
there is prophesied a new and richer coming of the
kingdom of the Lord of love and life. But now at
first I ask you only to note the fact, which no
thoughtful and observant man can fail to see, and
then to observe how many men among us, how we
all perhaps sometimes, are led on to attribute a
power to such a change in men's thoughts of God
and of His ways which no mere change of thought,
however it may be from the less to the more true,
ever can possess. We glory in the fuller spirit of
the New Testament which pervades our religion.
The stern judge of the older dispensation is lost be-
hind the gracious and merciful presence of the
Christ. Pity is more than judgment, sympathy
more than authority, persuasion more than rebuke,
in the God of whom men are thinking, of whom
men are preaching now. As we talk thus it some-
times seems to us as if the work of religion for the
world and for us would be accomplished when these
new and glorious ideas shall have become supreme
and universal. Sin will be conquered, man will be
saved, when the old, severe theology shall be en-
tirely dethroned and men hear everywhere the truth
of truths, that " God is love." At such a time it
340 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
seems to me that some one ought to speak the very
words that Moses spoke to Pharaoh, " The thunder
shall cease, neither shall there be any more hail.
But as for thee and thy servants I know that ye will
not yet fear the Lord God." The mercy, the pity,
the tenderness, the long-suffering, the humanness of
God — these shall be shown to man as man has never
seen them, but be sure that not these aspects of God
nor any others of themselves, not this theology nor
any other of itself, can make men good, can turn men
from their sins, can do away with the fundamental
necessities of personal struggle, personal consecra-
tion, personal holiness in human lives. It seems to
me that men are very much in danger now of attrib-
uting to a liberal and spiritual theology that same
impossible virtue which men in other times attributed
to a hard and formal theology, — a virtue which really
no theology can possess, the virtue of itself to make
men good and strong and pure. Against that dan-
ger I want to warn you and myself. To many an
ardent, many a noisy champion of the love of God
as against His sternness and His wrath, it seems as
if God must be sadly saying, " Yes, I will show you
all my love. But yet I know that you will not fear
me."
One striking illustration of what I am saying
meets us very often. Constantly in New England,
which a generation ago was full of the sternest
teachings, I hear the lamentations of men who were
brought up under the Puritan theology. I have
grown familiar to weariness with the self-excuse of
men who say, " Oh, if I had not had the terrors of
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY. 34I
the Lord so preached to me when I was a boy, if I
had not been so confronted with the woes of hell
and the awfulness of the judgment day, I should be
religious to-day, I should have been religious long
ago." My friends, I think I never hear a meaner or
a falser speech than that. Men may believe it when
they say it — I suppose they do — but it is not true.
It is unmanly, I think. It is throwing on their
teaching and their teachers, or their fathers and
their mothers, the fault which belongs to their own
neglect, because they never have taken up the earnest
fight with sin and sought through every obstacle for
truth and God. It has the essential vice of dog-
matism about it, for it claims that a different view of
God would have done for them that which no view
of God can do, that which must be done, under any
system, any teaching, by humility and penitence
and struggle and self-sacrifice. Without these no
teaching saves the soul. With these, under any
teaching, the soul must find its Father.
Again I say that I believe the new is better than
the old. The new theology in all its great general
characteristics I love with all my heart; I rejoice to
preach it as Moses must have felt his heart fill with
joy as he went forth to pray for the calm sky and
the stilled thunder. But just because I love it and
believe in it, I want to say most earnestly that there
is no essential power in it to release man from the
hard and inexorable necessities and duties by which
alone man treads his unbelief and sin under his feet
and comes to God.
I hold, then, this, that the change which so de-
342 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
lights man's imagination and kindles his ambition,
the change from the arbitrary to the essential, from
the awful to the gentle, from the narrow to the
broad, from the formal to the spiritual, is always a
change from the easy to the hard, and not, as men
are always choosing to think it, from the hard to
the easy. It is so everywhere. In government, the
old method of despotism breaks open and the new
life of popular freedom comes forth. Men shout as
if the race were saved. Now all men will be happy !
Now all men will be good! What are we finding ?
Alas for him whom any dangers that proceed from
liberty would drive to think for one base moment of
shutting back the tide of freedom behind the hard
barriers of personal authority again ! His folly is
only made harmless by its hopelessness. But alas
also for the nation or the citizen which does not
learn that to live in freedom is harder than to live as
a slave, that liberty of itself makes no people and
no man prosperous or good, that self-restraint and
honesty and generosity and independence, if they
are the crown upon the head of a benignant despot-
ism, are the very life-blood in the veins of a self-
governing republic. Or think of education. We used
to dictate arbitrary schemes of study to our college
students and to what we chose to call our educated
men ; now we throw open the whole field of learning
and say to the studying man, ay, even to the sopho-
more in our colleges, " Go study what you will, and
if you learn it we will call you learned." Is the
student's task easier or harder than it used to be ?
Alas for him who thinks it easier, who thinks that
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY. 343
the license to be learned where he will has any way
annulled the everlasting law that knowledge only
comes by toil ! Happy for him who sees at once
that the new liberty demands of him severer self-
control and a more conscientious just because a freer
work! The methods of dictation and despotism
attempted less but they were more likely to do what
they attempted than the free selection and the per-
sonal self-government are to attain their higher
ends. Where the boy turns into the man, where
the drudge turns into the scholar, where the slave
steps forth to liberty, where the Eden of guarded
virtue opens into the world of self-deciding moral
life, there always the easy changes to the hard,
there always the wise soul hears anew the old words
of God, " Thorns also and thistles shall it bring
forth to thee," and " In the sweat of thy face shalt
thou eat bread. ' '
But let us come more directly to our subject.
The change of which I spoke in the character of
religious faith shows everywhere, and I want to
follow it into some of its special manifestations. So
we shall best perceive the danger which I said be-
longs to it. In the first place, then, it involves a
change in the whole conception of the religious mo-
tive. What is it that religiously makes men good
and keeps them from being bad ? It used to be, no
doubt, the fear of the punishment that God would
send them if they sinned. It is becoming more and
more the perception of what a high life is set before
the soul if it does right, and the sight of God's love
which a loving soul dreads to offend. From fear
344 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
to love ! Not that the change is absolute, not that
there ever was a Christian faith which was not all
pervaded with the power of love, not that there ever
can be a true faith in God so loving that it shall not
be solemnized by fear, but as the prominent, the
conscious, the recognized and trusted power, it is
the love of God and not the fear of God that fills
the eye of worshipping manhood more and more.
This outbreak of protest against the dreadful doc-
trine of endless punishment is really nothing but an
utterance of the profound conviction that not by
threats of punishment, however awful and however
true, but by the promises of love, are men to be
brought into the best obedience to God.
The change which the dethronement of that dog-
ma and all the terrible theology which belonged to
it has brought, is so radical that we cannot fully
comprehend or state it, but it fills us with joy. It
has made religion a new thing for multitudes of
souls. It has swept the heavy cloud away and let
the sunlight into many a life. It has brought fer-
tility to many a desert. And the thanksgivings of
men and women who have found that their religion
may be just the love of God because He has loved
them, and that in that pure love lies their salvation,
make the song and glory of these new years of God.
No wonder if amid such joy the danger comes, no
wonder if there are men who, thinking they have
discovered that there is no hell, seem thereby to
have secured their place in heaven, as if to be in
heaven were nothing greater and better than to be
out of hell. No wonder that one hesitates, eveo
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY. 345
when he believes the truth with all his heart, to go
to certain men and declare what he believes, because
he knows that it will seem to them as if at once the
old need of struggle, the old criticalness of living
were gone with the old fear of hell ; as if some easy
way of holiness had been flung open instead of the
straight and narrow way that always has led, that
always must lead, to everlasting life. But surely if
anywhere our principle is true that the change from
the less to the greater is a change not from the hard
to the easy, but from the easy to the hard, it is true
here. Suppose I am a true believer in the old idea
of government by terror. Let it stand to me in its
blankest form, — I am trying not to sin because if I
do sin I shall go to everlasting torment. Under
that fear I study all the law and try to keep it all ; I
pray, I watch ; I give myself no rest ; never for a
moment is the hand that presses down on me re-
laxed ; never for a moment are those blazing com-
mandments lost from before my eyes. I am afraid
to disobey. No doubt the obedience that comes is
hard, and narrow, formal, and superficial, but an
obedience does come. What such a fear can do it
does. But let the liberation dawn. Let the larger
faith of love take me into its power. Let me begin
to serve God, not for His terror but for His dear-
ness. A larger, nobler, sweeter life at once ! The
sky is broader and the world is bigger ! But oh ! the
new exactingness of this new service. Oh ! the way
in which the deep affections, all unstirred before,
begin to hear the call of duty. Now they must
waken. Not the hands only, now the very heart
346 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
must obey. As much deeper as this new love lies
below that old terror, so much deeper must the new
watchfulness and scrupulousness go below the old.
Not now to escape from pain, but to be worthy of
this divine love the soul aspires. Its dangers become
far more subtle and at the same time far more dan-
gerous. A finer spiritual machinery must respond
to this finer and more spiritual power ; and struggle
comes to mean for the soul something so much more
intense that it seems as if all that it had before called
struggle were the most placid calm.
My dear friend, unless this is its efTect in us our
milder conception of God's present and future deal-
ing with the souls of men, however true it may be
in itself, is a curse to us and not a blessing. Unless
it does this for us we are making the truth of God
have the power of a lie. We ought to be afraid of
any theology which tampers with the sacredness of
duty and the awfulness of life. I would far rather
be a believer in the most material notions of eternal
penalty and get out of that belief the hard and
frightened solemnity and scrupulousness which it
has to give, than to hold all the sweet broad truth
to which God is now leading us and have it make life
seem a playtime and the world a game. No ! What
one wants to plead with every soul whom he sees
going, whom perhaps he himself is trying to lead
into the new motive of love, away from the old mo-
tive of fear, is this : Remember that you are going
where duty will grow not less but more imperious.
Remember that watchfulness, obedience, righteous-
ness, will mean far more deep and sacred things to
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY. 347
you there than they have meant before. Go there
expecting life and salvation to become a thousand-
fold more solemn. Go there expecting sin to be
vastly more dreadful. O you who glory in your
new faith, see what it asks of you ! See what you
must be to be worthy of it ! See what a deeper
vigilance, what a more utter consecration, there
must be in this new soul to which it has been shown
that he is to be saved not by the fear but by the
love of God !
I turn to another somewhat different development
of the freer — what some, no doubt, will call the
looser — religious thinking which pervades our time,
that which concerns the whole matter of belief in
doctrine. Orthodoxy used to mean the intelligent
and convinced reception of a large number of clearly
defined propositions about God and Christ and man.
Orthodoxy now, for many men, has come to mean
a sympathetic entrance into the spirit and genius of
Christianity, and especially a cordial personal loyalty
to Jesus. I know that here there is a true and great
advance. I know the man who seeks to understand
his Saviour is nearer to the New Testament than the
man who merely learns his creed? In all those
sacred pages the idea of doctrinal orthodoxy is
very vague. In the Gospels it hardly shows at all.
The idea of personal sympathy and personal loyalty
is everything. " Whom say ye that I am ? " that is
the ceaseless question. And so I know that a man
has come nearer to the mind of Christ when he
thinks that his work in life is to enter into the genius
of Christian truth and to be the friend and disciple
348 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY,
of Jesus, rather than to satisfy himself of the truth
of many inferential propositions drawn from what
Christ and his apostles said. But here, again, the
believer in this new and better method is all wrong
if he thinks that it opens to him an easier or less
exacting spiritual experience than that in which he
used to live when he was the champion of doctrines
and of creeds. It needs a greater man to be a Chris-
tian in the spirit than in the letter of the faith. He
who undertakes it must be prepared for deeper men-
tal experiences, for doubts beside which the old
doubts shall seem child's play, for a complete obedi-
ence of which he never dreamed till he began to seek
not only the truth of Christ but Christ the truth.
For all experience tells us that a man may pretty
easily believe any statement of truth which he wants
to believe. Intent, exclusive fixing of the mind
upon it will almost certainly make it seem true.
But how much more than that is needed when I
have to enter into the soul of a great system of sal-
vation like Christianity, or to make myself the disci-
ple, with a discipleship that shall renew me into the
likeness of a spiritual Lord like Christ. What repres-
sion of myself, what independence of my fellow-men,
what opening of the inmost secret places of my life
to Him! I know that I could convince a man that
a certain theory of the atonement was true, that
what Christ did for man upon the Cross was just
exactly this or this, with far less strain upon His
spiritual power, with far less calling out of his pro-
foundest faith, than I should need in order to make
him know the mystery of the Christhood in which
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY. 349
our dear Lord not merely wrought but was the per-
fect atonement for our sins. One would need a
persuaded mind ; the other needs a quickened soul,
alive with all the same purposes that filled the soul
of Jesus.
Therefore it is, I say, that the new faith demands
a larger man and a profounder belief than that
which went before. Oh, do not think that because
men no longer dare to ask you whether you believe
this or that doctrine and to decide whether or not
you are a Christian by your answer, that therefore
belief has grown a slight and easy thing. As their
poor questions fade and die away, all the more deep
and awful in the soul's ear grows the profounder
question of the Lord Himself which they used to
silence, " What think ye of me ? " " Whom say ye
that I am ? " Be sure that if you are to be a worthy
man of the new faith, a worthy Christian of the new
time, your heart must be strong to a more heroic
capacity of believing what men call impossible.
Your thread of unbelief in the new sight you have
of its spiritual essence must be far more deep, and
your closet must witness far more earnest pleadings
with the God of faith than any that the old days of
dogmatism ever saw.
3. I take another illustration from the field of
man's relation to his fellow-man in spiritual things.
It was a great advance when gradually the idea of
spiritual directorship narrowed its range before the
progress of the idea of personal responsibility. Once
the whole Christian world teemed with confessionals.
Certain chosen souls sat by the highways of all life,
350 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
often with the tenderest solicitude, often too with
wondrous skill and experience, all purified and made
the more acute by wondrous sympathy, to tell all
their puzzled brethren how to unsnarl their skeins of
tangled life, what was their duty, in which way they
ought to go. It belonged to all kinds of churches
of every creed, of every name. That day is past
over a very large proportion of the Christian world.
Wherever it has passed it never can come back
again. Here and there some men who dread the
dangers of the new life for their brethren are drag-
ging out the long-overthrown confessional from the
rubbish of the ages under which it lies and trying to
set its shattered and unsteady framework in its place
again ; or else they go and borrow one from that
part of the Christian world which has not yet dis-
owned its use. Here and there some puzzled soul
cries out for it and begs the Church to take a power
which her Lord never gave her, and tell it just how
it shall sail its most bewildered life. These are
anachronisms and exceptions. The world in which
we live, the world of progress, the modern world,
the modern man wants no confessional and asks the
Church to give him not minute rules of duty, but
great inspirations and broad principles of life. For
the application of those principles, for the special
life he ought to live from day to day, from hour to
hour, he appeals to his own conscience. Is the mod-
ern man right ? Indeed he is! The life that he
alone must carry up to God at last, he alone must
carry through this world of temptation now. He is
doing a noble act, an act to which his manhood
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY. 35 1
binds him and in which his manhood is asserted
when he goes up to the church, or to the priest, and
says, " Give me my life, for I must live it. Help
me, advise me, inspire me all you can, but give me
my life for I must live it." Only, it is of infinite
importance into what sort of hands he takes that
life of his, whether into hands trembhng with anxi-
ety or into hands greedy and coarse with pride. I
think that to the best souls of our time there is,
with all the exhilaration that comes of the sense of
freedom, a pathos that is almost sad about this new
consciousness of personal independence, which no
man can disown, with which the light souls play as
children might play with battle flags, but in which
lies unfolded a possibiHty of tragedy which no man
has begun to fathom. The best souls seem to come
to life as the morning comes to the world, all flushed
and bright with hope, but pausing, lingering, creep-
ing up the sky as if the day's work it saw before it
was too great. Oh, how much easier to find my
priest and have him tell me what I ought to do than
to seek it and find it for myself in all this maze of
doubt, hidden under all this heap of passion, preju-
dice, and pride ! Certainly no man is worthy to live
in these new days, and be a modern man in the pure
church where no spiritual directorship is tolerated,
who dares to be frivolous, who is not constantly
and almost overwhelmingly, aware that to guide
one's own life is not and cannot be an easy thing,
who is not made all the more humbly dependent
upon God by the independence of his fellow-men
which his soul steadfastly claims.
352 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
It would be interesting, if we had time, to trace
the clear illustration of our truth in relation to the
institutions of religion and the use that men make
of them. There, too, a freer method reigns.
There, too, the freer method is an advance upon the
stricter method just in proportion as it secures more
fully the purposes for which the institutions all exist.
For instance, there is a less constrained observance
of Sunday. There are larger notions of what con-
stitutes the sacredness of the Day of Rest. Is it a
gain or a loss, this departure from the severer rules
in which we lived some twenty years ago ? As
Christians we can give but one answer : It is a gain
so far as it makes a more reasonable, a more volun-
tary, a brighter and freer religion possible. If it
does that, because it does that, we are glad of the
new spirit that fills the Lord's Day. We rejoice
that its distinct difference from the Jewish Sabbath
has been distinctly shown, because thereby the
chance is opened for us to gain perfectly out of our
Lord's Day what the Jew could only gain most im-
perfectly by his most scrupulous Sabbatical pro-
priety. The larger liberty of Sunday is beautiful to
us because it means not the throwing away, but the
true keeping of the Lord's Day by the man for
whom it was made. There is a Sunday conceivable
on which no Hebrew shadow rests, a Sunday full of
spontaneousness and delight, a Sunday when the
soul honors its Lord not merely by turning aside to
some fenced and protected regions of its life where
alone it seems to it that He abides, but when it
touches the familiar things of the other days with
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY. 353
new hands and looks on them with new enlightened
eyes, and finds them sacred and full of light, — a
Sunday whose proper occupations are broadly and
freely dictated by the soul's own consciousness of
spiritual needs, a Sunday when men shut their shops
not by a law of the State but by the law of God in
their hearts, His everlasting law that the life is more
than meat, — a Sunday when the duty of the human
child to know his divine Father, that duty transfig-
ured to a privilege, fills every hour with fresh and
eager and ingenious exercise of the best powers that
the children of God possess. Every relaxing of the
iron laws of Sunday ought to be the opening of
the sacred day towards this divine ideal. Oh, let the
men who want the Sunday made more free, be sure,
as they are Christian men, that they are asking it in
the interest of an elevated and not of a degraded
spirituality. Let them know that it is not an easier
but a harder Sunday that they ask, a Sunday more
exacting in the demands it makes upon the personal
conscience, upon the spiritual ambition, upon the
constant, unsleeping vigilance of the soul which on
the free day would come freely to the presence of
God to its own best life. The man who clearly sees
and solemnly accepts that responsibility has a relig-
ious right as against every church and teacher to
claim the full freedom of his holy day.
All these same things are true about all religious
observances, about coming to church, about stated
times of prayer, about free intercourse with every
kind of worship. In every case the tight, hard rule
does to a large extent accomplish what it undertakes.
354 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
but it cannot undertake the best. He who launches
out into a freer life sets sail for higher things, but he
ought to know all the dangers of the voyage and be
ready for all the patience and watchfulness and sac-
rifice it will require. If he has faced all that, then
let him sail, but not till then. That is the true law
of all liberty.
I think that no man carefully reads the words of
Christ and does not feel how full his soul is always
of this truth which I have tried to preach to-day.
He came to lead his people out to freedom. He
came to show the love of God. I think that as He
stands there in the porch of the Hebrew temple
preaching His Christian Gospel we can often seem
to see upon His face and to hear trembling in His
voice a deep anxiety. He evidently dreads lest to
these people freedom and love should seem to be the
abrogation and not the consummation of the Law.
" Think not that I am come to destroy, I am not
come to destroy but to fulfil," these are His earnest
warning words. The broad is more exacting than
the narrow ; the complete makes larger demands
than the partial; how He is always insisting upon
that! It was said by them of old time " Thou shalt
not forswear thyself. But I say unto you, swear
not at all." " Ye have heard that it hath been
said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but
I say unto you resist not evil." Everywhere He
is so anxious that His Gospel should seem to be
not the corruption but the transfiguration of duty.
That the broad is more exacting than the narrow,
that the complete makes larger demands than the
THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY. 355
partial, that no theology is really an advance on
what has gone before it unless it deepens the sense
of personal duty and the awfulness of living, — these
are the convictions which we want to see firmly set
in the minds and consciences of men ; and then there
is no need to fear, — nay, we may rejoice in and be
thankful for every sign of liberal thought and action,
every claim of personal freedom which men make for
the belief and worship of their souls.
There is a picture which one dares to hope is be-
ing realized in many a brave and faithful spirit in
these days of ours. A true and earnest man longs
for a larger view of God and for a chance to live
more freely in His service. By and by he finds that
he can have such a chance, that it belongs to him as
God's child. He takes it joyfully. He lives in
larger doctrine, in more spiritual relation to all ordi-
nances ; and yet as he grows more free he grows
more scrupulously, more eagerly obedient. Every
wish of God, discerned by free spiritual sympathy,
holds him like a law, and his daily delight lies in
finding how strong is love to do the work which
once he thought could not be done except by fear.
Every new theological breadth means a new obliga-
tion to be pure and true and holy. It is as if the
world had been hooped with iron and kept shut up
in a vacuum till some day it was flung freely abroad
into its atmosphere, and found its iron hoops no
longer needed, only because its new liberty held it
so close into a sphere. That is the picture of the
best progress of earth, and the promise of the best
blessedness of heaven.
356 THE MITIGATION OF THEOLOGY.
We have wandered far enough from the old banks
of the Nile where stands King Pharaoh vainly prom-
ising that if the thunder and the hail will only cease
he will be good. But I hope in all our morning's
wandering we have been learning that the ceasing
of hail and thunder of itself makes no man good,
that no mitigation of theology, no truer presenta-
tion of God, no fading out of old threats, no relax-
ing of discipline, however they may sweetly tempt
men to a higher life, can ever abolish that which i&
the first law and the highest privilege of human life,
the everlasting need of moral struggle, of patient
watchfulness over ourselves, of resolute fight with
ourselves and of humble prayer to God, and of
brotherly devotion to our brethren which alone
makes us truly men.
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