The Origin of Evil: And Other Sermons

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ANDOVOJURVAID UBRARY

[Hlar^Dird) IQ)@p©§il%©irs^

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nin'

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THE OEIGIN OF EVIL

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THE OEIGIN OF EVIL

OTHEE SEEMONS

• Truth is the property of God ; the pursuit of
truth is what belongs to man."

— Von Miilkr.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MDCCCLXXIX

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All Eights reserved

TEB 2 S 1908

— L I D S A 12 Y. -

S'f, to 9

L

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CONTENTS.

PAGE

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, 1

THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING

1 13

II 26

III . .40

IV. ....... 53

PRAYER, 65

"what is truth 1" 75

MANLINESS —

I .87

II 97

IIL 107

the GREATNESS OF MAN, 121

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VI

Contents,

FAITH, ....

Christ's plan of salvation,

WORKS, ....

habit, ....

the harvest of character,

the supernaturalness of naturej

the naturalness of the supernatural,

"the argument from design,"

the vision of god,

punishment, ....

the fatherhood of god,

131
141
152
161
170
181
192
202
212
222
232

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The Origin of Evil.

" The Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the
garden thou mayest freely eat ; but of the tree of the know-
ledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it : for in the day
that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."— Genesis ii
16, 17.

lllY purpose in the present sermon is to show
^^■^ that God is not to be held responsible for
the existence of evil.

I shall not be able to discuss the Manichean
or optimist views — ^both of which seem to me
more or less eiToneous — but I shall assume the
ordinary opinions (which, probably, yoi; all hold)
that evil is a reality, that it is hateful to God,
and that He is more powerful than any other
being in the universe. How is it, then, let us
ask, that evil exists ?

Most theologians tell us that it must have
been permitted by God for some wise purpose ;
but that it is impossible to imagine what that
A

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2 The Origin of EviL

purpose can have been, and that therefore its
existence calls for the exercise of an unlimited
amount of faith. In other words, they talk
as if reason, apart from faith, would suggest
that God ought to have prevented evil, and
that had He done so we should have been
much more fortunately situated than we are.
Now reason, I X^&.^ it, teaches no such thing.
It shows us (on the contrary) that the preven-
tion of evil would have made our world not
better than it is, but worse. So far, at any rate,
as our present subject is concerned, reason and
faith are at one in maintaining that our world is
the best of all possible worlds.

I must ask you, first, to notice that God works
under certain restrictions, conditions, or limita-
tions. We say He can do all things; but by
this we should only mean all things that are
consistent with His own nature. He cannot lie;
He cannot be unkind. Some theologians I know
(notably Paley and Occam) have maintained that
lying and unkindness are only wrong because God
has forbidden them. Occam said that if God
had commanded us to hate Him, it would have
been our duty to do so. But the most sober
theologians have agreed in maintaining that God
could not make wrong right or right wrong. Dr

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The Origin of EviL 3

Ralph Cudworth has shown very clearly, in his
book on Eternal and Immutable Morality, that
the distinction between right and wrong is a dis-
tinction which is not made but accepted by God.
This distinction God could not alter even if He
would. He is good and God because He would
not alter it even if He could. - Well, then, this
amounts to saying that God, like ourselves, is
under moral obligations. There are other condi-
tions, also, imder which God works. He cannot,
e. g,y make two and two into five. He can create
a fifth thing ; but that is different. He cannot,
once more, make the same thing both to be
and not to be at the same time. He can anni-
hilate it ; but then it has ceased to be. He can
recreate it ; but then it no longer is not. Now
I want to show you that, in regard to the exist-
ence of evil, God was under a similar limitation,
because He could not have prevented it without
at the same time destroying the possibility of
goodness. If I can succeed in proving this,
I shall have proved that God could not have
prevented evil at all, consistently with His own
wisdom and perfection.

There are only three conceivable ways in
which evil could have been prevented. God
might have refrained from creating beings cap-

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4 The Origin of EviL

able of sinning — i.e., He might have created only-
inanimate objects and the lowest kinds of ani-
mals; or (2), having created beings capable of
sinning. He might have kept them from being
tempted ; or (3), He might have allowed them
to be tempted, and then have prevented them
by force from yielding to temptation. Now, no
doubt, in one sense, God could have done all of
these things — i.e.. He had power enough. But
in another sense He could not have done any
one of them ; they would have been incompat-
ible with His desire to create the best con-
ceivable world. Had He destroyed the possi-
bility of evil by any of these expedients. He
would, as we shall see, have destroyed at the
same time aU possibility of good.

1st, Suppose He had resorted to the first of the
three expedients I have mentioned. If He had
not created beings capable of sinning, He could
not have created any capable of doing right, for
the two things inevitably go together. He only
is able to do right who is able at the same time,
if he please, to do wrong. He only can stand,
in a moral sense, who is also free to fall. Let
me give you a very simple illustration. I wish
this desk to hold my sermon-case, and it holds it.
Do I thank it and feel grateful to it, and call

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The Origin of Evil. 5

it good or kind for obeying me ? No. Why ?
Because it cannot disobey ; and for this reason, it
cannot properly be said to obey. Or, again, take
the case of the lower animals. At first sight it
might seem as if some animals could lay more
claim than many men can do to the possession
of a conscience. But it is probable, after all,
that their best actions are done merely from an
instinctive and irresistible impulse of affection.
They can also, of course, be kept from doing
certain things by the knowledge that if they
do them they will be punished. But as they
have no language, properly so called, it is not
likely they could ever have reached the con-
ception of moral good; and without this there
can be no such thing as right or wrong conduct.
Animals may be taught not to steal, by being
whipped if they do steal; but they cannot be
taught to refrain from it on the ground of its
being an infringement of another's rights. For
these reasons they cannot do wrong; tod for
these reasons it is equally clear they cannot do
right.

Beings incapable of sin must be ignorant of
the difference between right and wrong, or must
be destitute of the power of choice, or must
always be impelled by irresistible instincts. In

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6 The Origin of Evil.

none of these cases could their conduct be really
moral or right. Had God, therefore, created
only beings of this description. He would, it is
true, have prevented evil ; but He would, at
the same time, also have prevented good. No-
thing higher could have been called into ex-
istence than inanimate objects and brutes.

2d, Suppose that God, after giving us a moral
nature, had shielded us from all temptation — what
would have been the result ? Why, this ? We
could never have attained to the possession of
a good character, for that comes only through
the conquest of temptation. We might have been
innocent as animals but never upright as men.
You mothers, as you look into the faces of
your infants, sometimes wish that you could
always shield them from the deceits of the world,
the flesh, and the devil. It is a natural, but an
unwise, wish. Their present innocence is a
quality they possess in common with stocks
and stones. If they are ever to rise into the
moral sphere, they must be tried and tempted.
You should rather wish for them victory over
temptation, — temptation no matter how fierce
and long protracted, no matter though it call
for resistance " even imto blood," so long only
as it is conquered at the last, ^here must come

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The Origin of Evil. 7

moral conflict, painful no doubt, but glorious
to all who are to deserve the name of men, still
more to all who are to be fujcounted worthy of
being called sons of God. Let the trees of
which Adam and Eve were allowed to eat
represent lawful pleasures, the tree of which
they were forbidden to eat represent unlawful
pleasures, and the command of God represent
the voice of conscience, then the account of
Adam's fall will be for ns a literal history of
our own. Temptation has in our case led to
a faU, to many falls. We have all fallen, and
are aU constantly falling, by eating forbidden
fruit. But, thank God, the temptations which
have led to our fall may lead to our rising again,
ay, and rising to a height to which, apart from
temptation, we could never have attained. It
would have been better for us, no doubt, tohave
been tempted without falling ; but it is better to
have fallen, and to be able to rise again, than
never to have been tempted at all. All moral
creatures in the universe must be tempted, or
their moral nature would be thrown away upon
them. Even Christ had to be made perfect through
suflfering ; and much of this suflfering, we may be
sure, arose from temptations to evil. There is a
glory possible for you and me, my brother —

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8 The Origin of Evil.

a regal godlike glory which, but for temptation,
could never have been ours, any more than it
could be attained by zoophytes or machines.
" To him that overcoToethl' says Christ, " will
I grant to sit with me on my throne, even as
I also overcame, and am set down with my
Father on His throne."

But, 3d, it is said God might have forcibly
prevented man from yielding to temptation, either
by giving him a will strong enough inevitably to
resist, or by compelling him on every occasion
to use his will in the right way. To say this
is, however, to talk nonsense ; for it is the essen-
tial nature of a will that it can choose either of
two alternative and opposite courses. No one
can be compelled to use his will in a particular
way. That would be to deprive him of his will
altogether. So long as he has a will, there is in
virtue thereof a choice of conduct open to him ;
for will is but another name for the power to
choose. God could of course have refrained
from making us free, but then we should not
have been men, we should only have been ani-
mals or machines. God could at any moment
deprive us of our will, and compel us to act in
some definite manner. But we should then,
for the time, cease to be men. A moral agent

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The Origin of EviL 9

must be a free agent ; and a free agent cannot
have his will used for him or tied up for him by
another. If God used a man's will for him, or
prevented him from using it in the way he pre-
ferred, the man would be no longer responsible
for his conduct ; and so he would be no better
than a piece of unreasoning matter. If you
keep your boy's hands out of the cupboard by
tying them behind his back, it is quite true
that he will not steal the jam ; but is there any
worth in his honesty ? Not a bit. While his
hands are tied, and so far as the cupboard is
concerned, he, as a moral agent, does not exist.
He cannot d.o wrong, and therefore he cannot
do right. So that we can agree with Spinoza,
though on different grounds, that " to ask why
God did not give Adam a more perfect will, is
as absurd as to ask why the circle has not been
endowed with the properties of the sphere."
God could not have given Adam a more perfect
will. Every will is a perfect will. The perfec-
tion of a will consists, not in being able to
choose only one course, but in being able to
choose either of two alternative and opposite
courses. Eight-doing is right and praiseworthy
jv;st hecavse it implies that wrong might have
been done but was not. John Stuart Mill ar-

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lo The Origin of Evil.

gues in his 'Posthumous Essays' that if God
desired all His creatures to be virtuous, He
would have made them so, had His power been
sufficiently great. As you are aware, Mill de-
nied the freedom of will, and this denial leads
him here, as elsewhere, to use words which are
absolutely destitute of meaning. The expression,
" making a man virtuous," is a contradiction in
terms. God cannot make a man virtuous;
and the fact that He cannot do so argues no
more limitation of His power, than does the fact
that He cannot act wrongly or inconsistently
with His own nature. A being can be compelled,
of course, to refrs^ from evil, but if he be so
compelled, there is no moral value in his refrain-
ing. Compelling him therefore to refrain from
evil is not compelling him to be virtuous. A
virtuous character cannot be bestowed on a
man by a creative fiat from without; it must
be the outcome of his own free will within.
Hence, what Mill, in the same connection, speaks
of as such an inexplicable mystery, becomes
quite simple if we recognise human freedom.
It is possible for a man "to produce, by a suc-
cession of efforts, what God himself had no other
means of creating," — to produce, namely, a good
character. " Be ye holy," we read, not " suffer

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The Origin of Evil. 1 1

ourselves to be made holy." If we are to be
holy at all, it can only be by a succession of
voluntary efforts.

Liability to evil, then, is inevitably involved
in the possibility of goodness, which must be the
result of choice. A forced goodness is a con-
tradiction in terms. There is no difference in
moral value between constrained obedience and
free disobedience. Hence responsibility for evil
rests not with God, but simply and solely with the
free agents who have sinned. A good God must
have been under the necessity, so to speak, of
creating beings capable of goodness. Such beings
must be free. When once they were created, it
was not for God, but for them, to decide whether
there should be evil in the world or no. Alas I
they have decided that there should. But even
so, a world without any human goodness in it,
without any noble Christlike men and women,
would have been infinitely inferior to our own,
in spite of all its wickedness. The goodness of
one righteous man will compensate for the wicked-
ness of many wicked. Sodom, we are told, would
have been spared for the sake of ten good men ;
Jerusalem for the sake of one. So that, since
much evil can be compensated for by a little
good, — since the prevention of evil would have

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1 2 The Origin of Evil.

been the prevention of good, — since evil, accord-
ing to the testimony of history, is necessarily
involved in good, as shadows are the invariable
accompaniments of light, — it is as absurd to
wish that evil had been prevented as to try and
do away with light for the sake of getting rid of
shadows.

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The Mystery of Suffering.

L

'It became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all
things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain
Df their salvation perfect through sufferings." — Hebbews ii. 10.

TN this sermon I shall endeavour to show you
-^ in the abstract that perfection of character
can only be brought about by means of suffering.
In the two following sermons, I shall ask you to
notice how the sufferings of Christ tended to
His perfection; and in a fourth I shall take a
bird's eye view of the whole subject, and notice
some remaining diflBlculties.

We have got used to the phrase — "Perfect
through sufferings," but how strange it would
appear to any one who read it for the first time.
" Perfect through sufferings ! " he would say ;
"surely the writer has made a mistake. He
must mean, perfect through joy. Suffering can

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1 4 The Mystery of Suffering,

only make men imperfect." The atheist points
to the groans and anguish of universal nature,
and says, " Look there ! how can there be a
loving God when all this misery is allowed —
misery which must be at once the sign and the
cause of imperfection ? " And I am sorry to say
there have been a great many theologians who
have represented suffering as a sort of vindictive
retaliation on the part of God, to compensate
Himself for the fall of Adam. I need not tell
you, I hope, that this latter view is quite as in-
compatible as the atheistic with Christ's doctrine
of the Fatherhood of God. Let us see, now, if
we cannot reach some conclusions more satis-
factory than these. Let us see if it is not
possible for reason to discover a necessity, a
usefulness and a blessedness, in suffering. If
I can show that it is necessary for the per-
fecting of character, then, since a perfect char-
acter is the best of all possessions, I shall have
proved that suffering is our greatest blessing and
our kindest friend. Let us look into this matter
a little.

In the first place, suffering acts as a check
upon our evil tendencies. Here we may be met
with the objection that if God had not allowed

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The Mystery of Suffering. 1 5

evil to exist, the suffering now required to check
it would have been unnecessary. We disposed
of this difficulty, however, when we were con-
sidering the origin of evil. We then saw that
the existence of evil could only have been pre-
vented by means which would, at the same time,
have prevented the existence of good. And
since much evil can be compensated for by a
little good, the prevention of evil would have
been an irrational and ungodlike act.

Evil, then, being a necessary fact, some suffer-
ing is also a necessity. So far as suffering ful-
fils this purpose, it is manifestly the outcome of
love. I say manifestly, and yet the Puritan and
Calvinistic theologians never saw it. They
erred, in my judgment, in representing God
as justice rather than as love ; whereas, accord-
ing to the teaching of Christ, God's justice
is but one phase of His love. All He does
apparently in justice He really does in love.
It is just that the sinner should be punished
for his sin. Why ? Because in no other way
can he be made to give up his sin; and this
is the consummation Love desires. The suf-
fering which follows sin is, I take it, a token,
not of justice, which can only, be appeased by

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1 6 The Mystery of Suffering.

wreaking out a certain quantity of agony as
an equivalent for a certain quantity of sin, but
it is the outcome of an infinitely tender love.
Since this is the case, suffering, so far as it
corrects evil, is not an argument against
either the Divine power or beneficence, but is
actually an argument strongly demonstrative of
loth.

But it is needless to say there is an enormous
amount of suffering in the world which cannot
be intended for the punishment of sin, inasmuch
as it has to be borne by men, women, and chil-
dren quite out of proportion to the sins which
they have committed; ay, very often they are
called upon to suffer because they are less sinful
than their neighbours. We must cast about,
therefore, and see if we cannot discover some
other use in suffering in addition to the cor-
rection of eviL I think we can. I think we
may find that it tends to the perfecting of char-
acter, not merely indirectly, by checking evil
tendencies, but directly, by developing good
ones. Shakespeare, the profoundest of aU stu-
dents of human nature, who knew better than
any one else has ever done what made or
marred men, says (you remember) in 'As You
Like it:'—

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The Mystery, of Suffering, v 1 7

** Sweet are the uses of adversity ;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head."

There are many ways, it seems to me, in
which suffering tends to the improvement of
character. Look, in the first place, at the ad-
vantages to be derived from long and painful
struggles for success. The road to success, it
has been well said, lies through a forest of
difficulties ; and this forest cannot be penetrated
without a certain amount of suffering. But
this is well. Good fortune and prosperity are
not worth much unless they have been achieved
in spAe of obstacles. Many are the advantages
of blue blood, but the man who has it not may
receive compensation. He who " was born mud
and dies marble " has something in him better
than blood. He has learnt to labour, to endure,
to wait, to conquer. He has learnt, in Long-
fellow's words, "to suffer and be strong;" and
all these lessons, acquired in much pain and
weariness, have helped to make him a higher
type of man. I have been told, again and again,
by successful merchants, how glad they were that
they began life at the bottom of the scale, —
that they swept floors and cleaned windows, that
for years they got up early and went to bed late,

B

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1 8 The Mystery of Suffering.

and worked very hard for very small wages.
Their successful struggles for success have given
them a self-reliance, a self-respect, a strength
and a nobleness of character, which they could
scarcely otherwise have attained. In fact, to be
bom at the top of the tree, as it is called in
common parlance, would be a tremendous mis-
fortune for a man, were it not that the name is a
misnoiner. There is no top of the tree for a finite
being. Existence for the king, as for the peasant,
ought to mean unceasing progress onwards and
upwards ; and therefore there is hope for a man,
Twtwithstanding the fact of his having been bom
into a comfortable or exalted sphere. John Stuart
Mill argues in his ' Posthumous Essays * that this
would be a far better world if all nations and
individuals were in possession of everything the
heart could wish. Well it might be a very
pleasant world for animals, at that rate, but not
for men. It seems to me far more sublime
for races, as for individuals, to struggle up to
perfection, — through and in spite of obstacles,
temptations, and sufferings, — than to have been
created perfect at the first. The perfection that
is stmggled for is worth something when at-
tained. It is far sweeter than the good fortime
that comes without an effort ; and the very en-

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The Mystery of Suffering. 1 9

deavour to attain it has been productive of the
greatest good. In point of fact, the highest kind
of perfection — ^viz., perfection of character — must
be struggled for. The only sense in which God
could create a perfect man is in the sense of
creating him free from sin. A perfect character
cannot be given to a man ; he must work it out
for himself. Strength, of course, with all it in-
volves, is an element of perfect character. And
how is this strength to be developed without
suffering? without that amount of suffering, at
any rate, which attends the battling with ad-
verse circumstances ? Our character could no
more be strong without such struggles than our
bodies could be strong without exercise. Just
as cutting down a hedge would develop one's
muscles, so overcoming a diflSculty improves
one's moral tone and increases one's moral
strength. Who best can suffer (says Milton)
best can do. It is equally true to say. Who
best have suffered, best can do. You remember
the words which Mr Greg puts into the mouth
of the " Angel DiflSculty : " —

** I am one of those bright angels
Passing earthwards, to and fro,
Heavenly messengers to mortals,
Now of gladness, now of woe.

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20 The Mystery of Suffering.

Might I bring from the Almighty
Strength from Him who maketh strong ;

Not as alms I drop the blessing, —
From my grasp it most be wrung.

Child of earth, I come to prove thee,
Hardly, sternly with thee deal ;

To mould thee in the forge and furnace,
Make thine iron tempered steel.

Come, then, and in loving warfare
Let us wrestle, tug, and strain,

Till thy breathcomes thick and gasping,
And the sweat pours down like rain.

Man with angel thus contending.
Angel-like in strength shall grow.

And the might of the Immortal
Pass into the mortal so."

Once more. It is a common saying, there is
no teacher like experience; and of all experi-
ences, that which teaches most is the experience
of suffering. It is when raised upon a cross that
a man obtains the clearest vision of God, and
sees farthest iuto the mystery of existence. This,
surely, is a good result of suffering so far as
the man himself is concerned; but that is not
all. What he has learnt, he can teach, and
teach to many. The world's greatest teachers
have usually been men of sorrow. I do not
mean whining, puling, sickly, sentimental sor-

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The Mystery of Suffering. 2 1

row, like that of Byron, or Alfred de Musset,
or Heine. The sorrow which a man feels be-
cause he cannot satisfy his greedy thirst for
pleasure is not at all ennobling. I mean sor-
row manly and heroic. And I say we may well
thank God for the existence of such suffering.
"We will not complain," says Thomas Carlyle,
" of Dante's miseries : had all gone right with
him, as he wished it, Florence would have had
another prosperous lord mayor, but the world
would have lost the ' Divina Commedia.' " Again,
we do not know much about Shakespeare's life ;
but we do know, from his sonnets, that he had
suffered vastly. The most striking instance, how-
ever, that I am acquainted with of the way in
which poets " learn in suffering what they teach
in song," is to be found in Tennyson. The only
great poem he has written is ' In Memoriam;' and
that, as you know, he wrote soon after the loss
of his friend, Arthur Hallam. See now the in-
spiration he derived from suffering. Why, there
are single stanzas in ' In Memoriam ' worth ten
thousand times as much as all his other poems
put together. And it is not only those who will
have a niche in the Temple of Fame that are
teachers of sorrow's divine lessons. I have
known women of whom the world will never

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2 2 The Mystery of Suffering.

hear, whose whole life was one protracted grief,
— who, by their patience, their faith, their cheer-
fulness, their unselfishness, have preached to all
who came near them sermons more eloquent by
far than were ever delivered from any pulpit —
sermons in comparison with which the discourses
of Chrysostom or Savonarola must have been
tame and dulL

But, lastly and chiefly, suffering is necessary
for the development in us of pity, mercy, and
self-sacrifice, which are the noblest and most
godlike of all our emotions. Even if there
had never been any sin in the world, I do
not see how these graces could have existed
in finite beings apart from the instrumental-
ity of suffering. And it seems to me they
must always be essential elements in human
perfection.

Of course on the assumption that the absence
of evil would have involved the absence of
suffering, it would follow that, if evil had never
existed, there would have been no need for
the actual exercise of the sorrowful affections.
But, I say, no character is perfect which has
not acquired the capacity for pity and mercy and
self-sacrifice. You who know how to pity, and
how to benefit another at some pain to yourself.

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The Mystery of Suffering. 23

are you not thankful that you have this know-
ledge ? It cost you suffering to learn it, it costs
you suffering to practise it. But do you grudge
the suffering? I know you do not. Spinoza
has a curious definition of suffering, as " the pas-
sage to a lower state of perfection." It is much
more frequently, I think, the passage to a higher
state of perfection. Spinoza's definition is singu-
larly inconsistent with his own acknowledgment
that the Man of Sorrows was the embodiment of
the wisdom and perfection of God. If suffering
were really a passage to a lower state of perfec-
tion, then we should have this singular anomaly,
— that. He who was always passing to a lower '
state came out at last at the highest. It is true
that suffering does sometimes embitter men, and
make them harsh and cynical. But even so, if
you come to know such persons intimately, you
wiU frequently find that there is a great depth
of tenderness in them which strangers never sus-
pect. Their cynicism is but a cloak, with which
they conceal the kindly feelings of which they
seem ashamed. As far as my own experience
goes, the noblest men and the sweetest women
I have known have been those who have suffered
most. On the other hand, we do sometimes
meet with monstrosities who have never suffered

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24 The Mystery of Suffering.

— who have never had a single ache or twinge
of body, mind, or spirit, since they were bom.
What contemptible objects they are! Words
fail one to express one's loathing for creatures
who can live, year after year, in a world so full
of woe, and their hearts never once throb with
anguish for others if not for themselves ! They
are far less human, in spite of their human form,
than many a dog. Well does Mr Greg say in
his 'Enigmas of Life' — "I have seen on the
same day brutes at the summit, and men at the
foot, of the great St Bernard, with regard to
whom no one would hesitate to assign to the
quadruped superiority in all that we call good."
Dogs ! it is a libel on many a dog to be men-
tioned in the same breath with these creatures
that are ignorant of sorrow. If I were in trouble,
I would confide my grief to the rock of flint
rather than to them. There is one thing need-
ful to make them men, and that one thing is
suffering.

Let us listen then, my friends, to Thomas Car-
lyle: "0 thou, broken with manifold merciful
afflictions, thank God for these : thank God for
these: thou hadst need of them: the self in
thee needed to be annihilated. By benignant
fever-paroxysms Life is rooting out the deep-

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seated chronic disease, and triumphs over death.
On the roaring billows of Time thou art not
engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of
Eternity." We are to be made " perfect through
sufferings."

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The Mystery of Suffering.
II.

" It became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all
things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain
of their salvation perfect through sufferings." — Hebrews ii. 10.

T PEOPOSE in this sermon to give you a slight
■*- sketch of the sufiferings of Christ. I need
not say that it will be very slight and very
incomplete; but still it will somewhat prepare
us for considering, as we shall have to do in the
next discourse, the way in which Christ's sufifer-
ings tended to His perfection.

Well, to begin with. He was poor. The trade
to which He was apprenticed would be anything
but lucrative in a small village like Nazareth.
The house in which Jesus dwelt was probably
no better than the houses of artisans in Nazareth
to-day. They consist of but one room, serving
at once for shop, kitchen, and bedroom ; they are

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lighted only by the door, and are almost destitute
of furniture. Thus, for thirty years Christ lived
in one of the smallest houses, of the most dis-
regarded village, of the most despised province
of a conquered land. His poverty must have
caused Him suffering, not so much because of
the privations it involved, — He would care
comparatively little for these, — ^but it was the
main reason why His teaching was despised by
His contemporaries. In those days to be poor
was to be contemptible. HiUel, by whom all
the Pharisees swore, had said so, — and that was
enough. " Is not this the carpenter ? " asked one.
" Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ? "
inquired another. " Out of Galilee ariseth no
prophet," said a third. All were agreed that it
was absurd to look for moral or religious instruc-
tion from a man of such low extraction and
such mean surroundings. Christ, therefore, would
constantly suffer by being reminded that men
judged Him according to His position in society,
and that this position was the greatest barrier to
His usefulness.

Again, He suffered from the physical pains to
which flesh is heir. In common with the fallen
sons of the Father, He had to earn His bread in
the sweat of His brow ; and where is the work-

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28 The Mystery of Suffering.

ing man who has not found that such earnings
sometime involve pain ? Christ suffered, too,
like other men — and more than most men —
from hunger and thirst, from exposure to heat
and cold, from sleepless nights, and from the
numberless and nameless ills that arise from
a delicate constitution. It is simply impossible
that He could have been physically strong. You
have heard the expression of a man's soul being
too much for his body. So it sometimes is ; it
consumes the body in which it dwells. A man
who thinks much (either because he is obliged
or because he cannot help it), a man who is
very intense and earnest, a man who sympathises
very deeply with the sufferings of his neighbours,
soon impairs his bodily organisation, however
strong it may at first have been. Such thoughts
and feelings are very wearing. They have
never existed, and can never exist, without
headache as well as heartache — without fre-
quent weariness and exhaustion. We read that
Jesus was weary with His journey to Samaria,
and sat on the well to rest; but the disciples
were not fatigued : they went away directly to
buy food. In one of their discussions the Jews
said to Him, " Thou art not yet fifty years old,
and hast thou seen Abraham ? " They could not

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The Mystery of Suffering. 29

guess from His worn and wasted appearance that
He was little more than thirty. He fainted
under the burden of His cross; but the other
prisoners did not faint under theirs. He died,
moreover, from the agonies of crucifixion sooner
than was usually the case; so that when the
soldiers, according to custom, came to put an
end to His torture, they found Him already dead.
His mental conflicts. His moral sufferings, and
the gradual imfolding within Him of the purpose
of His life, must have greatly enfeebled Him ;
and these weakening influences would be much
enhanced by His being so often deprived, and
by His often depriving Himself, of necessary food
and sleep.

Again, what unspeakable misery is involved
in the word homeless ! It matters but little
how melancholy in other respects may be a
man's life, if only he have a happy home. In
that case, in spite of aU his troubles, his is an
enviable lot. However desolate and dreary and
worried he may feel when in the outside world,
if there be somewhere a spot which he calls
home, and which really deserves that name, then
he is a happy man. Though his lot has been
cast in a desert, yet it is a desert that con-
tains an oasis, to which he can constantly return.

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30 The Mystery of Suffering.

There, at any rate, are sparkling streams and
refreshing shade ; and there the wayworn, foot-
sore traveller may rest and be refreshed. There,
for a little season, the weary can find repose,
and the sorrowing sympathy. There, by the
subtle power of love, burdens are lightened,
disappointments are alleviated, and the saddest
heart is cheered. I imagine there would be
many more madmen and suicides in the world
than there are, were it not for the blessedness of
home. But Christ was homeless. " The foxes
have holes," He said, " and the birds of the air
have nests ; but the Son of Man hath not where
to lay His head."

Once more. Christ suffered from intellectual,
moral, and social isolation, — from being very
little appreciated by any one, and entirely mis-
understood by all. He felt that He was born to
a godlike work. A mysterious purpose lay in
His heart, which was to lead the Father's fallen
sons to glory. The very nature of the purpose
would, as Dr Young remarks, make Him more
keenly susceptible, and desirous for gratitude
and sympathy. But in regard to the one great
object of His life. He stood entirely alone. The
Pharisees and Scribes, and the upper classes gen-
erally, opposed Him, not only on account of His

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poverty, but also on account of His doctrines.
He wanted to substitute purity and love for their
own wretched cant. He had kind words for the
publican and the harlot, but none for them, with
all their boasted righteousness. The common
people at first heard him gladly ; but when they
found He was not going to improve their earth-
ly circumstances, they became dissatisfied. As
Christ put it, they only followed Him because of
the miracle of the loaves. They wanted bread
for the body, not food for the mind. His own
relations, too, were an obstacle in His path.
"Not even His brethren believed on Him."
Christ must have suffered inexpressibly in seeing
how little spiritual good He was accomplishing.
His very disciples seemed to make no progress.
They understood Him as little at the end as at
the beginning of His ministry. For example,
Philip said, "Lord, show us the Father." He
did not perceive that Christ's whole life had
been one prolonged manifestation of God. James
and John wanted to call down fire on the in-
habitants of a Samaritan village. How infinitely
far they must have been, at that time, from the
kingdom of God! Peter rebuked Christ for
prophesying His own death, and was thus, as
Christ told him, a real stumbling-block in His

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32 The Mystery of Suffering.

way. He was urging Him, as the devil did
in the wilderness, to sacrifice God and the world
rather than Himself. Peter could discover no
needs-be in the humiliation and death of Christ.
He would have been quite content with a crown
for his Master : he did not desire a cross. And so
it was with the rest of the disciples. They per-
sisted in thinking, notwithstanding all He could
say to the contrary, that He intended to deliver
them from the dominion of the Eomans ; they
could not grasp the notion that He wished to
deliver all men from the dominion of sin. They
would have it that He ought to be king of the
Jews : it never entered into their thoughts that
He was to be the Saviour of the world. They
were willing to struggle and to fight if they
might thereby secure an earthly empire for their
Master ; but they could not appreciate (or even
comprehend) that kingdom of righteousness which
it was Christ's sole desire to establish. This
want of understanding would lead to want of
sympathy. Daily and almost hourly Christ
must have been pained by proofs oif their sel-
fishness ; and He must have been sadly pre-
pared for their conduct at the last, when one
betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver, another
denied on oath having ever had anything to

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do with Him, and all the rest forsook Him and
fled.

Once more Christ "suffered being tempted."
Temptation was to Him as real as to ns. He
would have fallen as we sometimes fall, unless
He had resisted as we ought always to resist.
" He passed through the moral conflict," says
Pr^sens^ "as we do with all the perils of freedom.
If it is maintained that He could not have
yielded to temptation, and that He knew it all
along. His humanity remains only an illusion,
and He was not really tempted at aU. Let us
bring Christ down from this cold empyrean of
theology, where He is but a dogma, and say
with Irenaeus, ' He was truly a man fighting for
His home.' Let us receive that sublime text,
' He learned obedience ; ' which signifies that from
a state of natural innocence. He was to raise
Himself to the holiness that follows choice. A
perilous transit; but in it Christ conquered, —
conquered by the sole arms of faith and prayer,
and not by girding on Godhood as an impene-
trable panoply."

The same view is taken by Canon Farrar.

"Some," he says, "have claimed for Christ not

only actual sinlessness, but a nature to which

sin was miraculously impossible. What, then ?

C

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34 The Mystery of Suffering.

If His great conflict were a mere deceptive
phantasmagoria, how can the narrative of it pro-
fit ns ? If we have to fight the battle clad in
the armour of human free-will, which has been
hacked and riven about our bosom by so many
a cruel blow, what comfort is it to us if our
great Captain fought not only victoriously, but
without real danger, — not only uninjured, but
witliout even the possibility of a wound ? Where
is the warrior's courage if he knows that for him
there is but the semblance of a battle against the
simulacrum of a foe? They who would thus
honour Him rob ub of our living Christ, and
substitute for Him a perilous phantom, incapable
of kindling devotion or inspiring trust."

The account of the Temptation, as it is called,
is generally understood in a more or less alle-
gorical sense. Origen, Lange, Schleiermacher,
Olshausen, Neander, and Calvin understood it
thus. But it is, at any rate, an allegorical
representation of a fact — the fact, namely, that
Jesus Christ was brought face to face with the
powers of evil, and had to struggle in order to
overcome.

" Command that these stonfes be made bread,"
said the tempter. In other words, spend those
powers in the service of the senses and the body.

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The Mystery of Suffering. 35

wliich ought only to be spent in the service of
the Spirit and God. " Cast thyself down from
hence." In other words, improvidence and pre-
sumption would be no sin in Thee if Thou art
the Son of God. " All these things will I give
Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me."
In other words, would it not be better to gain
the world in the service of the devil than to lose
it in the service of God ? The alternatives pre-
sented to Christ were very similar to those which
are presented to every free agent. He was called
on to decide whether He would sacrifice pleasure
to duty, or duty to pleasure ; whether He would
take His ease, or "work the work of God;" whether
He would strive for temporal prosperity, or seek
the salvation of the world. This temptation
was constantly being repeated by His disciples
and His relations. " Since Thou canst do these
things," said the latter, "show Thyself to the
world," and demand a throne. He conquered, as
we know, but the amount of suffering involved
in the conquest is not easy to realise. He had to
choose between selfishness and self-sacrifice. He
determined to obey instead of being obeyed.
He accepted shame instead of glory. He drew
on Himself execration instead of popularity. He
consigned Himself to the cross instead of to

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36 The Mystery of Suffering.

a throne. If you doubt the agony involved in
all this, try and imagine what ycm would have
suffered under similar circumstances. Would
not the conflict have torn your very heart in
twain?

Further, as Ullman has beautifully observed, the
Man of Sorrows must have been always endur-
ing the temptation of suffering, in one or other
of its many forms. Not only did He suffer being
tempted, but He was tempted being in suffering.
In the last sermon we saw that suffeiing might
be, and frequently was, a means to moral pro-
gress ; but like most other means to progress, it
has its drawbacks and disadvantages. It brings
with it temptations to fretfulness, to ;*epining,
to faithlessness, and, if it be very severe, the
temptation which poor Job felt, to curse God
and die.

Lastly, Christ suffered death ; and that death
to Him was no ordinary death, may be clearly
seen from the agony He experienced in the anti-
cipation of it. The inducement to compromise for
a time with the Pharisees must have been very
strong. He had accomplished very little in the
world as yet ; but He was only thirty-three ; He
might do so much if He could but Kve. He
might then " see of the travail of His soul and

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The Mystery of Suffering. 37

be satisfied," instead of having to die in the faith.
Death by crucifixion, too, was physically the
most agonising, and socially the most ignomin-
ious, which it was possible to endure. It was a
Eoman punishment, but one which the Eomans
themselves only inflicted upon slaves or captives
taken in war. The crucifixion of a Eoman
citizen would have been considered a reflection
upon the dignity of Eome. "It includes all
that pain and death can have of the horrible
and ghastly. Dizziness, cramp, thirst, tetanus,
starvation, sleeplessness, fever, publicity of
shame, long continuance of torment, mortifica-
tion of untended wounds, all intensified just up
to that point at which they can be endured,
but all stopping short for long weary hours of
the point which gives to the sufierer the re-
Kef of unconsciousness. Every variety of an-
guish went on increasing until the crucified
yearned for death as for a delicious and ex-
quisite release."

All His previous sufferings and sorrows, more-
over, were gathered up and repeated with tenfold
intensity in His dying hours. He was poorer
than ever now, for His very clothes were being
divided among His executioners ; more homeless
than ever now, since His last resting-placQ was a

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38 The Mystery of Suffering.

cross; more tempted than ever now, for the
temptations that are bom of anguish had reached
their climax; more isolated than ever now, for
not only were the Pharisees against Him, but
the common people, who had once heard Him
gladly, were indulging in jeers and ridicule ; not
only had eleven of His disciples forsaken Him and
fled, but the one who was there to see Him die,
and the three Marys who were with Him, had
a wondering pity depicted on their countenances,
that seemed to say they had hoped better
things from Him, — that seemed to reproach
Him for the failure of His life. To crown all,
in His last moments Christ experienced that in-
effable bitterness of spirit, compared with which
all other suffering is joy, — the feeling that He was
deserted by God. From His breaking heart was
wrung the bitter cry, " My God, my God, why
hast Thou forsaken me ? "

Die on now, Saviour of mankind! Now
truly thou canst say, " It is finished." " Never
was sorrow like unto Thy sorrow." " Thou hast
learned obedience with strong crjdng and tears."
Thou hast drunk to the dregs the cup which the
Father hath given Thee. Thou hast sacrificed
Thyself wholly, unreservedly, in life and in

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death. Thou hast not spared Thyself one single
pain which could enable us to feel that we might
find in Thee a brother's sympathy. Thou hast
omitted nothing that was necessary to prove the
beauty and divinity of self-sacrificing love. Thou
hast been made " perfect through sufferings."

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The Mystery of Suffering.
III.

*' It became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all
things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain
of their salvation perfect through sufferings." — Hebrews ii. 10.

T PEOPOSE in the present sermon to point
■^ out one or two of the ways in which the
suflferings of Christ seem to have tended to the
perfecting of His character.

First of all, what do you suppose Christ was
like in person? There are two statements in
the Bible which are generally understood as
referring to Him. "He was altogether lovely."
"His countenance was marred more than all
the sons of men." Kow I apprehend that
both these statements were literally true. The
painters who have represented Christ with a
smooth and placid face have made, I think, a
great mistake. We have seen that He was in

I

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The Mystery of Suffering. 4 1

bad health towards the close of His life, and
that He looked much older than He really was.
The fact that His temptations and moral con-
flicts were so numerous and so severe renders it
probable a priori that His countenance should
have been "marred more than all the sons of
men." Yet we may be sure that to those who had
eyes to see it, the face of Christ was beautiful.
There are two distinct kinds of beauty. The
soft, rosy, dimpled, laughing face, lovely though
it be, is not the only fair countenance that the
world contains. No. Is there not beauty to the
eye of faith in a face like that of Livingstone's,
all covered with scars and seams ? For does not
every one of those so-called deformities tell of
moral conflicts and moral victories, of profound
thought and intense feeling, of tremendous
earnestness and enthusiasm, of self-abnegation
and self-sacriflce ? To those who had no
spiritual insight Christ would appear "as a
root out of a dry ground, having no form or
comeliness ; " but in reality " the beauty of the
Lord God was upon Him."

Again, we have seen how isolated Christ was,
— intellectually, morally, and socially. No one
understood His purposes, no one cared for His
ideal morality, no one sympathised with Him in

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42 The Mystery of Suffering.

His eflforts to make the world better. But this
painful experience must have increased His moral
strength, and tended to His general self-develop-
ment. The man will never be worth much who
is always on good terms with every one, who is
continually courted and petted by all with whom
he comes in contact. He who is content to
take everything as he finds it, who has never
had an idea which the meanest of his neighbours
could not appreciate, who has never felt himself
morally indignant with any of his surroundings,
such a person is not half a man. Loneliness,
moral isolation, is essential to the development
of a noble character. Lonely as Christ was
socially, He often courted physical solitude as
well, and many a night He passed by Himself
upon the silent slopes of the Mount of Olives.
He who would know something of the great-
ness and the infinite possibilities of his own
nature must likewise court isolation. We lose
ourselves in the company of our fellows: we
find ourselves when alone. I pity the man
who has never stood by himself upon the
mountain - side, or in some retired spot, far
away from the "din of human words," — stood
there in the dusk of evening, or the gloom of
night, till the silence became so intense as to

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remind him of the words of Coleridge's " Ancient
Mariner " —

" So lonely 'twas that God Himself
Scarce seemed there to be."

He who has not had some such experience as
this knows little more of the mystery of his own
nature than does the child yet unborn. The
intense mental strain that accompanies such
physical isolation is akin to pain, but how
blessed it is in its results. A man learns in
solitude something of his own capabilities. He
learns that he is not like a drop in the ocean,
obliged to move with the tide ; nor like a leaf
in the forest, obliged to bend to the wind ; but
that he is a free and godlike agent, and that,
feeble as he has been accustomed to think him-
self, he is in reality strong enough to resist a
universe of evil, and to conquer even death and
hell. Christ's isolation tended to make Him
strong. How strong he was ! how calmly and
divinely self-reliant! Since the world began
there have been no such scathing denunciations
as He uttered against the rulers of His nation, —
uttered to their very face and in the hearing of
the populace, though He knew all the while they
had power to condemn Him to death.

Isolation, again, not only tends to self-develop-

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44 The Mystery of Suffering.

ment, or to the growth of a man's self-conscious-
ness, but also to the intensification of his God-
consciousness. It not only teaches him how
great he is in himself, but it also reveals to him
how great is the God from whom his own great-
ness is derived. At first it makes a man feel
that he is alone, but afterwards he perceives
that he is not alone, for God is with him. This
most of us have experienced amid the lonely
scenes of nature. You remember Wordsworth,
in the " Excursion," speaking of the Wanderer,
says —

** That in the mountains did he feel his faith ;
. . . Nor did he believe, he saw,"

Hence Milton's paradox is true, that

** Solitude is sometimes best society ; "

for human solitude may be divine society. But
moral isolation, — ^that is, want of sympathy and
appreciation, — still more, perhaps, than mere
physical solitude, tends to the development of our
God-consciousness. It has been well said, that
" it is not till we feel we are alone on earth, that
we know for a certainty we are not alone in
heaven." It was the utter want of sympathy
which Christ experienced that, more than any-

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The Mystery of Suffering. 45

thing else, taught Him to say, " I am not alone,
for the Father is with me." Further, this want
of human sympathy, of which His homelessness
formed an important part, combined with the
sorrowful tenor of His whole life, must have
made it easier for Him to set His affections
entirely upon His mission, and upon the accom-
plishment of the Father's will. So long as He
acted conscientiously there would be nothing
to live for in this world ; and hence it was but
natural, so to speat, for Him to dwell in an-
other. This idea is well expressed by John
Henry Newman: —

** Thrice blessed are they who feel their loneliness.

Till, sick at heart, beyond the veil they fly,
Seeking His presence who alone can bless. "

How completely Christ lived beyond the veil !
*'I have meat to eat," He said to His dis-
ciples, " that ye know not of." And He spoke
of Himself as "the Son of Man which, is in
heaven"

With regard to Christ's suffering under temp-
tation, I need not here do more than repeat
that unless He had suffered under it. He would
not really have been tempted at all; and that
without temptatioii He could never have acquired

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46 The Mystery of Suffering.

a perfect character, nor indeed any character
at all.

Once more. We have seen that pity, tender-
ness, mercy, compassion and self-sacrifice, which
are essential elements in a perfect character, can
only be developed by suffering. If you want
any further proof of this, look at the great
cruelty of young boys, who have, generally
speaking (unless, firam being delicate, they know
what suffering means), no greater delight than to
cause pain. Tennyson, in one of his smaller
poems, says —

** As cruel as a schoolboy, ere he grow
To pity."

It is not till he begins to experience suffering,
that he ceases to tate delight in inflictiQg
it. Now He who was pre-eininently acquainted
with grief was pre-eminently remarkable for
His tenderness and compassion. Bead those
loving words of His to the disciples, and His
prayer for them, as recorded in the fourteenth
and following chapters of St John. He knew
that the darkest scenes of His life were at hand,
and yet He thought only of comforting them.
This pity He manifested all through His min-
istry, under the most varied circumstances.

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Listen : " Suffer little children to come unto Me^
and forbid them not." " Woman, where are
those thine accusers ? hath no man condemned
thee ? Neither do I condemn thee." " Jeru-
salem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets,
and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how
often would I have gathered thy children to-
gether, even as a hen gathereth her chickens
under her wings, and ye would not!" " 60 into
all the world and preach the remission of sins,
beginning at Jerusalem," — the scene of His cru-
cifixion. " Could ye not watch with Me one
hour ? ye were willing indeed in spirit, but the
flesh was weak." " Son, behold thy mother !
woman, behold thy son ! " " Father, forgive
them; for they know not what they do."

The death of Christ was the perfecting of His
perfection. It was the last and steepest step on
the altar of self-sacrifice He had been so long
ascending. All the sufferings of His previous
life were (as we have seen) there gathered up
and consummated. He who h^d borne all His
previous troubles unblenchingly, shrank and
shuddered from the thought of Calvary and the
anguish that it involved. We saw that among
other things it meant leaving the world when
He had scarcely accomplished anything. We saw

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48 The Mystery of Suffering.

that there was a strong inducement for Him to
parley with conscience, to make a compromise with
the Pharisees, to do evil that good might come.
We saw that this temptation would be the sever-
est He ever experienced, and that overcoming it
would therefore involve the extremest suffering.
But had He failed here, all would have been lost.
He would have shown that He was unselfish,
but only within certain limits. He would have
shown that He had faith in God, but only up to
a certain point. He would have proved Himself,
in the battle with sin, a brave soldier, but con-
querable, and therefore unfitted to be the Captain
of our salvation. But He persevered even unto
death. The Cross has ever since been a sym-
bol and synonym of all that Christ thought and
did and was. And rightly so, for it was the
summing up and the completion of all.

Well, now, is He not perfect, this Man of
Sorrows ? " Sin," as Pr^sens^ has well remarked,
" leaves its trace and stigma on a man even when
it has had no human witness, just as the water
which has flowed over a muddy bed never regains
perfect transparency at any point in its course."
But eighteen centuries of microscopic prejudice
have failed to 'pr&ee a flaw in the character of
Christ. Did He not imite in Himself all good

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The Mystery of Suffering. 49

qualities which in others are only found apart,
and even then in an inferior degree? Do we
not find in Him, for example, more than the
tenderness of woman, combined with more than
the strength of man ? Has not the story of His
self-sacrificing love purified the vilest hearts,
and brought the most abandoned of the devil's
votaries to the very feet of God? Did not
everything good in the world before Christ point
to something better far in Him? Does not
everything that is best in the world to-day
owe its origin to Him ? How much of what is
sweetest and noblest in painting and poetry, in
music and literature, would never have existed
but for Christ ! Can you not trace His footsteps
wherever there is progress in right, and freedom
and toleration and joy ? Can you not see that
the thoughts of the Kazarene lie at the basis of
modem civilisation ? " In every region of life,"
says Canon Farrar, " the influence of Christ has
been felt. It changed pity from a vice into a
virtue. It elevated poverty from a curse into a
beatitude. It ennobled labour from a vulgarity
into a dignity and duty. It revealed the angelic
beauty of a meekness at which men had for-
merly scoffed. It sanctified marriage from little
more than a burdensome convention into little
D

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50 The Mystery of Suffering.

less than a blessed sacrament. It broadened the
obligation of charity from the narrow limits of
the neighbourhood to the widest horizons of the
race. While thus it evolved the idea of humanity
as a common brotherhood, even where its tidings
were not believed, all the world over, — where
its tidings were believed, it has cleansed the life
and elevated the soul of every individual man."

The glory of Christ has been seen and ac-
knowledged not only by clergymen, not only by
orthodox Trinitarians ; but nearly all the greatest
minds of the last two thousand years, though
holding the most divergent religious opinions,
and differing perhaps in regard to almost every
other subject, have been unanimous in their
praise of Christ. Milton, Shakespeare, Galileo,
Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Schel-
ling, Hegel, Herder, Goethe, Napoleon, Jean
Paul Eichter, Carlyle, Eousseau, E^nan, John
Stuart Mill, and a host of others, have been
unanimous in lauding the beauty of His life,
the wisdom of His teaching, the blessedness of
His work. For instance. Napoleon said, " Alex-
ander, Caesar, Charlemague, and myself, founded
great empires ; but the creations of our genius
depended upon force. Jesus alone founded His
empire upon love, and to this day millions would

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TJie Mystery of Suffering, 5 1

die for Him." Eichter says, " Christ was the
holiest among the mighty, and the mightiest
among the holy. He lifted with His pierced
hands empires off their hinges; He turned the
stream of history, and still governs the ages."
Eousseau says, "If the life and death of Socrates
were those of a sage^ the life and death of Jesus
were those of a God." E^nan says, " Thanks to
Jesus, the dullest existence, the most absorbed
by sad and humiliating duties, has had its
glimpse of heaven:" and again, "To tear the
name of Jesus from the world would be to shake
it to its very foundations."

And there have been some who have not only
admired but loved Him, — loved Him with a
passionate and enthusiastic devotion that was a
copy — and not a faint copy either — of His own
self - sacrificing tenderness. There have been
some who have surrendered for Christ pleasure,
money, health, fame, family, friends, position,
prospects, and even life ; who for His sake have
suffered the loss of all things. There have been
some who, for Christ's sake, " have been tortured,
and had trial and cruel mockings and scourgings,
and bonds and imprisonment; who wandered
over deserts and dwelt in caves ; who were clad
in sheepskins and goatskins ; who were destitute,

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afficted, tormented; who were stoned or sawn
asunder, or slain with the sword ; '* and who not
only endured these things, hnt. gloried in them,
counting it all joy that they were thought worthy
to suffer shame for Christ. And there have
been many — a vast multitude that no man can
number — belonging to "all nations, and kin-
dreds, and peoples, and tongues," who, (hough
coming short of this enthusiastic devotion, have
yet loved and served Christ to the best of their
ability, following Him sometimes closely, some-
times from afar off, sometimes forsaking Him,
but always returning to Him again. They differ
from one another in all conceivable respects ;
they agree in nothing save their love for Christ.
This love is ennobling them, and through them
the world at large, — ^very slowly, alas ! but still
surely ennobling the whole human race, so that
at last they shall "all come to the measure
of the stature of the fulness of Christ." Must
He not have been perfect, this Man of Sorrows,
to have accomplished such results as these ?

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The Mystery of Suffering.

IV.

*' It became Him, for whom are all tliingd, and by whom are all
things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain
of their salvation perfect through sufferings." — Hebkews ii. 10.

AXJE line of thought in the previous sermons
^ has been that the existence of suffering, so
far as it tended to the perfecting of character, was
not an argument against, but an argument for,
the power and beneficence of God. It must be
admitted, however, that all suffering does not
appear to have this beneficial tendency. It
may have occurred to some of you already that
suffering sometimes appears to have a hardening,
rather than a softening, effect, — ^in some cases
seems, not to improve, but rather to deteriorate
character. To this I have two replies.

First, the man who is apparently injured by
suffering may be in reality benefited. He may

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54 The Mystery of Suffering.

appear, to the careless observer, to be very harsh
and bitter ; but those who know him more inti-
mately may discover an infinite depth of tender-
ness underlying this superficial cynicism. There
was a striking example of this in a noted
preacher and lecturer not long dead. He had
experienced, in the course of his life, the severest
trials, the greatest of all being this, that his only
daughter, who as a child had been brilliantly
clever, became, at the age of twenty, owing to
over - study, very nearly an idiot. Well, one
Sunday he preached a peculiar sermon, con-
sisting of the shortest sentences and the simplest
ideas, fit only for an infant class. His con-
gregation did not know what to make of it ;
but the explanation was this. His daughter
was at the service that morning ; and her mind
happened, as he knew, to be less obscured than
usual. The sermon was addressed to her. The
text was, " Like as a father pitieth his children,
so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him." Now,
the man who could do this must have been
possessed of the very rarest tenderness; yet if
you had met him at a dinner-party, or heard
him lecture, you would have said he was the
most cynical and misanthropical man you had
ever known. So I say that suffering, even when

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The Mystery of Suffe'ring. 55

it seyBms to have injured any one, may, after all,
have had the opposite effect.

But, secondly, I do not deny — ^I acknowledge
—that suffering does occasionally deteriorate
character. The most useful agents m nature
have sometimes the most deadly effects. The
atmosphere, which is essential to life, is the
chief source of putrefaction and decay. The
sea, which bears one mariner safely to the
desired haven, buries another in a watery grave.
Electricity, which carries a message across the
world at the bidding of one man, strikes another
dead. And so it is in the moral sphere. The very
circumstances of which a good man makes step-
ping-stones to heaven, a bad man will turn into
a pathway to hell. The responsibility for this,
however, rests not with God, but with men.
As we saw in considering the origin of evil,
we must be free or we should not be moral
agents ; and being free, it is for us (not for God)
to decide how we shall deal with our opportu-
nities and temptations.

But, further, it must be acknowledged that
there is an immense amount of suffering in the
world, the natural and inevitable tendency of
which seems neither to correct evil nor to de-.
velop good, but, on the contrary, to develop evil

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56 The Mystery of Suffering.

and to stifle good. Thousands, at home and
abroad, are brought up in the midst of filth,
obscenity, and blasphemy, so that for them
health, virtue, and religion are impossibilities.
Justice seems to demand not only that these
men and women should not be made to suffer
in the future for the sins which were unavoid-
able in their case in the past, but that, somehow
and somewhere, they should receive compeTisation
for all the calamities which they suffered while
on earth. If there be a future life, where com-
pensation can be made, then this suffering, horri-
ble as it at first sight appears, does not necessarily
tell against either the power or goodness of God.
Even these hapless souls may, by-and-by, be able
to say that it was good for them to be afiSiicted.

But what shall we say in regard to the suffer-
ings of the brute creation ? Ages before man
appeared on the earth animals were groaning
and travailing in pain together, having to bear
the pangs of disease and death, and in most
cases being preyed upon and devoured by crea-
tures stronger than themselves. And they will
probably continue to suffer long after human
life has ceased to exist upon our planet. Their
sensuous suffering is at least as great as ours.
As Shakespeare has it, —

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The Mystery of Suffering, 5 7

**The poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds as great a pang
As when a giant dies."

And they have few of the reliefs from suffering
which we enjoy. They seldom get the benefit
of medical advice or surgical skill. They do not
often, except when we choose to make pets of
them, meet with manifestations of sympathy.
They have no mental resources, as we have,
for alleviating physical pain. They cannot, like
Pascal, cure the toothache with mathematics.
They cannot, like you or me, forget their troubles
by taking up an amusing book or resorting to
cheerful society. If, when they die, they die for
ever, it follows that, in being deprived of the
pleasures of sense, they lose their little all.
What have they done to deserve this ? Nothing.
Indeed some of them, in spite of their poor
mental endowments, have exhibited a wealth of
affection and self-sacrifice such as is rarely found
in human beings. Now, I ask. What are we to
make of their sufferings?

Of course, the old theory that they result from
man's fall is worse than worthless. For, in the
first place, no reason can be shown why they
should be made to suffer for our transgressions ;
and, in the second place, they began to suffer

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long before man came into existence. Horace
Bushnell, in his 'Moral Uses of Dark Things/
has an interesting and suggestive chapter upon
physical pain ; but I cannot accept his solution
of the problem. He argues that God foresaw
the fall, and prepared the world accordingly
— ^that is, He made it a suitable habitation for
sinners. " The very rocks of the world," he
says, " are monuments of buried pain, themselves
also racked and contorted, as if meant to be
lithograph types of general anguish. Making
all the world foUow the fortunes of man, and in
some sense go down with him and groan with
him in his evil, carries with it an immense
power of moral benefit. No matter if the pains
were initiated long ages before his arrival, still
they are just as truly for him and from him as
if they had come after." The justice of this, in
regard to animals, he supports by saying that
they are merely things, and not in any such
relation to God as to have a moral right against
pain. To this I reply, that if they are but
things, they are in no such relation to i^ as to
have a moral right against pain, and that there-
fore the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals is engaged in as foolish a work as
would be an association for preventing tourists

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The Mystery of Suffering. 59

from cutting tiieir initials upon the trees, or
geologists from breaking the rocks with their
hammers.

It is singular that religionists have been almost
as unanimous in denying a future to animals as
in asserting it for themselves. There have been
a few striking exceptions, however ; as, for ex-
ample, Tennyson, Mr Greg, Miss Cobbe, Dr
Abbot, and Bishop Butler, who have suggested
the hypothesis of a future life for eJl animals,
or, at any rate, for the higher kinds. I need
scarcely say there is nothing in the Bible
which contradicts the theory. The verse which
speaks of the spirit of a man as going upward,
and the spirit of a beast as going downward,
may, of course, refer to the grovelling nature
of the one and the aspiring nature of the other.
But at this rate, feome who have been accustomed
to think themselves men would have to be classed
in the other category. Bishop Butler says, that
many of the ftrguments commonly urged in fav-
our of human immortality, are equally appli-
cable to that of the lower animals; and there
is no reason, he argues, why they should not
be immortal. Even if it were neceasary for
them to arrive at great attainments, and become
rational and moral agents, still this would be

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no difficulty, since we know not with what latetd
powers and capacities they may be endowed. In
fact, it seems a general law of nature that crea-
tures, endowed with capacities of virtue and
religion, should be at first placed in a condition
of being in which they are altogether without
the use of these faculties. This is the case, e.^r.,
with ourselves in infancy. And since a large
proportion of the human species die soon after
they are bom, it follows that many, capable of
becoming moral agents, go out of the present
world before they have actually reached the
moral stage of being. But, further, Butler ob-
serves, the lower animals might be immortal,
even though they were incapable of any high
development. The economy of the universe
might require that there should always be liv-
ing creatures of an inferior kind. And all diffi-
culties, he concludes, as to the manner in which
such inferior beings would be disposed of, are so
wholly founded in our ignorance, that "it is
wonderful they should be insisted upon by
any but such as are weak enough to think
that they are acquainted with the whole system
of things."

There seems no reason, then, why we should
not say, —

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The Mystery of Suffering. 6 1

** Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be a final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood :

That nothing walks with aimless feet ;

That not one life shall be destroyed

Or cast as rubbish to the void.
When God hath made the pile complete :

That not a worm is cloven'in vain, —
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shriveird in 9i, fruitless fire.

Or but subserves another's gain."

But we must also add, —

" Behold, we know not anything ;

I can but trust that good shall fall.
At last— far off— at last to all.
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream ; but what am I ?
An infant crying in the night, —
An infant crying for the light, —

And with no language but a cry."

Yes, as the grand old dramatist, -^schylus,
says, "The ways of God are as passages in a
wood thick with leaves, through which one can
only see but a little way."

Leaving, then, what is doubtful, and it may
be from a human standpoint inexplicable, let us
sum up the demonstrable results of our investi-
gation. We have seen that evil could not have

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62 The Mystery of Suffering.

been prevented without the prevention of a more
than compensatory amount of good, which is
equivalent to saying that evil could not have
been prevented at all. We have seen that the
existence of suffering, so far as it is required
for the destruction of evil, is actually a proof of
the Divine power and beneficence. As Bushnell
finely says, it is the outcome of " eternal ten-
derness, ironclad for the right." We have seen
that other sufferings have been useful in develop-
ing the benevolent and sympathetic affections —
in leading men to a knowledge of themselves and
of God, as well as in giving them strength and
nobility of character ; and so far as we were able
to make out, these results could not have been
effected, in an equal degree, by any other means.
Even Christ required the discipline of grief. We
noticed in one or two instances the direct bear-
ing of a certain form of suffering upon a certain
phase of His character. The Man of Sorrows,
we saw, was made perfect through sufferings, — so
perfect that He has become to us God manifest
in the flesh. Hence, since a perfect character
is the best of all possessions, cheaply purchased,
if need be, by a lifetime of pain and woe, it
turns out that sufferings, which appeared, at
first sight, signs of the littleness of the Divine

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The Mystery of Suffering. 63

power or love, are in many cases, on the contrary,
proofs of the greatness of both.

Hence we have found a rational basis, — smaU
it may be, but immovcbbly secure, for the faith
which believes that the " sufferings of this pre-
sent time are not worthy to be compared with
the glory that shall be revealed;" "that our
light aflliction, which is but for a moment, is
working out for us a far more exceeding and an
eternal weight of glory ; " that the Creator is the
Father of His creatures, extending His tender
mercies over all His works, and leading the
whole creation by a right way, though it be
oftentimes by a way that cannot be known or
understood. With this foundation for our faith,
we may, not merely as religionists, but even as
logicians, look for reward with a sure and certain
hope to that

*' One far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."

Just as the moth becomes a chrysalis, and the
chrysalis a butterfly ; just as a grain of seed falls
into the ground and dies, that it may rise again
the blade, the ear, the full com in the ear ; just
as babyhood gives place to childhood, childhood
to youth, youth to manhood ; just as there are

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64 The Mystery of Suffering.

men and women in the world to-day who feel
already more than compensated for the toils,
struggles, and privations of the past — who can
say with John Henry Newman, —

" I would not miss one sigh or tear,
Heart-pang, or throbbing brow ;
Sweet was the chastisement severe,
And sweet its memory now ; " —

just as every one of us has sometimes found
pain the prelude to pleasure and sorrow the
pathway to joy ; just as the sublimest music
involves the resolution of discords, — so all the
chances and changes of this mortal life are but
preparaiions for a better, where we shall be made
glad '* according to the days wherein we have
been afiiicted, and the years wherein we have
seen evil," with a gladness sweeter, purer, deeper
than could ever have been ours, but for those
days of evil and those years of affliction.

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Prayer^

' Be careful for nothing ; but in everything by prayer and suppli-
cation, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known
unto God. And the peace of Gk>d, which passeth all understand-
ing, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."
— Philippians iv. 6, 7.

rriHIS, and one or two similar passj^es of
-*- Scripture, have given rise to a celebrated
misrepresentation of our holy religion. " Be
careful for nothing ;" " take no thought for the
morrow," &c., were alleged by Strauss, Buckle,
and others, as proofs that the New Testament is
opposed to industry and commerce. They further
maintained that the world could do better without
Christianity than it could without commerce; and
so they advised us to shelve Christianity as a
thing of the past, opposed to the better instincts
and wiser reflections of the nineteenth century.
But, though we are urged by Christianity to
" seek first the kingdom of God and His right-
eousness," we are also urged to do whatsoever

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66 Prayer.

our hand findeth to do with our might. When
Christ tells us to "take no thought for the
morrow," it is plain, from the word used in the
Greek, that He is warning us not against pru-
dent, but against anxiotis thought. If a man
insures his life, though he is in one sense taking
thought, not only for the morrow, but for an
event that may not happen for thirty, forty, fifty
years, yet he is not violating Christ's command ;
he is performing a thoroughly Christian duty.
So in regard to our text, " Be careftd for noth-
ing," might be more strictly rendered, "he not
anadom about anything." It is the same word
that is translated elsewhere, " take no thought."
But without consulting our Greek Testaments, we
might surely have guessed that the active, earnest,
energetic, hard-working Paul was not exhorting
us to apathy, to indolence, to a care-for-nothing-
and- nobody state of mind. On the contrary,
the freedom from anxiety to which he is exhort-
ing us, is the essential condition of true work.
When do you work best ? When you are
worried ? When your hearts and minds are in
a feverish state of restlessness and foreboding ?
Nay, surely, is it not rather when your hearts
are at peace ?

The true cure for anxiety, the apostle tells us.

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Prayer, 67

is prayer. " Be careful for nothing, but let your
requests be made known unto God." In this
sceptical age, however, when the very founda-
tions of our faith are being shaken, it is some-
what difficult to believe in the usefulness of
prayer. The opinion is becoming very general
that answers to prayer must be impossible,
inasmuch as they would imply violations of
natural law. But this difficulty, I think, may
be at once removed. What do we mean by a
law of nature ? as for example, when we speak
of the law of gravitation ? Why, simply, that
all bodies or particles of matter in the uni-
verse attract one another in a certain definite
way, and so tend to come together. But, mark
you, though they tend to come together, this can
be prevented. Suppose your child is leaning
from a window at the top of the house, and that
he leans a little too far, loses his balance and
falls out. Gravitation will inevitably and re-
niorselessly drag him to the ground unless some
one interferes. But if you see his danger, and
rush forward and catch him, he will be saved
in sfpUe of gravity. That law has not been
violated, it is still acting, and tending to drag
the child downwards, but you have countefracted
it. Gravitation — a force that is perhaps as old

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68 Prayer.

as eternity — gravitation would have killed him ;
but you, who were bom yesterday and will die
to-morrow — ^you, with your puny strength, have
successfully interfered. Take another equally
simple illustration. When you light a fire on
a winter's day, you do not violate the laws of
cold; you only introduce other forces, working
according to other laws, which counteract those
previously in operation. So that you see though
the laws of nature can never be violated, they
can be, and constantly are, counteracted. And,
in point of fact, it is their inviolability which
enables us to overcome them. If we could
not depend upon the way in which any force
was going to act, we should not know with
what other forces it might be resisted. Take
the case of lightning. We know it is a law
that a tall chimney or lofty building tends to
attract electricity from a thunder-cloud. We
also know that some metals are good conductors.
Hence we attach metallic rods to our more lofty
and valuable structures, so that the electricity
may be conducted thereby* into the ground, in-
stead of lingering about the edifice and destroy-
ing it. But if the laws of electricity were
changeable, — ^if, for instance, metals were some-
times, conductors and sometimes non-conductors,

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Prayer. 69

we should be altogether helpless. It is only
when we foresee the precise mode of action of
natural forces that we understand what to do if
we wish to counteract them. As the Duke of
Ai^U says in his * Eeign of Law/ " It is the very
inviolability of these laws which makes them
subject to contrivance through endless cycles of
design. How imperious they are, yet how sub-
missive ! How they reign, yet how they serve ! "

This word law, then, is not such a bugbear as
it looks. It does not prevent 'ws from accom-
plishing our own purposes and plans; and if
we can frustrate the tendency of natural forces
by the introduction of other forces, why cannot
God do the same ? Just in proportion as God's
knowledge and power are greater than ours, will
He be able to achieve what it is impossible for
us to effect. Well, then, supposing we are in
any " trouble, need, sorrow, sickness, or any other
adversity," from which we are unable to extricate
ourselves, God cmLd perhaps deliver us from it,
without any violation or violent rupture of the
laws of nature, merely in virtue of His superior
knowledge of those laws, and His superior power
of wielding, combining, and adapting them.

But what I want you specially to notice is
this : The end and use of prayer is not to bring

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^o Prayer.

God's will into conformity with ours ; it is
to bring our wills into conformity with God's.
When we pray for the good things of this life,
we know not what we ask. We may be praying
for what cannot, possibly be granted consistently
with the welfare of others, or even with our own.
Juvenal said to the Eomans, in one of his Satires,
" You pray for money and children and long life,
forgetting that you may imknowingly be praying
for' curses instead of blessings. Why do you
not," he asks, " pray that the gods will give you
what they see will be best ? " That old Eoman
satirist had more faith in heaven than most of
us. We say often enough, " Thy will be done ;"
but how often do we fed it ? And it is not
words, it is feelings, that constitute prayer. Is
there, I wonder, any one here to-day who has
Qver really prayed that prayer ? Do you know
what it means, " Thy will be done " ? It means
this: Send me wealth or poverty, success or
failure, friends or enemies, health or sickness,
bliss or anguish, life or death, as seemeth
best unto Thy Godly wisdom. Is there one
of us who has ever said that in his heart of
hearts ? Is there one of us who could honestly
kneel down and say it now ? Yet this is what
we ought to feel, this is what we ought to mean,

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every time we say " Thy will be doue." There
have been men and women who could adopt the
sentiments of Faber : —

** I worship Thee, sweet Will of God,
And all Thy ways adore ;
And every day I live I seem
To love Thee more and more.

I love to kiss each print where Thou

Hast set Thine unseen feet.
I cannot fear Thee, blessed Will,

Thine empire is so sweet.

HI that Qod blesses is our good,

And unblessed good is ill ;
And all is right that seems most wrong,

If it be His sweet Wm."

Would that we, too, were able to adopt them !

That the use of prayer is to bring our wills
into harmony with God's is brought out strik-
ingly in our text. The apostle does not say, let
your requests be made known unto God and
they will be granted. No ; he says, " Let your
requests be made known unto God, and the
peace of God shall keep your hearts and minds."

Here lies the true answer to Professor Tyndall
and others, who some time ago suggested testing
the efficacy of prayer by a series of scientific
experiments. They proposed, as you may re-
member, to have a hospital divided into two

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72 Prayer.

sections ; the one was to contain patients who
prayed and were prayed for, — the other those
for whom no prayer was offered ; and then
it was to be noticed whether the recoveries
were more frequent in the former case than in
the latter. But they forgot that prayer may be
answered by mental peace as well as by bodily
health, — by a translation to heaven as well as
by a prolongation of life. If all those who
prayed died, and all those who did not pray
recovered, the efficacy of prayer would not be
disproved. Hezekiah prayed to be restored to
health, " and there was added to his life fifteen
years." Solomon prayed for wisdom, and he
was wise. Paul prayed that his thorn in the
flesh might be removed, and the answer he re-
ceived was, "My grace is sufficient for thee."
We nineteenth-century men may be prodigies in
some respects, but we are, I fear, somewhat
pigmies in faith. We all find it more or less
difficult to believe in anything which cannot be
apprehended by the senses. A man's prayer,
however, need not necessarily be unanswered be-
cause you cannot perceive the answer to it. He
may have prayed for health, and you may see
him racked with physical anguish; but before
you venture to say that his prayer has been ^

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unavailing, you must be quite sure of one thing,
that there has not come to him a divine and
ineffable peace, " which passeth all understand-
ing," and therefore passeth all your scientific
tests. We read that the apostles, after being
imprisoned and scourged, counted it all joy that
they were thought worthy to suffer shame for
Christ. We read of men, ay, and even women,
smiling amid their martyr fliames. To a super-
ficial observer they may have appeared to be in
a sorry plight ; but they were in the enjoyment
of a peace which they would not have exchanged
for all that the world calls good. So that I say
scientific experiments are useless for testing the
efl&cacy of prayer. The only answer that can
be expected, always and under all circumstances,
is the answer of peace. This peace cannot be
detected by the curious experimenter. It may
be outwardly manifested in a placid and happy
countenance ; but it may not. It may exist in
the heart when the face is distorted by pain.

The apostle says we should make known our
requests " in everything," or upon every occasion,
unto God. The life we are obliged to live may
sometimes appear to us paltry and contemptible. .
But since it is the life which God has ordained
for us, there must be a sublimity in it after all,

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74 Prayer.

such as to render it worthy of His regard.
It is the ever-recurring little troubles that do
most to mar our happiness ; and these, therefore,
are pre-eminently fit subjects for prayer. Human
friendship and sympathy can do much for us, I
admit. We may be able to say with Tennyson —

'^ I conid not weary, heart or limb,

For mighty Love would cleave in twain
The burden of each single pain,
And part it, giving half to him.''

But you and I are not very likely to find a
friend such as Arthur Hallam ; and even if we
found one, our friend, like Tennyson's, might die.
Not unfrequently we shall feel ourselves alone,
and have sadly to say —

** There's none to weep for my distress,
Though friends stand firm and true,
For in this tangled wilderness
They bleed and battle too."

It is worth trying for this " peace of God
which passeth all understanding." It is this
for which men are yearning and pining. It is
this which makes '' the heaven that is so near
to us all if we could but enter in, and yet so
far off because so few of us can." Let us see
if we cannot enter by means of prayer.

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75

''What is Truth?''

The context reads : '* Pilate saith unto Him, What is truth ? And
when he had said this, he went out." — John xviii. 88.

"piLATE was probably a thoughtful, well-edu-
-■■ cated man, and from this passage it would
seem likely that he belonged to the class of
thinkers called sometimes Agnostics, sometimes
Pyrrhonists, and sometimes Sceptics, who hold
that it is impossible for us ever to attain to any
certain knowledge. Hence, when Christ began
to speak to him about truth, he asked, with a
sort of contemptuous smile, " What is truth ? "
and with a shrug of the shoulder turned on
his heeL Let us ask this question to-day, but
not with the same "genteel indifference," as
Hegel calls it. Let us wait for a reply.

According to Home Tooke, in the * Diversions
of Purley,' the word truth is derived from to trow
in the sense of believe. If so, truth would mean
that which a man troweth or believeth. Now

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76 ''What is Truth?''

this is precisely what truth does not mean. The
best authorities nowadays will teU you that the
Anglo-Saxon treowe is the same as the German
trauen (to trust), and the Icelandic traust or the
Sanscrit dhruria (which mean fixed -or firm). This
derivation suggests the proper signification of the
word truth. While belief or opinion is constantly
changing, truth is that which does not change.
While belief may be false, truth cannot but be
true. If truth were synonymous with opinion,
it would follow that, supposing you thought two
and two made four, and I thought they made
five, our opinions would both equally deserve to
be called truth. This view has been held, as for
example, by the Sophists and by Grote ; but I
shall assume in the present sermon the view,
which probably you all hold, that there is such
a thing as absolute truth, regarding which it is
possible to obtain certain knowledge. In other
words, truth, I take it, is something which is
the same for all, whatever may be their opinions
or absence of opinions, — something which should
be believed in because it can be proved, not
something which should be considered proved
because it is believed in. Truth will thus corre-
spond pretty much with the word fact, which word
includes everything that exists and everything

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" What is Truth ? " 77

that happens. Facts do not vary with our ever-
changing opinions and beliefs ; for a thing must
be what it is whether we believe it or not. If
a man takes poison he will be poisoned, however
loudly he may vociferate that he believed it to
be medicine. Fact is firm, fixed, steadfast, reli-
able, remaining always the same, however much
opinions may change in regard to it. We are
therefore at liberty to say, and this will simplify
our subject, that truth is equivalent to truths,
and that truths are synonymous with facts.
All facts are parts of that vast whole which is
summed up in the word Truth.

Broadly speaking, we may distinguish three
spheres of truth. There is (1) the truth involved
in and revealed by nature ; (2) that involved in
and revealed by our own mental constitution;
(3) that involved in and revealed by Christ;
which may be called respectively physical, meta-
physical, and Christian truth.

First, as to physical truth. The Duke of
Argyll has well said, " Indifference to truth in
apparently the most distant spheres of thought
relaxes the most powerful springs of action."
He is right. The connection, for example, be-
tween hygiene, or the laws of health, and your
religious welfare, is closer, perhaps, than you

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78 ''What is Truth?''

imagine. The more extensive is your knowledge
of those laws, the better it will be for you spir-
itually as well as temporally. If you eat too
much or too little, if you sleep too long or too
short a time, if you work too hard or not hard
enough, if you indulge in recreations too often or
too seldom, if you in any way violate the laws of
your own nature — laws which can be fully under-
stood only after careful investigation and study
— not only will your life be shortened, but your
character will be deteriorated. It is of little
avail for the spirit to be willing when the flesh
is weak. Discontentment, despondency, despair,
and suicide sometimes result from a dyspepsia
which is due to ignorance or carelessness.

But the laws of the human body are of course
only a very small portion of physical truth, in-
difference to any part of which is the sign of a
moral languor incompatible with real greatness
or goodness. Yet how common such indiffer-
ence is ! As Faraday says, " We come into this
world, we live and depart from it, without ever
thinking how it all takes place ; and were it not
for the exertion of a few inquiring minds, who
have ascertained the beautiful laws and condi-
tions by which we do live, we should hardly be
aware that there is anything wonderful in it."

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" What is Truth ? '' 79

Not only are the facts of nature interesting
for their own sake, but every one of them is, as
Carlyle puts it, " a window through which we
can look into infinity." How constantly Christ
discovered spiritual meaning in natural objects
and events ! To the far-seeing man, indeed, the
vision of nature is the vision of God.

Secondly, there is metaphysical truth. The
facts and laws of the human mind are worthy of
study, partly for their own sake, partly for the
mental vigour and discipline to be gained in the
process, but especially, I apprehend, because the
mind of man is in some respects similar to the
mind of God. "Were it different in Idnd as weU
as in degree, knowledge of God, and stUl more
communion with God, would be impossible.
Such expressions as King, Judge, Sovereign,
Father, when applied to God, mean nothing if
they do not mean that there is a resemblance
between the divine and human natures, as well
as between divine and human relationships.
Dean Mansel, I know, in his Bampton Lecture
on the Limits of Eeligious Thought, maintains
the opposite view. He says that we cannot
argue from ourselves to God; that the words
personality, justice, love, &c., when applied to God,
are used in different senses from those in which

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8o ''What is Truth?''

we apply them to men, and that in the one
application they may mean quite the contrary of
what they mean in the other. Now nothing
could have been further from the Dean's inten-
tion than to reduce the God of Christ to the
same level of abstraction as Herbert Spen;fer's ^
" Unknowable ; " but there seems to me no oifFer-
ence between the two conceptions. -If words ^
mean one thing when applied to man, and
another when applied to God, then aU reason-
ing and speaking about the Divine Being would
be a ridiculous waste of time. It is of no use to
say that God is just unless we mea^ by "just"
what we usually mean when we use that word.
We had better say we do not know whether He
is just or unjust. The views of Chrysostom
and Augustine seem to me more correct on this
matter. The latter said — "Through my own
mind I ascend to my own God;" and the
former — "Self-knowledge is the highest of aU
knowledge, for he who truly knows himself
knows God." Just as an orrery will enable a
child to understand something of the mechanism
of the heavens, whereas he would be perfectly
bewildered if he were to contemplate the heavens
themselves, so the finite could never know any-
thing of the Infinite except through the medium

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''What is Truth?'' 8 1

of its own finitude. God, like the noonday sun,
can only be seen " through a glass darkly " — ^in
other words, through the human mind.

The macrocosm and the microcosm, then, — the
great world without us and the little world with-
in, — are important spheres of truth; important
for their own sake, but especially important for
what they suggest and reveal of God. There is,
however, a third sphere of truth more important
still, that, namely, which is contained in the re-
ligion of Christ. Christ taught men that their
Creator was no capricious or spiteful being, but
a God of love, who is their Judge and King
only in virtue of and in subserviency to His
Fatherhood. Christ taught men that their pro-
found and hitherto unintelligible yearnings were
but the natural longing of the human heart for
filial communion with the divine; and he de-
clared there was no barrier between themselves
and God, except their own mistaken notion that
He was imforgiviug and revengeful. Christ's
ministry, crowned, completed, and glorified by
His death, was one prolonged ^manifestation of
love, and of the fact that God is love. Christ
was therefore the great Eevealer of religious
truth. He was, we may say, that truth itself,
in its deepest and sublimest phases, sensibly pre-

F

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82 " What is Truth?''

sented before the world, so that to look at Christ
is to see the truth. In other words, Christ was the
embodiment of the most important of all truths.
Now let us ask. What is the relation between
creeds and truth ? They are by no means iden-
tical. A creed means, as you know, what is be-
lieved, and we have seen belief is just that which
truth is not. Your belief that two and two
make four is not the same thing as that a priori
necessity which compels them to do so. Nor is
your belief that God is love, however correct it
may be, the same thing as that fact itself. A
man's creed is something subjective, existing in
his own mind. Truth is something objective,
existing irrespective of his mind. Belief, or
opinion, is to fact what a man's likeness is
to the man himself. The likeness may be a
good likeness, the opinion may be a correct
opinion, but they are only copieSy after all, of
something different from themselves. A creed,
then, can at best be but a subjective repre-
sentation of certain objective truths. And not
only so, but the knowledge of a creed is ele-
Tomtary knowledge; it should be the beginning
of our acquaintance with truth, it can never
be the end. Surely I need scarcely say that, if
you wish in the very faintest measure to appre-

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''What is Truth?'' 83

hend any fragment of the truth as it is in Jesus,
you must penetrate far below the surface-meaning
of any mere forms of words.

Creeds rightly understood and rightly used
are of the utmost value. George Henry Lewes
tells us in his ' Seaside Studies/ that for years
very little progress was made in zoology because
the workers in that department of science had
no definite creed to guide them. A creed is
just a register of results in the search for truth.
It has been transmitted to us, or should have
been transmitted to us, for the guidance, and not
for the extinction, of future thought and dis-
covery. It is a starting-point, not a goal.. Just
as an invading army, to use an illustration of
Sir William Hamilton's, makes good each posi-
tion gained by planting a citadel, so creeds are
fortresses, as it were, from which we can make
further incursions into the still outstanding, still
unconquered, realms of truth. How vast are those
outstanding realms which still remain for us to
conquer ! Truth, it has been well said, cannot be
symbolised by a circle, but rather by an infinite
line. The Eegius Professor of Divinity in the
University of Oxford drew attention some time
ago to the danger of theology becoming a stag-
nant science, and warned theologians against rest-

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84 ''What is Truth?''

ing contented with a mere reproduction of the
.<».> /^v^past. But there are many persons who think
J' ^) ' >-. that theology should be stagnant, who regard the
attempt to get beyond our ancestors as a sort
of exhibition of juvenile impertinence. It is a
very common but a very false argument from
analogy, to maintain that our ancestors must
have known more than we can know because
they were born before us. But the reason why
a father is wiser than his child is not, of course,
that he was bom first, but that he has lived
longer, and therefore had more experience. When
a child has grown up he may be and should be
wiser than his father, for he has had the benefit
of his father's experience and of his own as well.
As Bacon long ago pointed out, if he who has
had most experience be rightly regarded as the
father of him who has had least, then we are the
fathers and grandfathers of our ancestors: for
they had their experience but not ours ; we have
had the benefit of both. AU honour to them
( for the truths which they discovered ! All shame
to us if we do not discover more !

You laugh at the infant who cries for the
moon, and thinks that his nurse, if she were
only so disposed, might fetch it and give it him
for a football. You laugh at the child who sets

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" What is Truth ? '' 85

himself the task of carrying away the waters of
the ocean in his tiny pail. You laugh at the
barbarian who fancies, when he first comes upon
the sea, that he has reached the end of the
world. You would laugh at a man who proposed
to build himself a house, but was so pleased
with the foundation that he thought it unneces-
sary to proceed with the building. You would
laugh if an athlete, who was going to run a
race, became enamoured of the arrangements at
the first end of the course, and while others were
pressing on towards the goal, contented himself
with going round and round the starting-post.
But there is something more laughable still.
There is no conceivable object in the universe of
God half so ludicrous or absurd as the man who
thinks that as soon as he could repeat his creed
like a parrot he had mastered truth; who
imagines that truth — illimitable, infinite, ever-
unfolding truth — ^is deposited in a corner of his
own finite mind, — a mind that is not only finite
but small, shrivelled into almost nothing for the
want of use. Did I say such a man was a fit
object for laughter? I was wrong. I should
have said for tears.

What, then, is the conclusion of the whole
matter? Why, this. Truth has heights and

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86 ''What is Truth?''

depths, and lengths and breadths, which eternity
itself will be too short to traverse and explore.
Truth is high as heaven, deep as hell, broad as
the universe, infinite as God, everlasting as eter-
nity. The answer to the question, "What is
truth ? " is one which will be ever telling, yet
never completely told. In our present state we
are at a disadvantage. We are painfuUy con-
scious that there is

** A deep below the deep,

And a height beyond the height.
Our hearing is not hearing,
And our seeing is not sight.*'

But, behold, you who are sincere, earnest
men and women — behold your glorious destiny !
Throughout the never-ending cycles of eternity
you will be unceasingly rising, by means of the
truths you have already apprehended, as upon
stepping-stones, to truth still higher, still nobler,
stni more sublime.

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87

Manliness.
I.

" Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now,
and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find
a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh
the truth ; and I will pardon it/*— Jeremiah v. 1.

TN" Hebrew, just as in Latin and Greek and
-*- other languages, there are two words for
man, — ^the one appKcable to the whole human
species, as distinguished from the lower animals,
the other applicable only to those who possess
the noblest characteristics of manhood — to those
whom, in English, we should call manly men, or
heroes. It is, of course, the latter of these words
that is used in our text. There were thousands
of beings in Jerusalem who had the outward
semblance of men ; but the question was, whe-
ther any one of them had a manly character.
Alas ! the expression, a manly man, is by no

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88 Manliness.

means a tautological expression. The noun
refers to the body, the adjective to the souL It
is quite possible to have the body of a man and
the soul of a baby ; or worse, to have the body
of a man and the soul of a beast ; or worst of
all, to have the body of a man and the soul of
a fiend.

Executing judgment means, in modem Eng-
lish, doing right. Jeremiah's conception of a
true man, — a man in the highest significa-
tion of the term, is, that he is one who does
right and seeks truth. We shall only be able
in this -sermon to notice the first of these
characteristics. We must leave the second for
future consideration, as well as the value of
manhood, implied in the words, " I will par-
don it."

The first test, then, of genuine manliness —
the first criterion whether or not a human
being deserves to be called a man — ^is this,
Does he or does he not do right ? It is a mat-
ter for serious reflection whether men — real,
genuine men — are not as rare in the towns
and villages of England to-day as they would
seem to have been in Jerusalem in the time of
Jeremiah.

Just think, in the first instance, of the fhiuds

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Manliness. 89

daily perpetrated in trade. You have all heard
the phrase "commercial morality," and you all
know that it is but a euphonious expression
for the immoralities of commerce — ^immoralities
which men try to persuade themselves must
have been rendered moral by force of custom.
I need not remind you how many thousands of
times whitened water has been sold for milk,
sweetened sand for sugar, or a mixture of sloe-
leaves and iron -filings for tea. I need not
remind you how frequently your children's
sweets have been composed of sulphuric acid
and red-lead, or your beer flavoured with cop-
peras, Cocculus indicm, or strychnine. Tour port
wine, as it is called by way of courtesy, is com-
monly made in London. Your Stilton cheese
grows green not with age, but by the aid of
copper nails.

'* Chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread,
And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life."

Poisons are, unhappily, much cheaper than food.
It pays, therefore, to sell poison and to charge
for food ; and whatever pays is right, according
to the gospel of commercial morality. \ You buy
a horse. You see, as you think, that he is so
many years old ; but, poor man ! you are taken

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90 Manliness.

in. The other day that horse was made to grow
a year or two older in five minutes by the skil-
ful operation of a dentist. You buy a picture
which has all the appearance of being ancient.
But again you are deceived : this appearance was
created a week ago by a few pennyworths of
paint. You buy some silver. It has the mark
which stamps it as antique ; but that mark is a
forgery, and was put on the day before yester-
day. You buy a house, which, in your inno-
cence, you imagine will be some sort of shelter
from wind and rain ; but if it is built on nine-
teenth-century principles — that is to say, of the
very worst materials which can by any possi-
bility be made to hold together — ^by the time
your house has " settled," as they call it, there
will not be a single window that will shut, or a
single door that will fasten.

Think, again, of the frauds so common on
the Stock Exchange, where, as you know, it is a
frequent practice with many men to spread false
reports for the sake of increasing their own
profit. Think of the immense number of per-
sons too respectable to steal, but not too respect-
able to make purchases for which they have no
intention of paying. Think of the enormous
amount of crime that has been perpetrated, dur-

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Manliness, 91

ing the last fifty years or so, in connection with
public companies. The large majority of these
companies have been begun, continued, and ended
in chicanery. Very often they could only be
started by the publication of that string of lies
technically known as "rigging the market;"
and the promoters were well aware that their
pockets could only be filled if those of the share-
holders were emptied. Thus, on a foundation
of falsehood has been based a superstructure of
robbery; and when the whole concern falls to
the ground, those who are buried in the ruins
find out, too late, that they have trusted not
in men but in knaves. Not unfrequently, too,
these knaves are diabolical enough to veil their
rascality with a hypocritical cloak of canting
religiousness. One of the directors of the Glas-
gow Bank, you remember, was too pious to read
Monday's newspaper because it was printed on
Sunday. Tennyson, in his "Sea Dreams," has
given us a very striking sketch of this kind of
creature : —

" With his fat affectionate smile
That makes the widow lean. . . .
Who, never naming God except for gain,
So never took that useful name in vain, —
Made ,Him his catspaw, and the cross his tool,
And Christ a bait to trap his dupe and fool ;

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92 Manliness.

And, snake-like, slimed his victim ere he gorged ;

And oft at Bible-meetings, o*er the rest

Arising, did his holy oily best

To spread the "Word by which himself had thriven."

It is bad to be a knave, but infinitely worse to
be a pious knave.

I must not omit to mention the dishonesty
that exists in the professions. There are doc-
tors who never tell a patient they can make
nothing of his case, or that it is one which
requires the attention of a specialist. They
would rather kill a man themselves than allow
a brother practitioner to cure him. There are
lawyers who only "rescue your estate from
your enemy to keep it for themselves." There
are clergymen who talk merely because they are
paid to talk, or because they have got into the
habit of talking, or because they want to make
a name for themselves, and do not care three
straws whether they injure or benefit their con-
gregations.

No doubt this is a glorious century in which
we live. In some respects it deserves to be
called the world's golden age. It is an era
pregnant with invention, and discovery, and free-
dom of thought. But, on the other hand, there
never was a time in which so many persons

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Manliness. 93

lived by cheating. Almost every week we
read in the papers of some clever rogue who
has discovered a new method of getting money
by false pretences. And fraud, as I have in-
timated, is by no means confined to the lower
classes. Of six persons imprisoned the other
day for this offence, one was a barrister and
another a clergyman. There was a time when
the word of an English gentleman was " as good
as his bond,*' but that can never be again. There
has been too much cheating by persons who
were gentlemen in virtue of position and edu-
cation and even birth.

I have dwelt upon dishonesty, because it
seems to me one of the most characteristic sins
of our day. It springs from the love of money,
which St Paul describes as " the root of all evil,"
— that inordinate passion for wealth which
makes men feel that they must and will have it,
if not by fair means, then by foul. This passion
for money has never been more general than
it is at present. Its pernicious influence may
be traced not only in trade, but in almost
every sphere of life. Mr Goschen, speaking
recently to the students of University College,
Bristol, made an earnest protest against the
tendency to acquire what he called " saleable

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94 Manliness.

knowledge," to the exclusion of that purely
mental training which would enlarge the capaci-
ties of the mind. The protest is much needed.
Boys at school and young men at college are
sorely tempted nowadays to learn only what will
pay, and to regard everything as useless if its
value cannot be expressed in poimds sterling.
Education ought to mean sd f 'development , but
it is too frequently believed to consist in the
acquisition of the art of money-making. Hence
the passion for wealth has led men not only to
be dishonest in their dealings with others, but
also to be dishonest towards themselves. It
tempts them to sell the glorious birthright of
their manhood for what is little better than a
mess of pottage.

There is another characteristic fault of our
day, which I can only just mention — ^the fault,
namely, of paying too much regard to appear-
ances and too little regard to reality. " Strive
to be rather than to seem," was a maxim laid
down by ^schylus in one of his dramas. Strive
to seem rather than to be, is the maxim of our
time. It is the great aim in this nineteenth
century to pass examinations, and so to appear
clever; to live in good style, and so to appear

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rich ; to conform outwardly to the demands of
society, and so to appear respectable. In some
form or other, I fear, paying more attention to
seeming than to being is the besetting sin of
most of us ; and so far as we do this, our life
is a living lie. It is the very first step towards
right-doing, and therefore towards manliness in
the best sense of that word, that we should be
real, genuine, honest, true.

I am afraid you will think I have been harsh
and severe ; but it is a preacher's duty some- **
times to speak plainly. I have not spared my
own profession, — I have no wish to spare myself.
I would remind myself, as well as you, that
in so far as we knowingly and voluntarily do
wrong, either in ways more peculiar to our own
age, or in ways common to all ages, — in so far
as we fail to do right, according to the measure
of our light and ability, — ^we are unworthy of
the name of men. A man properly so called
does not, like a beast, act with a view to the
pleasure of the next succeeding moment : he is
"a being of a large discourse, looking before
and after." A man properly so called does not
float upon the waves of inclination : when they
threaten to sweep him from the path of rectitude,

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he majestically bids them back, saying, " Hither-
to shall ye come, but here shall ye be stayed."
A man properly so called dares to tread the
path of duty, however steep it may be, however
difficult, for he perceives that it " leads through
darkness up to God."

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Manliness.
II.

" Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now,
and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find
a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh
the truth ; and I will pardon it." — Jeremiah v. 1.

TN" the last sermon we noticed the first of two
•*• characteristics which, according to Jeremiah,
belong to every genuine man — ^viz., that of exe-
cuting judgment or doing right. The second
characteristic is that he seeks the truth, or rather
seeks truth ; — there is no article in the Hebrew,
and so the word truth must be taken in its widest
signification.

In trying to answer the question, What is
truth ? we saw that the word was synonymous
with fact, and must be carefully distinguished
from opinions, beliefs, and creeds. The latter
change, the former is unchangeable. Opinion

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or belief may be false; truth or fact cannot
but be true, for everything must be what it is.
Truth is something which is the same for all,
whatever be their opinions or absence of opin-
ions. Commonly the werd truth is restricted
to the more important classes of facts; we
speak, for example, of physical facts and of
moral or religious truths. The distinction, how-
ever, is unnecessary and rather misleading. All
facts, whether physical, psychical, or religious,
are parts of that comprehensive whole which
is summed up in the one word truth. We
saw, further, that opinions, beliefs, or creeds are
to truth what a man's likeness is to the man
himself. They can at best be but copies of
truth, and they will probably be more or less
imperfect and incorrect. And not only so, but
we saw that a creed could only be the beginning
of our acqutdntance with truth, — it may be th©
starting-point, but cannot be the goal. Truth
cannot be symbolised by a finite circle, but
rather by an infinite line.

From all this it follows that every one who
would lay claim to the name of man must be-
come a searcher after truth. He who thin^
he knows it all, or even a large proportion of
it, shows by the very thought his surpassing

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ignorance. When the Delphic oracle declared
that Socrates was the wisest man in Greece,
the philosoper said he was at first very much
puzzled, for he had a painful consciousness that
he was not reaUy wise ; but he saw afterwards
his wisdom consisted in this, that while in
common with other men he knew nothing, he
recognised his ignorance, while they prided them-
selves on their knowledge. The more extensive
is any one's acquaintance with truth, the more
clearly does he perceive that what he knows is
as nothing in comparison with what he does not
know ; and hence he feels that if truth is to be
won he must search for it

The power of seeking for truth is one of the
grandest of human prerogatives. It is far more
valuable than would have been an intuitive ac-
quaintance with all the truth we ever required
to know; for nothing is worth much to finite
beings that has not been obtained by efforts
The struggle to acquire truth is almost, if not
quite, as beneficial as its actual acquisition.
*' If," says Malebranche, " I held truth captive in
my hand, I should open my hand and let it fly,
that I might again pursue and catch it." " Did
the Almighty," says Lessing, " hold in His right
hand truth and in His left hand the search after

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truth, and deign to tender me the one I might
prefer, I should in all humility, but without hesi-
tation, request the search after truth." These
passages perhaps underestimate the value of
truth attained. There is an inestimable advan-
tage and an ineffable joy in becoming acquainted
with some fresh truth ; but still the advantage
and the joy I apprehend are due chiefly to the
fact that we are thereby better equipped for con-
tinuing our search.

Seeking after truth involves the investigation
of the knowledge bequeathed to us by others
(with the view of ascertaining whether their opin-
ions and beliefs were correct copies of the truth),
and it also involves the effort to acquire fresh
knowledge for ourselves. We have to beware,
on the one hand, of a flippant contempt for
authority, and on the other, of a slavish cringing
to authority —

" Not clinging to some ancient saw,
Not mastered by some modern term,
Not swift, nor slow to change, but firm ; " —

firm in our allegiance to the truth ; so firm that
when we really find an opinion to be erroneous,
we shall venture to discard it, no matter whose
opinion it may have been.

Of course there are many subjects in regard

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to which we are not competent to form an inde-
pendent judgment, and in these cases we should
thankfully accept the teaching of others. It
would be supremely absurd for most of us to
question the validity of the received astronomical
measurements, for we do not possess the requisite
knowledge of mathematics which their investi-
gation would require. But in regard to religion,
the case is somewhat different. Eeason and con-
science are the chief instruments necessary in
a search for religious truth. I do not mean, of
course, unaided reason and conscience, but reason
and conscience appplied to the revelations of God
which we have in nature, in human nature, in
history, in the Bible, in Christ, and so on. Still,
even here there is danger of pride, and there
is need for humility. It is well that we
should all find some spiritual teacher to whom
we can look up with reverence as more likely to
arrive at the truth than ourselves, and whose
opinion will therefore be treated by us, though
not as, law, yet with thoughtful respect. There
is nothing more disgusting than to hear, as we
sometimes do, criticisms on books or sermons
which show that the would-be censors are not
only incompetent for the task they have set
themselves, but that they are actually ignorant

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I02 Manliness.

of the very meaning of the terms in which their
criticisms are expressed. Still, though the right
of private judgment, — that glorious privilege won
for us by the Eeformation, — is often abused, it
is nevertheless the inalienable prerogative of
every one who is properly called a man.

There are three things which may prevent a
man from seeking truth — conceit, laziness, and
fear. First, there is conceit. Some persons
look upon their own little stock of beliefs "as the
sum of human knowledge. Having been provi-
dentially preserved from the possibility of error,
it is, of course, needless for them to test the
accuracy of their opinions; and since they
know all that needs to be known, they have
nothing to do but rest and be thankful. They
enjoy a pleasing conviction, as George Eliot
says, that if there are any facts which have
escaped their observation, they must be facts
not worth observing. I need scarcely say that
these persons are unworthy of being called men.
They profess themselves to be wise, but un-
fortunately they are fools.

Then there is laziness. You remember the
inimitable description of Cervantes, in which the
knight of La Mancha is represented as construct-
ing for himself a helmet. When it was finished

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he smote it with his sword to try its strength.
The blow broke it in halves, so he was obliged
to make another. But this time he did not test
it; he persuaded himself it was strong enough
to render any trial superfluous. Very much on
the same principle, there are persons who once
in their lives tried to do a little thinking ; but
when many of their old and long - cherished
opinions began to give way under the process,
they desisted from thought, and argued with
themselves that it was unnecessary, or even sin-
ful You will generally find that if a man is
too lazy to seek for religious truth, he justifies
his laziness by maintaining that such a search
is tantamount to scepticism. There is a good
deal of indolence in the world, as well as a
good deal of stupidity, which is dignified with
the name of faith.

Lastly, fear keeps many from seeking for
truth. There are some well-meaning but feeble-
minded persons who imagine that God will judge
them according to the state of their opinions,
and not according to the state of their hearts ;
and who come, therefore, to the conclusion that
if, in seeking after truth, they were to form an
erroneous judgment, they would be visited with
the divine vengeance. Hence they want to re-

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ceive their opinions — especially their religious
opinions — upon authority ; for by so doing they
think that their own responsibility will cease.
Some time ago I met an old schoolfellow, who
told me he thought of becoming a Eoman Catho-
lic. I asked him why. " Well," he said, " I
will tell you. Theology is in such an imsettled
condition in my own denomination, that I don't
know what I am to believe. One man, for
example, teaches the eternity of future pimish-
ment ; another insists on universal restoration ;
and a third maintains the doctrine of annihila-
tion. One man holds the old substitutionary
view of the atonement ; and another the modem
revelatory view. I should like to belong to a
Church which would tell me what I ought to
believe, and then I would believe it." This, I
apprehend, is not an uncommon state of mind.

Now it is quite true that the search for reli-
gious truth is a serious and solemn thing ; and
it is also true that it often leads men, for a time,
into a very unenviable state of perplexity, un-
certainty, and doubt. As the old foundations of
their existence totter and threaten to fall, they
feel as if they were sinking — sinking — sinking
into the blackness of despair. But such a state
of mind, though painful, is neither wicked nor

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Manliness. 105

ignoble. " Behold, I go forward," said poor
broken-hearted Job, "but He is not there; and
backward, but I cannot perceive him: on the
left hand, where He doth work, but I cannot
behold Him: He hideth Himself on the right
hand, that I cannot see Him : but He knoweth
the way that I take : when He hath tried me, I
shall come forth as gold." If you would see
this strikingly fulfilled, read the Life of Eobert-
son of Brighton.

The creed which a man accepts just because
he has been told it is correct, and which he has
not made his own by thought, investigation, and
study, is for him a worthless creed. He does
not really believe, but, as Coleridge says, merely
" believes that he believes." Holding his creed
in this stupid way, it becomes to him, not (as it
should be) a means to progress, but (as it should
not be) a barrier against progress. He believes,
as he thinks, what he ought to believe, and
hence he has no anxiety to make any further
acquisitions.

The only excuse to be made for such men is,
that they have not known the truth, and there-
fore they are ignorant what it is they are
despising. " Ye shall know the truth," said
Christ, " and the truth shall make you free," —

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free from such pitiful conceit, free from such
contemptible indolence, free from such un-
worthy fear. He who has once stood face to
face with Truth, and gazed upon her matchless
beauty, loves her with more than a lover's love,
and will not grudge an eternity of effort and
of peril spent in wooing and winning her for
his own.

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Manliness.
III.

** Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now,
and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find
a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh
the truth; and I will pardon it." — Jkbkmtah v. 1.

T MENTIONED that the word used for man
-*" in the Hebrew of our text is a term which
stands, not for a man as distinguished from a
brute, but for a high type of man as distin-
guished from a low. Some are men in outward
semblance only, but the manly man or hero is a
man in soul. His character is manly or heroic.
According to Jeremiah, he has two distinguishing
attributes, he does right and seeks truth. He
obeys the dictates of conscience, however strong
may be the enticements of expediency or pleas-
ure, feeling that, '' because right is right, to
choose the right is wisdom, in the scorn of con-

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io8 Manliness.

sequence/* He examines, moreover, to the best
of his ability, the worth of currently received
opinions ; and, recognising that his actual know-
ledge involves but the most fragmentary ac-
quaintance with truth, he strives diligently and
continuously for further acquisitions.

Such a conception of manhood no doubt is
idealistic. The best of us will sometimes slip.
The wisest of us will sometimes feel incapable of
mental effort. But it behoves us to ask our-
selves whether or not this ideal is our standard
of excellence, towards which we are honestly
and earnestly doing our utmost to approximate.

It remains to speak of the value of true man-
hood. I need scarcely say that from the point
of view of political economy, it is a worthless
possession, or even worse than worthless. It is
not a marketable commodity ; it will neither
increase any one's income, nor improve his posi-
tion in society. History teaches us that men
who have been, in any marked degree, wiser or
better than the vulgar herd, have usually suffered
in proportion to their superiority. It is curious
to notice, for example, that those' to whom
Greece was most indebted were almost always
rewarded with imprisonment or exile, or some
other form of punishment. Several names will

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Manliness, 109

readily occur to you illustrative of tliis — such
as bleisthenes, Miltiades, Themistocles, Aris-
tides, Cimon, and Pericles. You may remem-
ber, too, tHe well-known couplet about the world's
greatest poet, —

*' Seven cities quarrelled over Homer dead,
Throngli which the living Homer begged his bread. "

While he was alive people thought his efifusions
amply repaid by a beggar's crust ; but when he
was dead they fought for the honour of calling
him a fellow-townsman. If this is not histori-
cally true in regard to Homer, it may be re-
garded as a figurative biography of a very
large proportion of the world's greatest men.
Their greatness has rarely been recognised
until long after their death; or if it has been
recognised, it has elicited envy rather than
admiration, punishment rather than reward.
The nearer men have approached to the lofty
ideal of manliness described in our text, the
more loyal they have been in their devotion to
right and to truth, the more have they been
called upon to suffer. Goethe truly says, " a
noble nature can only attract the noble." We
may even go further than this. A noble nature
repels, and excites the animosity of, the ignoble.

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It may seem cynical to assert that the majority
of mankind have always had degraded concep-
tions of human duty, but it is demonstrably
true, proved by the fact that real nobility of
character has almost invariably cost a man very,
very dear. Unflinching devotion to right and
truth has led to ignominy and persecution, to
the loss of pleasure, property, friends, freedom,
life. The world — that is to say, the ignoble
many as opposed to the noble few, — ^has approved
of doing right up to a certtdn point, — up to the
point of expediency ; but to go beyond this, to
be honest when honesty was not the best pol-
icy, it has always considered a sign of lunacy.
Even to-day in civilised and Christian England,
a tradesman whose code of morals is that which
is technically called commercial, will not respect
an apprentice who refuses to tell a useful lie ;
on the contrary, he will despise and dismiss
him. The world has approved of seeking after
truth up to a certain point, so far as the investi-
gation of nature was likely to increase capital
or to raise the rate of profit, but there it stops.
It despises facts which cannot be turned to
pecuniary account. It never seeks after truth
in the moral or religious sphere, and it hates aU
who do. 'It beKeves that it knows everything

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Manliness. 1 1 1

worth knowing. It dislikes being disturbed
with new ideas. It has a horror of being told
anything it never heard before. There has been
no prophet, nor apostle, nor philosopher, nor re-
former whom it has not execrated, against whom
it has not howled out the accusation which the
Ephesians brought against St Paul, that the
world was being turned by him upside down.
The very truisms of one age were often regarded
in the preceding generation as impious blas-
phemies, justly punished by fines and imprison-
ment, by torture and death : —

" For aU the jlast of time reveals,
A bridal dawn of thunder-peals,
Whenever thought hath wedded fact."

Let me call to your minds one or two familiar
illustrations. Anaxagoras, after the early Greek
philosophers had long groped in vain for a First
Cause, which they fancied was to be found in
the principles of water, air, or fire, — Anaxagoras
saw and said that the origin of all things must be
ultimately traced to Intelligence. This his coun-
trymen could not tolerate, — it was too novel, too
absurd. Private judgment must be punished, they
said, when it wandered so far from the truth ; so
he was banished from Greece, and had a narrow
escape of death. Socrates, who was the first to

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112 Manliness.

perceive that morality must be something deeper,
something altogether different from expediency,
— Socrates, who was the first to declare that evil
should not be rendered for evil,^-Socrates, whose
conceptions of Deity were too lofty to tally with
the childish orthodoxy of his contemporaries, —
Socrates, who was brave enough to express the
memorable utterance, " I will venture to be true
to my conviction, though all the world oppose
it," — Socrates, the purest, wisest, noblest of men,
was accused, forsooth, of being an atheist and of
corrupting the young, and was despatched with
a cup of hemlock. Galileo, for saying that the
earth moved when he ought to have said it was
at rest, was stretched upon the rack. The world
was in this instance, I am sorry to say, rep-
resented by a section of the Christian Church.
Giordano Bruno, one of the ^subtlest thinkers 'of
the middle ages, suggested the hypothesis that
our earth was not the only abode of life in the
universe. For this he was arrested by the same
section of the Church and burnt at the stake.
The story of Columbus, again, is a striking
illustration of the way in which the world esti-
mates and treats its heroes. Early in life the
idea dawned upon him, and gradually grew into
an irresistible assurance, that there must be a

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continent in the far west as yet undiscovered.
The Spaniards may perhaps be forgiven for
treating his theory as a mad delusion. Had
they been a little wiser they would have ob-
served that it possessed all the characteristics of
an inspiration ; but, fortunately for them, as for
a good many others, stupidity is not an unpar-
donable sin. They may perhaps be forgiven for
allowing him to set sail on his perilous voyage
in a boat little better than a coal-barge, with no
scientific instruments but a compass and a quad-
rant ; for this indifference was a necessary result
of their ignorance and foolishness. But they can
never be forgiven for their subsequent treatment
of him. It has earned for them undying shame.
When they found that America was involving
them in trouble and expense, they came to the
conclusion that Columbus had committed a crime
in discovering a fact which they did not want,
which they would have been better without ; and
so the grand old hero, near the close of his life,
was flung into prison and loaded with chains.
Think, too, of the thousands and tens of thou-
sands of martyrs who have proved the beauty of
truth and the divinity of right by the eloquent
testimony of anguish; who, because they re-
fused to be false to their convictions, "were
H

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1 14 Manliness.

stoned, were sawn asunder, were tempted, were
slain with the sword; who were tortured, not
accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a
better resurrection ; who had trial of cruel mock-
ings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and
imprisonment; who wandered about in sheep-
skins and goat-skins ; who dwelt in deserts and
in mountains, and in dens and caves of the
earth; being destitute, aflfliicted, tormented: of
whom the world was not worthy." Lastly and
specially, call to remembrance how the world
treated Christ. In Him the ideal of manhood
was completely realised ; on Him, therefore, it
inflicted its most cruel vengeance, and against
Him it directed its vilest blasphemies. You'
know His character: I need not describe it.
Pure, unselfish, noble as was His own life, He
was full of tenderness and helpful sympathy
for the sinful, the fallen, the debased. Yet He
was almost universally hated. He was hated by
the Pharisees because He had shown the worth-
lessness of their broad phylacteries and long
prayers and orthodox platitudes, the worse than
worthlessness of their lying, canting hypocrisy.
He was hated in the end by the common people
when they found that, notwithstanding all His
kindness. He was not likely to improve their

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social condition. As soon as they made this
discovery, Christ ceased to be their favourite.
With the usual fickleness of a mob, they sud-
denly transferred their enthusiasm to the sedi-
tious demagogue Barabbas. " Not this man, but
Barabbas," they shouted. " Now Barabbas," the
evangelist sarcastically adds, "was a robber."
For once high and low, rich and poor, priest and
layman, patrician and plebeian, educated and
unlettered, the man of cidture and the boor,
— for once these were all agreed. They were
unanimous in taking away the life of the man
Christ Jesus, who by His teaching and example
had made it possible for all future lives to
become noble and sublime.

Such has been the world's treatment of true
manliness in the past. And when we remember
the persecutions inflicted only a few years ago
on men like Frederick Robertson, Frederick
Maurice, and Charles Kingsley, we are almost
driven to the conclusion that the ignoble are still
as numerous and as base as ever. If we take a
wide view, however, we must come to the happy
conclusion that the number of true men is on
the increase, and that they are more and more
tolerated, not to say respected. You and I are
not likely to suffer death or torture for fidelity

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ii6 Manliness.

to conscience or to reason. We shall probably,
by such fidelity, meet with sympathy that will
be unspeakably precious and helpful. Still, if
we are unswervingly noble — if we lift up our
voice against fraud or cant — if we choose to be
singular, unfashionable, or heterodox, rather than
false to our convictions — if we always and every-
where prefer right to wrong, truth to error, God
to mammon, — we shall certainly, sooner or later,
and to a greater or less extent, have to suffer
for so doing. We shall lose money, it may be,
or forfeit esteem, or terminate old friendships,
or injure our prospects. Possibly we may incur
all these troubles at once. That we do not
suffer more, will be due to the sacrifices of the
noble men and women who have gone before
us, — above all, to the one prolonged sacrifice of
the life and death of Christ. And surely we
shall not grudge to offer up our own oblation of
anguish at the altars of right and of truth.

The value of manliness, then, does not con-
sist in its conferring .any pecuniary or social
advaiitages. He who would be a true man
must be willing, if necessary, to dispense with
these. Its real worth is twofold. First of all,
it entitles us to self - respect ; and any evil
which the world can inflict is insignificant when

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Manliness. 117

compared with this privilege, which it cannot
take away. There can be no sweeter expe-
rience than the knowledge that, having been
created in the image of God, we have striven,
though unsuccessfully oftentimes, yet honestly
and heartily, to preserve that image from defile-
ment. But, secondly — and this is the point
suggested by our text, — a point on which Christ
would have us lay stress, — the value of manli-
ness consists, not in what we gain by it for our-
selves, but in what we give by it to others.
"Eun ye to and fro through the streets of
Jerusalem, and see if ye can find a man, one
that doeth right and seeketh truth; 9xA I will
pardon it'' — pardon thousands of human beings
who might have been men but were not, for the
sake of one who was really a man. Now, since
pardon would be immoral, and therefore impos-
sible, without genuine repentance, the forgiveness
to wliich the prophet refers must imply that the
one true man would, by his conscious and un-
conscious influence, gradually convert the other
inhabitants of Jerusalem, or their descendants,
from the error of their ways, and induce them
also to be loyal to right and truth. We are
inclined very much to underrate the power
which every human being possesses over the

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future of his race. However poor and ignorant
we may be, there are some whom we can directly
influence. Each one of our acquaintances will,
in his turn, exert a similar influence upon several
others ; and the descendants of all these, to the
end of time, will be the better for every effort
we have made to be true to the nature with
which we have been endowed. " We see human
heroism," says George Eliot, " broken into units,
and we say this unit did little — might as well
not have been ; but in this way we might break
up a great army into units ; in this way we
might break the sunlight into fragments, and
think that this and the other might be lightly
parted with." The careful student of history
cannot fail to perceive that the human race is
making intellectual and moral progress — ^very
slow, but very real; and that we may reason-
ably look forward, with sure and certain hope,
to a final victory in the far-ofif future for right
and truth. Each one of us may contribute some-
thing to this glorious consummation. "There
needs not a great soul," says Carlyle, " to make
a hero: there needs a God-created soul, which
will be true to its origin, — that is, a great soul."
As surely as every ray of light has a tendency
to dissipate darkness, or every grain of salt to

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prevent corruption, so surely does every good
action we perform confer some blessing upon our
race. Here there is no such thing as failure.
Apparent failure is often the most splendid
success. It was, pre-eminently, in the case of
Christ ; it is so oftentimes, in some small meas-
ure, in the case of His followers. Martyrdom
is not defeat — ^it is victory; for it is the sub-
limest testimony to the value of right and to
the beauty of truth.

" Disciples see their Master bleeding

Upon the dreadful cross ;
Hopeless of better days succeeding,

They mourn the battle's loss :
But at this hour of their bewailing,

While sin and sorrow rails,
'Tis man who triumphs that is failing,

'Tis Christ who dies prevails."

To be a man is no easy task, I admit. The
constant doing of what is right implies continual
self-denial, than which there is nothing in the
world tiiore painfuL The earnest search after
truth implies hard thinking; and I know of
nothing that requires a greater effort. It is
because true manliness is so difficult of attain-
ment that it is so rarely attained. "Nothing
great," says Plato, " is easy." " All noble things,"
s«lys Spinoza, "are rare, — all noble things are

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I20 Manliness.

diflBcult." And if we are to succeed, we must
have the strength that conies from communion
with God.

" God, our spirits, v/nassisted,

Must nnsnccessful be.
Whoever hath the world resisted

Except by help of Thee ?
But, sayed by a divine alliance,

From terrors of defeat,
Unvauntingly, yet with defiance.

One man the world tnay meet

My soul is for a crown aspiring —

The crown of righteousness ;
My soul is for truth inquiring —

For God, and nothing less.
Sin, sorrow, and the world, conspiring,

Assault me, and I bleed.
Tired am I : yet, through love, untiring,

I know I shall succeed.**

There is this for your consolation. Indifference
to right and truth would save you trouble, but
would assuredly degrade your nature; whereas
the pain you experience in striving to live a
manly life is noble and elevatiug in itself, and
will end in eternal joy. Do not sell your birth-
right for a mess of pottage. What shall it profit
you if you gaiu the whole world, and lose your-
self? Sirs! I beseech you, for your own sakes,
for Christ's sake, for God*s sake, be men !

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The Greatness of Man.

" When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon
and the stars, which Thou hast ordained ; What is man, that
Thou art mindful of him ? and the son of man, that Thou
visitest him ? For " (or rather but) " Thou hast made him a
little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory
and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the
works of Thy hands ; Thou hast put all things under his feet."
—Psalm viii. 8-6.

TT7HKN" the Psalmist looked up to the heavens
^^ he was at first overwhelmed with a sense
of his own littleness. The sun, moon, and stars
appeared to him so majestic, that he said, " Lord,
what is man, that Thou art mindful of him ? and
the son of man, that Thou visitest hiin ? " Man
seemed in comparison insignificant and unworthy
of the divine regard. But, on second thoughts,
David bethought himself that this was an entire
misconception of the matter, and that man could
not be inferior to the heavens ; for God had, in
point of fact, made him only a little lower than
the angels, — ^than the Elohim is the word in the

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122 The Greatness of Man.

Hebrew. This term, in the Elohistic portion of
the Pentateuch, is applied to the Ahnighty in-
stead of the term Jehovah. God had made man,
we may therefore read, a little lower than Him-
self ; had crowned him with glory and honour;
had given him dominion over the works of His
hands, and had put all things under his feet
The idea suggested by our text is this —

<' On earth there is nothing great but man :
In man there is nothing great but mind."

In other words, true greatness consists, not in
weight or extension, but in intellectual power
and moral worth. Instead of being of less value
than the heavens, man is of infinitely more value
than they, for he is but a little lower than the
Elohim.

We need to be retaught this lesson.

The progress of science has a constantly in-
creasing tendency to make us underrate our
manhood. Our relations to time and space
seem so paltry, when we compare them with
those of the material world. If the Psalmist
were overawed by the heavens, much more must
they overawe thoughtful and imaginative minds
in our own day. There are but 5932 stars
visible to the naked eye, and David did not even

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The Greatness of Man. 123

suspect the existence of any others. His view
of their origin was that they were suddenly
called into existence on a certain Thursday,
two thousand years before the time of Noah.
They were intended, he thought (the whole
5932 of them), to adorn his firmament or to
light up his roads. The sun and moon he prob-
ably considered to be no larger than Palestine,
and not more than 50 or 100 miles distant.
How different are our heavens from his ! Eosse's
telescope has brought to view over 20,000,000
of stars. We know that many of these are
hundreds of times greater than our own sun,
and that most of them (like him) have planets
revolving around them. We know that the
volume of the sun is 1 J million times as large
as that of the earth. We know it is so far dis-
tant, that if we coidd travel towards it day and
night at the rate of 60 mUes an hour, it could
not be reached in less than 180 years. We
know that Neptune is 30 times as far away
from the sun as we are, and that therefore it
woidd take any one, at the same rate, over
5400 years to traverse the intervening space.
We know that some of the nearest fixed stars
are more than 45 billions (i.e., millions of
millions) of miles away from us, so that if we

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124 ^^^ Greatness of Man.

travelled as before 60 miles an hour, it woidd
require nearly 90,000,000 of years to perform
the journey. We know that the so-called fixed
stars are not really at rest, but that they are
moving in orbits hundreds of millions of miles
in diameter, which enormous orbits, owing to
the distance, appear to us like mere mathemat-
ical points. It seems probable enough that
stars exist in such far-off tracts of space, that
their light, though travelling as it must do at
the rate of 192,000 miles per second, has not
yefc reached us; and when it comes it will reveal,
as Sir John Herschel said, not the actual con-
dition of those stars at the time, but the state
in which they were ages and ages before.

Again, the duration of the material universe
in time is no less stupendous than its extension
in space. There is every reason to believe that
myriads of ages ago our earth was a rotating
mass of glowing gas; that it gradually cooled
into the liquid state; that at last the outside
crust became solid, the inside only remaining
molten ; and that after millions of years this in-
ternal source of the earth's surface-heat will be
exhausted, in consequence of which it will be no
longer capable of maintaining animal or even veg-
etable life. " Then," says Mr K. A. Proctor, " her

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The Greatness of Man. 125

desert continents and frost-bound oceans will in
some degree resemble the arid wastes which the
astronomer recognises in the moon. Long as
has been, and doubtless will be, the duration of
life upon the earth (and it has certainly existed
for myriads and myriads of years), it seems less
than a second when compared with those two
awful time-intervals — one past, when as yet life
was not, and one future, when all life shall have
passed away. Long after the earth has ceased
to be the abode of life, other planets will become
fitted for this purpose. Even the^e time-intervals
will pass, however, until every planet in turn
has been the source of busy life, and afterwards
become inert and dead. Then, after the lapse,
perchance, of a lifeless interval (compared with
which all the past eras of the solar system were
utterly insignificant), the time will arrive when
the sun will be a fit abode for living creatures,
and will continue so during ages infinite to our
conceptions. We may even look forward to still
more distant changes, seeing that the solar sys-
tem is itself moving round an orbit, though the
centre around which it travels is so distant that
at present it remains unknown. The end, seem-
ingly so remote, to which our earth is tend-
ing — the end, infinitely more remote, towards

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126 The Greatness of Man.

which the solar system is tending, — the end of
our galaxy — ^the end of systems of such galaxies
as ours, — are but the beginnings of fresh eras
comparable with themselves. The wave of life
which is now passing over our earth is but a
ripple on the sea of life within the solar system ;
and the sea of life is but as a wavelet on the
great ocean of life that is coextensive with the
universe."

These are not fancies, but facts. In the Milky
Way, as La Place showed, we can see worlds
in the very process of creation, in. all stages of
transition from the gaseous, through the liquid,
to the solid state.

It has been believed, too, by some, that our
earth is being slowly forced nearer to the sun,
into which it will ultimately fall ; that a similar
fate is in store for the whole solar system, for
>the system of which that forms a part, and so
on ad infinitum; that, as Shelley has magnifi-
cently put it in his " Hellas," —

•* Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay.
Like the bubbles on a river.
Sparkling, bursting, borne away."

In the presence of such thoughts as these,
one is tempted, like the Psalmist, to say in

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The Greatness of Man. 127

despair, "What is man?" We, who are con-
sidered tall if we are seventy-two inches high,
who cannot walk faster than three or four miles
an hour, who die almost as soon as we are
bom, must feel very, very insignificant, if we
look only at our relations with space or time,
and then compare ourselves in these respects
with galaxies of worlds. We shall be inclined
to adopt the poet's words, —

" See how beneath the moonbeam's smile

Yon little billow heaves its breast,
And foams and sparkles for a while,

And murmuring then subsides to rest.
Thus man, the sport of bliss and care,

Rises on time's eventful sea.
And having swelled a moment there.

Then melts into eternity."

This kind of sentiment is just now in the air.
One of the most striking characteristics of the
modem mind is to think less of man in propor-
tion as larger views have to be taken of the
universe in which man dwells.

But this way of looking at things seems to me
erroneous and pernicious. There were a couple
of very interesting articles in the ' Spectator ' for
December 1878, in which the question, "Will
progress diminish joy?" was argued at some
length, affirmatively and negatively. The writer

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128 The Greatness of Man.

on the negative side, in trying to show that pro-
gress need not diminish joy, says: "I do not
mean that it adds to our gladness to conceive of
ourselves as mere ants upon an orange in a uni-
verse of innumerable ^uns ; or that the progress
which has led so many astronomers to consider
the cooling down of the earth into a lifeless
cinder, as, sooner or later, a physical certainty, is
a kind of progress that makes the heart lighter.
But after all, is not an ant on a orange, if it
have keen thoughts and warm hopes, and a
sense of communion with the eternal, inmcTi more
than a frozen planet or a globe of fire not yet
aUve?"

That is very well put. Since we are endowed
with sensibility, imagination, memory, hope, af-
fection, reason, conscience, will, and since the
material universe is not so endowed, we are
in reality great, it is comparatively insignifi-
cant. The knowledge we have acquired of the
physical greatness of the universe has had a
tendency to depress us. But we should re-
member that that very knowledge is a proof of
our own more amazing greatness. The material
universe does not know itself. We know both
ourselves and it. Modem scientists have been
too much engrossed with the marvels of the mac-

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The Greatness of Man. 129

rocosm. The still greater wonders of the mic-
rocosm have been ignored or forgotten. The
language of most thinkers, nowadays, is the first
hasty utterance of the Psalmist — "What is
man?" And the answer they give to the
question is this: — man is but a mote in the
sunbeam, a grain of sand in the desert, a ripple
upon an infinite ocean, an atom in immensity.
They forget that he is an atom which feels and
knows and thinks, which imagines and reasons
and hopes and loves, — an atom that can tran-
scend its normal limits in space, and "dwell
far in the unapparent " in communion with the
Unseen, — an atom that believes itself endowed
with " the power of an endless life." The Psalm-
ist, on second thoughts, perceived that his feeling
of despondency had been illegitimate. "Thou
madest man," he continues, " a little lower than
ThyseK; Thou gavest him a nature like Thine
own, differing in degree rather than in kind;
Thou crownedst him with glory and honour;
Thou madest him to have dominion over the
works of Thy hands ; Thou hast put all things
under his feet." " 0, rich and various man,"
says Ealph Waldo Emerson, "thou palace of
sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the
morning and the night and the unfathomable

I

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130 The Greatness of Man.

galaxy, in thy brain the geometry of the city
of God, in thy heart the power of love and the
realms of right and wrong ! "

Moreover the doctrine of man's paltriness and
insignificance seems to me no less pernicious than
erroneous. If we be so paltry, we say to our-
selves, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die." Why should such contemptible atoms go
through the torture of battling with temptation
or of conquering self ? But when we remember
that our spiritual nature is akin to God's, made
only a little lower than His — made, perhaps, as
nearly like to His own as it was possible for God
Himself to make it — then we are stimulated to
walk worthy of the manhood with which we
have been endowed. We are inspired to agonise
(if need be) until we become perfect, even as He
is perfect.

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131

Faith.

** The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in
Him, and I am helped : therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth ;
and with my song will I praise Him/' — Psalm xxviii. 7.

^^fTIHE conditions necessary to constitute a
"■- religion/' it has been well said, "are
these : — there must be a creed or conviction,
claiming authority over the whole of human life;
a belief or set of beliefs, deliberately adopted,
respecting human destiny and duty, to which
the believer inwardly acknowledges that all his
actions must be subordinated ; and, moreover,
there must be a sentiment connected with this
creed, or capable of being evoked by it, suffici-
ently powerful to give it in fact the authority
over human conduct to which it lays claim."
Now this creed or conviction, this belief or set
of beliefs, this attendant sentiment, and this
correspondence of conduct with the dictates of
the creed, are all summed up in the word faith.

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132 Faith.

The Old Testament doctrine of faith in God,
and the New Testament doctrine, are both doc-
trines of trust in a Person. Faith is not mere
belief. It is something quite different from the
tacit assent which a man may give to a proposi-
tion, because he does not care to take the trouble
of denying it. Faith or trust is an affection of
the heart, not a faculty of the head. " Christian
faith," says Dr Bushnell, "is the faith of a
transaction ; it is not the committing of one's
thought in assent to a proposition, but it is the
trusting of one's being to a Being, there to be
rested, kept, guided, moulded, governed and
possessed for ever."

St James, you remember, says, " Thou b^Kev-
est that there is a God. Thou doest well ; but
the devils also beKeve." The devils are as
religious as you are, if your belief in the exist-
ence of God constitutes the whole of your
religion. Suppose a man beKeves in Thirty-
Nine Articles (or, for the matter of that, in 399),
if his religion ends there, what is he the better
for it ? He might just as well be without it.
Suppose a man beKeves in the righteousness and
binding force of the Ten Commandments, and
breaks them all, his belief, so far from making
him a better man, is the strongest proof of his

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Faith. 133

degradation. *' What doth it profit, my brethren,"
says St James, " though a man say he hath faith,
and have not works, can faith save him ? Faith
without works is dead." Luther did not like the
Epistle of James. He called it an epistle of
straw, and would have liked to expunge it from
the Bible. But the doctrine of St James is most
certainly the doctrine of Christ. "Not every
one that saith unto me. Lord, Lord, shall enter
into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth
the will of my Father." The doctrine of St
James is also that of St PauL The faith which
St James says cannot save is the faith of mere
belief. The faith which St Paul says can save
is the faith of trust ; the faith that worketh by
love ; the faith that makes a man one with
Christ in nature, in sympathy, in aim. As the
author of ' Ecce Homo ' says, " Christ required
personal devotion from His followers so vehe-
mently, that they often, in describing their rela-
tion to Him, overleap the bounds of ordinary
figurative language. They speak of hating father
and mother for the sake of Christ — that is,
their love for their earthly relations seemed but
as hatred when compared with their passionate
love for Him. St Paul speaks of Christ being
his life, his very self. It is this intense per-

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1 34 Faith.

sonal devotion, this habitual feeding on the char-
acter of Christ, so that the essential nature of
the Master seems to pass into and become the
essential nature of the servant, that is expressed
in the words, ^ Eating the flesh and drinking the
blood of the Son of Man. ' "

Our text, in addition to supplying us with a
definition of faith, points out its reasonableness.
If it were not reasonable for me to trust in God,
I ought not to be expected to trust in Him.
Some persons seem to think, as Hooker quaintly
puts it, " that the way to be ripe in faith is to
be raw in wit and judgment." But faith, pro-
perly so called, can only be based on reason. It
is reasonable for a human being to trust in God,
because he needs the strengthening and protec-
tion which this trust alone can secure.

Man is morally weak. When we look at him
in his conflict with evil, we are forcibly remind-
ed of the remark of Pliny, that there is nothing
in the world at once so sublime and so paltry
as man. He is sublime enough to know the
right ; but he is paltry because he does the wrong.
It is unnecessary to attempt to prove this.
Every one who is not totally destitute of a con-
science must sometimes have said with the
poet —

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Faith. 135

*' I see, but cannot reach, the height
That lies for ever in the light,
And still for ever and for ever,
What seeming just within my grasp,
I feel my feeble hands unclasp,
And sink disconraged into night."

Every one, therefore, is in need of strength. For
"to be weak/' as Milton says, "is the true
misery."'

Again, men are exposed to moral danger, to
what St Paul forcibly speaks of as "the fiery
darts of the wicked one." The nature of these
fiery darts will vary according to a man's cir-
cumstances and education and position. To one
man they will come in the shape of such a
thought as this: What, if there should be no
God ! "What, if the world and all that is there-
in be the creation and the sport of cbance ! To
another they come in this form: What, if I
should not be one of God's elect ! If you wish
to see how much suffering that thought may
cause a man, read the life of Byron. A third is
haunted by the notion that perhaps there may
be no hereafter and that the grave will be an
everlasting dwelling-place. For many men in
the present day these fiery darts take the shape
of a sceptic£d despair, driving them to the con-
clusion that God is absolutely unknowable ; that

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136 Faith.

life is an utterly insoluble riddle; and that death,
at the best, is but " a leap into the dark." At
other times they will come in the form of an
idea that ''everything done under the sun is
vanity and vexation of spirit," that life is not
worth the pain of living; and then a man
begins, like Hamlet, to debate with himself
whether it would not be better to shuflle off
this mortal coil, rather than endure any longer
the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In
the saddest of all autobiographies, John Stuart
Mill tells us how for many months he suffered
such deep distress from imagining there was
nothing worth living for, that he kept constantly
thinking he could not bear it much longer, but
would soon be obliged to make an end of him-
self. And, in a word, every one who has ever felt
that things were going very strangely in this
world, — that they might have been better ar-
ranged, — everyone who has ever had a moment's
uneasy foreboding in regard to a future life, has
suffered from these fiery darts of the wicked
one.

The Psalmist tells us that after his trust in
God he was helped. The more vou associate
with a human being who is wiser and better
than yourself, the wiser and better you will

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Faith. 137

become. On the same principle you m^y
become godlike by communion with God. It
is a fact of experience that thousands and tens
of thousands, after trusting in God, have been
able to say, "I am helped," and that nothing
has ever been comparable to faith for removing
men's forebodings and bringing them off con-
querors over sin. You remember those touch-
ing lines of Bums's: —

" If I have wandered in those paths
Of life I ought to shun,
As something loudly in my breast
Remonstrates I have done ;

Thxm knowest Thou hast formed me
"With passions wild and strong ;
And listening to their witching voice,
Has often led me wrong."

Poor Burns! hadst thou but learnt the secret
of faith thou wouldst have found, that though
thy passions were strong there was a strength
stronger than theirs which could enable thee
to regulate and subdue them. There have been
men with passions as strong as thine, who have
nevertheless become saints, of whom it was true,
in a spiritual sense, that "they stopped the
mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire,
escaped the edge of the sword, and out of weak-
ness were made strong."

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1 38 Faith.

The help that follows faith consists not only
in an increase of moral strength, but in protec-
tion from gloomy doubts and forebodings. The
man of faith has learnt to "rest in the Lord,
and wait patiently for Him ; " to believe that all
things, in spite of appearances to the contrary,
are working together for good; and to look
forward in sure and certain hope to another and
better world. Therefore his heart greatly re-
joiceth, rejoiceth with an abiding and unchange-
able joy, which external circumstances are
imable to take away. Happiness depends, you
know, far more on the mind than the body.
We may be very miserable amid the most
pleasant physical surroundings, and very happy
amid the most impleasant. The old Stoics used
to maintain that a wise and virtuous man would
be happy even on the rack. And Epicurus, writ-
ing to a friend the day before he died, said that
though he was suffering the most excruciating
pain, he yet felt exceedingly happy, for he was
thinking of the joyful seasons they had spent
together in the past. It seems strange at first
sight that Christ should have said to His dis-
ciples, " My joy I leave with you." " The joy
of the Man of Sorrows ! what joy could He have
to bequeath?" He had neither money nor

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Faith. 1 39

home; His friends were fair-weather friends,
who forsook Him and fled in the hour of His
need. And, since the reward of His three years*
ministry among the Jews was crucifixion, it
seemed as if His life had been an unutterable
failure. Yet he said, "My joy I leave with
you." He knew that His life was not really a
failure, but that it was to be the means of turn-
ing the world's history from a downward into
an upward course. Hence He could rejoice.
The joy which results from faith is a joy that
dwells in the very depths of a man's being,
and is neither dissipated nor disturbed by
the changes of this mortal life. There are
no storms at the bottom of the sea; on the
surface the waves may mingle^ with the clouds,
the waters may roar and be troubled, and the
mountains shake with the swelling thereof, but
there it is as calm as on the stillest summer's
day. So the man of faith may be, to all out-
ward appearance, extremely unfortunate, and yet
he can say with the Psalmist, " The Lord is my
strength and shield ; my heart trusted in Him,
and I am helped; therefore my heart greatly
rejoiceth, and with my song will I praise Him."
The mry life of such a man is one unceasing
psalm of praise.

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I40 Faith.

These are the results of faith. But a mere
orthodox belief is worthless and even injurious.
I have watched the sun as he sank into his
ocean bed and paved the sea with a golden
pathway that seemed to lead to the very gates
of glory; and I have seen the golden hues
gradually fading into gloom, tiU soon the black-
est part of the whole horizon was that which a
few moments before had been so glorious and
bright. The profession of a creed may give us
for a time an air of respectability or an odour of
sancity, but, alas ! for us if our religion ends
with mere belief. We may think it will take
us to happiness and God, but it will not; it
will bring us to darkness and despair.

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141

Chris fs Plan of Salvation.

"Love is the fulfilling of the law."— Romans xiii. 10.

rriHE context reads, " Owe no man anything,
-*- but love one another: for he that loveth
another hath fulfilled the law. For this, thou
shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill,
thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not
covet; and if there be any other command-
ment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying,
namely. Thou shalt love thy neighbour £is thy-
self. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour:
therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."

The question may occur to some one. Why
should the law be fulfilled ? When it acts as a
check upon a man's inclinations or passions, he
is inclined to regard it as his enemy, he would
fain do away with it altogether. But if we look
into the matter a little, we shall see that law is
a most useful friend. Would it be a better

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142 Christ's Plan of Salvation.

universe to live in, think you, if there were no
law of planetary motion ? If the stars, instead
of revolving, as they do, with mathematical pre-
cision, in orbits marked out for them by the law
of gravitation, were at liberty to move in any
direction with any velocity? Better! Why
this earth of ours, set free from the control of
law, might one day be as far from the sun as
Neptune, where we should die of cold, and the
next as near as Mercury, where our frozen re-
mains would be cremated. And law is infinitely
more necessary in the social than in the physical
sphere. The great thing requisite to make
human life even tolerable is security, and this,
of course, we could never feel if every one were
at liberty to treat every one else exactly as he
might happen to please. In that case we should
live in a state of universal warfare and constant
dread. Hence we owe to law a debt not only
of obedience but of gratitude. Though it forbids
our injuring others, it also forbids our being
injured by others. Though it points out our
duties it also protects our rights. Though it
has punishments for the guilty, it also has
rewards for the just. As the water which is
evaporated from the surface of the earth returns
again in fertilising showers, so we are compen-

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Christ's Plan of Salvation. 143

sated for the self-restraint which law demands of
us by that which it exacts from others, and by
the consequent security in which we are enabled
to live. "Of law," says Hooker, in the cele-
brated sentence with which he closes the first
book of his 'Ecclesiastical PoKty,' and which
has been sometimes called the finest sentence in
EngKsh literature, — " Of law there can be no less
acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of
God, her voice the harmony of the world. All
things in heaven and earth do her homage ; the
least as not beneath her care, and the greatest
as not exempted from her power. Both angels
and men, and all creatures of what condition
soever, though each in a different sort and
manner, yet each with uniform consent, admir-
ing her as the mother of their peace and joy."
If this, then, be the nature and value of law,
its fulfilment must be pre-eminently rational
and desirable.

Now law is often obeyed because punishment
is expected to follow its violation. A person may
pay his debts, for example, because, if he do not,
he will go to prison. But you can never be
quite sure that law will be obeyed when you
only appeal to fear. If a man be a clever
scoundrel he may avoid detection, or, if detected.

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144 Christ's Plan of Salvation.

he may perhaps be able to make his escape
before the punishment can be inflicted. And
a stupid scoundrel, probably not knowing that
he is stupid, will often run a similar risk. So,
while the law depends solely upon fear for its
fulfilment, however vigilant may be our police,
however upright our courts of justice, however
severe may be the condemnation of society, we
have no security that it will be obeyed, and as
a matter of fact we know that it is constantly
being violated.

And further, the law is not fulfilled by those
who are satisfied with the mere fulfilment of its
letter. Its spirit is, " Thou shalt do no ill to
thy neighbour;" but in order to be made
definite, this command has to be narrowed in
the written law, where we read only, "Thou
shalt not injure thy neighbour in such and such
ways." It is easy to see that the man who is
contented with keeping the letter will violate the
spirit; for though he refrains from committing
certain definite and punishable injuries, he yet
does grievous wrong to all with whom he comes
in contact by his cold, callous, hard-hearted
selfishness. We sometimes meet with men,
who, we are quite sure, would not rob or
murder us, but who, we are equally sure, would

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not move their Kttle finger to do us any good,
would not raise their hand to save us from de-
struction. These men do incalculable mischief,
and that, too, of the worst kind. They injure the
moral nature of their neighbours, whose best
affections are dwarfed, or it may be destroyed,
by their inhumanity, just as fruit is bKghted
by the frost. They do all that in them lies
to make other men as selfish as themselves.
Hence, though they are not guilty of any
punishable crime, they are guilty of violating
the spirit of the law: they do ill to their
neighbours.

Now Christ saw, what the wisest philosophers
before Him had failed to see, that the law — the
fulfilment of which is essential to human well-
being — can only be fulfilled by love. This idea
is the key to His teaching, the central doctrine
of His EeKgion. Love and Christianity are
synonymous terms. The kingdom which Christ
founded is one in which the members are to be
unitecf by the ties of brotherly kindness. " All
ye are brethren," He said to His disciples ; and,
again, " A new commandment I give unto you,
that ye love one another." This new command-
ment summed up and supplemented all the old.
Understood in the sense in which Christ meant

K

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146 Christ s Plan of Salvation.

it to be understood, as referring, not to a tran-
sient sentimentalism, but to a lifelong practice,
it covers the whole field of human existence,
insomuch that in His description of the last
Judgment, He intimates the divine verdict will
be favourable or unfavourable according as this
new commandment has been obeyed or neglected.
In order that men might become worthy mem-
bers of His kingdom. He sought to infuse into
them His own spirit, — that spirit of passionate
devotedness to the wellbeing of mankind, which
the author of 'Ecce Homo' has aptly named
" the enthusiasm of humanity." And when men
catch this sublime spirit of self-abnegation, they,
too, will desire not to be ministered unto but to
minister ; they, too, will feel identified with the
race, and regard injuries inflicted or benefits
conferred upon others as inflicted or conferred
upon themselves ; they, too, will go about con-
tinually, not merely refraining from evil, but
doing good; they, too, will avoid needlessly
wounding the humblest of their fellow men,
and will yearn with all their heart aid soul
and strength and mind to diffuse joy and glad-
ness among the whole human family. So that
in the kingdom of Christ, owing to the law being
perfectly fulfilled through love, not only has a

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man^s neighbour ceased to be his enemy, but he
has actually become his friend.

This is Christianity. Is it not a beautiful
religion ? " Beautiful enough/' some one may say,
" but altogether Utopian. Life is so hard now-
adays, it is all I can do to look out for myself."
Well, my good friend, life is hard enough, I
admit ; but judged of even by the low standard
of profit and loss, you may be a gainer by un-
selfishness. The joy of doing good to others is
far greater than that of' getting good for one's
self, as every one will tell you who has had ex-
perience of both. " There is that scattereth and
yet increaseth.'* There are rewards which, though
they would not enlarge your balance at the
bankers, you would find nevertheless to be of
unspeakable value. The power of self-denial,
if you only knew it, is your most glorious
prerogative.

Christ's religion, then, rightly understood, may
be seen, I maintain, to be as reasonable as it is
beautiful. It satisfies the requirements of the
human intellect as weU as the aspirations of the
human heart.

But I need scarcely remind you that every-
thing called Christianity is riot Christianity.
" Words," Hobbes truly said, " are the counters

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148 Christ's Plan of Salvation.

of wise men, but the money of fools." Because
a sect or a doctrine has called itself Chris-
tian, it does not of course follow that it comes
from Christ. It is often necessary to distinguish,
as Lessing observes, between the reKgion of
Christ and the Christian religion — that is to
say, between the religion which Christ Himself
actually taught, and religions which happen to
be called after His name. James Mill used to
declare that Christianity was the ne plv^ ultra of
wickedness, — ^the wickedest thing in the world.
One wonders at such a statement proceeding from
an educated man, a statement no less absurd than
false, till one remembers the circumstances in
which he had been brought up. He was referring,
not to the Christianity of Christ, of which he w£is
as ignorant as any Hottentot, but to the Chris-
tianity of Calvin. You remember the words which
Goethe puts into the mouth of Faust. Mar-
guerite has been making anxious inquiries about
his theological opinions, and he replies that
he cannot accept any of the religions with
which he is acquainted. She asks him why.
He answers, "even from religiousness;" mean-
ing that all these religions appeared to violate
what he believed to be eternally sacred moral
principles. It is possible to be religiously

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Chris fs Plan of Salvation. 149

irreKgious. Just as the man who is outwardly-
devout may be really destitute of any genuine
religious feeling, so the man who is apparently
irreligious may be in reality acting nobly in
rejecting certain forms of worship or belief which
he finds hirpself conscientiously unable to accept.
For instance, there have been men calling them-
selves Christians, who have said that the sweetest
music of heaven would be the wailings of the
lost in hell. There have been men calling
themselves Christians, who have maintained that
God created the vast majority of the human race
for the sole purpose of consigning them to ever-
lasting flames, in order that He Himself might
be, as they strangely term it, glorified. There
have been men calling themselves Christians,
whose religion has consisted in breaking on the
wheel or burning at the stake those who differed
from themselves. There have been men calling
themselves Christians, who asserted that any sins
they might choose to commit after their " conver-
sion " would be matters of the most perfect in-
difference. There have been men calling them-
selves Christians, who were remarkable for noth-
ing save the conceited ignorance of the bigot,
the Satanic fury of the persecutor, the childish
puerilities of the formalist, or the sickening cant

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150 Chris fs Plan 0/ Salvation.

of the hypocrite. Now so long as any one
believes that such men are the genuine rep-
resentatives of the teaching of Christ, can you
censure him for rejecting what he conceives to be
Christianity ? Surely not. He would be acting
irreligiously in accepting it. I for one admire
and reverence that moral integrity which shud-
ders at the very idea of accepting for true a
blasphemous, or even an unworthy, representation
of the Deity.

''There dwells more faith in honest donbt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."

But, sirs, you inflict on Christ a grievous
wrong if you judge Him by every travesty or
caricature which chooses to caU itself Christian.
You do not blame light for your experiences in
a fog ; nor should you blame the Nazarene for
such diabolical doctrines or practices as those to
which I have referred. On the contrary, it is
mainly owing to His teaching that we so utterly
loathe and execrate them. The kingdom which
He founded is one of the most perfect ideal
beauty. The loftiest conceptions of Plato or
Aristotle, of Buddha or Confucius, sink into in-
significance, when compared with the Christianity
of Christ. Passing from the society of those

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Christ's Plan of Salvation. 151

who are utterly destitute of His spirit, into the
company of those who are somewhat imbued with
it, is like migrating from the cutting east winds
of our English climate to the gentle, sweet-scented
breezes of the South. Nay, it is like going into
another and a grander world. " Christ's king-
dom," as He said, " is not of this world." It is
the kingdom of God. It is the kingdom of
Heaven.

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Works.

" Work out your own salratioii with fear and trembling : for it is
God who worketh in yon both to will and to do of His good
pleasnre."— Philippians ii 12, 13.

f\F all the spurious forms of Christianity there
^ is none worse than the doctrine that men
are saved, if they are saved, and lost, if they
are lost, according to the will of God, and not
according to their own. If God were the author
of the goodness of the good, He would of course
be to blame for the badness of the bad. If He
could compel one man to do right, He oiight to
compel alL If it were really the doctrine of the
Bible that God forced some men into the king-
dom of Heaven, and only some, leaving the rest
bad and wretched when He might have made
them good and happy, — ^if this were the teaching
of the Bible, we should feel that that book was
not the Word of God, but, on the contrary, the
word of the wicked one.

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Works. 153

I had the curiosity to look into 'Calvin's
Institutes ' to see what he would make of our
text. Calvin maintained, as you are aware,
like the old Greek dramatists, that men were
not free agents, but necessitated — compelled
to act continually according to the will of a
higher Power. Calvin taught that men are made
heirs of eternal life if God wants them in
heaven; and that, on the other hand, if they
remain heirs of death, it is because He prefers
their going to hell. Our text, one would think,
must have puzzled him. At any rate he explains
it by explaining it away. " God, he says, works
all things, therefore we are to submit ourselves
to Him with fear. Paul requires nothing of the
PhiUppian Christians, but that they submit them-
selves to God with true self-renunciation." You
see Paul says we are to work ; Calvin says we
are riot to work, but to leave our salvation to
God. It is sufl&cient confutation of Calvin's
doctrine to say that its logical outcome would
be, that men are helpless hapless puppets,
played with according to the caprice of a Being
who is the very opposite of Love, — a Being in
comparison with whom Nero was kind-hearted,
amiable and beneficent.

The teaching of the New Testament is, that

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our salvation or wellbeing depends, in the last
resort, upon ourselves. Christ has explained to
us that the law can only be fulfilled by love. But
it is for us to decide whether we so fulfil it.
Christ "left us an example;" but it depends
upon ourselves whether we " follow in His
steps."

The meaning of the expression, " God worketh
in you to will and to do of His good pleasure,"
is, I apprehend, that, according to His good
pleasure — i.e., in harmony with His love — ^He
gives us free wiU, He makes us free agents.
The freedom of the will is a conception of Chris-
tian origin.^ We find Aristotle, in his ' Ethics,'
groping his way towards it; but he never at-
tained any clear or consistent conceptions. The
Stoics, no doubt, talked of the virtuous man as
" a free man ; " but they used the term only in
a complimentary and metaphorical sense, just as
they said the virtuous man was rich and hand-
some and a king. A distinct idea of moral
freedom arose only with Christianity, of which

1 This, I may mention by the way, is a bad and misleading
expression. A will, of course, must be free, or it would not be
a will. A necessitated will is a contradiction in terms. He
who has a will is free, and, conversely, he who is free has a
will. Hence the correct phrase would be, not freedom of the
will, but freedom of the man.

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it is one of the most fundamental doctrines.
However, ideas exist in men's minds long before
they have coined words to correspond. The
Apostle Paul knew of no single term which
would express the notion of freedom; for he
wrote in Greek, and there is no term for it in
that language. Hence he speaks here somewhat
periphrastically. Instead of saying, God makes
you free, he says, God works in you to will and
to do — i, e,, He gives you the power to wiU and
to do.

Very well. Since we are free, the apostle
exhorts us to use this freedom in working out
our salvation, which salvation or wellbeing in-
volves, as we saw in the previous sermon, the
fulfilment of the law through love. It will be
well with us in this world in proportion as we
learn to act unselfishly. Truly did Christ say,
" He that loseth his Ufe for my sake shall find
it." There is more happiness to be derived from
a single kindly action than can be obtained from
the self-aggrandisement of a lifetime. It wUl
be well with us in the next world in proportion
as we have learned to act unselfishly. Accord-
ing to Christ's teaching, we shall be welcomed
by Him with the words, " Come, ye blessed of
my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for

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you from the foundation of the world : for I was
an hungered, and ye gave me meat : I was thirsty,
and ye gave me drink : I was a stranger, and ye
took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was
sick, and ye visited me : I was in prison, and
ye came unto me. Inasmuch as ye have done
it unto one of the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me."

But the acquisition of this unselfish spirit,
the accomplishment of these unselfish acts, is no
child's play. It is work — work of the very
hardest kind. It involves effort — protracted, life-
long effort. God has done for us all that He can
do. He has created us in His own image, since
He has made us free. Descartes says : *' It is
chiefly my wiU that leads me to discern that I
bear a certain image and similitude of Deity.
For although the faculty of will is incomparably
greater in God than in myself, in so far as it
extends to a greater number of objects, it does
not seem to be greater, considered in itself; for
the power of wiU consists only in this, that we
are able to do or not to do the same thing un-
determined by any external force." God could
have conferred upon us nothing higher or better
^ than the gift of choice. And in virtue of this
gift, our salvation depends upon ourselves. We

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Works. 157

cannot be saved against our will. External
influences will not do everything even for a vege-
table. A tree in spring-time requires sunshine
and rain and air and light ; but these are not
enough. Without the action of the sap within
they will be altogether useless. If the tree
has been injured, so that this internal influence
cannot be excited, it will never be clothed with
leaves, but will remain an unsightly blot upon
the fairest summer landscape. God can no
more do our work than we can do His. We
could not have created ourselves. We could
not have taught ourselves what Christ has
taught us. But having been created and having
been taught, our wellbeing now depends upon
ourselves. It cannot be thrust upon us by
God.

In this thought we find cause for the fear and
trembling with which the apostle exhorts us to
work. It is possible to prostitute our freedom,
and with it to work out our ruin. Every time
we are conquered by a temptation our will is
weakened ; and by continually yielding we may,
to all intents and purposes, completely lose our
power of choice.

** The bough tliat bent, when green, awry,
Will not come straight when old and dry."

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It is possible for a man, though created
originally in the image of God, to sink far below
the level of a brute, and become as incapable of
seK-control as a feather fluttering in the wind.
On the other hand, he may rise upon the step-
ping-stones of conquered temptations into a
sphere where evil will cease to be attractive,
and where conflict will therefore give place to
repose.

** Our deeds stiU travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.*'

There is one very stimulating reflection. The
salvation of Christ is worth the eflfort of working
out. Do not take a low and paltry view of that
salvation. It is not synonymous with the mere
escape from hell or from punishment of any
kind. No ! In working out your own salvation
you are really working for the good of humanity,
for the good of the entire universe. In learning
to be kind and unselfish you are not only build-
ing up for yourself a noble character, but you
are becoming a creator of happiness, an inspirer
of nobihty, to all with whom you come in con-
tact. Leo Grindon truly says : *' Good deeds are
never without result. Once enacted, they become

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part of the moral world, they give to it new
enrichment and beauty, the whole nniverse par-
takes of their influence. They will return to us
after the manner of seeds which develop into
flowers. No particle of matter is ever destroyed.
It may pass into new shapes, it may comWne
with other elements, it may float away into
vapour ; but it will come back some time in the
dewdrop or the rain, helping the leaf to grow
and the fruit to swelL So is it, too, with every
generous, self-denying effort. It may escape our
observation and be utterly forgotten — ^it may
seem to have been altogether useless ; but it has
painted itself on the eternal world, and can
never be effaced." Carlyle, too, says, in reference
to this working out of salvation : " Oh, it is
great, and there is no other greatness ! To make
some nook of God's creation a little fruitfuUer,
better, more worthy God — to make some human
hearts a little wiser, manfuller, happier — ^it is
work for a God!"

It is possible for us so to live as to leave
this world better than we found it — as to en-
hance, by our presence, the brightness and the
beauty of the next. Shall this work be accom-
plished, or shall it not ? It is for us to decide.

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It is a work which God cannot accomplish for
us. Unless we accomplish it ourselves it will
remain eternally undone. It ougM to be ac-
complished. It can be.

'' So nigli to grandeur is our dust,
So nigh is God to man,
When duty whispers low, * Thou must I *
The soul yeplies, * I can.* "

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Habit.

" If thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door."— Genesis iv. 7.

TF angels weep, as they are said to do, over
-*- human follies and shortcomings, there can
be nothing which more frequently elicits their
tears than the ignorance and thoughtlessness
of men in regard to the laws of their own nature.
It is strange that they should know, and care
to know, so little of the world they live in ; that
many of them should go out of it without hav-
ing made much more acquaintance with its laws
than could be achieved by an unthinking brute.
But it is still more strange that thousands
should live and die in almost equal ignorance of
themselves. Instead of the knowledge of human
nature being made the first business of education
(civil and religious), it is usually the last, if
indeed it be not altogether ignored. And yet
L

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1 62 Habit.

the old Delphic maxim, " Know thyself," was
one of the wisest ever uttered. It will be well
with a man exactly in proportion to the extent
and profundity of his acquaintance with the
laws of his own body, mind and spirit. Just
as the labour of a mechanic wOl be good, bad
or indifferent, according to his knowledge of the
material upon which, and the instruments with
which, he works, so the value of your life-work
and mine will depend mainly upon the amount
of attentive consideration which we have given
to the laws of our own nature. For that nature
is at once the material upon which we work —
since all our actions change it for the better or
the worse, and it is also the instrument with
which we work — since the actions that change us
originate with ourselves. The laws of our being
cannot be altered by us any more than the laws
of the external world. Bacon, you remember,
urged men to the study of natural phenomena,
on the ground that knowledge is power. The
more men know about the laws of nature the
better will they be able to use them for their
own advantage. Electricity, e,g,^ which is cap-
able of destroying us, we have now compelled
into our service, and send it round the world
at our bidding. So, too, there are laws in our

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Habit. 163

own personal being which may be our salvation
or our ruin ; and it will be well with us just
in proportion to the knowledge we possess in
regard to them.

Now of all these laws, there is perhaps none
so important as the law of habit, according to
which acts, by being often repeated, become, first
of aU, easier to be performed, and afterwards
difficult, if not impossible, to be avoided. It
is to this law of habit, I think, that the text
refers, *' K thou doest not well, sin lieth at the
door." Sin is here personified, and represented
as a beast of prey ready to spring upon itSs
victim. Our actions have a tendency to enslave
us. The wrong deeds which we once voluntarily
chose to perform are very apt to grow into
wrong practices, which we shall at last perform
mechanically, without any choice, or even in
opposition to the most earnest desire to refrain.
So when a man sins he may fairly be represented,
in the graphic language of the text, as having
called into existence a habit which, like an evil
beast, is waiting to seize and devour him. Every
one has read of the terrible moral conflicts in
which De Quincey had to engage, when he was
trying to give up the practice of eating opium.
Everybody has heard how Samuel Taylor Cole-

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1 64 Habit.

ridge, when he found himself enslaved by the
same habit, used to order his servant to follow
him in his walks, and prevent him by force from
entering the opium-shops which he might happen
to pass. We all know that men are constantly,
as in the case of drunkards, ruined by the mere
force of habit. Their iniquities have *' taken
hold upon them." They have ceased to find any
pleasure in their sins ; and yet to refrain would
require a greater effort than they are capable
of making, — a greater agony than they are able
to endure. We have all known or heard of
cases in which the grasp of habit became so
deadly, that it crushed out of its wretched victim
every trace of manhood or of womanhood, and
what had once been a human being was left no
better than a brute. No better ? Ay, infinitely
worse. For, to use the words of the prophets,
it is " gold which has become dim," it is *' most
fine gold which has been changed." It is the
image of God which has given place to the
image of the deviL

But though we are all familiar with such
illustrations as these of the law of habit, we
do not sufficiently realise the wide scope of that
law. We think that if we are not the slaves
(and are not likely to become the slaves) of any

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Habit. 165

great vice or crime, the law of habit has compar-
atively little to do with us. Now we could not
make a greater or more serious mistake. Paley
truly says, " There are habits not only of drink-
ing, swearing, lying, and so on, but of every
modification of action, speech and thought.
Man is a "bundle of habits. There are habits of
industry, attention and vigilance; of obedience
to the judgment, or of yielding to the first im-
pulse of passion ; of extending our views to the
future, or of acting on the present; of iadol-
ence, dilatoriness, vanity, self-conceit, melancholy,
partiality, fretfulness, suspicion, captiousness, cen-
soriousness ; of pride, ambition, covetousness ; in
a word, there is not a quality or function, either
of body or mind, which does not feel the influ-
ence of this great law."

Now since our duty in this world is to imitate
Christ — in other words, to form for ourselves a
perfect character ; and since the law of which we
are speaking is coextensive with all the thoughts
and actions of our life, it behoves us carefully to
inquire what is the nature of those thoughts
and actions — or, in other words, what is the
moral quality of the habits we are forming?

Let me say a word or two to boys and girls.
Of your time of life it may be emphatically

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1 66 Habit.

declared, " Now is the accepted time, now is the
day of salvation." You might now with com-
parative ease acquire such habits of right-doing,
that by -and -by it would be almost impossible
for you to do wrong. " If we choose the mode
of life which is the most commendable, habit will
render it the most delightful." Good actions, as
well as bad, become easy by the force of habit.
The law obtains in every department of life.
For instance : " Sir Joshua Eeynolds once asked
Dr Johnson by what means he had attained his
extraordinary accuracy and flow of language. He
told him he had early laid it down as a fixed
rule to do his best on every occasion and in
every company to impart whatever he knew in
the most forcible language he could put it in ;
and that by constant practice, and never suffer-
ing any careless expressions to escape him,
or attempting to deliver his thoughts without
arranging them in the clearest manner, it became
habitual to him." On the other hand, you may
almost imperceptibly be forming bad habits, from
which only the most frightful conflicts will free
you, and from which the chances are you will
never be delivered. Tennyson, you remember,
in the 'Idyll of Gareth and Lynette,' speaks
of—

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Habit. 167

''One
That all in later, sadder life begins
To war against ill uses of a life.
But these firom all his life arise and cry —
' Thou hast made us lords, and canst not put us down.' "

As you look forward to the future, you boys
and girls, you hope to make money, to enjoy
yourself, to get on in life as it is called. Some
of you may perhaps hope to become famous.
All these hopes are natural and right. But let
me remind you there is something more im-
portant still — something more worthy of being
achieved — and that is, the attainment of a good
character. Day by day, then, and hour by
hour, try and acquire habits of talking sensi-
bly, and acting kindly, and thinking wisely.
This will at first need many an effort, many a
struggle ; but if you persevere, it will by-and-by
become your second nature. Euripides has truly
said that good habits are more to be relied on
than good laws. A strong temptation will often
cause a man to run the risk of punishment by
violating a law; but temptation is powerless
against the force of habit. And remember that
of the three things I have urged you to cultivate,
namely, talking sensibly, acting kindly, and think-
ing wisely, the last is quite as important as the
other two. Your health, your happiness, your

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1 68 Habit.

moral worth, will largely depend upon your
thoughts; for these will mainly determine the
quality of your words and acts. Evil thoughts have
a tendency to produce habits which may ultim-
ately make a man Satanic. As Dry den says —

*' 111 habits gaiher by unseen degrees,
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas."

. For you who are older and have become more
or less the slaves of bad habits, I have a word of
encouragement, if you will only endeavmvr to shsike
them off. The first effort may involve you in an
agony of conflict, but no succeeding effort will be
so hard. The law of habit applies not only to the
adoption of new practices, but to the discarding
of old ones. Every time you struggle to be free
you have made your freedom easier to be obtained.
Every temptation you conquer has diminished
the force of the next. Every time you refrain
from an evil practice you have made each
succeeding abstinence less difficult. "When the
queen says to Hamlet —

" Hamlet, thou bast cleft my heart in twain ! "

He replies —

'* throw away the worser part of it
And live the purer with the other half.

Refrain to-night.

And that will lend a kind of easiness

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Habit. 169

To the next abstinence ; the next more easy :
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either curb the devil, or throw him out
"With wondrous potency."

It is impossible to overrate the importance of
the subject we have been considering. " Every
man," says Carlyle, " should be the king of his
own habits/' But if we are not careful we shall
be their slaves. " He that committeth sin is the
servant of sin." We should adopt good habits
because they are good, not yield to evil habits
because they were formerly adopted. Bad prac-
tices which may now be sitting loosely upon us (so
to speak) like a vestment, will, if we do not inter-
fere, go on tightening their grasp, till at last it
will become almost, if not quite impossible, for
us to wrench ourselves free. " Can the Ethiopian
change his skin? or the leopard his spots? Then
may ye also do good that have been accustomed
to do evil." " If thou doest not well, sin lieth at
the door." Beware ! Beware !

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The Harvest of Character.

"Whatsoever a man sowetli, that shall he also reap." — Gala-
TIANS vi. 7.

TUST as it is impossible, in the physical world,
^ to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles,
so is it impossible in the moral world to reap in
the end and in the long-run anything but re-
ward for the good which we do, anything but
punishment for the eviL This assertion is de-
monstrably, I had almost said, undeniably, true.
But there have always been moralists, from the
time of the old Greek Sophists down to the
present professor of logic in the University of
Aberdeen, who have maintained that the only
punishment to be feared by wrongdoers was that
which could be inflicted from without, — fines,
imprisonment, social ignominy, and so forth. If
this were really so, — if there were no other form
in which retribution could come, our text would
not be universally valid. Whether it held in

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any particular case would depend upon whether
the wrongdoer could or could not escape detec-
tion. If he could, it might be possible to sow
one thing and reap another, to sow evil and
to reap good. It not unfrequently happens, in-
deed, that a man who is dishonest, by managing
to appear honest reaps the external rewards
of honesty. But, nevertheless, it is true of him
that " Whatsoever he has sown, that shall he also
reap," ay, that he has already begun to reap.
There is a harvest of character that follows from
human actions, and this is at once the most
important and the most certain form of retribu-
tion. Every action a man commits will infal-
libly make him a better or worse kind of man
than he was before its commission. It is to this
harvest of character that I wish to call your
attention.

There are some very interesting discussions
on this subject in Plato's ' Eepublic' Thrasy-
machus, one of the Sophists, undertakes to prove
that the unjust man, if only he is unjust on a
large enough scale, is always a gainer. He
says, whenever the unjust and just man are
partners in any business undertaking, the former
gets the best of it by overreaching the latter.
In the case of income-tax, the unjust man, who

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gives a false return, will pay less on the same
amount of income than the just. Again, in an
official situation, he who is a conscientious man
will neglect his own affairs for the sake of the
general good, and will not enrich himself from
the public purse as he might if he were not
troubled with a conscience. Being unjust on
a sftmll scale procures for men the names of
burglar, swindler, thief, &c. ; but to be xmjust on
a large scale, like a tyrant usurper, for example,
who has forced his way to a throne through
rivers of blood, and has then sacrificed without
stint the health and happiness and lives of his
subjects for his own enjoyment, — to be wicked
on such a magnificent scale as this is the way
to procure for one's self all that heart can wish.
To illustrate Thrasymachus's view by what often
takes place in the present day : if a man steals a
shilling's worth of goods he is called a thief and
sent to prison ; but if he buys £10,000 worth of
goods without paying for them, he is called a
gentleman, and allowed to move in the best
society.

Another speaker in the same dialogue, named
Glaucon, supports a somewhat different position.
He argues, that generally speaking it is impos-
sible to commit injustice with impunity, either

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on a large scale or on a small scale. He ad-
mits that if it were possible to injure our neigh-
bours without any fear of civil punishment, it
would be the best thing we could do ; but he
says as men cannot count on acting injuriously
to others without running the risk of being
injured by them in return, they have agreed
among themselves that they will mutually re-
frain. So justice is the result of a compromise
between the best of all, which would be to do
injustice to others without suffering it from them
in return, and the worst of all, which is to suffer
without the power of retaliation. He goes on to
assert, what I hope for the sake of humanity is
not true, that if the just man and the unjust had
entire liberty given them to do what they liked,
they would both go the same way, — they would
both become imjust. Supposing that each had
a Gyges' ring, by which he could become in-
visible when he pleased, their actions would
become identical. Glaucon further maintains
that the appearance of justice is alone necessary
to secure happiness ; because if a man seems to
be just he will obtain for himself the rewards of
society and the snules of his fellow men quite
as much as if he were really what he seemed.
Hence if it were generally possible for a man to

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appear just and to be unjust, that should be the
object of our endeavours: for we should then
reap a twofold advantage, — we should obtain the
rewards, without the punishment, of injustice, and
also the rewards of justice ; we should enjoy the
pleasures of sin without its pains, and also the
favours which society is in the habit of bestow-
ing upon honest and honourable men. Still, as
a . rule, if a man has only the appearance of
justice, the chances of exposure are great; and
therefore honesty is on the whole the best pos-
sible. It is a sacrifice of one's own interest,
but it is one which pays.

Here Socrates takes up the discussion. He
proceeds to argue that virtue is desirable not
only for its extrinsic, but also for its intrinsic,
rewards ; not only because it procures for us the
goodwill and kindly offices of our feUow men,
but also, and chiefly, because of what it is in
itself. Virtue, says Socrates, is the weUbeing of
the soul, and therefore it is its own reward.
The virtuous soul is as superior to the vicious as
a weU-ordered and weU-governed commonwealth
is better than a country which is in a state of
civil war. The heart of the vicious man is
necessarily more or less filled, even in pros-
perity, with tumult and discord ; while the heart

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of the virtuous man is tranquil, content, and
happy even in adversity.

In the dialogue called " Gorgias," Plato takes a
somewhat similar view. He there compares the
virtuous to the healthy man. Just as the man
who is a prey to some excruciating and loath-
some disease is to be pitied, even though he be
a millionaire, so the man whose soul is impure is
in an unenviable state, however splendid may
be his possessions and surroundings. His evil
deeds may have procured for him, so far as
appearances are concerned, only wealth and
fame and power ; but if, during the process, his
soul has contracted an incurable disease, he is
after all the most miserable of men. What
shall it profit a man, Plato asks in effect, if he
gain the whole world and yet lose himself ?

Now the views of Thrasymachus and Glaucon,
which Socrates and Plato controverted, are held
at the present time in a somewhat less extreme
form, not only by several thinkers, but also by
a great many who are certainly not thinkers.

When men escape the detection and punishment
of society, they fancy they have got off altogether
scot-free. The professional thief, who has been
successful in a robbery, imagines that, as he has
balked the police, he is at liberty to offer him-

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self unqualified congratulations. The person who
has said something that is not strictly true, in
order to shield himself from blame, knows that
if he is detected ^rhe will fall in the esteem of
his feUow men ; but if he is not detected, he
flatters himself that all is right, that he need
not trouble himself any further ; that, though it
would not be safe to try the experiment too
often, yet for this once he has sown without
having reaped, or rather has sown evil and
reaped only good. And all of us are too much
in the habit of thinking, in regard to actions
which lie on the border-land between the good
and the bad, that it really does not matter
whether we do them or not, for in neither case
does there seem much prospect of reaping either
punishment or reward. For instance, a man de-
cides on amusing himself when perhaps he ought
to be at work. The work may not promise any
immediate remuneration, but the amusement seems
self-evidently desirable. And so he imagines that,
in choosing the latter, he must be acting wisely,
or that at any rate he is doing himself no harm.
Now in reasoning thus, we are guilty of two
oversights. In the first place, it no more follows,
because the retribution of pain does not follow
at once, that it will never come at all, than it

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follows because the harvest does not come in the
spring-time, that it will not come in the autumn.
The " retribution," says Emerson, " is inseparable
from the thing, but it is often spread over a long
time, and so does not become distinct for meuiy
years. Crime and punishment grow out of one
stem. Punishment is the fruit that, unsuspected,
ripens within the flower of the pleasure that con-
ceals it." In the long-run, £uid as a rule, we
shall reap, even in this life, a harvest of pleasure
or of pain, according to the moral goodness or
badness of the actions we have sown. " In the
weary satiety of the idle," says Mr Greg, "in
the healthy energy of honest labour, in the
irritable temper of the selfish, in the serene peace
of the benevolent, in the startling tortures of the
soul where the passions have the mastery, in the
calm Elysium which succeeds their subjugation,
may be traced materials of retribution sufficient
to satisfy the severest justice."

But in the second place, even if punishment for
evil deeds were not to take the form of actual
pain, it would by no means follow that those
deeds were altogether unpunished. The retribu-
tion may have come as deterioration of character ;
and this is a far worse punishment than physical
pain. It is better to be a man than an ape, even
M

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though the ape may have more pleasure and less
pain in his life than the man ; so it is better for
a human being to act in a way which will
develop a noble character, though he may there-
by lose pleasure not only at the time but even
in the long-run. As Barbauld quaintly puts it :
"Is it not some reproach on the economy of
Providence that such an one, who is a mean
dirty fellow, should have amassed wealth enough
to buy half a nation ? Not in the least. He
made himself a mean dirty fellow for that very
end. He has paid his health, his conscience, his
liberty for it; and will you envy him the bargaia?"
Even granting the extreme supposition, which I
do not think at all likely to be* true, but granting,
for argument's sake, that such a man had more,
pleasure in his life than you who are striving
honestly to do your duty, would you change places
with him ? I know you would not. The good
seed you have sown, in the shape of these con-
scientious endeavours, has resulted in the harvest
of an honourable character ; and that is a posses-
sion beyond all price, cheaply purchased, if need
be, by a long-protracted agony of pain.

Let us learn, then, to look at our actions, ay,
even at our words and thoughts, from this point
of view. The safest criterion of their quality is,

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not what eflfect will they have in winning for us
the smiles of our fellow men, nor how far will
they procure for us pleasure or pain, but what
will be their influence upon our characters ? If
an action tends to make tis wiser, stronger,
nobler, more sympathetic, more unselfish — in
one word, better than we were before, then (even
though it may involve pain and odium), it is
pre-eminently right and desirable and good, both
for ourselves and for the world, both as regards
the present and the future, both for this life
and that which is to come. Yes ; even for that
which is to come. "We brought nothing into
the world, and it is certain we can carry nothing
out," — nothing except character. That is a man's
greatest blessing or greatest curse, as the case
may be, in the present state of existence, and it
is the only thing which he can take with him
into the next. There will be a time when our
bodies must mingle with the dust. There will
be a time when this earth, which seems so solid
and so permanent, will come to an end. Then,

*' Like the baseless fabric of a vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, aU which it inherit, shaU dissolve.
And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded.
Leave not a rack behind ; "—

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not a rack but character. That can never die, —
that is immortal as God Himself. The things
which are seen, on which we lavish so much
love, are temporal. Character, which is not
seen, and which we too often lamentably neglect,
is eternal. They shall perish, but character re-
maineth; they all shall wax old, as doth a
garment, and as a vesture shall they be folded
up and set aside, but xjharacter will endure as
long as eternity shall last. We must take up
our life in the next world where we leave it off
in the present. Let us see to it, then, that we
do not enter into the great hereafter with a mean,
sordid, despicable character. Let us see to it
that our thoughts and words and deeds are such
as will tend to the development of a character
that shall be noble and divine.

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The Supernaturalness of Nature.

" 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."— 2 Kings vi. 17.

rjlHE distinction commonly made between the
-^ natural and the supernatural, though useful
and convenient for certain purposes, becomes
misleading and false if understood to mean that
a hard and fast line can be drawn between the
two, or that the one necessarily excludes the other.
I want to show you that they are always com-
bined. The words I have just read from the
2d Book of Kings, understood in an allegorical
sense, will furnish a suggestive motto. It is
possible to see the unseeable. What is invisible
to the bodily eyes may be plain enough to the
mind or to the heart ; and thus the apparently
bare mountain is sometimes discovered to be
full of horses and chariots of fire. If we do

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not find something supernatural in the common-
est objects and phenomena, it must be, — not
because there is nothing supernatural in them,
but because our own vision is defective. Of
many a man it may, alas ! be said —

* ' A primrose by a river's brim,
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more."

But there are others who know from their own
experience the force of the profound words of
Tennyson : —

" Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies ;
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — ^but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."

To the vulgar man matter is but another name
for dirt; to the man who is a physicist and
nothing more, it is merely a curious combination
of atoms ; but to poets and philosophers it is
the Shechinah of infinite mystery. The follow-
ing hints may perhaps help you to see that
the conception of poets and philosophers is the
most natural and the most correct.

There is a line of argument I should like to
take up, which, I am afraid, however, is too

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The Supernaturalness of Nature. 183

long and too difficult for a sermon, and which
I will therefore only mention. Hegel, the
prince of thinkers, has shown that matter can
neither be known nor conceived of except as
permeated through and through with thought;
and he has thus for ever precluded any one
from being a materialist who will take the
trouble to master the first principles of his philo-
sophy.

But leaving this, let us look at our subject
from another point of .view. There is a class of
thinkers in the present day (of whom Professor
Bain of Aberdeen is the most striking example)
who persist in talking as if naming a thing and
telling us a little about it were equivalent to
giving its complete explanation and removing
from it every vestige of mystery. But this short
and easy method of annihilating the supernatural
is altogether unwarranted. Let us take an illus-
tration. The force of gravity is probably of
all natural phenomena the one with which
science has made us most familiar. She has
given us in regard to it what at first sight
may seem a comprehensive and final account.
We know that this attractive influence which
material bodies exert upon each other is not
confined to our own world or to our own time,

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but that it is at work in distant planets as well
as in still more distant stars, and that its opera-
tions must have been continued at the very least
for millions £uid millions of years. We know,
too, precisely the law of this force, namely, that
objects will fall together or tend to fall together,
with a velocity varying directly as their mass
and inversely as the square of their distances.
By means of this intimate knowledge we are
able to explain the motions and positions of
the heavenly bodies, we can foretell the return
of comets that have not been visible for genera-
tions, and predict, centuries beforehand, the time
when eclipses may be expected, almost to the
fraction of a second. So that if science has
seen through anything, if it has mastered any-
thing, if it has exorcised the supernatural from
anything, it must have seen through and mastered
and exorcised the supernatural from the pheno-
menon of gravitation. And yet, after all, if we
think a little longer, we shall see that even in this
case science has but revealed the magnitude of
a mystery which remains, as of yore, insoluble.
Think how much is yet untold. We may ask.
Whence comes this force ? Is it older or younger
than the particles of matter in which it acts ? Or
is it coeval with them ? Is it something separable

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The Supernaiuralness of Nature. 185

from them ? Or is it part of their very essence ?
What makes it act as it does ? Will it always
act thus ? Is it comiected, and if so how, with
mind and will ? These are questions which we
cannot answer ; upon which, at any rate, physical
science C£ui throw no light. Now this is just an
illustration of what seems to me universally true.
If we look long and earnestly into the com-
monest natural object or phenomenon, we shall
by- and -by begin to perceive a supernatural
mystery before which we shall be humbled and
amazed.

Again. The feelings excited in us by natural
scenery are quite incompatible with the suppo-
sition that there is nothing in it but a mere
fortuitous concurrence of atoms, which can be
weighed and measured and chemically resolved.
Physical science can neither explain nor explain
away the fact that nature, besides producing
impressions on our senses, appeals to our minds
and hearts. "Day unto day uttereth speech,
and night unto night showeth knowledge. There
is no speech nor language, their voice is not
heard; but their line is gone out through all
the earth, their words unto the end of the
world." Nature, the uncrowned queen of song,
is continually producing poems that need not

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^' the din of words." With her silent eloquence
she makes us now pensive and now glad ; she
arouses our hopes and excites our fears ; she in-
spires us with yearnings after the Unseen and
Eternal. You remember Wordsworth's lines,
the finest he ever wrote: —

" I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth.

I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts. A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

Call it what you wUl, name it how you please
— men of all creeds, and men of no creed, have
felt this mysterious presence. It cannot possibly
be explained by any mechanical play of atoms,
but it is none the less real for that. It is as
much a fact as electricity or heat. Its exist-
ence is proved by its eflfects. A German writer,
Lotze (who is no less versed in physics than iii
metaphysics), well says that science can never
give us the whole of what is to be said about

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the universe, it can but give us the smaller half.
"Above and beneath and around the bit of
nature which we can weigh and measure and
dissect and fit into our formulae, there is a
region which is for us the realm of wonder."
The mechanical action and reaction of material
atoms is but one phase of the universe. There is
in addition something that leads to art and poetry
and religion. To ignore this is to ignore what
is highest and best. " This green, flowery, rock-
built earth," says Carlyle, " the trees, the moun-
tains, rivers, many-sounding seas, the great deep
sea of azure that swims overhead, the winds
sweeping through it, the black cloud fashioning
itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail,
now rain, — ^what is it ? Ay, what ? At bottom
we do not yet know, we can never know at all.
It is not by our superior insight that we escape
the difficulty, it is by our superior levity, our
inattention, our want of insight. It is by not
thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hard-
ened round us, encasing whoUy every notion
we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays,
mere words. We call that fire of the black
thundercloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly
about it, and grind the like of it out of glass
and silk; but what is it? What made it?

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Whence comes it ? Whither goes it ? Science
has done much for us, but it is a poor science
that would hide from us the great, deep, sacred
infinitude of nescience which we can never pene-
trate, on which all science swims as a mere
superficial film. This world, after all our science
and sciences, is still a miracle, wonderful, in-
scrutable, magical and more to whosever will
tMnk of it."

The design, meaning, and purpose which can
be detected in Nature aflFord the most striking
instances of its supernaturalness. I can do no
more than aUude to them in the present dis-
course. In another sermon I shall endeavour to
show that these evidences of a Mind and Will
underlying Nature have not been nullified by
modem discoveries or theories.

Let me, in conclusion, call your attention to
one other point. There is a danger of our being
led to believe not only that mystery has been
exorcised from the external world, but that we
ourselves have been likewise reduced to the
level of commonplace machines. Owing to the
triumphs of physiology, there is a growing in-
clination to think that the nerves and brain are
everything, — that there is no need for a mind, or
soul, or ego. But if this view be examined, it

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will be seen that it is pre-eminently absurd.
It may be true, it probably is true, that our
sensations, thoughts and volitions, are preceded,
accompanied and followed by molecular changes
in nerve-fibres ; but these material disturbances
of the nervous system do not themselves feel or
think or will. They are not conscious of them-
selves, and therefore they cannot in the least
degree do away with the necessity for a sentient,
percipient, intelligent mind. This has been
sometimes acknowledged even by writers of the
Positive school, like John Stuart Mill or Pro-
fessor Tyndall. You may follow up nervous
vibrations to their last flutter in the brain, but
the material flutter is not consciousness, bears
not the slightest resemblance to consciousness,
throws no light whatsoever upon any of the
phenomena of consciousness. So that physiology
in reality can do nothing more than lead us up
to the mystery of mind ; it can neither explain
that mystery nor explain it away.

In addition to the common consciousness of
our everyday working life, there are also, as
Lotze has remarked, inner recesses of conscious-
ness which can be even less explained, if that
were possible, by the methods and formulae of
physics. We sometimes experience such an

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awe, such a faith, such unutterable yearnings,
such an agony of grief, such a rapture of hope,
as may alone suffice for proof that we are some-
thing more than, something other than, dust.
" So long," says Euskin, " as you have that fire
of the heart within you, and know the reality
of it, you need be under no alarm as to its
chemical or mechanical analysis. The philo-
sophers are very humorous in their ecstasy of
hope about it, but the real interest of their dis-
coveries in this direction is very small to human
kind. It is quite true that the tympanum of the
ear vibrates under sound, and that the surface of
the water in a ditch vibrates too ; but the ditch
hears nothing for all that, and my hearing is
still to me as blessed a mystery as ever, and
the interval between the ditch and me quite as
great. If the trembling sound in my ears was
once of the marriage bells which began my hap-
piness, and is now of the passing bell which ends
it, the difference between those two sounds to me
cannot be counted by the number of concus-
sions. There have been some curious specula-
tions lately as to the conveyance of mental
changes by brain-waves. What does it matter
how it is conveyed? The consciousness itself
is not a wave : it may be accompanied here and

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there by any quantity of quivers and shakes of
anything you can find in the universe that is
shakeable. What is that to me? My friend
is dead, and my — according to modern views —
vibratory sorrow is not one whit less or less
mysterious than my old quiet one."

The attempt, then, to ignore the supernatural
is most unphilosophical. But we are so terribly
afraid nowadays of being over-credulous. We
should remember, however, that believing too
much is not the only sign of a weak mind. We
may show our mental incapacity by believing too
little. He who regards a human being as a mere
mass of nerves, — he who maintains that there is
nothing in Nature but a mechanical combination
of atoms, — must be a very superficial thinker.
The chemical analysis of a tear into oxygen,
hydrogen, chlorine and sodium is not a complete
explanation of the mystery of grief: nor is the
supernaturalness of Nature disproved by the fact
that it cannot be depicted upon the retina of the
eye. It may be discovered by the mind : it
may be felt by the heart. Let us search dili-
gently until we find it.

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The Naturalness of the Supernatural.

" The Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither
shadow of taming." — James L 17.

TT is interestdng and suggestive to notice how,
-*- with the progress of science, our notions of
the universe have been revolutionised. Once
men believed in the universal reign of caprice ;
now they believe in the universal reign of law.
Formerly earth, air and sea were peopled with
a host of imaginary beings, and we were sup-
posed to be at the mercy of their changeable
whims or of their unchangeable vindictiveness.
It was thought that any one of them, if strong
enough to prevail over the rest, might alter the
course of nature at a moment's notice. Eeligion,
therefore, consisted in appeasing these divinities,
so powerful for evil, with barley, wine or blood.
In the darkness of an eclipse, in the rolling peal
of the thunder, in a volcanic eruption, in the
devastation of a plague, and even in an unusual

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state of the weather, men saw, as they thought,
the capricious interference of these supernatural
powers. But observation and reflection have
made us wiser. The more that nature has been
investigated, the more has her uniformity been
brought to light. Eesemblances have been dis-
covered even where they were least expected ;
as, for example, in the similarity of structure
belonging to animals of different species, which
at first sight appeared to be altogether diverse.
And not only has nature been discovered to
be uniform in our own time and in our own
world, but the most remote spheres and ages,
regarding which we are able to gather any
information, have been found to be subject
to the same laws which obtain here and now.
"We know, beyond a doubt, that the force which
causes a leaf to fall to the ground is concerned
in the revolutions of the most distant star ; that
" the law which moulds a planet rounds a tear ;"
and that the light of to-day has exactly the same
properties as the light of the pre- Adamite world.
So certain are we of the universality of law, that
we know apparent exceptions cannot be real
exceptions. In fact, a seeming violation of law
has not unfrequently led to a fresh confirmation
of its absolute inviolability. For example, the fact

N

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that Uranus did not move in exact accordance
with astronomical calculations suggested that
there must exist somewhere a disturbing cause.
The amount of divergence from its calculated
path pointed to the exact spot where that dis-
turbing cause must be looked for; and there,
accordingly, what is now called Neptune was
discovered. Even in cases where, owing to the
complexity of the problem, our knowledge is less
exact, — even where we have not been able to
ascertain the precise manner in which certain
results are produced, we yet feel absolutely sure
that these results are brought about by unchang-
ing and unchangeable laws. Epidemics of cholera
and plague, for instance, which our ancestors
attributed to the anger of heaven — ^we believe
to be due to a violation of the laws of health ;
we no longer connect them with a sudden inter-
ference of Providence, but we set about tracing
them to the impurity of our pumps, or to some
other equally simple and natural cause. And
similarly in regard to the weather, though it is
the very type of fickleness, and though our
knowledge of the laws which govern it is ex-
ceedingly imperfect, yet there is not an educated
man in the world to-day who does not feel
certain that rain and drought, heat ^and cold,

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good seasons and bad, depend upon laws as
stringent and immutable as those which deter-
mine the planetary motions. In a word, to us
in this nineteenth century the universe is essen-
tially and pre-eminently a universe of order and
of law.

Now it is on this ground that so many per-
sons object to what is called supernatural re-
ligion. To them Christianity appears a sort of
chaos, where chance and disorder and irration-
ality rule supreme. I wish to point out to you
that this notion of Christianity is not correct.
I wish to call your attention to the reign of law
in the religion of Christ ; or, in other words, to
the naturalness of the supernatural

I do not propose to discuss in this sermon the
question of miracles. If you feel interested in
that subject you may refer to the Duke of
Argyll's book, in which he shows that they do
not necessarily imply anything more than a
superhuman combination and adaptation of nat-
ural laws. You may also look at Butler's
'Analogy,' part ii chap, iv., where you will
find that the bishop takes a similar view.

I shall allude only to three of the most funda-
mental doctrines of Christianity. And first let
us consider the efficacy of prayer. In the

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196 The Naturalness of the SupernaturaL

sermon upon that subject, I pointed out that the
laws of nature, though unchangeahle, are yet
capable of modification and of counteraction.
We ourselves are accustomed to accomplish our
own purposes and plans by a skilful adjustment
and combination of natural laws, which might be
useless or even injurious to us without such com-
bination and adjustment. We are constantly
counteracting one force by means of another.
We dissipate cold by lighting a fire. We pre-
vent the lightning from destroying our buildings
by affixing to them metallic conductors. We
avoid a sunstroke by retiring into the shade.
And so on, and so on. It is a matter of com-
mon experience, then, that the tendency of natu-
ral forces can be ncdurally counteracted by the
judicious introduction of other forces. Well,
then, supposing we are " in any trouble, sorrow,
need, sickness, or any other adversity" from which
we are unable to extricate ourselves, if there
exist any superior Being in the universe. He
might, perhaps, deliver us without any violent
rupture of law, but merely by a supematurally
skiKul combination and adjustment of natural
forces. I pointed out to you, however, that,
after aU, the end and use of prayer was not to
bring God's will into harmony with ours, but

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that it was intended, on the contrary, to bring
our wills into conformity with God's. The
apostle does not say, let your requests be made
known unto God, and your requests shall be
granted ; but, '^ let your requests be made
known, and the peace of God shall keep your
hearts and minds." It might be impossible,
even for Omnipotence, to grant our requests, con-
sistently with the welfare of others, or even con-
sistently with our own. Hence the only answer
to prayer which the Christian religion always
guarantees is the answer of peace. And if there
be in the universe a mind and heart superior to
our own, the very effort that we make in prayer
to realise His existence and to submit ourselves
to His will, must naturally and inevitably tend
to bring with it peace. Now, I ask, is there
anything chaotic, lawless, disorderly or irra-
tional in this doctrine of prayer ?

Secondly, let us look at the Atonement, or,
rather, at one of its phases. In the sermon on
The Mystery of Suffering I endeavoured to
show that no character could be perfected except
through the instrumentality of sorrow. The
discipline of grief is sometimes required in order
that evil tendencies may be eradicated. The
painful battling with difficulties, again, develops

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strength, self-reliance and self-respect. More-
over, pity, mercy and self-sacrifice have never
existed, and can never exist, in beings who have
not been called upon to suffer. It is a matter
of common experience, then, that suffering is
needful for moral perfection. Now, according
to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
the anguish of the Man of Sorrows Ls but an
exemplification of this universal law. "It be-
came Him, for whom are all things, and by
whom are all things, in bringing many sons
unto glory, to make the Captain of their salva-
tion perfect through sufferings." In other words,
God Himself could only bring about the salva-
tion of men by making even Christ, their leader
and example, perfect through that very discipline
of sorrow which we saw reason to believe was
always necessary for the formation of a noble
character. So that you see Christ is no excep-
tion to the reign of law. He is a most striking
example of its universality.

Thirdly, I think we may see that even the
doctrine of immortality is an instance of the
naturalness of the supernatural. Though our
sensations and thoughts and volitions may be
always precieded or accompanied or followed by
changes in the nerves, those mental states them-

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selves *are totally different from any neural pro-
cess. As Aristotle and Plato ages ago explained,
it is not our eyes that see, nor is it our ears that
hear. It is we that see and hear hy means of
those organs. They are but the instruments of
the mind. If you . take away a man's telescope
you deprive him of that kind of vision which a
telescope affords. Similarly the destruction of
the eye by death is the destruction of common
sight. But there is no more reason in the one
case than in the other to suppose that the mind
which sees is thereby destroyed. And since we
have not the remotest idea of the nature of the
connection between mind and body — since we
cannot conceive, e.g,, how it is that an impression
on the retina produces in us the Sensation of
sight, there is nothing to prevent our supppsing
that the mind could perceive without material
organs, or, at any rate, by means of organs
different from those with which it is at present
provided. As Butler says, it is not even prob-
able that the mind has any kind of relation
to the body which it might not have to any
other foreign matter formed into instruments
of perception. So far, negatively, the doctrine
of immortality is not unnatural. But further,
positively. The indivisible conscious mind

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200 The Naturalness of the Supernatural.

(whatever it may be or may not be) 'cannot
conceivably be the same thing as the divisible
and unconscious nerves and brain. Its power
of reasoning and its power of self-determing-tion
prove that it is not a mere passive recipient of
sensations. It is evidently an active principle,
and, in some way or other, an originative centre
of force. Hence it follows that the doctrine
of immortality is not only not unnatural, but
pre-eminently natural ; for it accords with the
universal law of the conservation of energy.
There would be, it seems to me, a violation of
that law if the mind were annihilated when the
body was dissolved by death.

Let me press upon your careful and protracted
consideration the line of thought which I have
endeavoured to open up for you in this and the
preceding sermon. Those persons who have
chosen to style themselves "exact thinkers"
want to persuade us that the physical methods
of investigation can fathom nature to its very
deepest depths, that everything which those
methods fail to discover should be considered
non-existent, and above all that the doctrines
of religion are superlatively absurd. The natu-
ral they regard as the realm of light, in which
wise men dwell; the supernatural they look

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upon as the region of darkness, into whicli fools
and fanatics are prone to wander. But we liave
seen, have we not? that the natural and the
supernatural are really inseparable. On the
one hand, if we look deeply enough into any
objective or subjective phenomenon, we come to
something which, though it can be detected
neither by microscope nor chemical reagent, we
are nevertheless compelled to recognise as real.
When our eyes are opened, the mountain which
once appeared bare is seen to be " full of horses
and chariots of fire." In other words, the nat-
ural is essentially supernatural. On the other
hand, if we carefully examine fundamental doc-
trines of religion, we do not find, as the " exact
thinkers " say we must find, disorder, lawlessness
and chaos. We discover, on the contrary, that
these doctrines, if properly understood, are in
perfect harmony with our common, everyday
experience. In other words, the supernatural
is essentially natural. With the Father of
lights " there is neither variableness nor shadow
of turning."

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'' The Argument from Design''

*'He maketh His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of
fire ; " or, rather, it should be rendered, " He maketh the
winds His angels, and flaming fires his ministers."— Psalm
civ. 4 ; Hebbews L 7.

T PEOPOSE to direct your attention in this
-*- sermon to the evidence of design in nature.
Our subject connects itseK with the two pre-
ceding discourses. Inasmuch as design cannot
be detected by any of the physical methods,
but is a purely mental inference, it is so far
supernatural Inasmuch, however, as we our-
selves are conscious of forming plans and devis-
ing contrivances, the supernatural design in
nature will correlate with the design in our
common experience, and be so far natural

In the present day, a large number of scien-
tific men maintain that the appearance of design
in nature is an appearance only, not a reality.
This view is supported on two grounds, — first.

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** The Argument from Design^ 203

that of the general doctrine of the universal
reign of law ; and second, that of the particular
theory of evolution.

Let us look at the objection drawn from the
universality of law. The regularity of nature is
supposed by many to disprove the existence of
God, or, at any rate, to disprove the religious
doctrine that God is the King of Nature. Now,
on the contrary, it seems to me that the uni-
versality of the reign of law, so far from being
an argument against the existence or providence
of God, is a strong argument for both. The
question will always arise in the minds of all
but superficial thinkers. Why is the reign of
law productive, on the whole, of order, harmony
and beauty ?

Law, I may remark, is a very misleading
word. It is generally printed wit^ a capital
L, which gives it a more imposing appearance
than it justly deserves. Law only means in-
variable sequence. It is often said that the
universe is governed by laws ; but it would
be more correct to say that it is governed dccord-
ing to laws ; for it is not maintained by any one
that these invariable sequences are the expres-
sion of their own volitions. The sequences will
not explain themselves. Hume proved that we

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204 " The Argument from Design^

can never discover anything in a cause to account
for the efifect which it produces. We do not
know why the sun wanns or why food nourishes.
" Apart from experience, anything might be the
cause of anything." The regularity of nature,
therefore, needs to be explained — it cannot
explain itself, nor can it disprove the exist-
ence of a controlling wilL It is incompatible
with a fickle will, but not with one that is
steadfast and unchangeable. Whether the forces
of nature were created, and the laws of nature
imposed by God, it is impossible logically to
determine. But since their united effect is to
produce a cosmos, an order of nature, a system
of things in which it is desirable to live, it is
contrary to experience to suppose that they are
not at any rate combined, adapted and ad-
justed by a Will that loves beauty, harmony,
and joy.

Professor Huxley says : " The progress of
science in all ages has meant the extension of
the province of what we caU matter and caus-
ation, and the concomitant general banishment
of what we caU spirit and spontaneity." But he
admits that a human being is " capable, within
certain limits, of self-adjustment ; " and it is ad-
mitted by all that he is capable of adjusting

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" The Argument from Design'' 205

external forces. Hence it is undeniable that
there is such a thing as human spontaneity. This
power which we possess of initiating, controlling
and modifying events, is the most important of
all our faculties. If, therefore, the progress of
science has consisted in throwing this fact of
spontaneity into the shade, so much the worse
for science.

The reign of law, not being incompatible with
human spontaneity, need not be incompatible
with divine. The forces of nature we can and
do use, control, adapt and make subservient to
the accomplishment of our own purposes and
plans. "Immutability is the very character-
istic which makes them subject to contrivance
through endless cycles of design." And since,
when they are free from human control and in-
terference, they continue working together for
good, producing order and not disorder, the only
reasonable conclusion — the only conclusion war-
ranted by experience — is, that they are connected
with another Will in which is " neither variable-
ness nor shadow of turning."

" Nowadays," says Comte, " the heavens declare
no other glory than that of Hipparchus, Kepler,
Newton and the rest, who have found out the
laws of their sequence." That would be true if

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the discovery of sequences were also the discov-
ery that these sequences could have no cause.
But to treat this as an axiom is the very acme
of illogical flippancy. A regular and orderly
system of nature, Comte tell us, requires no
supernatural explanation such as would be needed
by an irregular and disorderly system. In other
words, God is only to be recognised if He mani-
fests Himself by the attributes of fickleness and
impotence. An operative in a mill has constantly
to stop his machinery to piece a broken thread.
If God were always interfering with nature in
this kind of way, in order to rectify her defects,
He would be recognised and acknowledged. But
because He is not made manifest by His failures.
His existence is denied.

The reign of law, then, does not compel us to
reject the evidences of design in nature. Law
means nothing more than orderly sequence. And
the orderly sequences of nature, so far from
disproving the existence of a wiU, go a long way
towards proving the existence of a perfect will.

Secondly, let us look at the bearing of the
particular theory of evolution upon theology.
I will just premise that this doctrine, in any
form, is but a hypothesis, the evidence in favour
of it, though strong, being insuflBcient for de-

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" The Argument from Design!' 207

monstration. This is acknowledged by most
evolutionists. Further, in its extreme form,
there is very strong evidence against it. No
less eminent an evolutionist than Mr Wallace
distinctly refuses to admit that this theory
will account for the human mind. But we will
just suppose, for argument's sake, that, even in
its most comprehensive shape, the doctrine has
been proved true, — we will imagine it to be a
demonstrated certainty that vegetable, animal
and even human life have been evolved from
some primordial germ or germs, originally latent
in a fiery cloud, and that the development of
higher from lower forms of existence can be
accounted for by natural selection, by the fact,
namely, that the less desirable forms have an in-
herent tendency to give place to the more desir-
able. If we grant all this, what follows ? What
is the effect upon our theology ? Why, simply
that a certain mode of statement of a certain
argument of Pale/s is seen to be unsound, and
this has been already proved untenable on other
grounds. If the theory of evolution were to
turn out a fact which no sane person could deny,
the only effect upon us as Christians would be
that we should find ourselves unable to hold a
position which had long ago been given up by

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2o8 " The Argument from Design!^

all educated men. Paley maintained that every
definite organ and portion of an organ through-
out the world is specially, by a particular creative
fiat, adapted to a certain end. But this, as
everybody now knows, is completely disproved
by the existence in all animals of rudimentary
and abortive organs, which are evidently not
adapted to any end; as, e.g.^ the rudiments of
fingers in a horse's hoofs.

But though Paley's statement that everything
in nature implies a special ad of design on the
part of God, just as every portion of a watch
implies a special contrivance on the part of a
watchmaker, must be given up; yet his more
general and fundamental assertion cannot be
assailed, — the assertion, namely, that there is
evidence of some kind of design in nature no
less than in a watcL The design may be carried
into effect differently in each case, but it is none
the less design. Professor Huxley imagines, how-
ever, that he has ousted every one from this second
position. He maintains it to be conceivable, that
a watch might be made without contrivance.
" Suppose," he says, " that any one had been
able to show that the watch had not been made
directly by any one person, but that it was the
result of the modification of another watch, which

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** The Argument from Design^ 209

kept time but poorly ; and that this, again, had
proceeded from a structure that could hardly be
called a watch at all, seeing that it had no figures
on the dial, and the hands were rudimentary;
and that, going back and back in time, we came
at last to a revolving barrel, as the earliest trace-
able rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine
that it had been possible to show that all those
changes had resulted, first, from a tendency of
the structure to vary indefinitely ; and secondly,
from something in the surrounding world which
helped all variations in the direction of an
accurate time-keeper, and checked all those in
other directions, — and then it is obvious that the
force of Paley's argument would be gone. For
it would be demonstrated that an apparatus
thoroughly well adapted to a particular purpose
might be the result of a method of trial and
error, worked out by unintelligent agents, as well
as of the direct application of the means appro-
priate to the end."

Very good. But whence came that "tendency
in the structure to vary," and that " something
in the surrounding world ? " When we consider
these results, we are are forbidden, both by ex-
perience and by reason, to suppose that their
combined working is the effect of chance. If

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two things, by their interaction, extending over
long periods of time, produce rational and pro-
gressive results, the only legitimate hypothesis is
that they were intended and adapted for that
purpose. So that, after, all, the watch made
according to the ingenious theory of the profes-
sor has not been made without design. He has
got rid of one kind and method of contrivance
only by substituting another.

"Two ignorant men," says an anonymous
writer, "might have a controversy as to the
origin of a bronze statue. Says the one, 'He
must have been a great sculptor who made that
statue;' to which the other replies, 'You are
quite wrong, my friend ; no sculptor ever touched
that statue : I saw it made myself. I saw the
metal, a formless molten mass, flow out of the
furnace into the sand, and then in a while come
out, as you see it, a bronze statue. It was not
the sculptor who made the statue, but the sand.
There was, first, "a tendency" in the molten
metal to " vary indefinitely ; " and secondly, there
was something in the surrounding sand that
helped aU variations in the direction of a beauti-
ful statue, and checked all those in other direc-
tions. The result is a statue made not by
contrivance but by natural selection/" The

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" The Argument from Design^ 211

answer to this is of course very simple. The
molten metal and the sand were intended and
adapted to work together for the production of
the statue. Hence, natural selection turns out
to be but another form of contrivance.

So we may stiU rationally hold with the
Psalmist, that there is a God who " maketh the
winds his angels, and the flaming fires his min-
isters." The fact that these natural agencies
work together regularly and methodically does
not prove that they have no master — it suggests
rather His absolute control. The fact, if it should
prove to be a fact, that lower forms of existence
are continually evolving higher, does not prevent
us from recognising God in nature. On the con-
trary, this eternally progressive evolution of the
more desirable from the less cannot be logically
accounted for except on the ground that it is
effected by Infinite power and wisdom and skill.

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The Vision of God.

' KMsed are the pure in heart, for thej Shan see Ood.**
— Matthsw t. 8.

T APPREHEND that Christ was referring as
'"' much to our present as to our future life
when He uttered these words ; and it is to the
former phase of the subject that I propose in
this sermon to direct your attention.

There are three distinct kinds of vision.
There is, first of all, physical sight, which de-
pends chiefly on bodily organs, and by which
we merely distinguish material objects fix)m one
another. Then, secondly, there is mental sight
— ^the sight of the scientist and the poet This
enables us to discover analogies, resemblances
and connections between the most distant and
dissimilar things. Hence it gives rise to the
metaphors and similes of poetry, and leads to
the discovery of the laws of nature. It was

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The Vision of God. 213

this faculty of mental vision, for example, which
suggested to Newton that perhaps the earth
might exercise the same influence of attrac-
tion upon the moon which it did upon a falling
apple, and which thus led to the establishment
of the widest scientific generalisation. Then,
thirdly, there is spiritual sight, which belongs to
the metaphysical philosopher and to the religious
man — religious I mean, not in the sense of merely
going to church and that sort of thing, but religious
in his heart of hearts. This faculty enables men
to see Him who is invisible, unseeable, by either
the first or the second kind of sight.

We may, as I have intimated, call these
powers of vision, if we please, the sight of the
body, mind and spirit respectively. Of course
this is only a rough classification. Strictly
speaking, it is the mind that sees, and not the
bodily eye. Still, for the lowest kind of vision
there is needed only such an exercise of mind as
it is possible for a brute to put forth without an
effort. Again, in our present state of existence
there is no such thing as sight that is purely
spiritual. Spiritual sight depends, to a large
extent, upon materials which must be received
through the senses. If we are spiritually to
see God in nature, it is necessary that we, first

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214 The Vision of God.

of all, physically see nature itselfl " That is not
first which is spiritual, but that which is natural,
and afterward that which is spiritual" And,
once more, you must remember the distinction
between mind and spirit does not imply two
separate entities, but only distinct faculties in
the one indivisible man. The mind stands for
the lower intellectual faculties, such as imagina-
tion or reason, the spirit for the higher, such as
faith and the religious aflFections. TVlth these
qualifications, we may, if we please, talk of the
three kinds of sight as bodily, mental and spiri-
tual, remembering that these adjectives refer only
to the most striking or the most important fcudor
in the process of vision in each particular case.

Now not one of these three faculties of sight
is used by any of us as much as it should be.
Even the first and simplest kind we often allow
to lie dormant, though it requires no more exer-
tion than to open our eyes and look about us.
I remember noticing one summer's evening at an
English watering-place, while the spectacle of
one of the most glorious sunsets ever seen was
being unfolded on the horizon, there were a
number of persons sitting on the promenade
mfh their lacks to it. That is just an example
of the way in which nature's beauty is not un-

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The Vision of God. 215

frequently ignored. " Men have eyes, but they
see not" For all purposes except eating and
drinking and enjoying themselves (as they call
it), they might as well be blind.

The second faculty of sight is still more
neglected by most of us, for this requires not
only that we use our eyes, but that we think
about what we see. We might know a great
deal more about nature's ways than we do, — we
might decipher for ourselves some of her im-
spoken poems, — ^if we would only use our mental
vision. But, as Carlyle says, "We have to
regret not only that men have no religion, but
that they have no reflection. They go about
with their heads full of mere extraneous noises,
with their eyes wide open but visionless, — for the
most part in the somnambulist state." Now I
think that the diversity between men in regard
to their scientific or poetic insight into nature
depends, not so much on differences of brain as
it does on the different use they make of their
brains. No man was ever a great poet or a
great discoverer without an effort proportionate
to the greatness of his achievements. Why,
genius itself has been defined by a French writer
as patience; and patience is, at any rate, its
most important constituent. Intellectual vision

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2i6 The Vision of God.

requires a determined eflfort — ay, thousands
of determined efiforts — ^to think. We must ** in-
terrogate nature," as Bacon puts it — ^that is,
ask what are the causes and effects and uses
and meanings of the phenomena taking place
everywhere around us. And we might all do
this if we would. It is quite true that the eye
can only see what it brings with it the power
of seeing. "To the mean eye," says Carlyle,
"all things are trivial, just as certainly as to
the jaundiced eye all things are yellow." But
it is also true that we may by practice and
effort improve our power of mental vision.
Even our physical faculty of sight (as I have
called it) can only be developed by experience.
Those of you who know anything of psychology,
or have read Berkeley's ' Theory of Vision,' will
understand what I mean. All that you actually
see at any moment is but a little flat patch of
colour on the retina of your eye. What you
se^m to see, namely, such and such aii object, at
such and such a distance, is an inference. The
correctness of such inferences is due to the con-
stant and life-long practice you have had in
drawing them. This practice is forced upon us
by the common experiences of life. But the
development of mental vision requires not only

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The Vision of God, 217

long-continued involuntary practice, but long-
continued voluntary effort. A preacher, who is
remarkable for the number and force of his illus-
trations, has said that in the beginning of his
career he found it diflBcult to find illustrations at
all. He acquired the faculty merely by deter-
mining that he would acquire it. I venture to
say that there is not one young man now pres-
ent who might not, before he died, see things
in nature, either after the manner of the scientist
or the poet, which have never yet been seen, and
which the world would be the better for knowing,
if oTdy he wovZd take the trouble to look for them'.

Similarly, in regard to spiritual vision, we all
have this capacity within us, latent if not de-
veloped. This kind of sight Christ teaches us
depends on pureness of heart. A pure heart,
I take it, is one that is not entirely consecrated
to the acquisition of pleasure, or money, or fame,
or any other form of self-seeking, — a heart that
is not altogether set upon self-gratification, — a
heart " at leisure from itself," and so at leisure
to seek for God.

Some of you may be inclined to ask, How is
it that modem scientists find the vision of God
in nature so blurred and indistinct ? They are
certainly not selfish pleasure-seekers or money-

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makers. They are for the most part disin-
terested and enthusiastic seekers after truth.
But to them, generally speaking, the Deity is an
unknown God. Yet others far less gifted than
they, and not more unselfish, have "seen the
King in His beauty;" and while they traversed
the mazes of this present world, have felt their
hearts "burn within them" as He talked to
them by the way. I think the chief reason is
this. Just as the body may be overstrained, and
its powers developed to the injury of the mind,
so the mental faculties may be over-educated, —
educated, that is, at the expense of the spiritual.
This has been the case, it seems to me, with a
good many modem physicists. Their whole lives
are spent in weighing, measuring and analysing
things, so that they feel hopelessly lost in re-
gard to subjects which do not admit of such
treatment. There are not many of them, I
admit, who would make such a foolish remark
as that of Lalande : " I have swept the heavens
with my telescope, and have not seen God," a
remark which would equally disprove the exist-
ence of gravity. It is a popular error to sup-
pose that Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Spencer,
Virschow and others are atheists. They are
nothing of the kind. But they think we can

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The Vision of God, 219

know little or nothing about God, beyond the
bare fact of His existence, inasmuch as we
cannot discover anything by means of the ordi*
nary scientific methods. They forget that these
methods equally fail us in examining a human
character. That can be investigated neither by
microscope nor telescope, neither by scales nor
chemical tests, and yet it can be known. Just
as some theologians have been one-sided in re-
fusing to accept the ascertained facts of science
as the very truth of God, so many modern scien-
tists are one-sided in overestimating the power
and scope of the physical methods of research.
It is a pity that they should make this mistake ;
but still it is not altogether surprising. " Let
him among you that is without sin" — ^let hini
who is quite sure that all his faculties are de-
veloped in due proportion — '' cast the first stone."
Still, though I am not desirous of condemning
those who have failed to see the vision of God
in nature, I am anxious to point out to you that
it really exists, and that it has been seen by
many in all its mysterious grandeur. It is use-
less for any one to say that those who see it, or
think they see it, are mere visionary fanatics
whom too much or too little learning has made
mad. For this vision has been seen by such

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220 The Vision of God,

men (to take only three examples) bs Goethe,
Carlyle, and Tennyson. You may remember
that the Earth-spirit in Faust says —

"Thus at the roaring loom of time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by. "

That is Goethe's idea of nature. She is " the
garment of God." Carlyle says in ' Sartor Ee-
sartus/ " This fair universe, even in the meanest
province, is in very deed the star-doomed city of
God. Through every star, through every grass-
blade, the glory of a present God still beams."
And Tennyson, in yet more eloquent language,
says —

'* The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the
plains.
Are not these, soul, the vision of Him who reigns ?

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ?

Spe^k to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can

meet.
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. "

Well, then, this vision, since others have
seen it, may be seen by you and me. Let
us look for God in the future more earnestly
than we have done in the past, — ^look for Him

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The Vision of God. 221

in vineyards and orchards and harvest-fields, —
in the bright plumage of birds, and the delicate
bloom of fruit, and the sweet gracefulness of
flowers, — in the dense foliage of the forest, aod
the sparse heather of the moor, — in the rich
luxuriance of fertile valleys, and the ru^ed
grandeur of the everlasting hills, — in the merry
dance of the rivulet, and the majestic tides of the
ocean, — ^in the gay colours of the rainbow, and the
quiet splendour of the starry heavens, — in the
gentle radiance of the moon, and the gorgeous light
of setting suns, — in the clear azure sky, and the
weird pageantry of clouds, — in the snow-mantled
wintry landscape, and the brilliant effulgence of
a summer's noon, — in the virgin loveliness of
spring, and in the pensive fading beauty of
autumn ; — ^let us look for Him with an earnest,
eager, and unwearied gaze, till we see Him to be
a God of wisdom as well as power, of love as
well as sovereignty, of beauty as well as glory.

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J22

Punishment.

* God is a consuming fire.''
" God is love."

A EE these two statements reconcilable with
-^^ one another and with the facts of experi-
ence ? They seem to be contradictory ; but they
are not, on that account, to be rejected : for an
apparent paradox is often the most accurate ex-
pression of a truth. This is illustrated by the
celebrated quarrel regarding the nature of a cer-
tain shield. One person said it was made of
gold, and another that it was made of silver.
They were both right and both wrong. They
had been looking at it from different points of
view, and one had seen only the inside, which
was silver, the other only the outside, which was
golden. The attainment of truth always involves
a combination of partial views, and often requires
the reconciliation of apparently irreconcilable
facts. Till we have reconciled the contradic-

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Punishment. 223

tion, however, — till we have removed the diffi-
culty, we cannot accept them both. It is just as
impossible to hold a theological contradiction as
to think that twice two make five. If a man pro-
fesses to believe statements which appear to him
to be contradictory, he is not manifesting faith,
— he is, in plain English, telling a lie. Still we
are perhaps never more likely to be on the track
of truth than when we are examining, as we
shall have to do in the present discourse, seem-
ing paradoxes.

That " God is a consuming fire " cannot be
doubted. The nature of the unseen Power that
punishes the wrongdoer will always be a matter
for controversy ; but the fact that retribution, in
some form or other, follows sin, has never been,
and can never be, disputed. Professor Huxley in
one of his lay sermons has the following striking
passage : " The happiness of every one of us (and
more or less of those connected with us) depends
upon our knowing something of the rules of a
game infinitely more complex than chess. It is
a game which has been played for untold ages ;
every man and woman of us being one of the
two players in a game of his or her own. The
chess-board is the world, the pieces are the
phenomena of the universe, the rules of the

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224 Punishment

game are what we call the laws of nature."
(The professor uses this term in a wide sense,
so as to include moral laws.) " The player on
the other side is hidden fix)m us. We know
that His play is always fair, just, and patient.
But also we know, to our cost, that He never
overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allow-
ance for ignorance. To the man who plays weU
the highest stakes are paid with that sort of
overflowing generosity with which the strong
shows delight in strengtL And one who plays
ill is checkmated, without haste, but without
remorse."

The fact of punishment, then, is indisputable.
The only question admitting of controversy is
this : Can punishment be traced to any reason-
able and intelligible cause ?

The most common view, perhaps, has been
that the Invisible Power who works against the
sinner is a spiteful and revengeful Being, dis-
pensing pain and anguish in haughty anger that
His commands have been disobeyed. This is the
view suggested by the old Greek conception of
the Avenging Furies, which play such an im-
portant part in the dramas of uEschylus. And,
unfortunately, a similar doctrine has not unfre-
quently been taught by professedly Christian

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Punishment. 225

theologians. I am sorry to say it, but say it I
must, that the blackest devil ever described
or imagined would be adorable in comparison
with the horrible caricature of Deity which
some have professed and endeavoured to worship,
under the mistaken opinion that He was the
God revealed by Christ. The laws of this so-
called God are represented as the mere arbitrary
exactions of His caprice. He does not command
or forbid things because they are essentially right
or wrong ; but, on the contrary, the terms right
and wrong mean only that certain things have
been commanded or forbidden by Him out of
pure self-will. He punishes every dereliction
from His statutes simply and solely from mot-
ives of wrathful vindictiveness. His very "love"
is the crowning proof of the meaimess of His
nature ; for the few rare individuals upon whom
He chooses to bestow it are selected with even less
show of reason than that which may be supposed
to guide the most heartless coquette in the be-
stowal of her favours. If such a Being wer^ the
strongest Power in the universe, it would be the
bounden duty of every true man, not to worship
but to execrate Him, not to obey Him but to
resist him, if need be, even unto death. As
John Stuart Mill has finely said (finely, though

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226 Punishment.

inconsistently with lus own utilitarian prin-
ciples): "If Grod can send me to heU for not
saying right is wrong and wrong is right, why, to
heU I will go."

Of the many horrible theories which have
been taught in the supposed interests of religion,
I know of none so horrible as that I have just
described. Milton justly puts it into the mouth
of the hideous sorceress (the personification of sin),
whom he represents as guarding the gates of heU.
She speaks to Satan of

" Him who sits above, and langlis the while
At thee, ordained his drudge, to execute
Whatever his wrath (which he calls justice) bids."

K justice were synonymous with wrath, it could
not be divine. Ages ago Protagoras said, " Novu
Jmt a least would punish merely because evil
had been done." If the unseen Being who
pimishes our wrongdoing consumed in order to
destroy — ^if He were satisfied by wringing out
agony from erring hearts — ^^He would be, not
Love, but Hate — not a GUxi, but a fiend.

In the book from which I have before quoted.
Professor Huxley continues: "My metaphor"
(about the invisible player) " will remind some of
you of the celebrated picture in which Eetzsch

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Punishment. 227

has depicted Satan playing at chess with man
for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend
in that picture a calm strong angel, who is play-
ing for love (as we say), and who would rather
lose than win, and I should accept it as an
image of human life." Or rather, I would sug-
gest, substitute a being stronger and calmer than
an angel, who not only would rather lose than win,
but who aims solely at enabling us to be vic-
torious, and whose condign punishment of false
moves has no other purpose than to teach us our
folly and make us wiser for the future.

There is nothing more needful than punish-
ment for the wellbeing of the human race. The
necessity for it could not have been avoided by
any conceivable possibility. Our moral free-
dom, without which we should have been merely
animals or machines, carries with it inevitably the
liability to sin. Sin is injurious to us, because
the pleasure that follows from it is at best of a
low type, and has to be paid for by a too prodi-
gal expenditure of pain. Theft, murder, adultery,
evil speaking, lying, and so on, must, from their
very nature, be prejudicial to the welfare of
society,: — and with this the welfare of every
individual member is inextricably involved.
Imagine, e.g.^ a lawless tribe of savages. Any

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228 Punishment.

particular member of this tribe might, for a
time, find pleasure in robbing his friends and
murdering his enemies; but it would not be
long before the tribe would be annihilated. A
supernatural interference to save men from any
of the punishments of wrongdoing would be
most tmwise, for it would be most destructive.
Such an interposition could never be a proof of
love. It must always hinder us in the attain-
ment of a noble character, which it is the
glorious prerogative of our manhood to create.
This can be attained only by sacrificing inclination
to duty when the two are incompatible. Now,
nothing can afford us a stronger inducement to
resist temptation — nothing can be a greater help
to us in our moral conflicts — than the certoAn
knowledge that suffering, sooner or later, and in
various forms, will inevitably follow sin. From
the greatest punishment of wrongdoing — ^namely,
the deterioration of our character— ^God Himself
could not save us, no, not even by a miracle.
It is just conceivable that He might interfere
so as to save us from some of the consequences
of our evil deeds. It is just conceivable that
He might refrain from visiting us with those
pangs of conscience which may be supposed to
come more directly and immediately from Him-

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Punishment, 229

self. But were He to do so He would be
inflicting on us the greatest possible injury —
He would be doing His best to destroy us.
The withdrawal of punishments would prevent
us from achieving that character which is the
one thing worth living for, and without which
we may well be described, in the emphatic
language of the Bible, as being lost, as having
perished.

It is very often stated by persons who profess
to be expounding the doctrines of Christ that
God is Justice as well as Love. The Bible does
not say so. It merely says that God is just.
The meaning of this distinction we may take to
be, that justice is not something opposed to
love, but is rather its necessary outcome. It is
just that the sinner should be pimished in pro-
portion to his sin, because only in this way can
he be saved from that sin, which is the con-
summation love desires. In other words, just
punishments may be regarded as expressions of
love. I forget who it is who says, " A God all
mercy is a God unjust." If by mercy be meant
withholding pimishment, we may say, with equal
truth, "A God all mercy is a God unkind."
"Nothing emboldens sin," says one of Shake-
speare's characters, " so much as mercy." But

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230 Punishment.

to do anything that emboldens sin is, in reality,
to act most unmercifully. Eli, in the treatment
of his children, is a type, not of affection, but of
indifference. It is only a sickly sentimentalism
that withholds punishment when punishment
would be useful God is too merciful for this.
" Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth."

Plato, in his * Gorgias,' argues, in reference to
the punishments inflicted by society, that the
man who manages to avoid them is to be pitied ;
for since vice is a disease of the soul, and
punishment its cure, he who gets off scot-free is
left, so far as society is concerned, to die of
his disease. And we may argue in a similar
manner regarding punishments in general Just
as the caustic applied by a physician is meant
to destroy the disease which might otherwise
destroy the body, so the fire of retribution is
intended to consume the sin which might else
consume the sinner — which might eat away his
manhood, and leave him wasted, marred, ruined,
lost. God is not satisfied with the suffering that
foUows sin. The suffering is merely a means
to an end, and that end is joy. God's glory
can be no selfish pride. It must consist in the
welfare of His creatures. " The Lord's portion
is His people." Hence, as Faber has finely said :

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Punishment, 231

' God's justice is the gladdest thing
Creation can behold.

There is a wideness in His mercy

Like the wideness of the sea ;
There is a kindness in His justice

Which is more than liberty.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measures of man's mind ;

And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind."

So we have discovered that the two ap-
parently contradictory statements of our text
are really quite consistent. The first is a
corollary easily deducible from the second. If
God be love He mtcst punish. Hence the fact
of pxmishment is not an argument against the
divine benevolence, but an additional argument
for it. On the one hand, a retributive fire,
consuming only to destroy, would be diabolical.
On the other hand, a love which withheld the
punishment essential to our wellbeing, would be
contemptible and equally destructive. It would
harm us while meaning to be kind. Out of pity
it would ruin us. The love which consumes in
order to save is alone worthy of being called
divine.

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The Fatherhood of God.

(SUNDAY-SCHOOL SBKMON.)
*' Our Father."

"TF there were no God," said Voltaire, "it
-■- would be necessary to create one." By
this, I suppose he meant that men must have
some object of worship ; that they cannot avoid
forming a conception of the Being, or Cause, or
Force, however they may please to term it,
which they can regard as the one great fact of
the universe. The impossibility of dispensing
altogether with religion was strikingly illustrated
by Comte, the author of ' Positive Philosophy.'
He rejected what he considered the fiction of a
god, but supplied its place by the abstract idea
of humanity, which he called the Grand Eire,
the Great Being. The cultus, or system of
worship, which he instituted in honour of this

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The Fatherhood of God. 233

conception, involved a doctrine of inunortality,
the practice of prayer, as well as other religious
observances; and, above all, it included the
tyranny of a despotic priesthood, who were to
determine not only what common people should
believe, but also the subjects with which thinkers
and scientific investigators should be occupied.
The religion of Comte, the prince of atheists, has
been weU described by Professor Huxley as " a
sort of Eoman Catholicism minus Christianity."

The human heart, at any rate in its quieter
and more sober moments, when it is resting
from the rush of life, craves and demands a God.
The universality of this yearning has been for-
cibly described by Professor Max Mtiller in his
lectures on the Science of Eeligion. " There was
in the heart of man from the very first a feeling
of incompleteness, of weakness, of dependence, of
whatever we like to call it in our abstract
language. We can explain it as little as we can
explain why a newborn child feels the cravings
of hunger or of thirst ; but it was so from the
first, and is so even now. Man knows not
whence he comes, and whither he goes; he
looks for a guide, a friend ; he wearies for some
one on whom he can rest ; he wants something
like a Father in heaven. In addition to all the

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impressions he received from the outer world,
there was a stronger impulse from within; a
sigh, a yearning for something that should not
come and go like everything else; that should be
before and after, and for ever ; that should hold
and support everything ; that should make maji
feel at home in this strange universe."

We are likely to forget the debt of gratitude
which we owe to Christ for having revealed to
us the doctrine of our text. The conception of
the Fatherhood of God may seem a simple and
natural idea, that might have easily occurred to
any one. But this is not the case. History,
and still more philology, show how hard and
how long men struggled unsuccessfully to find a
word which would fitly express, and an emblem
which would worthily symbolise, the Deity.
Max Miiller has pointed out that the name of
sky has been chosen for this purpose at one
time or other by almost all nations. We have
examples of this in the Eoman Jupiter, and in
the Greek Zeus. But he asks, "Was the sky
the full expression of that within the mind which
wanted expression ? Far from it. The first
man who, after looking everywhere for what he
wanted, and who at last from sheer exhaustion
grasped at the name of sky as better than

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The Fatherhood of God, 235

nothing, knew but too well that after all his suc-
cess was a miserable failure. The sky was no
doubt the most exalted, the only imchanging and
infinite being that had received a name, and that
could lend its name to the — as yet imbom —
idea of the Infinite, which disquieted the human
mind. But the man who chose the name could
not have meant that the visible sky was all he
wanted, and that the blue canopy above was his
God." This was the best, however, that could
be done in the days of the world's infancy. Age
succeeded age, and thinker followed thinker;
men still yearned to comprehend the Being
from whom their life was derived; but they
could not even guess what His nature must be
in order to satisfy the longings of the human
heart. The Athenians, you remember, erected
an altar inscribed " to the unknown God." They
could not name him ; they did not try to do so ;
they felt that every word which suggested itself
was inadequate, misleading, and false. The idea
of the Fatherhood of God had never occurred
even to such a poet as Plato. We find from the
Old Testament that it had now and again flashed
through the minds of one or two of the most
spiritual of the Jewish seers. But this notwith-
standing, we may safely say that the conception

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2 36 The Fatherhood of God.

was never fully realised or developed before the
time of Christ.

I have no intention in this sermon of attempt-
ing to prove the legitimacy of the idea — that is
to say, its conformability with reason. I will
merely suggest to any one who may doubt this
conformability, that there is nothing in nature
to contradict it. True our world has in it a vast
amount of suffering, but still it has in it a much
greater amount of joy. When we carefully com-
pare the two, we see that suffering is after all
the exception, and not the rule. This is clearly
and dispassionately argued in one of John Stuart
Mill's posthumous essays. It is also forcibly
stated in the exquisite poem entitled "Even-
song," by the author of the ' Songs of Two
Worlds : ' —

''Pain comes, hopeless pain, Ckxl knows, and we know, again

and again;
But even pain has its intervals blest, when 'tis heaven to be

free from pain.
And I think that the wretch who lies, pressed by a load of

incurable ill,
With a grave pity pities himself, but would choose to have

lived it still :
He pities himself, and yet knows, as he casts up life's chequered

sum,
It were best on the whole to have lived, whatever calamity

come.

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The Fatherhood of God. 237

And the earth is full of joy. Every blade of grass that springs ;
Every cool worm that crawls, content as the eagle on soaring

wings;
Every summer's day instinct with life ; every dawn when from

waking bird
And morning hum of the bee a chorus of praise is heard ;
Every gnat that sports in the sun for his little life of a day ;
Every flower that opens its cup to the dews of a perfumed May ;
Every child that wakes with a smile, and sings to the ceiling

at dawn ;
Every bosom which knows a new hope stir beneath its virginal

lawn ;
Every young soul ardent and high, rushing forth into life's hot

fight;
Every home of happy content, lit by love's own mystical light ;
Every worker who works till the evening, and takes before

night his wage ;
Be his work a furrow straight down, or the joy of a bettered

age;
Every thinker who, standing aloof from the throng, finds a higt

delight,
In striking, with voice or with pen, a stroke for the triumph of

right ;—
All these know that life is sweet,. all these with a consonant

voice,
Read the legend of time with a smile, and that which they read

is * Rejoice.' "

Since then the pain and sorrow of our world
are more than counterbalanced by its pleasure and
its joys ; since, moreover, we know that sufifering
is sometimes productive of good, and do not
know but that it may be always productive of
good, it follows that the idea of the Fatherhood
of God is a conception which, to say the least of

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238 The Fatherhood of God.

it, canuot be disproved by any of the facts of
experience.

Now I want to point out, more particularly to
those of you who are engaged in the religious
instruction of the young, that our text embodies
the most fundamental, the most comprehensive,
doctrine of Christianity ; and that no system of
theology can lay claim to any value which does
not start from this point. Oliver Wendell
Holmes tells us that, when asked by some one
what was his creed, he replied, " the first two
words of the paternoster." Those who think
that his answer indicated a feeble faith and a
contracted belief do not know the meaning of
the words. They are pregnant with significance.
Let me give you one illustration of their com-
prehensiveness. Some persons are afraid that if
the love of God be too much insisted upon, there
is a danger of His justice being ignored. They
seem to imagine that if we too often speak about
the Divine Fatherhood, it will be forgotten that
punishment must follow sin. Now there could
not be a greater mistake. All the more import-
ant practical doctrines of Christianity mevitably
follow, alnd can be easily deduced, from the state-
ment that God is our Father. Whereas the
systems of theology which have started from

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The Fatherhood of God. 2 39

God's sovereignty, or omnipotence, or justice,
have never reached His love. The only thing
they have recognised under that name is so
limited, so capricious, and so unreasonable, as
to be altogether beneath contempt. Instead of
representing God's tender mercies as "over all
His works," they have made Him care only for a
few ; and for these few, simply in order that by
them His own isolated glory might be promoted.
From a narrow conception like that of justice,
it is as impossible to deduce a broad concep-
tion like that of love, as it would be to extract
the whole from a part, the greater from the
less. But on the other hand, we can scarcely
fail to see that the idea of justice follows neces-
sarily from that of love ; that it is, in fact,
included in it. A father worthy of the name
must evidently be just — that is, must deal with
his children according to their deserts. Again,
from the fact of punishment we cannot prove
love ; for punishment may be inflicted out of
hate. But love necessarily involves and car-
ries with it the idea of potential punishment.
A father worthy of the name must punish his
children when, their welfare demands this dis-
cipline. The doctrine of God's Fatherhood, then,
does not destroy any wholesome dread of retri-

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240 The Fatherhood of God.

bution. On the contrary, the very intensity of
the Infinite Father's affection makes it certain
that no sin will be overlooked, but that every
delinquency will be followed by the consuming
fire of suffering, in order that the sinner him-
self may, if possible, be made perfect.

After all, however, the fear of punishment,
though a help to right-doing is not the only,
nor is it the greatest, help. We may be terrified
away from the bad, but we may be also attracted
and charmed towards the good. " If for every
rebuke," says Euskin, " that we utter of men's
vices, we put forth a claim upon their hearts ;
if for every assertion of God's demands from
them, we could substitute a display of His
kindness to them; if side by side with every
warning of death we could exhibit promises
of immortality; if, in fine, instead of assum-
ing the being of an awful Deity, which men
are sometimes unable to conceive, we were to
show them a near, visible, all-beneficent Deity,
whose presence makes the earth itself a heaven,
I thiok there would be fewer deaf children sitting
in the market-place." Euskin is right Men
may be more easily drawn than driven. Even
punishment itself, when it is seen to proceed
from love, becomes attractive, irresistibly attrac-

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The Fatherhood of God, 24 1

tive. But unless, or until, this origin can
be discovered for it, it may have a hardening
rather than a subduing influence. Strong, brave,
high-spirited men will be inclined to resist,
even unto death. According to the old classic
legend, when Jove seemed to be hurling his
thunderbolts in a tyrannical and imjust fashion,
the Titans endeavoured to scale heaven and
wrest them from his grasp. So it will ever be.
Those who are endowed with true nobility of
soul will be but little influenced by fear. But
if you can bring to bear upon them motives
of admiration, of gratitude, of affection, you may
do with them almost what you will. Hence
a belief in the Fatherhood of God is the strongest
and the best stimulus to right-doing.

Therefore, let me ask you, when you are
instructing the young, to remember that you
cannot lay too much stress upon the words of
our text. They involve almost the whole of
practical religion. It is impossible to overrate
the value of the work which succeeds in instill-
ing them into young minds and hearts, not as
a dead intellectual dogma, but as an active prin-
ciple, permeating the whole of life. In the hey-
day of youth and health and pleasure, men may
feel self-suflBcient ; they may not recognise their
Q

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242 The Fatherhood of God.

need of the Infinite Father: But they will not

always be young, and well, and happy, and what

then ? What then ? As Bums truly says —

•
" When nnting roand in pleasure's ring,
Beligion msj be blinded ;
Or if she gie a random sting.
It may be little minded.

Bat when on life we're tempest-driren.

And conscience bnt a canker,
A correspondence fixed with hearen

Is sore a noble anchor.**

There will come to many of the children now
in our homes and schools seasons of affliction,
when they will be wellnigh crushed beneath
the burden of life, when its dull monotony or
poignant anguish will make them yearn for the
rest and peace of death. There will come to
most of the children of the rising generation,
seasons of fierce mental conflict, and dense spiri-
tual darkness, when they will feel painfully
conscious of the mystery of existence, and pain-
fully unconscious of any satisfactory solution
for the mystery. Faith for them, believe me,
\7ill be no easy matter. Scarcely a week will
pass but they will read in some newspaper or
review ingenious and powerful attacks, not only
upon orthodoxy, but upon religion in general, —

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The Fatherhood of God, 243

not only upon Christianity, but even upon theism.
They will not be able, like so many of their
predecessors, to believe that they believe every-
thing which has been handed down to them
upon authority. In the agony of scepticism
many of them may be driven for the moment
to think, with Schopenhauer, that the universe
is an egregious blunder, that life is a horrid
mockery, that there is nothing desirable but
annihilation. We tremble as we picture to our-
selves the voyage of these little ones over life's
wild waste of waters. Yet we need not despair.
We, too, perhaps, have been overtaken by the
same terrible tempest, and enveloped in the same
blackness of darkness. Through the storm, how-
ever, there have come echoes, faint, but passing
sweet, of the music of our childhood. There have
thrilled through us memories of the time when
we were first taught, by the lips of some gentle
teacher, to say, " Our Father.'' And we have
taken courage; hoping even against hope, that
after all there may be a meaning and a use
in our calamity, that the tempest may be but
wafting us more swiftly to a desirable haven,
that the darkness may be but the prelude of
dawn. We have been enabled to say with poor
broken-hearted Job, " Behold, I go forward, but

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244 ^'^^ Fatherhood of God.

He is not there ; and backward, but I cannot
perceive Him : on the left hand, where He doth
work, but I cannot behold Him : He hideth Him-
self on the right hand, that I cannot see Him.
But He knoweth the way that I take : when He
hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold."

blessed memories of childhood's most pre-
cious lesson ! Let us do what we can that they
may be the heritage of the rising generation.

THE END.

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J Davies, M.A.
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Church, M.A., and the Rev. W. J.

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