The reasonableness of faith, and other addresses

NYPL RESEARCH LIBRARIES

3 3433 06828633 9

The Reasonableness of Faith

The Reasonableness
of Faith

and Other Addresses

By

•Vv

W: Sr RAINSFORD, D. D,

NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
1902

9

h

THE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX ANO
TILDE N rc>*.'>'DATIoe^«.

R 1 902 ^

Copyright, tgo2, by

DouBi-EDAY, Page & Co.

Published May, 1902

CONTENTS

The Reasonableness of Faith

Courage

There Wrestled a Man

The Gospel of Genesis

Harvard Baccalaureate

Love Not the World

The Eyes of the Heart

The Rest Day

Phillips Brooks

Our Duty to Civilization

Leanness of Soul .

Sacrifice to Their Net

Claims and Duties of Our Time

Creation and the Fall

Whosoever Shall Seek to Save

Life Shall Lose It
God's Lmage in Man
Christ Sent Me not to Baptize
What Manner of Man is This?

Hi

Page
I

45
6i

77
91
115
125
139
157
171

193
205
219
^33

251
261

279

297

THE REASONABLENESS OF FAITH

"If thou canst do anything, have compassion on
us and help us.

"Jesus said unto him, if thou canst believe, all
things are possible to him that believeth. "

Mark ix. : 22-23

Here is the old, old subject — Christ's
changeless demand for faith. Is it a
reasonable demand? Can ordinary men
comply with it ?

Of all questions the thoughtful man is
called on to face, there can, I think, be none
more important than this. There are those
— not a few — who tell us faith is waning.
On the other hand, there are many at least
as competent to form a judgment who
confidently assert that our age is pre-emi-
nently one of faith. Goethe says the ages
of belief are the only fruitful ages, and
history backs his opinion. If, then, faith
is slowly waning from the earth, and the
most progressive peoples are learning to
live without it, the fact is one of gravest
I

2 The Reasonableness of Faith

significance. If, on the other hand, it is
only the antiquated and infirm forms of
faith (her cast-off garments) that are passing,
cast aside as things no longer usable, while
the real body and life of faith are quick and
vital — then the time is ripe for new and
simpler definitions of what our honoured
forbears called ' ' saving faith. ' *

With this last view I am very heartily
in accord, and to-day, when you have called
me, gentlemen of Columbia University, to
the very high honour of addressing you, I
know of no more timely subject for which
to claim your indulgent attention.

I wish to try and point out that faith as
demanded by Jesus Christ and His apostles
never was meant to be adhesion to any
credal statement, but a vital obedience to,
and trust in, a living man. Who in His
Person and teaching revealed two things
as they never had been revealed before —
the nature of man and the nature of God.
My subject, then, I shall call the reason-
ableness OF faith.

First of all, I ask you to consider that Jesus
wins the response of faith that He desires
from all sorts of people. The most un-

The Reasonableness of Faith 3

promising win their way to Him and gain
His approval. He expects to find good in
men, to find something worth helping and
saving in them, and to find this worthiness
in the most unlikely places.

In order tO' understand what Jesus meant
and what He taught about faith, we must
refuse to separate His acts and His words.
We must put acts and words together, and
then what He does will illustrate what He
says. Here, I venture to think. Christian
men have very often failed, and are failing
to-day.

We take a word of His — this word faith,
belief; we find that to those who have
it and exercise it He constantly makes
such promises as these: ''All things are
possible to him that believeth"; "He that
believeth on the Son hath everlasting
life"; *'He that believeth on Me, though he
were dead, yet shall he live." No words
seem too strong when He seeks to express
His fear for those who have it and exercise it
not: *'He that believeth not shall not see
life, but the wrath of God abideth on him,"
and a multitude of similar passages. We
remember these passages, but we forget

4 The Reasonableness of Faith

the circumstances in which they were spoken.
Did we remember them, the circumstances
would illuminate and make their meaning
plain. These, however, we ignore, and the
unfortunate result arises that, before we
are aware of it, faith seems to become an
unreal, impossible thing, a demand with
which we cannot comply, a possession which
but few have. Thus it fades, and the
Christianity of which it is the root and
spirit fades too.

Notice, then, that from all sorts of people —
the learned and the unlearned, the stranger
of a day and the life-long friend, the dis-
ciple who clings to Him and the casual
visitor who comes to Him only for some one
thing, and, having got it, goes away — from
all alike Jesus demands faith and belief.
He will have no dealings with men with-
out it.

In word or act of Jesus we can find no
precedent for the state of things which we
have brought about to-day. We have made
faith seem difficult; so difficult that multi-
tudes of our very best men and women
turn from the Church, because in their
souls they believe it is impossible for them

The Reasonableness of Faith 5

to yield to the demand which the Church
makes on them for faith. They are just
as good as the Church people from whose
company they turn, as kind to their
children, as faithful in their loves and
friendships, as scrupulously honest in their
lives, as fervent in their patrotism, as ready
to serve and suffer for their fellowmen.
Their aims are the aims of all good men
and women, and yet they are turning away
sadly or indifferently from the Church and
from Christ. And why are they doing it?
Because we have made His claims on
them appear to be claims with which they
cannot in their conscience feel it is right
for them to comply.

This is nothing less than a perverting
of the known character of Jesus, an unlaw-
ful reversal of His method, an unfaithful
presentation of His message. So far as we
have achieved this result we have not been
faithful witnesses to God for our own time
and generation. I claim not only a word
or a text here and there in the inspired
records, but the whole life-long conduct
of Jesus in proof of the truth of what I have
said — that when He demanded faith and

6 The Reasonableness of Faith

belief from men, He demanded something
which He thought the every-day man was
able to give.

Let us notice, then, that our Lord came
not to create barriers between God and men,
to thrust man farther from God, to call the
few to their Father. His yoke was easy.
His burden was light, the door of His feast
stood wide open, the wanderers in way-
sides and hedges were welcome within.
When He sowed the seed of the kingdom,
the rocky road, the choking thorn, the
barren hillside as well as the fruitful earth
liberally received the golden grain. He
sought no rare possession, like genius, in
man. No ! He fastened on some common
gift, the most universal, when He appealed
to faith and belief. This was Jesus' fixed
conviction. Every little child. He said,
had faith naturally within, and could sub-
stantially exercise it. In Christ's view to
demand faith is to make no unfairly diffi-
cult demand.

Nor can belief be confused with credulity.
This Jesus rebukes again and again. Cre-
dulity turns the soul into an ash-heap on
which are cast together all sorts of things

The Reasonableness of Faith 7

good and bad, and all alike are wasted.
Credulity is not clear-eyed but blear-eyed.
Credulity abases judgment. Credulity is
a traveller without a guide, or one with a
hundred guides who is trying to follow
them all by turn. He blunders round in
a circle, makes no progress, and wins no
goal either of character or attainment.

Nor can faith, as Jesus demands it, be
the development of ourselves at the cost
of some one part of ourselves (though this
fallacy has been taught again and again,
and is believed sometimes in the present),
at the cost of that part of us by which we
know and judge of all other things— our
reason. Faith cannot be created, called
out, developed, at the cost of reason; for
to play off our faith against our reason is
to raise a civil war in man, destructive,
fratricidal and unnatural.

I would like in passing to recal what
Lord Bacon says about this: ''It were
better," he says, ''to have no opinion at
all of God than such an opinion as is un-
worthy of Him; for the one is unbelief, the
other contumely." He then goes on to
illustrate: ''Plutarch said well, 1 would

8 The Reasonableness of Faith

rather a great deal men said there was no
such man as Plutarch at all, than that they
should say there was one Plutarch who
would eat his own children as soon as bom. ' "
For this was what the priests of Saturn
taught, that Saturn did.

In the light, then, of the plain practice
of Jesus as told to us in the Evangelists, I
think it is evident that there were three
things faith was not: not difficult or rare,
not credulous, and in no way opposed to
reason.

Now see how this wonderful story of the
transfigured Christ coming down from the
moimtain to relieve His sorely confused
and beset disciples, and help the father in
his misery, and the son in his epilepsy,
illustrates what Jesus would have us believe
that faith is. Notice first that here Christ
confronts all that is most hopeless in life.
He is face to face with life's tragedy ; for here
we see a father's misery, a son's insanity, a
disciple's stupidity, while round the spec-
tacle gathers the heedless, gaping crowd.

A father is crying for help, such help as
love needs for its loved ones. The cry is
the cry of need, of need for another, for

The Reasonableness of Faith 9

another's pain. Most of us have felt it — pain
so much deeper, sharper, more unbearably-
bitter, than any pain of our own. It is the
cry of him who has tried all known methods,
tested all panaceas, and won no relief. His
long course of disappointment has robbed
him of all faith. Expectation even is
almost dead. Hear him speak for himself.
*'If thou canst do anything, have pity upon
us and help us." But this is not the only
misery that confronts the Lord. Here is a
son's insanity, the very quintessence of
earthly failure. How weary we sometimes
grow of failure, weary of bearing the burden
of failure which is the result of our own
miscalculation or sin ! But harder still is it
to confront hopefully that heavy burden
of failure which seems to weigh on the world
from no immediate fault of its own — failure
the result of some hidden deed, some for-
gotten sin of long ago, an hereditary taint
handed down, bringing forth at last its
bitter Dead Sea fruit.

But another failure confronts Jesus here,
a failure more near and intimate. His
chosen disciples, whose great task lies be-
fore them as yet unattempted, they who

10 The Reasonableness of Faith

must minister to pain, they who, inspired
by Him, must go forth to heal earth's failures,
seeking to uplift and inspire those multitudes
of men whom it is so hard permanently to
touch ; these men have failed in their efforts
to help the boy. What promise is this for
the work before them? For these men
must be not only soldiers, sharing the
dangers of the field, but while they fight they
must bring succour. They must be in-
vincible veterans fighting with one hand,
and bearing the wounded to shelter with the
other. They must learn to tread out evil,
learn to smite and hate it, to steady the
poor soul caught in its toil, and, freeing
his feet from the entangling snare, set him
on the path of life again.

So we behold our Lord confronted by
the human need of the father's misery, the
son's insanity, and the sad incapacity of
earthly ministry. What does Christ do?
It is all-important that we should know.

Something in all these men. He says, is
put there by God, a quality which lies
within them, buried and almost lost, per-
haps, but still resident, responsive to meet
just such occasions as these. The most

The Reasonableness of Faith ii

real of all human need carries, Christ teaches
us, the cure for its want in its own bosom.
Belief lies almost dead there among those
men because unused for so long. But
father and disciple alike, even in the face
of such difficulties, can exercise a trust so
vital, so warm, so strong, that not only can
they stand up in it and conquer for them-
selves, but the influence of their own faith
can work the deliverance from what seems
to be a hopeless failure, and break the
ties that have botind this boy in darkness
from his cradle.

And what is this belief which Jesus de-
mands and calls into exercise, which He
challenges, and which immediately comes
forth in obedience to His challenge? He
does not enter into disquisition or definition
of it. He does not even say, ''Believe in
Me." It is just belief in God, belief that
He is good, not bad ; that He is near, not far ;
that He is loving, not indifferent ; that He is
all-powerful, not powerless; belief that He
is the sort of God, in short, that the dis-
tracted father, the imbecile son and the
despairing disciple really want, if they will
but have it so.

12 The Reasonableness of Faith

Jesus tells them that they do believe in
God, that they have always believed in
God, that it is human instinct to have faith
in God. "Arise and exercise what is your
own, and all things are possible to him that
belie veth." To convince them of the truth
of the great power, of the possibilities of the
exercise of this power within them, Jesus will
give them a display of divine power. He
cannot repeat such displays forever: by
doing so He would make them meaning-
less. He will not break in on His Father's
laws — which are the best laws possible for
men — but He will more fully reveal those
laws; and, therefore. He works what people
call a miracle. That does not mean that
He will do a supernatural deed — there can
be no such thing as a supernatural deed —
but He will more fully explain the natural.
He will not alter by one degree any divine
order, but He will give in His own person
an illustration of the beauty of the order.
He will show that it is God's will that misery,
insanity, stupidity, should cease to be, and
that when men are at one with God as He is,
these old oppressions of earth are powerless
to resist their faithful, God-trusting will.

The Reasonableness of Faith 13

To them, then, is entrusted a power before
which the long entrenched evils of earth
shrivel up and disappear.

We know that as long as this Jesus stood
before men, living the life that inspired
them, doing the deeds that thrilled them,
using the old word faith, belief, and breath-
ing into it absolutely new meaning — so long
did faith to the Apostles mean the exercise
of that spiritual faculty within them that
lived by the life of Jesus. They were not
believing things about Him. Day by day
they were drawing vigour, vision, and virtue
from Him. And the reason why the Gospels
are so invaluable to us, and no criticisms
can ever rob them of their value, lies
just here — they give to us in its simple beauty,
its compelling reasonableness and its utter
comprehensiveness, this imperishable pic-
ture of the Son of Mary.

At the bidding of faith man stands forth
transfigured and transfiguring in his power;
for faith is a vast unused capacity inside
all men. This is the emphasis Christ lays
upon it: ''All things are possible to him
that believeth." ''Look not," He says,
*'even to Me for immediate deliverance,

14 The Reasonableness of Faith

call not on some new power, seek not to
ally yourself with some awe-inspiring thing.
Can you believe? Believe with only a
little belief, come with Me and I will show
you. All things are possible to him that
belie veth."

When Jesus stands beside us and calls on
us to believe, we sometimes feel that we,
too, can face all the pathos and tragedy of
life as He speaks. Why, then, have we
done so little with this divine endowment?
What are we doing with it? Casting it
into the lumber-room of unused things,
or putting it in some pitiful way into evi-
dence, as in some homes they put the family
Bible on a table by itself, where, if they did
not dust the room day by day, you could
write with your finger on the cover. This,
we are told, is a day in which faith is wan-
ing, and yet we believe in many things,
believe quite as much as any generation
before believed, and feverishly follow the
things we believe. But the faith of which
Christ spoke, misdirected and misused,
shrinks within us. Crowded out by mean
ambition, debased, it loses its hold. Starved
and untended, it seems to fail us at the

The Reasonableness of Faith 15

supreme hour of need. We do not take
time to believe in God. Perhaps we know
that once we did believe in Him, and we
think that our belief is with us still; but
some night the winds begin to rise, and we
hear the voice of the coming storm. We
must go out alone on the water, and the
ship has, plank by plank, been builded of
things we have been and done.

Ah ! some of us have lived in havens
land-locked. Safely anchored we have been
by stem and stern, and no storm test of
life has been possible. We have come to
believe that our portion in existence must
be everlasting serenity. But no; we too
must front the stress of wind and weather,
and all we have been and done must be
tested by the winds that blow, the floods
that flow, and the rains that beat upon the
houses of our lives. Friendships only built
on favours accepted; deeds that look won-
derful outside, but are hollow within; popu-
lar descrpitions of us with which men flatter
us, or tickle our vanity while we know them
to be more than half deceits — what are all
of these worth? They are only wreckage
before the first rockings of that storm.

1 6 The Reasonableness of Faith

Yet God for every soul of man hath pre-
pared that which, doth he but use it, will
bear him to haven and safety.

I have seen an old boat lie on the shore.
Well built it had been and well-shaped. Its
lines are fair and strong. There is its rud-
der; oars and sails lie wrapped beneath
its thwarts. Launch into the wild sea
and trust yourself to it, and quickly it
sinks with you into the salt water. Any
child can tell you why. For years it has
lain unused. The suns have smitten it and
the frosts have cracked it. Its seams gape,
its timbers part. It is fairly shaped ; it was
strongly built. It could once carry fifty.
Now it is only a cofhn for one. It has never
been put to sea. It is no more help than a
boat painted on canvas. In the hour of
trial it fails, as all unused, unexercised
things must fail. So it is with faith. Care-
fully, wisely, firmly within us, the quality
and capacity of faith has been builded. It
was meant to bear us through all storms
and temptations to a fairer, further shore;
but laid away, forgotten, unused, it moulders,
shrinks and dries up beyond recovery.

But let us turn and look more deeply into

The Reasonableness of Faith 17

the nature of faith, see how it comes to be,
and why its exercise is so vital to us. You
judge of a tree by its fruits, not by its leaf,
or even by its flower. You judge of any
course of events by its results; a theory
too, a doctrine, a philosophy — nay, more,
any government or institution. They must
all submit to the same test. By that they
stand or fall. Not only is there no fairer
test, nor any better all-round test, but there
is no other test. This, you say, is sound
theory. Nay, you say it is more than theory
— it is well-ascertained fact; for though we
may often deny and forget it, the nature of
things around us never forgets it.

Nature has been working on this line for
ages untold. She only accepts and pre-
serves as her instruments things that suc-
cessfully endure this final test. She has a
vast work to do, carries on innumerable
manufactories under inconceivably numer-
ous conditions. She tries all sorts of tools
in her vast workshop, and ever and always
casts aside all tools that break or fail. In
the process she piles up heaps of failures,
but the things she finally arrives at — the
good things, the useful things, beautiful and

1 8 The Reasonableness of Faith

fitted things — these all have stood the test
successively. They are not only good but
they keep on improving. In this consists
their vital goodness. They are all the time
being tested by competition.

How we hated, as boys, our first com-
petitive examinations ! How well we re-
member the long breath we drew when we
were through the last of them. And yet,
when we left the examination room, as we
thought forever, we were only entering the
larger examination hall of life. When we
left the competition of the book, study and
paper, we were entering on a fiercer test of
competition still. For competition rules
everywhere, in the air and sky — yes, far aloft
in the ether, in the dark earth beneath our
feet, in the sunless gulfs of the sea. Every
blade of grass, every ear of corn holds its
own by competition. The multitudinous
things that crawl, that live, that walk, that
swim, that fly — they are all of them, little
as we notice it, holding their own painfully,
in circumstances of fierce struggle. And so
it is that from her vast competition halls
nature brings forth not only the good but
the best. Only the best survive, because

The Reasonableness op Faith 19

she admits no favouritism in her vast house-
hold. Her system is absolutely fair. She
scorns all suggestion of *'pull. " She loves
the strong, the fair, the good, and these at
their strongest, fairest, and best. All lesser
goods and fairs and strongs are ever making
way, under her order, for her best, her fairest
and her strongest.

When we denounce competition we de-
nounce a divinely ordained process for
weeding out the imperfect. Nay, further,
we denounce the only conceivable process by
which sorrow, pain, imperfection and at last
death itself, can be done away. Let us gird
up the loins of our minds, face facts, and
cease crying for the moon. By competition
we are what we are. By competition our
children shall be, please God, better than we.
God's great competitive examination board
is ever in session, and through it our nation
has been lately passing, as you well know;
for what after all is war, but the competitive
examinations of nations?

The point I want to make is this: This
faith which Jesus demands of us is a common
possession. This religious instinct which even
a child possesses is acquired by us all as

20 The Reasonableness of Faith

all other valuable qualities are, as the result
of a system of competition. The knowledge
of these later times has bidden us hold what
is old with new reverence. The very fact
that it is old carries to the thoughtful
mind proof of its vitality. Its age is the
medal on its breast, telling of the many
victories it has won, the struggles in which
it has conquered things of lesser good than
itself. So we value what is old, and we call
it beautiful, for we know it is the result of
actual worth, that no favouritism of nature
has saved it for us. And this truth teaches-
us a new respect for the good things around
us and within us. They are not only ancient ;
they are costly, they are approved, they
have won their right to use and a hearing.
And the greatest, the most lasting, the most
universal of these is faith.

But there is a further reason for valuing
faith, another proof of its importance. It is
not sufficient in God's economy that things
should be old ; they must also be adaptable,
for no quality or possession, however vener-
able, that lacks this capacity for adaption
can live on; or, to go back to what I have
said, can keep improving, can keep on hold-

The Reasonableness of Faith 21

ing its own in the competitive examinations
of God. And therefore the proof of the
vitality of faith is the measure and magni-
tude of its adaptabiHty. AdaptabiHty, in
this sense, comes to be a greater sign of
vitaHty than age. And this adaptabiHty is
the pre-eminent quahty of faith. When
man's condition was low, his faith was base
born. It clothed itself in base forms.
When his moral ideas were undeveloped he
clothed his ideas of God with his own im-
perfections. When he was cruel, so was his
God; lustful, so was his God; jealous and
full of hatred to his enemies, his God was a
God of battles and a jealous God. The
reason thoughtless people to-day find fault
with the Bible is because many of the pre-
sentations of God which its pages bring to
us do not agree with our present conceptions
of God. If the Bible were not full of mis-
conceptions, or old and imperfect concep-
tions, it could not in any sense be the Bible
at all. It could not be a true history of
man's reaching out in earlier times toward
God. In centuries much later than those
whose record we have in the Bible you can
note the same process. From pagan to

2 2 The Reasonableness of Faith

puritan you follow the idea of God, and God
is chiefly a law-giver, His chief seat the
judgment seat. His title the Lord of Hosts.

But our faith calls, yearns for something
higher, for a God higher than the law-giving
God and the ruling God. Yes, for One in
whom infinite tenderness and mercy can,
as the old hymn puts it,

"Make the dying bed
Feel soft as downy pillows are."

So in the Bible and, since the Bible was
written, still on in human history, faith
gathers up all the broken lights that have
come from God, all the thoughts which men
have in their best hours worthily formed
of Him ; gathers them from the artist yearn-
ing for His beauty; from the poet, divining
His meaning; from the philosopher thirsting
for His truth; yes, from misunderstood re-
former and martyr. From all religions and
all histories faith gathers them up, and
sees in the teachings of Jesus the explana-
tion and vindication of them all. Old and
new, changing because it lives, who can fix
for it a birth date, and who can set any
boundary to its advancing tide? Man's
hunger for and appreciation of God ! So

The Reasonableness of Faith 23

the Son of Man explains to us the universal
instinct. We are not inventing an explana-
tion of faith. We are face to face with its
actuality. This faith of ours is as much an
evolution as our eye is, as our hands are;
and to-day with us it is not the rudimentary
thing it once was, just as our eyes are not
the rudimentary things they were once, or
our hands the rudimentary things the
monkeys once had. Eyes and hands and
faith have all been developed by ages of
painful use.

But I hear some one object, and the ob-
jection at first seems both reasonable and
weighty: What proof have you that this
faith — the result of evolution, possessing
wonderful powers of adaption — has not,
hke many other old things, fulfilled its pur-
pose and is now no longer useful? Let us
consider this a moment. There are things
within us that are old, and have no doubt
been in the past adaptable, but, so far as
we can see, are useful no longer. What
distinguishes them? They are like links
connecting us to the brutishness of the past.
They are marks of a lower order. The
scientists call them vestigia, for they are

24 The Reasonableness of Faith

carried around by the living body, but are
not fulfilling a living function ; are not vitally
important to any part of our lives. The
proof that we can do without them is that
we do not use them at all, or use them
less and less.

Now faith I hold is probably not one of
these. What is best and highest and most
seemly in our lives is ever dependent on the
exercise of the religious instinct. It would
not be hard to prove that in every depart-
ment of progress man fortifies and inspires
himself by the use of this part of himself —
the inspirational impulse toward the best of
which he is cognizant. I have no claim to
scientific learning, but I can quote the
words of one who had the greatest mind
probably that Germany ever produced
and I remember again that it is Goethe who
says: ''Only the believing ages are the
fruitful ages. " Scientific progress and scien-
tific men are commonly supposed to have
little to do with faith (a supposition which,
by the way, I think is false), but to-day
faith has modified the whole aspect of science.
Contrast the greatest scientists the past has
produced with the attitude of the present

The Reasonableness of Faith 25

scientific men. Consider the wisdom of
Egypt confronting the baffling mysteries of
the universe ! Hear the spirit of the past
speak in the motto of the Temple of Isis : "I
am whatever hath been, is, or ever will be,
and my veil hath no man yet lifted. " Now
hear the later voice: ''Veil after veil have
we lifted, and her face grows more beautiful,
august and wonderful with every barrier
withdrawn. "

But let us contrast religion where faith
dwells and religion where mere resignation
takes the place of the hope and inspiration
that rightly belongs to faith. For let us
not forget this: Faith is never mere ac-
ceptance; it is the appreciation of God that
yearns and strives and grows from good to
better, and from pure to purer. It is the
religious instinct in exercise.

On reading an interesting book lately, the
tale of a strange life lived in the Far East —
''Colonel Gardiner's Memoirs" — I came on
this story. Gardiner was staying with a
mountain chieftain who held sway over a
lonely valley on the borders of Thibet.
This valley and all its inhabitants were
threatened by the ruthless incursion of a

26 The Reasonableness of Faith

more powerful chieftain, of whom all the
people lived in dread. Gardiner's host set
himself to procure a present which, when
presented to the tyrant, would save his people
from rapine. An old fakir lived in a cave
at the mouth of the valley. For years the
old man had lived only to pray and to share
his scanty provision with travellers poorer
than himself. He possessed, however, an
extraordinary ruby, which had come to him
by direct descent, a family heirloom from
the time of the great Timour. Gardiner
describes their visit to the old man. They
found him immersed in contemplation, and
the chief told the cause of their visit, the
threatened invasion, the certain ruin to all
his people, and begged that, in the hope of
propitiating the tyrant, the old man would
give to him his one treasure. He listened,
said Gardiner, and then he arose, went to a
comer of the hut and unwound the jewel
(which, by the way, was as safe in his keep-
ing as though it had been in the Bank of
England, for no one in that country would
touch the dwelling of the fakir), unwound
the jewel from a bit of rag and put it in his
visitor's hands, saying: "I hope the gift

The Reasonableness of Faith 27

may have the result you expect." Large
money was offered, but this the old man
would not take. " But you may, if you will, "
he said, "give me a larger allowance of corn,
for many hungry people pass this way."
Then he asked to be left alone, and com-
posed himself to prayer again. Here in
this lonely, distant, unknown land, where
no Anglo-Saxon had ever come before, was
holiness of a pure type, unworldliness
complete in its renunciation, charity as
unselfish as that of the Son of Mary
Himself. Yet numberless such men have
for long centuries sat in their caves or huts,
looking on the fair plains of the valleys
of those cruel lands. Alas ! their holiness
has not availed in those regions to advance
by an inch, so far as we can see, the cause of
life, humanity and truth. Lust and cruelty
reign supreme. Regions once prosperous
and happy are desert and soaked in blood.
Man still remains as he has been for cen-
turies, a ravening wild beast. And why?
Because the progressive power of religion
lives in faith alone, and not in mere un-
worldliness. No renunciation, no unselfish
charity, no piety, nor all these combined.

28 The Reasonableness of Faith

however splendid they are, can, when faith
has fled from them, permanently uplift
mankind.

There is such a thing as heredity in good-
ness. Men are like tops often. The top
spins a long time after the string that spun
it is withdrawn, but in time it totters to a
fall. So hereditary goodness stored up will
uphold individuals, will for a time even
sustain society; but take faith away, and
though courage still upholds the brave,
and fortitude still supports the strong of
heart, the skies have become gray over the
pilgrim masses of men, their marching lines
have become broken, and no sweet singing
cheers the march, no heavenly allies help
them on their way. Such pilgrims will not
keep on marching forever, such soldiers will
soon cease to fight ; for even Mr. Greatheart
is himself a pilgrim, without hope of a
celestial city; and Galahad a knight-errant,
who dares no longer hope for a glimpse of
the white light of the Holy Grail.

But let us see how the Church has dealt
with faith. First, let us remember it is not
the policy of the Lord himself to utterly
destroy old conceptions that are part of

The Reasonableness of Faith 29

man's very growing. He replaces them
slowly with better ones. And so His new
gospel, as it clashed with time-honoured
beliefs, must merge and mingle with them.
Mankind's whole previous conception of
God was as unlike Jesus Christ as it well
could be. When the bodily vision of Him
passed, the great doctors and saints of the
time soon began to create from His teach-
ings, as they understood them, systems of
religion crude in form and profession, differ-
ing radically from Christ's gospel. It could
not be otherwise. Man's dominating idea
of God had been the God of force. Sheer
almightiness was exalted — man bidden to
bow — but sheer almightiness has no sweet
reasonableness. It may command and
threaten, but it ever remains a sort of militant
rule of life, a martial law for conscience ; the
rigorous control during a crisis, not the
normal condition of a peaceful and pro-
gressive life. But since the mere almighty
idea of God of necessity died slowly, ere it
passed there grew from it a whole series of
conceptions of a punishing and damning
God. Men bowed to religious laws as they
bowed to national laws. The world owed

30 The Reasonableness of Faith

much to the iron-law-clutch of rule, and in
the Church, in lesser scale, came naturally
to be reproduced a similar condition. It
seemed reasonable for men to demand, in
the name of God, obedience, acceptance
of certain definite things. They made pic-
tures of Jesus that were often veriest cari-
catures. They baked their truths into hard
and fast shape. Things that appeared to
be true about Jesus, men were told they
must believe; and faith came to be a de-
mand, and not the exercise of an instinct.

The movement was inevitable. It was
the highest sort of religious movement that
the time was capable of, but none the less
it replaced Christ's idea of faith with a
lesser one. It practically said that faith
was not merely the exercise of the religious
instinct addressed to its Lord, but the en-
forced belief in a complex system of things.
I have dwelt on this devolution of Chris-
tianity just to show that it was a growth in
the opposite direction to Christ's teaching.
As I have said, it had to be. The world was
not capable of evolving or accepting any-
thing higher. But truth put in hard and
fast shape, or in a word, dogmas, cannot

The Reasonableness of Faith 31

produce the highest form of Christ's like-
ness. Dogmas are poor food for the soul.
The Great Physician knew best, and seeing
far into the future as He did, and knowing
what must be the deepest needs of the
present, as well as of future times, He never
once made a demand on any soul for this
lower sort of faith. Well He knew that
belief in the mere almightiness of God only
tends to make strong natures diabolic; that
repression incites rebellion. And so, in not
one single, authentic incident did He so
represent His Father or make claim for
Himself. Recal one instant, if you can,
where faith, as Jesus demanded it, meant
believing in things. Always and ever, rather,
did faith with Him mean belief in the sort
of God that "I reveal to you;" ''He that
hath seen me hath seen the Father. "

So much for Christ's demand. How
about the Apostles' demand for faith?
What did they mean, for example, by faith
as a pre-requisite to baptism? What was
baptism? Was it more than a common
rite to which was given a new significance,
an open confession in the sight of men of
obedience to Jesus, a declaration that He

32 The Reasonableness of Faith

was the Son of God ; that His cause was the
one to fight for; His society the divine and
final society? Those who would be His
followers must be baptized. What was the
form of baptism? We know that baptism
at first was not administered in any other
form but the name of Jesus. The very
early Christians were not even baptized
in the name of the Trinity. This was a
later form. Belief in Jesus was the one
thing demanded, and that without any
disquisition on the nature of God at all.

There is not one single line in all St. Paul's
Thirteen Letters to lead us to suppose that
he laid any stress, with the multitude of his
converts, on mysterious questions of religious
truth; whether, for instance, Jesus was the
Son of Mary alone, or the Son of Mary and
Joseph. The subject does not come up
with St. Paul. Nor is there one line to lead
us to suppose he formulated for his converts
any doctrine of the Trinity. Rather, Paul
said, as his Master had said before him,
"Jesus stands before you — do you admire
Him, can you love Him, can you find it in
your hearts to obey Him? I speak to you
as the Apostle, the messenger to a despairing

The Reasonableness of Faith 33

world of the visible God in humanity. Here
at last is rest, pardon and hope for men. "

But this is not what men are asked to do
to-day. They are confronted with, or think
they are confronted with, certain churchly
demands. They must stand up to say a
creed, and they are told that that creed is
not simply a symbol of their faith, but an
accurate definition of things which they
consider to be often utterly beyond human
knowing, or at least human defining. Or,
second, they must submit to the rite of
baptism. But baptism does not seem to
them to be quite what the old rite was.
Once it meant danger braved, and now,
too often, they see it degraded till it is merely
a fashionable function. And the third de-
mand is, that they should kneel at the com-
munion table, where again " believing things"
confronts them. They have some dim idea
of what it means to kneel with the Lord of
long ago, when the multitude clamoured
for Him and were plotting His death, to
kneel around the altars of the early Church
when heathen Rome thundered and the
Arena reeked of blood. But what does this
kneeling mean to-day? They are told it

34 The Reasonableness of Faith

expresses a sorrow for sin which they cannot
always honestly call forth.

I might go farther, but time forbids me.
Here these three simple acts, these demands
of the Church, are each and all of them made
to rest on a false idea of faith. They are
not made the expression of personal obedi-
ence and reverence for Jesus. They have
been perverted from that. And can we not
see that the natural man, the inferior
man, often likes this system of perver-
sion, that he will readily comply with
these things? Cannot any one see that
he does this because he is a lesser
man ? The more scrupulous men, however —
the men built to a higher order, whose re-
ligion does not mean a bargaining with God,
but an effort to follow God in honesty of
soul — these greater, larger men cannot ac-
cept such conditions, but ever draw back
from them. They do so, not captiously,
but in order that they may safeguard the
very eye of the soul, the religious instinct
itself. A faith in things suits the natural
man, alas, too well. He is ever its de-
fender. But it leaves uncomforted and
unblest men of larger mould.

The Reasonableness of Faith 35

So, based on this misapprehension of the
meaning of faith, there has grown up a false
idea of the Church. From the Church men
turn away, for she seems to come to them
with intolerable demands. She makes them
suspect God, not love Him. She seems an
exacting Church, not a giving and freeing
Church, as of old she came in beauty and
might to men. The best and most scrupu-
lous men hold back from her too often,
doubtful of that to which they are asked to
commit themselves. Could they but realize
that religious faith is but a striving after
obedience to Jesus, the simple, great
Jesus Christ of the gospels; to seek to do
what He would have us do to make earth
more fit for His divine rule, to slowly lift
life's laws into harmony with love's law !
Let the Church demand these things of
men, and again will men listen to her, and
again will she lead them on in the path of
a high resolve. And though they stagger,
painfully at times, yet will they follow her,
for following her will then be following Him.

Faith, then, as Jesus and also His Apostles
demanded its exercise, was not believing
things that were hard to believe. It was

36 The Reasonableness of Faith

using a divinely implanted instinct, a power
and a faculty within us that answers to the
presentation of the living, loving God made
visible in Jesus Christ. When this faith
has failed to fasten its grasp on Him, again
and again it has created for itself distorted
images, again and again it has found itself
disastrously following wandering fires; but
still it ever contains within itself power to
turn to the true vision, and bow before the
supreme beauty, perceiving the beautiful
to be beautiful, and the good to be good,
and, therefore, sent from God. From this
the Christian Church started, and to this
the Christian Church must return. This is
the real Church. This is the real Christian-
ity. This is the Christianity that shook
the whole world and lifted it out of its
despair. This is the Christianity that can
breathe peace into the deep unrestfulness
of our times. It shows no defect of nature
to refuse to believe in old things just because
they are old. Tradition, however vener-
able and weighty, may be rooted in utter
error. It has often been proved to be so
rooted. To find one's self, therefore, incapable
of accepting truths accredited by most

The Reasonableness of Faith 37

venerable tradition shows no defect of
nature. I repeat ; to refuse to believe things
is no sin; but to refuse Jesus the faith He
demands — ah, what shall we say of that ?

We are told men take masses of precious
stuff, and, subjecting it to intolerable heat,
expect at last to see glowing in its centre
one tiny, blood-red drop — the ruby. So in
Jesus there is for man the declaration of
his own preciousness. The ages of human
struggle have not been in vain. The chaos
that often seemed to engulf man's life was
only the prelude to God's cosmos. All the
pains, and all the struggles, and all the
hopes of the mothers and fathers of the
world were justified when at last, as the
result of all the intolerable heat and pain of
living, there came forth One utterly beauti-
ful, completely good, and men bowed before
Him and cried : " Behold the Son of God ! "

More than once before on earth had burst
forth that ecstatic cry. But when at last
His own lips speak, we hear Him say : '' The
Son of Man!" To fail to see in Him a
present beauty, a visible loveliness, to fail to
hear and own the sway and inspiration of
His heavenly music — this indeed is to argue

38 The Reasonableness of Faith

defect and limitation ; for such failure means,
in part at least, a moral death.

Press faith on men. Emphasize it as
believing things, and you have but erected
thorny hedges around the cross of the
Christ through which men must peep, over
which, wounded, they may strain, and after
all only see partial views and catch distorted
outlines of Him Whom you would place
within. This has been done again and
again; done with the best intention, done
by those possessed of a passionate love for
Him Whom they would protect. But the
human hedges, whether erected by friends
or foes, with spiny barrier forbid the child-
faith He so loved to come near Him.

I would not be misunderstood. Creeds
are necessary, dogmas in their place essen-
tial. I have said nothing to decry them.
Many dogmas and doctrines have been
slowly evolved, and are the result of much
pain, of long and reverent study, and show
a profoimd insight as to human needs and
divine revelation. Thus thoughtfully, rever-
ently let us receive these partial statements
of eternal truth, till the Master open our
minds for better and higher things still.

The Reasonableness of Faith 39

Thoughtful men will readily admit that we
must have creed in every active relation of
life. The merchant has a creed in his office ;
the scientist one in his laboratory; the
brick-layer and builder one at his finger's
ends; and the soldier who charges and dies
at San Juan Hill, or amid the kopjes of
Natal does so because he accepts and obeys
the soldier's creed. The creed is a certain
accepted thing on which I, as a man, base
my action. The creed is a working neces-
sity at all times. In every department of
life, as much as in the religious department,
*'no creed" means paralysis.

And still further I must hold my creed
with other men, and make it a basis of
working with other men. The individualist
simply argues himself a fool when he says:
"I must unite with other men to make
money, unite to get learning, unite to pro-
duce any valuable earthwork, or unite to
defend anything that is worth defending.
But when it comes to a question of doing
good and developing my own character, let
me alone. Here I will be my own guide.
Here no man shall dictate to me, aid me,
or judge me." He may be perfectly in-

40 The Reasonableness of Faith

telligent, and have thought intelligently
along other lines, but along the spiritual
line he is not a thinker. He is talking
foolishly. All this is true and timely.

But what to-day is most important to
emphasize surely is this : all these doctrines,
dogmas, and creeds, however necessary they
may be, are but crutches and walking-sticks,
not hands and feet. They are but a tempor-
ary expression of the eternal verity, and, as
they change and pass, by their very change
are evidencing the might of the living truth
which, because it is the everlasting seed,
can ever, must ever, reclothe itself in a
series of new and beautiful bodies, thus
proving its life.

Shortly before he died Tennyson said:
''My most passionate desire is to obtain a
clearer and fuller view of God." So spoke
and still speak the great of the earth. For
man cannot live by bread alone. And if
we have learned in our heart of hearts to
want Jesus, then some glorious day He will
surely open our eyes to see the things we
cannot see now. The way shall be open
for us, and the lame man shall leap as the
hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.

The Reasonableness of Faith 41

The little lame boy needs his crutch as he
limps beside his father; but when they both
of them come to the stream-side, his father
takes him in his arms, and he needs his
crutches no more.

Let me beg, then, my friends, your care-
ful consideration for the meaning of faith. I
insist on it as of vital importance to-day.
Oh ! let us search our hearts so that we may
keep alive and in health this divinely ap-
preciative part of us. We are making pro-
vision for this part of our life itself. It is
ever the eye of the soul ; and all the spicery
of all the Indies, all the glut of all the seas,
all the flattery of all the myriad sycophants
of our time, cannot take its place, nay,
cannot satisfy the soul from which faith is
departing.

Be you inside the Church or outside the
Church, I charge you, then, make provision
for this faith that is in you, this religious
faculty God has given you, which you hold
by virtue of the painful struggles of the past,
and for the handing down of which to your
children you will be held accountable by
God. Keep the religious instinct alight.
Keep single this divine part. For in each

42 The Reasonableness of Faith

soul of man it is the little window opening
to the Everlasting Day.

It is because this wonderful religious in-
stinct and aspiration within us links us to
God, that faith, and faith only, can trans-
form. By faith's use it is absolutely true
we are transformed men. Faith softens us,
widens us, deepens our sympathy. It
breathes a peace over all our life. Why,
take it in the lower sphere. You trust a friend
of great resources — you who are poor and
friendless and burdened with a load you
cannot carry. You go to your friend, you
lay your case before him. He meets you
with kindly hand and eye, and before you
know it your burden is rolling from your
shoulders, and you go away from his house
or his office with lighter tread and hope re-
bom. Or you trust in some one you love —
your friend, your child — and in the strength
of that trust, no matter how fierce the sun
or how cruel the cold and frost, you find
warmth and shelter. What accomplishes
the wonder? It is just faith. Faith in
what is highest and best in those you know
down here. And so you go forth to life's
inevitable struggles with a gentler heart.

The Reasonableness of Faith 43

Faith justifies all it does and sees here by
what it believes in beyond. Faith is in-
tuition triumphing over appearances, ''the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things unseen." Put trust in God, the
Good over all, the Worker in all, the Power
behind all, and at last the Judge of all — not
the outside and distant God, but the immi-
nent and inside God, moving through all
men. When we reach this point, my friends,
we hear an echo of divine harmony, and we
know the beginnings of a holy peace.

"We know in part — how, then, can we
Make plain each heavenly mystery ?
Yet still the Almighty understands
Our human hearts, our human hands,
And, overarching all our creeds,
Gives His wide presence to our needs. "

And now as I close I turn specially to you
young men and women who to-day go forth
from this great university into the larger
life beyond. Oh, still it is true, true to-day
as it was eighteen hundred years ago — ''all
things are possible to him that believeth.''
Believe in your friends, believe in your
country, in your institutions, in yourself, in
your God. Believe in your dreams, your
best and highest and holiest dreams. Many

44 The Reasonableness of Faith

things you may have to give up, but never
surrender these. Use the BeHef you have,
and it will surely grow to more. For

"So nigh is glory to our dust
So close is God to man,
When duty whispers low, 'Thou must,*
The youth replies, 'I can.'"

COURAGE

"Add to your faith courage."

// Peter, i: 5

Why does the display of courage always
move us, even when that courage belongs to
what we would call the lower order? We
love a brave dog above a cowardly one.
Why is it we resent, as a personal insult,
any hint of the want of courage in our-
selves? I believe, my friends, we have
here an unconscious tribute to a divine law.
We accept the presence of courage as neces-
sary, we resent the absence of it, are filled
with shame at the thought of the absence
of it, because courage is a divine necessity.
No race can flourish or ever has flourished,
without courage. In the long ago, brute
courage was necessary in brute struggle;
and through those ages of strife life had to
pass. As life moves upward toward its
farther goal, the nature of courage, of
course, changes, but the necessity for it
45

46 The Reasonableness of Faith

remains the same. Environment will do
much for a people, craft and finesse for a
time may save a nation's life; but, sooner
or later, however favoured that race may
be, without courage it passes from the
regard and admiration of mankind. Some
thoughtlessly, I know, instance the Jews
as a people who have held their own mar-
vellously and yet were lacking in courage.
Yet but a slight study of that nation's
history makes it evident that nothing but
sheer valour saved the chosen people
again and again.

To pass, however, more immediately to
the sort of courage which the writer pleads
for — ''Add," he says, "to your faith cour-
age. " Courage, without faith, as I have tried
to point out briefly, is a powerful thing. The
courage of Rome was pitiless and unmoral.
The courage of Greece co-existed with con-
tempt for all mankind except the Greek. But
it is not the unmoral courage of Rome, nor
the hypercritical courage of the Greek, that
can stand us in stead to-day. These, in no
sense, could be said to have added courage
to their faith. Nor will every union of
faith and courage avail to make and keep

Courage 47

man great. The Barbary pirates have faith
as well as courage. The Soudanese have
an enthusiastic faith and matchless courage.
Perhaps they are physically the bravest
race that tread the earth to-day; yet, in
their combination of faith and courage,
there is no moral quality, and they are
thrust out beyond the bounds of civiliza-
tion, and by the cruel law of civilization
must inevitably perish.

And so we come, my friends, to the con-
clusion that valour necessary to the develop-
ment of Christian character, the valour we
need to add to our faith, must be a valour
of no obsolete type, no mere physical bravery,
no mere wilhngness to contend against long
odds, to risk everything in the contention.
It must go forward to its work, the ally and
support of an intelligent faith, a growing
faith, faith that grasps the truth of new
ideas; valour which, at any cost to self-
interest and self-pleasing, determines to
achieve them. Faith will vitalize and ap-
propriate new forms, courage fit itself to
new conditions, and thus only can the cause
of God and man be won. Such character
may indeed be hard to mould, such task

48 The Reasonableness of Faith

hard to achieve. But let me remind you,
this Sunday morning, that if the path be-
fore us is steep and thorny, and the enemies
against us are many and strong, they will
be not few that are on our side. Ours is in
truth a high calling. If ever a people
should be called on to exercise a high degree
of courage, we are that people. The herit-
age we have received is rich in both faith
and courage. Those peoples whose blood
mingled in our veins were faithful among
the faithful, were bravest among the brave.
English, German, Huguenot, Scandinavian,
Celt — where has bravery dwelt, where has
faith purified and inspired mankind, if not
in these families of men? Their courage,
their faith, are our heritage to-day. It is
for us to be worthy of that heritage.

Why do I press on you, my people in St.
George's, the need of courage? I do so
because I see all around us things which,
it seems to me, tend to make us ignore and
forget its imperative need. First of all,
our easy position among the nations, the
happy fortune of our lot, our immense un-
earned estate, rich beyond precedent in all
that goes to make the resources on which

Courage 49

a people can build prosperity; the un-
exampled suddenness of our riches; an
unassailable position, hedged off from trou-
ble by three thousand miles of sea; set, as
it were, alone in the midst of the earth,
the strifes, the turmoils, the vast destruc-
tions of other races and continents not for
us or for our people. Waxing fat, we begin
to dream that life owes us comfort, plenty,
power, ease. This is the devil's lie. Life
owes such things to no one — to no people.
Remember it once for all, no nation ever
has cheaply obtained these things which
make it stable and great. Comfort, plenty,
power, ease, self-control — these ever, always,
are only the reward of long toil, persistent
endeavour and victorious conquest urged
against odds that seemed overwhelming.
Two brief struggles we have had, neither
comparable to those struggles through which
other peoples have passed. Be sure that
longer and more protracted ones await us.
If we are to be truly great, if the dross is to
be purified from the pure gold of our life, oh,
be very sure of this, the plans and laws of
God cannot know reversal in our favour.
No favouring clause can be inserted in the

50 The Reasonableness of Faith

divine statutes on our behalf. We must
know chastisement, we must know trial, and
through these we must win our way, before,
in any sense, we can be truly stable and
great.

Again, I think, there is much in the so-
caUed orthodox religion of the present day
that makes little of courage. There is a
tendency to discount masculine virtues,
the hardihood, perseverance, honest pride
and love of work that belonged to the gener-
ations preceding us. These are not dwelt on
as they should be ; these are not sought as
they deserve to be sought. Religion is too
often taught as a thing apart. These
masculine virtues are in danger of being
neglected in our religious conceptions, be-
cause in secular life they are in danger of
being neglected. Prosperity and wealth
are sought by cunning, craft, clever com-
bination, lying advertising of self, unscrupu-
lous manipulation of fellow man; above
all, by tricky laws favourable to individuals
or groups of individuals. Such methods
are lauded as necessary to success. And
this is done not alone by those without
character or without position. The most

Courage 51

successful men are known to employ these
methods, confess that they employ these
methods very often; and orthodox religion,
sometimes, at least, receives their con-
science money and holds its tongue; stands
by again while the seamless coat of God is
torn into parts, and while men who even
think themselves to be Christians venture
to teach and to practise an utter atheism,
real and sadly effective in its denial of God,
however unconscious that denial may be;
a denial which asserts that religion is one
thing, patriotism another thing, and busi-
ness yet another thing.

Ah ! there is no room for courage there,
or for much faith either. Religion becomes
flabby, washy, full of humbug, and valour
gives way to craft. Men don't stand up
straight before their fellow men, any more
than they stand up straight before their God.
Life's balances are false, life's weights
tricky. Better open warfare than such
damnable deceit. When men divorce from
their religion or subordinate in their religious
thinking such simple, straightforward ideals
which we call masculine — hardihood, per-
severance, honest pride, love of work and

52 The Reasonableness of Faith

fairness of dealing between man and man —
religion will be found to take refuge in the
hysterical, and then men and women read
without condemnation such gross carica-
tures on religion and mankind, on both
faith and courage, as you find in the popu-
lar Hall Caine's '' Christian," which is mere
rant and hysteria from one cover to the
other. Its faith is delusion, its courage
that of a Don Quixote; and in a time when
knight errantry for Christ is needed as much
as it ever was, the simple, manly Christianity
which has won, and ever will command the
admiration and respect of sentient beings,
gradually passes from the field.

Shall we be discouraged on account of
these things? Far from it. The purposes
of God are sure. Those that do not add
valour to their faith will fail of their high
calling. Others will listen to the calling
they refused, will take up 'the tasks they
were false to, win the victories they shrunk
from, and at last stand on fairer shores and
bathe in the sunshine of a clear day. This
must come, for the nature of things is on
the side of faith and courage. Think with
me, for a moment, how certain this is.

Courage 53

God's kindly stern old nurse, Nature, man-
ages to harden her children somehow. She
wears a stem look about the eyes, but in her
bosom is a kindly heart. Omniscience has
set her to her task. She will see to it that no
race succeeds, no children brought up at her
knee win in the fight, but those who are
capable of sustained conflict. Nature has
set us among stormy seas and under gray
skies, given us to till a weedy earth, a long,
exhausting struggle to wage, — this she sets
us to, and all for a divine purpose. Now and
then her children forget it; but rudely she
stirs them up. Pain is here, sore sorrow
and disease, separation comes, the thwarting
of holiest desire, the denial of loftiest ambi-
tion, the inexplicable things of life are ever
present with us, the highest and truest
prayers of the soul often remain unanswered.
All these are, as it were, the hands of Nature
fastening iron armour on us, whether we
will or not, making us stand when we want
to crawl, making us mount when we fain
would rest, holding us in life's battle line
when we would fain shrink back.

But look away from Nature for a moment.
See man himself. He has a second fight on

54 The Reasonableness of Faith

his hands, a fight for his very soul, a fight
to which the first fight is a mere skirmish.
The moral nature of him wrestles for its
very life with the dormant beast within.
He comes into the world with leaden
weights to his feet, with anchor chains
that hold him to the mud and slime of
things; and weighted and tied by these, he
is bidden swim, — swim in a salt tide that
brims to his very lip, swim and swim against
wave and current, keep swimming when he
is wearied to death, — if he would ever land
on a far, fair shore. The battle within is
a battle indeed to which the outward strug-
gle is but a skirmish. He cannot evade
responsibility, he cannot drift, because
choice, all momentous, is thrust on him,
whether he will or will not. Opportunity
bows before him, but he must grasp her,
grasp her quick and hold her firm — dally
with her, she is gone. Emotions move
him tenderly, sing to him like spring birds
till he hears their song echoing in his blood ;
but he must transform motions into action
if they would stay with him. Action must
be repeated and repeated, and then at last
emotions remain and crystallize into charac-

Courage 55

ter. But deal with them only occasionally,
and as the morning cloud they vanish, and
as the evening dew they pass away. And
behind them they leave an exhausted life, a
cold, barren, burnt-out life, where once
dwelt the green, odorous possibilities of
fruitfulness.

Therefore let us take courage. But let us
never forget that the nature of things around
us and the nature of life within us, both
insist, with an insistence of divine pre-
vision, that if we would live and prosper,
we must, somehow, add to our faith courage.

And lastly, my people, what sort of
courage shall we. have ? Oh ! to-day, if
ever, we see the need of a courage that
recks not of odds; a courage that is deter-
mined to win against odds, be they what
they may, (I don't say, mark you, does
not tremble at odds — the very highest class
of courage often trembles) . I suppose some
of you remember the story of the Peninsula
officer, a man of undoubted courage, who
happened to command a regiment before
he had ever seen service. He had to lead
his regiment to the attack of a heavy line of
battle and against a superior artillery. As

56 The Reasonableness of Faith

he stood in front of the long Hne of his men
in which gaps were being blown, moment
by moment, by the enemy's guns, the men
in the front line could see that their Colonel's
knees were fairly knocking together, and
some said mockingly, "See, he is afraid!"
But there were those who knew the Colonel,
and, standing near him, heard him talking
to himself, and this is what he said as he
regarded his trembling extremities, "Oh,
shake away, but if you knew where I was
going to take you, you would give way
altogether/'

Yes, the courage that will make us worthy
of our opportunity and of our time has to be
a courage of the soul as well as of the limbs
— the courage that Bunyan has so splen-
didly described in the doings of Mr. Great
Heart. Great Hearts for a great time —
yes, they never have been lacking. No
need to speak of the past — God has not
left Himself without record in the present.
It was the great heart of Gordon that held
for so long Khartoum. It was a great
heart that bore Bishop Hannington into
the centre of blood-stained Africa and
there sustained him, till he fell under the

Courage 57

spears of those he came to save. It was a
great heart that kept Bishop Patteson
ever cheerful and brave in his lonely mission
to the far Pacific Islands, till on their sands
he gave up his life. It was a great heart
that spoke in F. W. Robertson of Brighton,
till, worn out, he died at thirty-five, the
greatest preacher that the English Church
has produced in the nineteenth century,
yet the worst abused man in England. It
was a great heart that enabled Mazzini to
endure his self-appointed exile and the
calumny and scorn of those who should be
his friends and allies.

And so with a high courage fell only
yesterday a man that all who knew loved
and delighted to honour — a true servant,
a true lover of his fellow men — Henry
George.

True prophets, knight errants without
sbame or smutch — they and hundreds of
thousands unknown to fame, whose work,
known and unknown, has kept the world
for God ! These all counted odds as nothing,
never stopped to think of mere reward or
human favour, for they knew that life
could not be gauged by these. Mighty for

58 The Reasonableness of Faith

good were they, because courage in them
went with faith.

What we need, to-day, is a courage that
springs from trust, trust in God and trust in
man. If you trust God, you must trust
man. Just as if you really loved God, you
cannot help loving men; for men are the
crowning result of creation, of redemption,
of salvation. All the world exists, Christ
and all the martyrs lived and died, for men.
And so your faith in God is a sham unless
it leads you to faith in men, as your
love for God is a fraud unless it makes
you love men. And love and faith in
men, and love and faith in God, must ever
go hand in hand. There can be no real
progress where this mutual trust does not
control things. And so I say to you, this
morning, be brave to trust men. Look for
faith in men and you will find it. Look for
courage in man, look for honesty and patriot-
ism in men and you will find and inspire them.
You will always find what you look for —
never forget that ! Look for the mean and
the small, and they will crawl out before
your eyes. Look for the great and the fair,
and they will stimulate you and cheer you

Courage 59

on. Oh ! let us trust men more, for Jesus
trusted men ; and if the men He trusted
first crucified Him, never forget that at last
they crowned Him.

Let us be brave, then, let us pray to be
J3j.ave,— brave for our great land, brave
for our splendid heritage of institution,
brave for our race's sake. Let us pray to
be brave against odds, brave whether the
battle seems to go ill or well. Victory is
the General's business— to carry ourselves
like men is ours. We have nothing to do
with odds— our simple duty is to hold the
ground where we stand. Oh pray, then,
to be brave. Look around the world and
you will see there are plenty to be wise,
plenty to be prudent, tactful, cautious,—
let us pray to be valiant for His truth upon
the earth. And may God who loves a
brave heart help us to remember that at
the last —

'• Only the Master shall praise us,
And only the Master shall blame,
And no man shall work for money,
And no man shall work for fame;
But each for the joy of workmg,
Each in his separate star,
Shall draw the thing as he sees it ^^
For the God of things as they are.

November, 1897.

THERE WRESTLED A MAN WITH HIM

UNTIL THE BREAKING OF

THE DAY

*' There wrestled a man with him until the breaking
of the day.

"Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but
Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and
with men, and hast prevailed. " — Genesis, xxxii: 24, 28.

We misjudge Jacob, because we insist
on looking at him as though he were a man
of our times, as though his standards were
our standards. As a fact, he was a man of
one thing. One determination ruled his
whole life — to win for his posterity the
blessing of the first-bom. In order to do
so, he did things that now would be un-
allowable; but we must not forget to look
at these things as the good men of his own
time would have looked at them. Un-
doubtedly, he aimed for the highest he saw,
he strove for the holiest he knew, and God
asks no man to do more. We are judged
most truly by our own people, by men of
our own race ; and Jacob's own people finally
concluded to give him the place of a prince.
61

62 The Reasonableness of Faith

He was one of those few whom not fate
itself availed to turn from his purpose.
Even seemingly divine interposition itself
could not swerve him. Do not forget that
this is the main point of Jacob's story. It
is this quality in Jacob's character that gives
him a rightful place among the immortals
of the earth. That this instinct of absolute
devotion to what a man feels to be his
highest call is ever the voice of God, we
know from the teachings of Jesus Christ
Himself. These specially hardy sons of His,
God loves, and, loving them, sends severest
trial, allots the fiercest struggles; and this
because they are His chosen ones. It was
Christ Himself who tried, with what seems a
cruel persistency, the faith of one weak
woman. ''It is not meet," said He, "to
take the children's bread and cast it to the
dogs." Her unconquerable faith endures
even such a rebuke, and then from the lips
of love there bursts forth an appreciation,
the like of which no one else during His
earthly pilgrimage seemed to win from Him :
*' O woman, great is thy faith ; be it unto thee
even as thou wilt." When you come to
think of it, there was nothing strange in

There Wrestled a Man 63

the Lord's so dealing with that faithful
woman; for when a great task has to be
achieved, a great duty done, whom do we
choose? We wisely choose our bravest
and our best; on them we lay the burden,
and to them, having borne it, we give the
praise.

This discipline of struggle is true also of
nations and of periods as well as of indi-
viduals. This will be apparent to you, if
you think about it. The great ages were
not the easy ages, but ages in which the
face of nature seemed dark and forbidding,
times in which men went forth to struggle
and discovery. The permanently good
things that come to mankind are not those
easily won. The things that make for
deepest peace, abiding happiness in us all —
these are not the result of plenty merely,
do not always come with physical comfort:
we only win them by persistent strenuous-
ness. And great men are not those whose
path has been easy, whose burden has been
light. The men who won empire, or wrestled
with nature for her deeply hidden secret,
who lived to produce the beautiful and the
true in art or in literature, who saw fair and

64 The Reasonableness of Faith

clear visions of a higher and holier society — •
I ask you, what sort of lives such men have
lived ? Surely, it is only the stupid and dull-
eyed who persuade themselves that the
really great, good and far-seeing men of
each age are the men who naturally suc-
ceed. It is only the degenerate church that
thoughtlessly cries Amen to such a proposi-
tion. The Master never taught so. Ye
shall be betrayed. He says, by parent and
kinsfolk and friends, and some of you shall
they cause to be put to death. Ye shall be
hated of all men, but there shall not a hair
of your head perish. Mark it — loss of every-
thing, but the real self, the real power;
nothing retained beyond that. The power
from the living God to reveal to their times
a ''life'' — and that is everything; for that
is the most beautiful, harmonious, abundant,
divine gift that men can hold in trust for
their fellows.

Why have I thus briefly developed for
you, my people, the part struggle plays
in the building up of the kingdom of God?
Because I believe God has called us to new
effort and new trial to-day. New ways
and tasks, and wrestlings lie before us.

There Wrestled a Man 65

The prospect of them has dismayed many.
Many true and good men are cast down,
and their depression has found frequent
voice most prominently, I am sorry to say,
in some of our time-honoured pulpits.
The cry of discouragement and fear arises
not from the poor and the ignorant men,
but from the educated and intelligent
among us, from men to whom we are ac-
customed to look for words of soberness.
They tell us the country is in danger, that
a new policy of expansion is the beginning
of the end of her story of greatness. We
are proposing to ourselves to hold colonies,
have dependencies, rule subject peoples.
Look first at home, they cry. See how we
have failed there. Listen to the story of
race riot in the South, see the pitiful condi-
tion of the Indian in the West. Note the
failure of municipal government every-
where. Mark the shame and corruption in
State legislation. And, remembering all
this, what madness is it, they cry, to accept
new responsibilities and place on our shoul-
ders new burdens ! I do not wish to be
uncharitable, but it is my firm conviction
that such an attitude of mind proves these

66 The Reasonableness of Faith

doleful prophets to be out of sympathy
with much that is most vitally alive in our
time.

I think these pessimists have failed to
note the great advance that has been
made by our people. They expect a highly
developed civilization too soon. They have
not carefully marked the great advance
already made. When I turn to the men
who know, — each in his own field, — what
they are talking about, when I visit the
leaders in such movements as are repre-
sented by Hampton and Tuskegee — there
I find hopefulness, not despair. If I want
to note the progress made by our plain
people, I give up a month to study those
extraordinaiy concourses met in Chicago a
few years ago, and compare the hundreds of
thousands there assembled with similar
great gatherings in England or France. If
I would give consideration to the best philo-
sophical thought of the time on the ques-
tion, I listen to a really great man like
Herbert Spencer, and from the study there
sounds a voice as emphatically hopeful as
from the schools where the common people
meet. The great synthetic philosopher is

There Wrestled a Man 67

as far from despair as the coloured genius
of Tuskegee.

But, these doleful prophets of to-day
not only make a grave mistake in their
judgment of the movements around them,
but it seems to me they are forgetful of
the ascertained laws of Cod. What do I
mean by the ascertained laws of God ? Let
me go back for a moment to make my mean-
ing plain. For sake of argument, admit
those correct who say that we cannot govern
ourselves, cannot clean our streets, cannot
command honesty of government in our
legislatures, have not as yet produced a
thoroughly united people. Admit it all —
what are we going to do about it? Leave
theorizing about the people, and look at
the people for a moment. Does any man
in his heart of hearts really believe that
the masses of the people in this country
are more ignorant, dishonest, impure, less
patriotic, less manly — worse men, in short,
than are the people composing other nations ?
Few intelligent men, I take it, will be found
ready to say this. Then on your own
showing, all you have to do is to arouse the
good, organize the good, give expression to

68 The Reasonableness of Faith

the better element, and then we will com-
pare not unfavourably with other people.
How are we to arouse, organize and educate
this waiting good — suppress virtue of the
nation, as it were? I say. the ascertained
way of God is plain.

Let me illustrate. Men are not by nature
cleanly. Cleanliness is won by painfully
slow degrees. The everlasting laws of life
make for cleanliness, and so, slowly, the
conviction that cleanliness is necessary,
produced a habit of cleanliness. But men
do not grow cleanly suddenly, only ac-
quiring these habits of cleanliness through
the persistent punishments which, in a
thousand ways, uncleanliness visits upon
them. Now I challenge you to show me
one single virtue that has not been won
in the same way that we have won a measure
of cleanliness. And yet, though won slowly,
the fight with uncleanliness has been so actu-
ally won, that few would think, to-day,
of cleanliness being a virtue at all, since
it is gradually being esteemed as a necessity.

Now for my application. How are we go-
ing to convince the inhabitants of our great
land that all forms of corruption which I

There Wrestled a Man 69

have alluded to, and which I deplore as
much as can any man, — how are we to
convince them that these things are evil,
not only in themselves, but that they are
ruinous to all that we love most, and threaten
our very freedom itself? How convince
them that in dealing with these evils,

"They enslave their children's children,
Who make compromise with sin."

I say again, my friends, the ascertained laws
of God only point to one way. Bring these
deeds to the light, hold them up to the day,
name them for what they are, trusting ever
and always that God lives in the hearts of
men, and that in the end when they see and
know, men will choose the good and the
fair, rather than the evil and the foul. That
is to say, the bulk of men will; for, in the
last resort, this was the teaching of Jesus
ever, and His hopefulness for His enemies
lay in this — that they did not really know
what they did. Ah, bring the deeds to the
light and have no fear; for the inexorable
law of God working in the atom or in the
planet, compelling the crawling of the
worm or the thinking of the philosopher,

70 The Reasonableness of Faith

lighting the glow-worm's tiny lamp, or
flashing in the planet's fiery glory — this
inexorable might of God is on the side of
purity, liberty and truth.

Now perhaps some will ask, Why is it that
I rejoice in the expansion of our land, even
though that expansion comes to us with
added burdens and most unexpected duties.
I admit we are unprepared. I deplore our
lack of Civil Service. I resent the ignorance
and conceit that makes many who should
be strong for a high order of Civil Service
languid or opposed to it. And yet, gauging,
I think, our weaknesses, I rejoice in this
expansive movement; because it will hale
us to the light, because we can no longer
hide from ourselves or from the world the
facts, because it will help to cast down in
us that ignorant, pharisaical cry: "Lord
God, we thank Thee we are not as other
men are." That spirit has obtained too
long. Now, sirs, our works are to be mani-
fested as never before. The world is to
see far more clearly than it has yet seen,
what we are. Our institutions are to be
tested as the institutions of other nations
have been tested and tried. The real inward-

There Wrestled a Man 71

ness of our civilization is to be made abund-
antly plain to all men, as they watch our deal-
ings with our dependencies. We have pro-
claimed in the face of the whole world, that
one nation's method of dealing with subject
peoples seems to us so utterly barbarous
that we, as a neighbourly nation, could
tolerate it no longer. The declaration was
honestly made. Now the world is to see
our improvement on that barbarous method.
Can any man dream that it would have
been a neighbourly act to drive Spain out,
and then, in our splendid vessels sailing
away, leave defenceless peoples to anarchy?
I remind you again, as I did months ago,
of the teachings of Jesus. To do so, I say,
would have been accurately to copy the
example of those who left the wounded man
on the highroad and passed by on the other
side. It would have been to earn the
curse of God and the contempt of man-
kind.

No, we are in for it, — and I thank God —
in for a work, in for the discharge of a long
and difficult duty, in which we are sure to
make mistakes; but in the persistent prose-
cution of which we shall learn to^know, as

72 The Reasonableness of Faith

never before, our weak spots, our strong
spots, and our real selves. For a time, I
say, we shall make mistakes. I fear all
our appointments will not be like those of
Colonel Wood in Santiago ; though plenty such
men could be found, when our nation calls
for them. There may be a tendency at
first to treat these rich islands, these un-
happy and ignorant peoples, as a further
field for money-making, but if, through
negligence or ignorance or greed, we are
so unfaithful to our trust, the sign of our
shame will be pinned round our neck, and
we stand pilloried before the nations. There
will not only be irritation abroad and scorn-
ful mocking, but I tell you that our people
at home will be brought face to face with
the intolerable usurpation that the love of
money engenders. They will see our na-
tional vice publicly shame us in the eyes
of all the world.

Oh, my friends, what does the Christian
believe in? He is bound to believe in the
cleansing power of light. Light reveals,
light discloses, washes, restores, revives
and cheers. So taught Christ, and so,
mark me, to a new and glorious extent,

There Wrestled a Man 73

the light of truth has shone for the healing
of the nations. In the criticism of mankind
to-day, there is a new assurance of safety
and of health. Yes, there is renewed hope
in it for the weak, new admonition for
the strong. The elder nations decayed and
failed utterly — why? Because they were
shut in, as it were, to their own atmosphere.
In them was no free breath of international
criticism. They breathed their own vitiated
air, like a sick man sealed up with his sick-
ness in an un ventilated room. No outside
succour, no healing medicine, could come
to the sick bed of the nations of old time.
But, to-day, all is changed. Who can over-
estimate the good that comes to a people
from other peoples? The sickness of one
is discussed by all, and touching, even as
we do in a thousand ways, we bring to each
other vitality, life and health. Aloofness,
separateness, are not a gain, but a great
danger, and this I assert in spite of the
pulpits and press.

There was a gnat once, its life was limited
to one summer evening, and it took its
airy flight just as the summer thunderstorm
was about to burst. In despair, the tiny

74 The Reasonableness of Faith

insect cried to its fellow: ''Here is the end
of the worid; alas for all its beauty and its
bloom ! " But the flowers, though they were
only flowers, knew better, and the gardener
knew best — that this storm was what he
had long waited for through days of parching
heat and drought, for the health of his
garden and the good of the land. Dark
times come. What of that ? The sun reigns
and the skies shall grow serene again.
If we fail for a time under new duties, it is
because we are cherishing and hugging to
ourselves old sins; and new duties are but
God's fair, strenuous messengers to show
us the foulness of old sins. The sin of our
nation, of all parts of our nation, is as
plain as plain can be. It is slavish obedience
to what we know to be sin, and slavish
obedience alone, that can make us seriously
fail. And that national sin is the one Jesus
warned us of. He and His apostles told us
it was to be the danger of a later time.
It was the overmastering love of money, and
what money will bring. Let good men teach
that, and good preachers preach that. Let
each of us try and show our independence
of that (and mark me, if we do this, we have

There Wrestled a Man 7^

our work cut out for us,) and in the end
God will accept us, and men shall say we
saw truly, and strove well.

December 5, 1898.

THE GOSPEL OF GENESIS

LABOUR AND REST

"God said." — Genesis i: j.
"God rested." — Genesis, ii: 2.

The value of Genesis lies not in its scien-
tific accuracy. It is God's sketch in char-
coal of the beginnings of things, at least
the beginnings of things in our small cor-
ner of His great field of spheres. To
suppose that here in Genesis we have a
scientifically accurate cosmogony is not
only unnecessary — it is absurd as it would
be to suppose the teacher in a kindergarten
school commenced the mathematical in-
struction of the infants by propounding
the binomial theorem. We have all that is
important for us to know suggested, and
more than that assured to us when we read,
"God said."

The gospel of Genesis is, that the creation
is God's word. Now what are words?
77

78 The Reasonableness of Faith

Words are effort after self-expression. The
child is not conscious of itself until it speaks.
Dawning self-consciousness and dawning
speech go together. And here we surely
have more than a hint of the everlasting
word — the word of God — if we may so say,
the eternal, creative property of God — His
everlasting effort after self-expression.
When before the inspired vision of that
prophet to whom we owe the first chapters
of Genesis, there rose this marvellous vision
of the creative plan and purpose of God, he
gave to his own and after times then these
splendid charcoal outlines — not the final
picture, not the completed work (for this
men were not ready then) — of understanding
this men are incapable now. But here
we have, with splendid distinctness, the
divinely inspired sketch of that great
panorama picture which each succeeding
age of thinking, studying, believing men
are to do something to enlarge and fill up.
Creation, in a real sense, then, is God's
word — His word, because it is His deed. It
expresses Him, as the fleshly body expresses
the soul within it.

And thus, here on the opening page of

The Gospel of Genesis. 79

inspiration is clearly seen the ground-work
and foundation of all human hope. All
that is is God's, and despair is impossible as
long as this is believed. Here in the very
opening page of inspiration is found the
warrant of those strange, quenchless hopes
and yearnings toward the infinite life that
no sin in man, no stress of circumstances, no
physical or moral disaster can totally de-
stroy in him, or rob him of. Here we have
in sharp and unmistakable outline, that
splendid truth that lurks dimly seen and
mixed with much error in all forms of so-
called heathen religious thinking, the myth
of Antaeus repeated again — that man is the
son of God and the son of earth, the
good brown earth herself, the very dust He
made. And so let human falls be crushing
as they may, overthrown manhood rises
from the bosom of his mother, with strength
miraculously renewed, to continue the wrest-
ling of life. Yes, that is the gospel of
Genesis. There is divine purpose in the
very dust. This is the good news of creation.
Creation is His word. And all its creeping
things, as well as its angels, its serpents, its
trees of knowledge both of good and evil

8o The Reasonableness of Faith

and its mystic trees of life, its closing para-
dise doors and its flaming swords — all, all,
all, very good, for all are of God. Divinity
itself inspires its dust.

But here someone will say to me, " How
about the Fall?" Let me frankly reply, I
do not know that I can explain it. I am
prepared to accept the language of our
Ninth Article, that man is very far gone
from ''original righteousness," but that
that original righteousness from which he
is very far gone is the righteousness of
his Original, I am very sure. There is
nothing in the Bible, nor, I hold it, in our
Book of Common Prayer that, thoroughly
interpreted, obliges us to say we believe
there ever was a time when men were better
than they are now, ever was a state in
which they were possessed of a righteous-
ness superior in quality to that they are
to-day possessed of. Did the Bible or
Prayer Book say this, we should be
obliged to reply that, in so far as such a
doctrine was taught our times had out-
grown it, for that in successive ages we had
learned to apprehend more truly man's
essential relationship to God, and imder-

The Gospel of Genesis 8i

standing this we found it impossible any
longer to believe that in the heart of the
race divine life had ebbed, not increased.
Certainly we know more of man's relation-
ship to God than our forefathers did. Cer-
tainly the all-inspiring Spirit has enlight-
ened us on this and on other points, and
man's relationship to his fellow man has
become a completer relationship. It is
only necessary to instance the change of all
human thought in relationship to such
questions as slavery, the punishment of
prisoners, the relationship of the sexes and
war, to make this evident to any thinking
man. But let me emphasize the fact, that
though it might be right so to argue, it is
not necessary. For as we look carefully at
our Bibles, certain things, I think, are plain.
First, whatever the meaning of his fall
may be, it is evident that the inspired
writer of Genesis held that man was abso-
lutely one with nature — made of the dust
of the earth. His is not an alien lordship.
He is the head and crown of things, but he is
one with the world he is called upon to rule.
Her cares are his cares, her pains his pains.
Among her thorns, as among her fruits, he

82 The Reasonableness of Faith

must toil. There is no trace of absentee land-
lordism in Genesis. Her last, fairest product
he is. He is her flower as much as her master
king. To lock man up in any Garden
Elysian and there make him superior to
natural law, which from beginning to end
of the Bible we see is divine order, would be
indeed to establish a vast dualism, would be
to introduce dissonance in the universe —
one set of laws for all nature and another
set for man, — and hopelessly separate nature
and humanity.

Again, once outside the state of rest,
outside pa.radise, with perpetual toil before
him, here it is he gets his first promise of
dominion — the long strife will be crowned
with victory. He goes forth to the exercise
of his highest faculty — the faculty of choice.
All nature that has produced him has known
successive births and known them only
through strife. Every point she has gained
has been gained by pain; every beautiful
thing she has produced has come through
travail. This law is divine and unchange-
able, and so a true humanity must be bom
by striving, and not in heaven, earth or
hell, can there be escape from an unchang-

The Gospel of Genesis St,

ing law. We talk of primal innocence.
Is innocence righteousness? Were inno-
cence possible, a fall would be a necessary
moral incident in the development of the
soul through innocence to righteousness.
The metal in the mine is good and pure,
and we might, in one sense, speak of it as
innocent; but the metal in the crucible has
a purity and a use that it never had in the
vein. Men and women must eat of the
tree of good and evil, for in no other way
can they learn to love the good and hate
the evil. And, however, to-day, we may
recognize the fact that truths such as these
have not yet found their best and com-
pletest expression in human thinking, that
we have not yet been able to correlate
them to others equally precious to us, we
feel and know them to be true. Our hope
and belief that we shall yet stand unabashed
before the vision of God in a universe of
light rests absolutely on this certainty,
that God by virtue of His own nature of
truth and love can never seek to bring out
of man what He did not first put into man^
that our ultimate evolution towards fitted-
ness for glory shall be uninterrupted and

84 The Reasonableness of Faith

certain, because we believe in our divine
involution. By creation He placed in us
the properties of the divine, and through
His infinite mercy and wisdom He will
draw those properties forth to the day.
But how will He do it? Not by leaving us
basking in seductive Capuas, or clothed in
primal innocence ; but only by the recurring
discipline of age-long struggle towards the
light.

But yet again, friends, is not the best ex-
planation, after all, of this falling, this
early catastrophe that overtook our par-
ents—to be sought in life itself? Has
not every man and woman before me,
again and again, known what it was to be
conscious of this falling only when it was
too late to go back and retrieve it? The
doors of opportunity lay open to us, but
by some fatal mesmerism our eyes were
holden that we did not see them until just
before they closed. A chance to succeed,
the value of a friend, the opportuntiy to do
some good — these and such like things lay
like unused treasure under our hands for
weeks, for months, for years, and just the
one instant before they were snatched away

The Gospel of Genesis 85

we realized what might have been. And
then the gates closed behind us and the
flaming sword forever barred the way.
Those mythical doors that closed on the
primal pair have kept closing on all of us,
age after age, since then.

Don't many of you remember how the
doors of the old homestead that had sheltered
so kindly your follies and witnessed so
many of your joys — one cold day, closed
on you and you looked your last on them,
and looking, could scarcely keep down
an unmanly tear? And a few, full years
pass over, and before you realize it
those dear, historic doors of the college
closed behind you, and you looked your
last on the windows you knew so well,
every one of which seemed to frame a
kindly face; and beyond the college campus
the world looked cold and hard and un-
inviting. Then you were ushered into the
big, hungry, selfish, multitudinous life of
utter competition which men call the world,
and when you got your breath from the
cold plunge and began to know the first
delight of feeling that you could breast its
current and keep your head above it with

86 The Reasonableness of Faith

the rest, you felt that you knew, in some
sort, another paradise, and so you did.
But the sense of victory in life did not last —
ideals, perhaps, fell away; and the sordid-
ness of much of it and the meanness was
borne home on you; and the spectacle of
the failure of others, often necessary to
your own success, bore hardly on you; and
contest became difficult and blows rude;
and there were stumblings in the mire,
mire that would cling and foul and would
not off — and then glimpses of open doors
and Edens of possible happiness; and look-
ings backward and yearnings forward; and
dead sea-fruits that grit the teeth and fall
to ashes; and sometimes a draught of living
water, too.

Yes, here too, doors are closing and
swords still bar the way on many a path
which you would fain enter. In your own
intimate life the same law held good. Sweet
friendships were offered to you, some
bright hopes arose, some clear vision of
service grew, and love was given and in-
spiration and help. But still it was not
as it might have been. And the friend was
never quite what the friend might be, and

The Gospel of Genesis 87

the home never quite what the home should
be, and the service never all that service
should be, and so much was unexplained, and
such mistakes were made, such cruel mis-
takes, such purblindness — taking true for
false and false for true. Yes, that, and far
more than that, is life. And yet in our
best and clearest hours we know it must be
so, that it ought to be so, and that if all the
barred doors were thrown open to us again,
and the opportunities lost and mourned
over recurred, we would not be bettered
thereby. For in some mysterious way, it
is only through the closing of our paradise
gates, only through the sending of us forth
to toil and often to failure, we can hope to
do anything worthy or at last attain our rest.
Surely, I am right in saying, that the best
explanation of the old Genesis story of man's
moral disaster is to be found in the pages of
each man's life. The ultimate meaning of
sin and evil may, as yet, elude us, but we
feel, and our feelings, our institutions, are
our best guides, that there must at last be

"Greater good because of evil,
Wider mercy through the fall;"

that as through the disobedience of one

88 The Reasonableness of Faith

the many were made sinners, so by the
obedience of One shall the many be made
righteous. Or again, to quote St. Paul,

"O, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom
and knowledge of God ! How unsearchable are his
judgments, and his ways past finding out !

"He hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he
might have mercy upon all. "

Surely, He is teaching us to walk as a
mother teaches her baby. See her — there
she puts it against the steadiest chair or sofa
in the room and stretches a long arm on
either side, and by language all of her own
devising she wooes it, she bids it come to
herself, and she calls that walking. Its little
toes are turned in, it staggers from side to
side, and tumbles first against one arm and
then against the other, — hear her de-
lightedly say, "It walks!" Such are our
walkings, such are our fallings, and on
either side lean towards us the everlasting
arms.

So it seems to me, I see creation — God
putting His creatures a little way away
from Him that they may come to Him — it
is not a long distance nor yet a long time,
if we measure by the ages, — and then com-
manding us to come to His breast. On the

The Gospel of Genesis 89

way there He has promised to teach us how
to walk, and surely He will not have done
with us, till, with steady stride, we shall
march by our Father's side up glorious
paths of being, which to-day eye hath not
seen nor ear heard tell of.

This, so far as I can see it, is the gospel of
creation, as in charcoal outlines we (lave it
in this vision of the seer. It is creation's
story, a story of a past lost in the being
of God, of a present full of the presence of
God, and a future glorious beyond all powers
of human thought in which we shall know
the joy of God. To believe and accept it is
already to taste the beginnings of a rest,
that in its nature is akin to the divine rest
we read of in this creation. God looked
over His work and from its lowest to its
highest saw it was good and rested therein.
In this assurance only can we know rest.
Do you remember what Goethe sang about
rest?

" Rest is not quitting the busy career,
Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere. "

Other races and times have sought this
rest by quitting rather than by fitting,
and so it was the deserts were dotted with

90 The Reasonableness of Faith

monasteries and thousands of recluses peo-
pled the Thebaid. To our race and to our
time is revealed a wiser and a truer rest —
something, as I have tried to say, akin to
God's rest in creation. A rest that may lie
at the ''heart of boundless agitation," as
Wordsworth well knew. A rest that is
based on the knowledge that God is before
all things, and by Him all things are held
together, that He is the all in all.

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine,
or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

"Nay, in all these things we are more than con-
querors through him that loved us.

" For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor
angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things
present, nor things to come,

"Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God,
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. "

God before it all, God in it all, God above
it all, God beyond it all.

March, 1891.

HARVARD BACCALAUREATE

JUNE, 1893.

"Not looking each of you to his own things, but
each of you also to the things of others. Have this
mind in you, which was also in Chnst Jesus: who,
being in the form of God, covmted it not a prize to be
on an equaUty with God, but emptied himself, taking
the form of a servant, being made m the likeness ot
men- and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled
himself, becoming obedient even unto death yea,
the death of the cross. Wherefore also God highly
exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is
above everv name; that in the name of Jesus every
knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on
earth and things under the earth, and that every
tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to
the glory of God the Father."— Phtltpptans, u: 4-1 1.

In these verses, St. Paul's meaning is
unmistakable. They sum up too, it seems,
much of his maturer teaching. The ques-
tion which some of us are in doubt
about to-day is. Is it possible to accept a
rule of life so difficult, so simple? Sur-
rounded as we are by temptations, con-
scious as we are of a pitiful mixture of motive,
is it possible for us in any real sense to yield
practical obedience to these most searching
91

92 The Reasonableness of Faith

and comprehensive commands ? Look stead-
ily, says the apostle, with purposefulness,
with honest intention, not on your own
affairs only, but on the things of others.
Look as you would look when pursuing
your own interests, wisely, bravely; not
merely as you study a problem, but as you
plan an enterprise. Look on the things of
others, and, as you look, let Christ's very
mind be yours; look as He looked. The
prize of life He could have grasped; He
sought it not for Himself. All the powers
of an extraordinary manhood were His; He
stripped Himself of them and voluntarily
forewent His own legitimate advantage. He
stooped to weakness when He need not have
stooped. He was willing to die and met death
in its most awful shape; turning to death,
agony and defeat, choosing these deliberately
as His portion sooner than give up His high
purpose of saving His fellow men. This
deliberate mode of action ruling all His
life and finally consummated by His death,
Paul declares the infinite God accepts and
crowns, and, so accepting and crowning it,
declares it to be the one supreme, final,
permanent, victorious form of life forever.

Harvard Baccalaureate 93

This indisputably is St. Paul's meaning. This
is Christianity, and the mind of Christ as He
understood it, preached it, and died for it.
Is this mind of Christ possible to us to-day ?
There is very much in the every-day life of
us all which seems, at a superficial glance,
to deny the practicability of living after this
high standard. We need the stimulus of
competition. This is not lacking even in
our college days. You are feeling what you
believe to be its legitimate influence now.
You are gathering the results, in these last,
few, crowded, exciting weeks of your Uni-
versity life, of a series of competitions, in
which you have engaged during all the course
of it; and you feel that in the stimulus of
reasonable competition there is real good.
Yet if you look at this college life of yours
at all searchingly, you are soon aware that
competition forms a very small part of its
life. Its main value lies far away from mere
advantages of competition. Its chief gains
are not to be won in any game of grab.
Rather it is in coming to understand your
own life, winning invaluable opportunities
to study men of like purposes and yet dif-
ferent capacities from your own, and in the

94 The Reasonableness of Faith

leisurely associating with so much that is
best and stimulating in American life and
scholarship, that the main good of it all Hes.
And as from the college walls, in an occa-
sional thoughtful hour, you look towards
the future, you have felt again that com-
petition as a rule of life with one's fellow is,
after all, a semi-barbarous law and that,
when needful, it bears to the generous spirit
pretty much the same relation that the
stinging spur does to the thoroughbred's flank.
By itself, it never won a great race yet. The
best blood scarcely acknowledges it.

Thus, brothers, as we look within and
then without, we are gradually aware that
in a strange and wonderful way the mind
of Christ is growing on men. Though some-
times disheartened and downcast, we seem
to see in life just the same sordidness and
cruelty that used to rule it long agO; we are
aware that such a state of mind is more or
less coloured by passing mood or feeling
and is not borne out by fact. The studies
of these past years ought to have done
something to convince you that there is a
tide in the affairs of men, a tide of pity, an
earnest, self-sacrificing interest, that flows

Harvard Baccalaureate 95

and ebbs not. More thoughtfully, more
considerately, man looks on the life of his
fellow. Our forefathers played the game
of grab so remorselessly, we ourselves are
so often keenly set at it, that a life without
strife, an existence in which competition in
a thousand forms and shapes does not play
a prominent part, is hard, nay, almost im-
possible for us to conceive. We are so
wedded to ideas of contention and competi-
tion that any other conditions than those
springing from these are well-nigh incon-
ceivable to us.

And yet his life is poor and narrow indeed,
who has not been blest by some vision of an
existence in which love casts out strife;
some limited sphere of life, at least, in which
competition and strife are not. It is pos-
sible for the poorest of us, possible for a
very imperfect character to love some one
with such a love, that into his relations with
that person competition and strife cannot
enter. For this loved one we forego our
own advantage with delight. For the sake
of such to suffer is as natural a thing as to
breathe. Further than this, if we look
around us thoughtfully, we must be aware

g6 The Reasonableness of Faith

that man's sphere of love is ever widening;
that widening interests bring men more
and more together. Warmer ties are gaining
strength surely, if slowly. Man is no longer
cut off from man as he used to be. Life
overlaps life. The hard, high walls of
prejudice and caste, of difference in fortune,
and even in nation, no longer serve to sepa-
rate men altogether from each other as they
used to do.

Look backward for the space of a few
generations only, and you see the best men,
the wisest, the most cultivated, incompre-
hensibly callous to the wants and woes of
those near them, untouched by the feeling
of their infirmity, unmoved by their bitterest
cry. Some two years ago, I happened to
spend two weeks of Spring weather in the
ancient City of Nuremberg. There, almost
untouched of our modern life, stands that
wonderful city. In its courts and palaces,
in its narrow streets and splendid churches,
the very spirit of mediasvalism seems to
have found its last retreat. There is scarcely
a finer hall in Europe than that splendid
council chamber in which Nuremberg's great
citizens, successful merchants and valiant

Harvard Baccalaureate 97

captains, took counsel for peace and for
war. Around that banqueting hall, bla-
zoned on its walls, is the tale of Nurem-
berg's greatness. There the great fresco
speaks of her past life and glory, her wealth,
her power, her independence, her artistic
genius. And, in the most natural way,
mingled with this record is the story of her
unconscious cruelty, too. The tale of tor-
tured criminal stands written on the wall
as plainly as the glory of the lordly mer-
chant. With equal truth they are drawn
side by side. As you stand in the hall,
the golden light falling through wide win-
dows, rich in glass, it is easy to think your-
self back to the time when what was richest,
wisest, fairest, bravest and best in that
central city of Europe, met and feasted
where now you stand. But what another
story is hidden beneath the great stone
floor! Go down a few feet, and there for
your inspection open up whole rows of
cells. Oh, such cells ! Noisome, dank, un-
penetrated by a single sun-ray. There in
darkness, utter and profound, men, and
women too, were imprisoned, tortured, put
to death; while a foot above their heads,

98 The Reasonableness of Faith

the solid stone shutting out all sound of
revelry from above or of wail from below,
the great citizens feasted and drank, planned
wars and discussed commerce.

Could such things be to-day? We smile
at the idea; it is an insult to imagine it
possible. And yet those men and women
that feasted were not specially bad men
and women; nor did those poor wretches
who suffered beneath own often to any sin
worse than misfortune. Why has the
former state of things passed away? I
tell you, brothers, there is but one reason —
'tis the advance of the tide of the mind of
Christ. Year by year, it seemed to those
who watched it to ebb as often as to flow.
Slowly, very slowly, it rose on the sands,
and as each watcher failed at his post, his
testimony as to its rising was all too un-
certain to assure him who took his place.
But there was no ebb for all that.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

' And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front, the sun climbs slow, — how slowly !
But westward, look, the land is bright. '.'

Harvard Baccalaureate 99

But, brothers, it is rising still. I tell you
the time will come — I believe it is near at
hand — when it will be as impossible for
men and women to live as at present the^''
are living in the broad and beautiful houses
of our great cities, surrounding themselves
there by all the rich gifts and bounty of
life, while close to them hundreds of thou-
sands of their fellow citizens are shut down
within the pestiferous narrowness of the
tenement house. It will be as impossible
for things which exist to-day to con-
tinue to exist side by side in our cities
and land, as it would be to fill Nurem-
berg's broad hall at this close of the nine-
teenth century with feasting citizens, while
her dungeons beneath were choked with
the victims of her torture. Yes, love is
casting out strife, is taking the bitterness
out of competition. Love recognizes to-day,
as she never did before, misfortune as es-
tablishing a claim on fortune, and sorrow
and suffering as pleas from which an hon-
ourable man must never turn away, if he
would hope for the favour not only of a
merciful God for himself, but of his own
justifying conscience ^F-r-^ t r-

255lio

loo The Reasonableness of Faith

And again, I ask, Why is this ? It is be-
cause the mind of Christ is increasingly
becoming a power among men. But as I
seek to set before you, this day, the reason-
ableness and certainty and coming preva-
lence of this mind of Christ, I shall be ac-
cused of sentimentalism. The plea I make,
you say, is sentimental. Is it so ? Brothers,
I would have you remember that it is not
the voice of religion alone that calls you
to-day to make the mind of Christ a power
in your own lives and in the world. What
science to-day, in the interest she excites
and in the splendid triumphs she has won,
takes more prominent place than does
physiology in all her branches? We might
call her the regnant science to-day. It
requires little more than a knowledge of first
principles of physiology to assure ourselves
that this youngest of all the sciences calls
on those who follow her deliberately to
accept self-sacrifice as their law. Some-
what heady with her own intoxicating
success, she stands before the world to-day.
''Listen to me," she seems to say, "let me
speak. I may be the youngest in the class,
but I have something most important to

Harvard Baccalaureate ioi

say." And when she does tell of her own
things, with a captivating vigour of youth
and enthusiasm cast around her, what
is the burden of her testimony? Invol-
untary sacrifice in the lowest orders of
life — voluntary sacrifice in the highest forms
of life. This her testimony, her message,
her gospel. In these highest she calls it
altruism. 'Tis really the mind of Christ,
without as yet its assurance of exaltation
and ultimate triumph. "You," she cries
to those who listen to her — "you are the
result of age-long processes of sacrifice;
fall in with the law that made you what you
are. Let this mind be in you: forego your
own advantage and, doing so, win your
highest life."

Or, listen with me for a moment to another
voice of weight, that in no sense claims to
be religious. This teacher, too, has the
confidence of youth, of youth renewed at
least. She tells us that we are only begin-
ning to understand how to place together
in their proper order and sequence the
lessons of history. "In physics," she cries,
"you have fixed laws, laws by which you
can judge certainly of nature's sequences.

I02 The Reasonableness of Faith

By these the tides rise and fall, the winds
come and go, light follows darkness, and
the glory of the Spring, the rigour of the
Winter. To the aid of these and the con-
duct of them the will of man is not necessary.
Seed-time and harvest, day and night,
snow and heat, Summer and Winter, shall
not fail. But in the conduct of his own
affairs, it is vitally necessary that he take
into his consideration the property and
responsibility of his own will. Nature mates
herself to that will. She aids man so long
as he struggles. She is to him a sturdy
helpmeet. But she will not live with him
as a sloven. She will marry him, but not
slave for him. If he neglect her, she with-
draws her forces, her vital warmth, from
him. Whether it is an individual or a
generation of individuals, this is true of
man's relations to her. She will give man
no assurance of faithfulness on her part,
and permanent support springing from that
faithfulness, if he continue faithless to her.
She will help her mate, man, to prepare for
each generation a more favourable en-
vironment in some respects than the pre-
vious generation had. Intellectually, mor-

Harvard Baccalaureate 103

ally, the atmosphere, the environment,
may be more favourable. But let that
generation, thus kindly greeted and pro-
vided for by nature, fail of its duty, cease
to do its part, be lacking in some essential
requirement, and the higher platform to
which it has been lifted serves but to pre-
pare the way for a more disastrous and
irremediable fall. The comparative study
of history makes it abundantly evident
to the student to-day that each generation
can do no more for its successor than pro-
vide it with a stout platform on which to
battle out its own destiny, wrestle for its
life, prove its own worthiness to exist, save
its own soul from the death.

At first sight, there seems little that
favours the Christ mind in the conclusions
of historic science. Look a little closer and
you will see that this is not so. The very
essence of that mind is willingness for the
good of others to forego its own legitimate
advantage. When first a few, ignorant
and weak men, dared to proclaim such
mind as the final type of human mind, what
state of things were they confronted with?
There was spread all over the known world

I04 The Reasonableness of Faith

a civilization marvellous in its success.
Seemingly, it was established forever. It
had founded itself on the ruin of all previous
civilizations. It had borrowed from their
experiences; it had been warned by their
failures. Its rule seemed as eternal as the
hills of its own city. And why? Men
great and small, old men and children, had ^
lived, planned, toiled, fought, and been
willing to die for Rome. And cemented
with the blood of her children, Rome stood
forth steadily and strong beyond compare.
She rose, flourished and blessed mankind.
But Rome grew rich and wanton; both
rich and poor alike sunk into selfishness.
The poor cried only for bread and pleasure,
and the rich for pleasure and power; and
so the crash of it all soon came. For Rome
was but the husk of herself. She had
turned to her muck-heap, and forgotten
the glory of her early crown. The fair
became foul, the wife a wanton, justice was
sold, honour fled, the mind of Christ openly
scoffed at. She fell and her fall was great.
Innocent and guilty fell together, for the
hope of mankind had been betrayed by
Rome. On her wreck and ruin, after a

Harvard Baccalaureate 105

time of doubt and dismay, larger founda-
tions of liberty and hope for mankind arose.
For in Frank, Goth and Visigoth, and in
all the so-called wave of barbarism which
had swept over her, possibilities of higher
life were existent which were no longer
possible to her. On these Christianity took
hold. These were the stock of the Christian
graft. Nations cannot live who refuse and
contemn the law revealed in the mind of
Christ. This is the verdict of history as it
is of physiology.

And now turn very briefly with me to the
definitely reHgious side of this question;
and be patient for a few moments while I
try to point out to you what the best life
in the Christian Church to-day is doing to
try and commend to men the mind of
Christ. The Church's conservatism seems
to many of you blind, unreasonable and
intolerant. Yet this is not altogether a
fair attitude for any intelligent man, even
though he be an unbeliever, to take to
organized Christianity to-day. Whether she
knows it or not, the Church stands for the
whole of humanity, and must shape her
formulas and teaching for the whole, and

io6 The Reasonableness of Faith

not for part. That which stands for the
culture and thought of our people, as Har-
vard University pre-eminently does, is surely
apt to forget this, in so far as we demand
too great or too sudden an amount of change
in the forms of speech which have enshrined,
more or less effectually, so much that has
been vital in the past. Men are conserva-
tive on the religious side of their nature,
because it is of supreme value to them. If,
on some sides of us, we are of necessity
radical in changes we call for and advocate;
on other sides, we are sure to be concomi-
tantly conservative.

And so, to-day, Christianity is labouring
to express the law and mind of Christ in
terms that are too often uncouth and un-
satisfactory. It is not because men have
ceased to believe in sacrifice, but because
Christian men too often seek to describe it
in terms that are grotesquely out of date,
that the whole Christian system of sacrifice
seems so unreal to those who stand outside,
and sometimes to those who hesitatingly
stand inside the Church. Our terminology
belongs to a time when men's highest idea
of sacrifice manifested itself in the shambles,

Harvard Baccalaureate 107

when lowing herds and bloody altar-steps
were men's highest conceptions of the wor-
ship of God. Terms that fitted those times
will not convey the sacrificial ideas of the
present. Yet men in those days thought
of sacrifice as an occasional necessity. Now
we know it as a vital and changeless law.
When we speak of the dying of Jesus, link-
ing it with such terms as justification, ex-
piation, atonement, imputed righteousness,
transferred sin, etc., we are using terms
once full of blessed meaning, because they
conveyed fittingly the highest thought of
which the religious mind of that time was
capable ; but now they veil from the minds
of multitudes the real significance of that
dying.

As St. Paul, in the passage I have read to
you, brings it before us, it is as fresh and
full of meaning for us to-day as it ever was.
The Saviour, whom St. Paul speaks of as
crowned with everlasting glory and before
whose august feet all things in heaven and
earth do bow and obey, sits on the throne
of His universe not by favour but by right.
He is exalted, because He alone has ex-
plained and vindicated the universal law.

io8 The Reasonableness of Faith

The whole universe, animate and inanimate,
bends in homage to Him, because He has
made glorious its own supreme law — the
law of sacrifice and of service. Through all
the dark and vaporous gray ages of the
past, that law has slowly worked out its
painful processes. It has been sobbed in
the universe, ages before it was revealed
on the cross of Christ. This is the force of
St. Paul's "Wherefore." Who shall justify
to the universe her sorrow, toil, pain, dying.
Who shall stand and explain her long, long
travail pang? Man and only man. Only
a Man-Child glorious can pay the poor earth
back for her long, drawn-out travail pang.
Without man, nature is inexplicable. And
man stands confused before himself, un-
certain of whence he came and whither he
goes, incapable of explaining and justifying
what he is and what he wants to be to him-
self, till the highest Man stands before him
and says: ''I am the way, the truth and
the life. No man cometh to the Father
but by me. See in me the explanation of
all that you see and feel and hope for in
yourself. "

** Therefore God hath highly exalted him. "

Harvard Baccalaureate 109

The life of Christ is the final type, and
therefore no other life can be exalted.
There can be no two victorious types. The
final life must be the fitted life. The un-
fitted must cease to be. The life that lives
in its true relations — to permit any other
life than this to survive would be to undo
what the ages have been doing; would be
to reverse the law by which the lower die
that the higher may flourish. God Himself
cannot make a world in which the saurian
exists side by side with man. Saurians are
best possible forms of life at one stage, yet
impossible at the next. The conditions of
the saurian are the conditions of the car-
boniferous age; these would but choke and
strangle the man. To persist in conditions
is the meaning of sin. A universe favourable
to the highest must of necessity be less
favourable to that which is not so high.
The mind of Christ and the selfish spirit of
self-seeking cannot finally co-exist. Which
is it to be in us, brothers? After which
mind shall we live ?

So let me conclude as I began. All that
this old University life stands for, these
friendships made, these halycon days in

no The Reasonableness of Faith

which are so delightfully mingled the spring
and zest of boyhood, with the growing sense
of power that belongs to early manhood —
all can avail you but little, if the chief value
of them you let slip, if the abiding result
of them is not found with you. That result
should be a deeper knowledge than is possi-
ble to others who have not had your ad-
vantages— a knowledge of what goes to
make manhood worthy, and true living
possible. Your outlook on life should surely
be not less sympathetic than that of other
men, because of these splendid opporttmi-
ties that you have enjoyed. It is men the
hour calls for, men who know themselves
to have a mission, and who can and will turn
away from all other prizes to win that one
life prize; from all other siren voices, to
listen to that " one clear call for me. "

Oh, my brothers, you come not here to
complete your life studies; but to fit your-
selves to pursue them. The study you have
known here has, if it be worth anything,
cost you something. The study that awaits
you in the great world will surely cost you
more. "Look not on your own things" —
not to your own aggrandizement, nor the

Harvard Baccalaureate hi

building of your fortune — but look on men,
and you will learn to know them a little,
and, as you know, to love them more.
Pursue pleasure and it will pall on you.
Give your soul up to toil, and work will be-
come some day unendurable. But the man
who gives out his best to his fellow is never
utterly cast down or disheartened. No
numbering cares can quite paralyze the
reverent student of men. Falls and fail-
ures he may make; but from them all, like
the fabled Antaeus of old, he will rise re-
freshed, for he has touched his fellow.
*'Look not on your own things," and you
will learn to love, love with a discriminating
hopefulness that rises above all disappoint-
ments, and year by year discovers promise
of a life that is worth living.

I have visited all the cities and all the
states in this great land of ours; but from
out them all, to my mind, one building
stands pre-eminently beautiful and eloquent.
'Tis that Memorial Hall yonder. It tells
the story of a college generation, that
earnestly looked on the things of others.
It tells the story of brave deeds following
that persistent looking. They had their

112 The Reasonableness of Faith

hour, those men of thirty years ago, and
they heard their call. A golden haze of
distance already hangs on that past time
to us. It seems to us very glorious, but
also very simple, very easy. They could
not have done other than they did. Ah,
that is how problems of one age always
look to the next. It did not seem so to
them. Partings had to be made, preju-
dices met, and deep questionings answered ;
yet out of them all they passed triumph-
ant. They did their duty, suffered and
died many of them before they knew they
had won. How? What mind was theirs
in that momentous hour, in those desperate
years of civil strife? It was the law of
sacrifice, it was the mind of Christ. The
cause was man's, the end his salvation;
and the means, the only means, sacrifice.
Man never could be, never can be, saved
by any other. If you would save him, you
must die for him.

Have not many of you often looked on
those monuments, and wished with all your
hearts that a duty as simple and direct was
yours to-day; that you, too, could hear a
voice that called, and know it to be divine.

Harvard Baccalaureate 113

But uncertainty surrounds you, checks you,
benumbs you. 'Tis hard to find the truth,
hard to know what to do. On sociological
questions we are at sea; on theological, we
are divided; on political, we sometimes
fiercely differ. We often feel deeply with
Matthew Arnold:

"But now the old is out of date,
The new is not yet born."

Brothers, as your chosen preacher, feel-
ing the solemnity of this occasion, one
that cannot recur in my life or yours again,
I call on you, by all that is highest and
holiest, all that in your own nature answers
and echoes God — I call on you to put before
you as an end and object in your life the
knowledge of men. Do this now, do it faith-
fully. More light and a clearer call shall
be yours by and by. Look earnestly not
on your own things, but on the things of
others. Look on man, God's last and high-
est work, and in that work you will learn to
see and reverence divine purpose. Give
men your mind, give them your hand, and
you cannot in time withhold your heart.
Know the ignorant to teach them. Know

114 The Reasonableness of Faith

the weak to help them. Those who are
out of the way, to lead them back. Oh,
get to know the boys in the great cities and
share with them some of those priceless
advantages that have enlarged your life.
Know the wounded to heal them, the sorrow-
ing to comfort them. Know the sinful to for-
give and save them. Only set yourselves
by the help of God — as a life-long purpose
set it before you, cost what it may ; sacrifice
time, self-interest, ambition and fortune to
it — set yourselves, I say, to know men; and
you have laid the foundation for a life that
cannot fail and a hope that shall not be
disappointed. Know men, and I have the
authority of the Highest for saying, that if
in this reverent spirit you seek to know men,
you shall at last stand unrebuked, accepted
by the Son of Man.

LOVE NOT THE WORLD

"Love not the world, neither the things that are in
the world. If any man love the world, the love of the
Father is not in him. r ^ n -l, a

"For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and
the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the
Father, but is of the world.

"And the world passeth away, and the lust thereot.—
/ John, it, 15, 16, 17.

Friends, we need Lent. Sick with its
hurry, its divided aims, we need to take
such opportunities as are given us for self-
explanation, for quiet searching into the
root of the needs and purposes of our lives.
If we neglect such opportunities, we siifEer
from the absence in our lives of the habit of
thought, of self-search, which is essential
to proper conduct. If any age falls from
such habit, then pain, friction, loss, incapac-
ity are soon seen; and the issues are not
doubtful. If the gentle and slow processes
by which we were intended to grow are not
sufficient, then, just as in nature, the Divine
Order provides for us shock and storm.
115

ii6 The Reasonableness of Faith

If the persuasive heat does not bring out
the Hfe of the chick, a rude blow from out-
side must crack the shell that no longer is
its wise guard, but henceforth is its un-
necessary prison-house. And just so with
the affairs of men — for this is what the
apostle is speaking of here. When we fall
into the way of living without consideration,
and acting without self-concentration (which
alone must lead to fruitful action) , then the
result is that we are bound by circumstances,
we are blind to duty, we are confined — to
use the words of the text — by a present
order, and oblivious to the need of change
of order.

For, after all, that is the meaning of this
idea of the world, as the text distinctly in-
dicates. The world is the present order,
an order that changes and whose every
change is purposeful; but an order that
exists, not for itself, but for what comes
after it. An order like the strata — line
upon line, each necessary to what will follow ;
but each not only useless, but positively
hurtful, if it be an end and finality in itself.
" Love not the world " — when the apostle uses
the term he means: Do not get bound up

Love not the World 117

in a present order whatever that order may
be, for the order changes and can only fulfil
itself in changing.

Indeed, there can be no possible doubt
about the effect on character of loving the
present order — for what is loving? Loving
is a world within a world. Loving is a prop-
erty and a quality which, if on one side
it touches what belongs to this order, on
the other side it opens its windows towards
heaven and the everlasting day. Loving is
the highest bliss, the sorest agony, the
supremest responsibility of mankind. Now,
friends — and I ask you as wise men to judge
what I say — there is no doubt to-day that
mere propinquity with a thing influences life ;
that mere juxtaposition with a thing creates
a likeness to the thing; that life contains
w4thin it a property of imitation so strong,
so pervasive, that the very animals take
the colouring of their surrounding — in the
white North, bird and beast are white; in
the gorgeous colouring of the tropics bird
and beast put on the striped and glistening
raiment of forest and jungle.

So in the higher life, we have to do with a
force that is not expressed in mere touch,

ii8 The Reasonableness of Faith

propinquity of environment; but when we
call into exercise, O men and women, that
supremest power of all that belongs to our-
selves alone — the power of loving — then
we are not only subject to the ordinary
force which makes us like the thing we touch
and with which we mingle; but just so soon
as you let that strange and divine power
of loving within you go forth, you capture
what you love and it captures you ; you feed
on what you love and it feeds on you ; you
assimilate what you love and it assimilates
you, until at last, my brother, you produce
and reproduce what you love, and it again
reproduces itself good or bad in you. Modern
man is accurately, scientifically, what he
loves. His love limits him, his love ex-
presses him, his love saves him, his love
damns him, his love is his salvation, his love
is his judgment eternal, and his love is his
perdition eternal. To love is to be abso-
lutely part and parcel of and to yield one's
self ultimately to what we love.

We must truly confess to each other that
if we love the present order, are satisfied
with the present order, give up the whole
strength and virility of our manhood to

Love not the World hq

maintain the present order — the simple
philosophy of it is not to be mistaken,
friends, — then you might as well expect a
fish to turn into a lap-dog, as for us to be-
come beings who successfully express the
wondrous idealism which Jesus Christ re-
veals to man as man's possibility, as his
divine high-calling. I ask you to test
yourselves by these unmistakable and in-
controvertible truths, and ask yourselves
if this be not so.

Love not the world, then, neither the
things that are in the world ; for if any man
love the present order in this sense, he is
absolutely putting himself out of count
with the order that is to be. Still further.
If there is no doubt about the effect of lov-
ing this order, there is also no doubt what-
ever about the doom of this order. When
Jesus spoke these words through His Spirit,
everything seemed firm and certain on earth.
The Roman Empire was superb in its legis-
lation, magnificent in its civilization. Here
were fools and blind calling out against this
order and declaring that it was passing away,
that the worm was already eating its way into
the tap-root of the gourd, and all the beauty

I20 The Reasonableness of Faith

and strength of Rome was crumbling to its
irrevocable fall. How impossible it seemed 1
How true it was ! Ah ! that is the law of the
world. You cannot convince any generation
that the thing it holds to is departing. It is
only the man that lives near the heart of
God that sees it. And I do not care whether
he be a scientist and thinks he does not believe
the creed, or a Christian — if he is in touch
with the heart of things he knows that
the whole order is passing away, and
only lives as it gives birth to the
babies of the order that is to be.
There are things we love in it because
they have satisfied us; there are things we
almost worship in it because they have
expressed us; things in it very precious to
us on account of these associations. But
remember how wonderfully true it is — the
very things in one generation for which
men have gladly poured out their life-
blood are accepted almost thoughtlessly as
the axioms of the next. The inspiring
dreams and visions of the one time are
regarded as commonplace by the times suc-
ceeding them. The achievements of one
age are like the toys of children, cast into

Love not the World 121

some musty corner, broken and played out.
You may make museums of men's aims, and
men wonder, to-day, that they ever could
be satisfied with things they sought at the
cost of life itself.

Rich with the storied experiences of the
eighteen hundred years that have passed
since then, the words come to us to-day —
"Love not the world, neither the things of
the world, for the world passeth away.'*
The word of God endureth forever. Faith
says, *'No doubt," and what does it mean?
It means that beyond the changing, beyond
the imperfect, beyond the temporary, there
is the changeless, the perfect, the eternal.
What do you mean by the changeless ? Not
stagnation — God forbid ! Not mere rest —
God forefend ! But beyond the present and
temporal there faith hopes and believes
doth spread a life in which these awful
breaks, these overwhelming experiences, shall
have performed their function and shall
have been buried among the things that are
no more — death and pain, and sorrow and
crying, having fulfilled their educational
work, are no more. He that doeth the word
of God, abideth forever. Why do we say it ?

122 The Reasonableness of Faith

Because we long for it, because we feel it.
The slow worm with a rudimentary eye
looks round it. It sees what it needs, it
feeds on what it sees, and its eye is satisfied
with the seeing. The eagle with an eye
miraculously developed, when compared
with the worm, looks around him and
sees what he needs and feeds on what he
sees, and his eye is satisfied with the seeing.
Do you remember the sublime line in Job : —

"There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which
the vulture's eye hath not seen. "

And this strange and wonderful spiral is
the path of man. Man sees what he
needs and feeds on what he sees, but the
eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear
with hearing — for within him is the spark of
the everlasting order that refuses to be
satisfied with the shards of time.

Therefore again sounding through all the
ages comes the entreaty of God — oh, my
child, give thyself not — bom for eternity —
to the order of the temporal. Live in it you
must, and love it you should, but not in the
sense of your yielding yourself up to it in
whole-hearted surrender. For, oh ! let this
fasten itself in your mind — nothing can

Love not the World 123

change the law of God. What you love, you
are. You assimilate it, you are like it. We go
into the far country, and though the infinite
love of God again and again brings life
from that country of death, beloved, there
may come a time when in the far country
there sounds no echo of the Father's voice,
for the very sonship of the son is dead
therein; he has loved the swine, and like
the swine he has become. He has loved the
citizens of that land, and one of them he has
become. The food, the husks, the company,
the environment of the low have sucked him
down and lowered him, and its vampires
have drained his life blood. And all that
infinite mercy itself can do for him is to
apportion him a sleep that knows no awaken-
ing, for the far country with its lusts and its
husks and its swine and its citizens has
passed, and left nothing behind. For the
world is only the bed where God grew His
flowers, and when it could grow flowers no
more its doom and its glory alike are sounded
forth in the decree — " Behold ! I make all
things new. "

March 18, 1894.

THE EYES OF THE HEART.

"The eyes of the heart being enlightened."

Eph., i: i8.

It is Palm Sunday to-day. We celebrate
the King coming to His own. On the Sun-
days lately past, I have tried with you to
take a glance at the nature of His kingdom.
Last Sunday we studied its method — the
method of the leaven, which a woman hid
in three measures of meal till the whole was
leavened, the yeast of His truth permeating
all deeds and thoughts of men till life is
occupied and blessed with good. Can such
vast hopes be ever realized? Are they
anything but iridescent dreams ?

There is a way. And here in this beauti-
ful line I have read to you, St. Paul points
it out; only one way to know about it all,
only one way to judge of it at all. That is
by the use of the eyes of the heart, the eyes
of your heart being enlightened. It is given
to men, sinful men though they be, to see
125

126 The Reasonableness of Faith

at times visions of coming good, to catch
glimpses of the celestial city, and know the
tabernacle of God is at last to be with men.
Such hope and vision, yes, more than this,
was given to him. The most holy men, the
most lonely men, yea, the Lord Himself, had
such times. *'We would like to have been
with Him then. "

I think it is well to remember that Jesus
was not always sad. All the great pictures
of Him are pictures done in tones of sadness,
and the reason of course is plain. For the
age when great religious art flourished was
an age of pre-eminent sadness. Those times
were very ill. Lust, vile ambition, deeds of
cruel violence reigned on all hands, and men
turned from what was bestial in the times
to the visions of Him; and His face would
seem to them to be a face more marred than
any man's. He was the Man of Sorrows
and acquainted with grief. Such a Lord
they needed. Therefore it was such a Lord
they saw. But Jesus could not have been
ever so. At the marriage feast, in the corn-
field, when He drew the little children to
His knee, He surely could not have been the
Man of Sorrows ; a great joy must have been

The Eyes of the Heart 127

His then. More than that, we read that
He rejoiced in spirit. And I beheve some
coming day, when men's thought shall have
risen beyond the shadows that oppress them,
when the vast perplexities that now weigh
us so heavily down shall have passed away,
some great artist of some coming time may
paint, perhaps for another generation, a
different sort of Christ face — a face suffused
with a transforming joy. We are right so
to think of Him, to-day when we watch
Him approaching the greatest tragedy
of our race, as resolutely He moved for-
ward to be the central figure in the
darkest crime of history, the supremest
misunderstanding of man by his fellowman —
the greatest murder of all time. The end
is clearly seen. The shadows grow to utter
blackness. Full well He knows it all. But
it is as He approaches them He celebrates
His solitary triumph, and lets His disciples
at last shout to their heart's content His
praises as He enters the city on Palm
Sunday. We want to see the whole of Him,
look at all His life, catch its full meaning,
and understand His joy as well as His
passion, so we may more fully obey.

128 The Reasonableness of Faith

How shall we do it? Here is the only-
way . The greatest witness He ever had,
His greatest apostle and lieutenant, the
man whose inspired genius gave Christ the
Gentile world — it is St. Paul speaks. " If
you would understand Him, if you would
follow Him, if you would adore Him, you
must do it as the faithful few in the multi-
tudes did that day, by using the eyes of
your heart; look at Jesus with the eyes of
your heart." That is St. Paul's plea — the
logical Paul, clear-thinker he. This man
who sees as no other man sees the evil and
good of his day. He pleads for the use of
the eyes of the heart. What are they?
We glory in the use of the eyes of the head.
We are apt, thoughtlessly, to depreciate
the use of those other eyes, especially so
to-day. For men are using the eyes of the
head as never before they did. They have
won, as it were, telescopic power. By their
aid we peer into the remotest past, and dig
out its hidden secrets. We correct its ac-
cepted verdicts. We are re-arranging all
our heroes. We insist on re-examining
them. Are they true? Are they worthy
heroes? We bring before our eyes those

The Eyes of the Heart 129

on whom the verdict of condemnation has
been passed. Were they in reaHty un-
worthy, or have we been hasty, ignorant,
prejudiced in our judgment ?

The eyes of the mind are wonderful eyes
to read the present, too ; and they yield such
knowledge as men never before dreamed of,
such as was never entrusted to men before.
We are masters of such resources as our
fathers never dreamed of possessing. We
curb death itself. We almost defy dis-
ease. Ah, these eyes of the intellect are
starry eyes.

But there are other eyes, too. And still
more we owe to the eyes of the heart, for
they are the first eyes we use; and when,
after long years, we have gained a little
wisdom, we learn to trust them above all
other eyes. We find they read more deeply
and see more truly far than the eyes of the
mind. It was with these eyes that the
great of the earth, the great of all ages and
times, the great of all races and religions,
saw further then their fellowmen; with
them the great painters painted; the great
musicians caught those views which moved
them to write down for men their works of

130 The Reasonableness of Faith

immortal music; with them great poets see
before they sing; great lovers and all lovers
with them at all times loved ; yes, and great
inventors and discoverers to see with the
eyes of the heart the distant continents
and islands, the distant secrets of nature
so closely hidden from the eyes of the mind.
The visions of men's hearts have always
initiated the great enterprises of all times.
By the use of the eyes of the heart all has
been best done on our poor earth, all that
will stand forever has been most chiefly
achieved.

Ah, friends, and let us never forget it !
The eyes of the head will accomplish much.
They can put together great skeletons of life,
erect its cities, rear its institutions, and pile up
its vast wealth by the sweating of the race and
the ransacking of continents, build a large and
lordly pleasure house for man. But when all
is said and done, the blood of it, the flesh of it,
the nerve and soul of it are all the result
of the eyes of the heart. The eyes of the
head can plan, and have in the past planned
and achieved vast civilizations. Let men
stop there, and what are they all ? Nothing
but one vast pent-house wherein men toil;

The Eyes of the Heart 131

one great prison-house where bHnd men
grind, and hate each other as they grind,
till at last some blind and tortured giant
lays, Sampson-like, his mighty arms on
the supporting pillars of that civilization
and tumbles it, and all it doth contain with
himself into a suicide grave. 'Tis no fancy
thus to speak. 'Tis for this civiHzation
builded when she used the eyes of the mind,
the neglecting the eyes of the heart.

The eyes of the old Greeks long ago were
wonderful eyes. They delighted in beauty,
they kindled at patriotism, but in them was
no welcome to the stranger, no mercy for the
slave, no pity for the cripple, no considera-
tion for the unfortunate and unhappy.

The eyes of the Roman were wonderful
eyes. They were like eagles'. They could
gaze at the sun; saw law in its majesty.
Steadfast were they too and brave. But
they glowed with lust and they glittered
with greed, and they could be cruel as the
eyes of a wild beast. And so they grew to
be selfish eyes, and learned to look only on
those who flattered their ambition, and
ministered to their pleasure. Neither Greece
nor Rome cared much or thought much

132 The Reasonableness of Faith

about the eyes of the heart, and so they fell.
And great was the fall of them.

As Paul wrote this wonderful line, he
could hear the grinding in the prison-house.
He could not fail to note the signs of coming
doom, but no social disaster could dismay
him. It was not with these eyes he had
found his Master, nor with them was he
content to follow Him, judge of His future,
or see His kingdom. The eyes of his heart
can never miss his Saviour, and, let change
and destruction come, nothing can separate
mankind from Him.

(i) Why are the eyes of the heart to be
opened and kept open? Because they see
further and see more truly than any other
eyes. Let's frankly own it. Jesus appeals
to the passions of men, to their feelings, to
their emotions. He appeals to these as
the highest part of us. He knoweth what
is in man, and He is right. For these are
to human-kind what instinct is to the beasts
and the birds. In their wise cultivation, ex-
pression, and ' obedience to their dictates,
lie the safety and development of man.

I am uttering no vague and truthless
statement when I say these things are the

The Eyes of the Heart 133

highest things about us. So high, so bind-
ing, so tremendously necessary are they,
that life without them would be an un-
endurable struggle, a savage conflict of
dogs for a bone, not the growing unity of
self-respecting men. Competition has played
a great part in man's development in the
past, and for long ages we shall need con-
stant touches of the spurs of competition.
But sheer competition, competition by itself
alone as a law governing life, would mean
return to savagedom and the beast. Nay,
it would be the conflict of beasts armed as
were never beasts before armed, with all
the engines of modern science. It is no
exaggeration to say that the whole progress
of mankind absolutely depends on the
triumph of the eyes of the heart. Tenderly
they have been shielded, and slowly, like
the orbs of the new-born baby they are
growing accustomed to the light of day,
getting their range little by little. They
always see the higher things.

The eyes of the mind cry "Keep." The
eyes of the heart cry "Give." The eyes
of the mind cry "Love yourself." The
eyes of the heart cry "Love your neighbour

134 The Reasonableness of Faith

as yourself. He that loveth not his brother
abideth in death." The eyes of the mind
cry "Life is good and pleasure is sweet.
Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. "
The eyes of the heart tell of a greater beauty,
a fairer and holier life, see beyond the seen
the unseen, beyond the temporal the things
eternal. Ah, are we not foolish? We veil
our true eyes, we shut out the light. We
do not look at the things we do not like to
look at; we read the things we fancy, not
those that are true; we surround ourselves
by such as buttress and strengthen our
prejudices, or comfort our ignorances, we
live in our prepossessions, so apt are we to
give all our energy to one narrow line in life,
to the eyes of the heart grown dim and
almost blind through non-use. Life's cus-
toms close in on us with slowly shrinking
wall, as did the old torture chambers on the
condemned criminal within.

The divine Man, supreme in beauty and
holiness, the great Saviour and leader stands
and pleads with us this Palm Sunday just
as He did long ago. He pleads with us by
living before us. He leads us by going in
front of us. He would woo us to use the

The Eyes of the Heart 13S

eyes of the heart by showing us how He
used the eyes of the heart.

(2.) How shall we use these eyes? We
shall use them by acknowledging Jesus.
Let us look backward for a moment at the
acknowledgment which this day we cele-
brate. Such a simple way as they had that
Palm Sunday so long ago, those disciples
of the Master whose pent-up joy found this
simple expression. He had been holding
them back, restraining their impetuosity.
Now they may come forward and shout and
sing as they will. Ah, His coming is no
longer a secret. It is made in the light of
day. It is inade to His own city. But
Jerusalem does not want Him. The kings
mocked Him, her religious teachers hated
Him. Her poor did not understand Him
and were so fickle. But what happened
that morning has passed into the world's
most sacred history, is guarded and cherished
among its precious possessions. Some poor,
blundering men came forward that day,
and laid their garments down on the ground
before His sacred feet, and He walked on
them. They rejoiced to do it, for it was
with the eyes of their heart they saw that

136 The Reasonableness of Faith

morning His coming triumph. They did
not know much about the bigotry of priestly
possession, or the ruthlessness of Roman
power. The eyes of their head served them
poorly, but the eyes of their heart were drawn
to Jesus, and fastened themselves there.
They could not make Jerusalem accept the
kingly Man, they could not make the re-
ligious teachers see that He was the heart
of all religion, they could not make the
governing men see that in His truth lay
the eternal basis of all law, the rich men
see that only by Him could they hold their
riches, or the poor men know that only
by Him could they endure their poverty
and wrong. These things they could not
do. But one thing they could and they
did do. They could lay their garments in
the way. I think I see those garments,
poor, most of them, and travel-stained, not
rich garments or spotless. Far from that.
But they were all they had, and they laid
them before the feet of Jesus.

Ah, beloved, we too can lay our garments
down — what each man has, what each man
is, — ^before His blessed feet. Not do it in a
comer, not do it in the indulgence of some

The Eyes of the Heart 137

secret intention, not hastily try to do it
when some shrinking fear, some terror of
danger and loss impending makes shiver
our soul, but here in the open day and
morning of our life, when the sun is high,
and life with us is still strong, here and now
lay such garments as we have, not many of
them rich perhaps, none of them spotless,
yet lay them before His feet.

I like to think that after many years had
passed, and the ruin and misery of Jerusa-
lem was over, some of the disciples who
paid that one brief tribute of praise to Him,
lingered long enough to gain some vision of
what His triumph meant for men. Perhaps
it was told them that in lands they had
never visited and among the first cities of
the earth His name and kingdom were
beginning at last to spread. Then, perhaps,
before they passed, some of them would tell
to their children, as a thing ever precious
and long to be remembered, that they were
allowed on that long-past morning to lay
the garments of their lives where His feet
would tread.

THE REST DAY

" Call the Sabbath a delight, honourable, and I will

cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth. "

— Isaiah Ivii: 13-14 {part).

The original form in which the ten words
were given was in all probability much
briefer than that in which at present we
have them, The first four commandments
in all probability were in some such form as
this:

1. Thou shalt have no gods but me.

2. Thou shalt not make to thyself any
graven image.

3. Thou shalt not take my name in vain.

4. Thou shalt preserve the rest day.

The remainder of this commandment —
Remember, that thou keep holy the Sabbath
day. Six days shalt thou labour, and do
all thy work. But the seventh day is the
Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou
shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son,
nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy
maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger
139

I40 The Reasonableness of Faith

that is within thy gates. For in six days
the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and
all that in them is, and rested the seventh
day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sab-
bath day, and hallowed it — is evident
amplification. Some poet of long ago con-
ceived of God as working six days and rest-
ing on the seventh, and by way of divine
illustration added this sanction to the
original brief commandment. Surely he
was an inspired poet, and surely he spoke
a great truth. His teaching will abide
though his theory of the creation is hopelessly
discredited.

The rest day is here to stay. Have no
fear about it, my friends. Set your minds
at rest on this point. The hue and cry
raised to-day as to the danger of a Continental
Sunday in our land is a huge mistake. A
large proportion of the labouring people on
the Continent of Europe know it not, and
great is their loss; but for us on this conti-
nent it is an assured possession. The rest
day is here to stay, not because the Church
advocates it, nor even because the people
enforce it, nor yet because it is rooted in
legal observance. These are cogent reasons,

The Rest Day 141

but there is a stronger. It meets the needs
of mankind. Americans who, alas, often
may not even darken a church door, feel
they require it, and the American working-
man has made up his mind that he is not
going to work seven days in the week.
He feels it hard enough to endure the toil
of six. The masses of the people who win
their bread by the sweat of their brow are
quite clear on this matter. I am constantly
in receipt of letters from all over this country
from the working people, and where work
is done occasionally on the seventh day —
as in the iron fields — it is done as piece
work and under protest, and only because
it is necessary to meet some temporary
exigency. Let me again assure you, nothing
seriously threatens the integrity of the
rest day.

The Church cannot be contented with
the acceptance of Sunday as a rest day
merely. And she is right, not only from a
religious point of view, but from a social
point of view. This must be plain to all
thoughtful people. Man can only be truly
man by educating and developing and
keeping alive all of himself. If he toils six

142 The Reasonableness of Faith

days and simply lies off the seventh, he
sinks, and he sinks rapidly. Certain
precious things are his only at the cost of
others' long struggle, and as the condition
of their attainment was that struggle, he
can, if he chooses, readily idle them away.
By struggle they came to us. By cultiva-
tion and by struggle alone can they be re-
tained by us. They are vitally important
things that call for food and exercise quite
as truly as our mere muscles do.

First, there is the family. The man who
toils sees very little of his family during
the week. Whether his toil be for millions
or for a small weekly wage, long hours and
fierce competition in multitudes of instances
prevent his giving the attention and thought
that the poorest or the richest home alike
requires. Here let me pause. Here let me
give you the experience of years of minis-
terial life. The men and women who fail
in their families are the men and women
who do not give them time. Husbands are
lost because their wives do not give them
time, and wives and children are lost be-
cause their husbands and fathers do not
give them time.

The Rest Day 143

His higher tastes die. All those
finer things that make life worth living
perish with non-use. And never forget
that most of these things are only to be
enjoyed in company with others. Do not
think me narrow when I tell you that I am
learning to be skeptical of the man who
goes to the country to worship God. Such
worship may in rare instances be possible,
but for the far greater part of us it is in
going to the *'kirk" in close association,
in the stimulus of fellow worship with our
neighbours, that man was made to gain
and uplift all common worship.

Then the hopes and beliefs that
alone can support us in the hours of pain
and trial that sooner or later must come
to us all — the circumstances of the toilful
life do not make for the sustenance and
development of these. We who are ap-
pointed to know sorrow and pain and at
last meet death, only as we have built up
and developed our hopes and beliefs shall
we be helped to acquit us like men in the
inevitable hour of trial.

Knowledge of the old Book — all it
teaches, all it stands for — are individuals

144 The Reasonableness of Faith

or a society yet fitted to do without it ? My
friends, I tell you the questions that come
to me week by week, year by year, display
an astounding ignorance of the Bible.
Parents who do not know, who seem alto-
gether careless that their children should
grow up without knowing — how are they
or their children to get knowledge; knowl-
edge by which our forebears grew strong
and kept strong? A mere rest day will
yield none of these things. From time
immemorial men have seen and felt the
wisdom of gathering together on the rest
day for the maintenance of such good
things, the education of such sweet hopes
and inspiring beliefs, the highest and best
things they had; and the usages approved
long ago, believe me, cannot ruthlessly be
thrust aside if society or individuals are
not to suffer or degenerate.
> How, then, are we to commend to
all men such a necessary and healthful use
of the rest day as the Bible commands
and experience has approved? Here two
distinct problems confront us. First I name
the problem of the well-to-do or the rich,
and I name it first for, in my judgment, it

The Rest Day 145

is much the more complex, much the more
difficult of the two. Nor is this surprising,
for plainly in the Gospels, yes, and plainly
in all history since the Gospels were written,
the main sins of non-observance have lain
at the door of the well-to-do and the rich.
Jesus said long ago that these were the peo-
ple He could not reach and of whom He
had lost hope. You will remember He
could not induce one of that class to join
His chosen band, though we have a record
of two efforts He made, and no doubt many
of His efforts were not recorded. Believe
me, I am not harsh here. I am simply
quoting the expressions of the Master.
The rich had so much, their barns were so
full, their tables so bountifully spread,
that they patronized Him occasionally but
refused to follow Him. Even His awful
pronouncements of woe moved them not,
or moved them but temporarily. By ap-
peal direct, by open denunciation, by pa-
thetic parable He approached them; He
entreated them, but in vain. Two only of
their number gave him a halting obedience,
and that after He was dead — Nicodemus
and Joseph of Arimathea. So, if we claim

146 The Reasonableness of Faith

the name of Jesus as Master, Saviour, and
Director, we are bound to remember His
experience. And it is most significant.

So much for the past. But turn your eyes
about you to-day and see. Try and imder-
stand what is passing around you, and you
will agree with me as to the danger and
duty of the hour. There are in this audi-
ence before me very few perhaps who can
be truthfully arraigned as belonging to this
class to which I have referred, and I shall
not be guilty of the foolish mistake of criti-
cising the present for the absent. But
many of you have influence, and here in
God's house this morning, with all earnest-
ness of which I am capable, I call upon you
to use it. Whenever you can, by means
direct or indirect, induce the rich and fash-
ionable people of the city to observe the
rest day and to Christianize it for Christ's
sake and for His Church's sake, don't fail
to do it. There is a deliberate, persistent,
inexcusable desecration of the rest day by
a certain number of our citizens. These
people figure largely in the public eye.
They so figure because they have invited
notoriety. What they do is printed in the

The Rest Day 147

daily papers because they take pains in
many instances that it should be so printed.
Or, if they do not do this to-day, they took
pains in times past to win for themselves
this miserable and notorious position. Once
that position was assured, they blamed
the public prints for a notoriety which,
with considerable pains and even money
they had won. The doings of such people,
heralded all over the United States, is so
much poison in the land. Their names
are on our church rolls, they often hold
pews, though they seldom come to worship.
Oh, why are they tired on Sunday morn-
ing? Why take its early hours for rest?
Why well-nigh imitate the custom of the
old Roman world and place themselves in
the hands of highly-trained servitors who
can restore by scientific means or clever
manipulation their overstrained bodies?
Why ? Not because they are working harder
for the country, or for fortune even, than
other men and women, but because they
are doing night work for themselves as well
as day work; because year after year finds
them in a round of excitement, empty,
aimless, selfish, utterly unintellectual, and

148 The Reasonableness of Faith

in the fierce struggle for social pre-eminence,
a pre-eminence yielded to mere show. And
so, slowly, sweetness, unselfishness, yes, the
mind itself are dried up, shrivelled and lost
in the unnatural and unhealthful processes.
Do what you can, my people, to make
yourselves felt on this question. If you
would be Christians in more than name,
do something to Christianize the rest day,
for these chief sinners against the law of
God and man are brutalizing it. The term
is not too strong. Do not go to the country
house where Sunday is desecrated. Do
not join in Sunday games. Do not give
Sunday receptions. Forego even Christian
liberty, if necessary, that the Christian rest
day may be retained. Ah, try and know
yourselves. Know your children. And know
your God on that day. This is the
true Lord's day indeed.

Then there is the problem of those who
are not well-to-do or rich. These, too,
are desecrating the Lord's day. What
can we do for them? How reach them?
To this problem I have given much time
and thought, and I may claim some special
knowledge. The first thing I think we

The Rest Day 149

ought to do is to face the fact that by the
most of such people we are largely misunder-
stood. Multitudes of plain people in our
cities dislike Christianity, and I am very
sure one of the chief reasons, if not the
chief reason, for this dislike is that we have
not gone to them in the name of Christ, but
have used methods of law. Nothing can
be more unchristian, nothing more fatal.
Practically we have said to them: We will
shut you up to church-going by law. If
you won't go to church, you shall not do
other things. It is the old Puritan position
over again. It never did work, it never
could work, not even under the tremendous
rule of the great Cromwell. We have
practically said: You shall not play, you
shall not read, you shall not learn, you
shall not go to the country. My friends,
some of you think I am exaggerating — I
wish I were — but it is not so. Who, may I
ask, opposed the opening of the museums
kept up by taxes drawn from the people's
money? Who for years but the churches
were the forefront of opposition? Who
opposed the opening of libraries? The
churches. Who opposed the running of

i5o The Reasonableness of Faith

street cars and Sunday trains, the only
possible means by which the multitude can
reach the country? The churches. Who
fiercely advocated the forbidding of Sunday
games to the young ? Insensate folly ! The
churches. If a boy, forbidden by New
York law to play on the public streets, gets
half a dozen lads to join him in a surrepti-
tious game of ball on some vacant lot, when
the pickets placed all around the neighbour-
hood give warning of the approaching
policeman — who sets the enginery of the law
against him, until all his boyish wit is en-
gaged to avoid that law or defy it? The
churches. That lad pockets his ball and
hides his bat, but takes a mental resolution
that churches, Sunday-school teachers and
parsons are his natural enemies.

Twelve years ago you, my people, know I
stood alone in New York in advocating
what appeared to me simple justice, namely,
the opening of the saloon on certain hours
on Sunday. Since then I have not changed
my mind; all the more so, that since then
many of the men I know, and whose judg-
ment I respect, have taken substantially
the same ground. Once again let me try

The Rest Day 151

and make my position plain. I am not ap-
proving the present saloon. Any one who
asserts I ever have approved or do approve
the present saloon perverts what I said.
God forbid ! I would to God that every
saloon in New York could be closed, and
kept closed seven days in the week, but it
is just as certain as that I stand to preach
to you this morning that the present saloon,
bad as it is, is the only means of supplying a
great social need in this city. If you would
win people from it you must give them
something better. Educate the people to
want something better, give them a sub-
stitute (and mark me, this can be done and
one of these days will be done), and then
you can oppose the saloon. But until you
do, to close it up on Sunday is doing all you
can to make hundreds of thousands of people
in the community resent your interference
and protest against it, and also doing all you
can to fasten corruption and blackmail on the
city of New York. To attempt to close
the saloons when hundreds of thousands
want to use them, and think they have a
right to use them, is simply to repeat the
old fatal mistake of seeking to make people

152 The Reasonableness of Faith

good by legislation. Supply their wants in
a better way, teach them that they are
wrong in wishing to use them, and then
you have accomplished your object and not
before.

Be patient with me. Let me make my
position plain beyond any possibility of
misunderstanding. I believe in local option,
but I think a great city is not like a country
district. If you vote local option in a
country district by a substantial majority
the law can be enforced. I do not believe
it can be so enforced in a city. If New York
voted to-morrow by fifty thousand majority
to close the saloons in New York on Sunday,
those saloons could not be kept closed so
long as a great minority believed they had
the right, and still retained the desire, to
use them. I really think that almost any-
body who will give careful thought to the
question will agree with me here. Let me
illustrate.

There is not one man in ten in New York
who wants to bet. Yet so long as that one
in ten is allowed, without any loss of charac-
ter, to bet $10,000 on a horse at Morris
Park, so long as the odds on the races are

The Rest Day 153

published in all the respectable papers, and
the coming and going of the folks who
keep up these establishments are a matter
of public notoriety, it would be altogether
beyond the power of the police or any
municipal government, however reformed
and good, permanently to stop the news-
boy from betting his ten cents in the policy
shop. Why? Because, though nine-tenths
of the population do not bet, they cannot
force their judgment on the one-tenth that
want to. Now, on the other hand, not one
man in a thousand in New York has a
desire to steal. Therefore the nine hundred
and ninety-nine can enforce the law against
larceny. Therefore I say to you this Sun-
day morning (and in days to come will you
please remember what I have said?) that
so long as a substantial minority in the city
of New York want to use the saloons on
Sunday, our efforts to close the saloons
will result only in secret debauchery and
law-breaking. The evils of drunkenness
are bad enough — so bad that there is no
need to exaggerate them — but it will not do
to make the sin of the drunkard the con-
venient scapegoat on which to pile all evil

154 The Reasonableness of Faith

things. This nation is in no danger of
becoming a nation of drunkards, in spite of
all that is said to the contrary. Our con-
sumption of alcohol per capita is one-
quarter that of France, and one-half that of
England; and it is decreasing. But there
is a worse sin. Drunkenness may threaten
our nation, but there is another and a graver
threat. There is a sin that lays its poison
to the very root of democratic institutions,
and of it I am far more afraid than of the
sin of intemperance. It is the sin of a light
regard for law, a law which we have estab-
lished. Let this sin prevail and Freedom
herself dies. Freedom is only possible where
men highly regard law.

One of the most brilliant bishops who
ever sat on the English bench more than,
twenty years ago cried in the House of
Lords : "I would rather see England free
than sober. " Thoughtless people and many-
good reformers howled. But the great
bishop was right. Sobriety to be lasting
and uplifting must be the free and deliberate
choice of free and intelligent men. The only
true temperance reformer is the man who
stands for freedom. You may imagine a

The Rest Day i55

nation of sober slaves, but you cannot
imagine a nation of drunken free-men.
To disregard law is to undermine and plot
against Freedom herself.

Ah, my friends and neighbours, the
people of this city are turning away
from the Church of God. The man who
cannot see this is blind. Tens of thousands
of men in this city who went to church
regularly years ago scarcely ever go now.
Ten of thousands of children are growing
up with no interest in the Church and no
knowledge of the Bible. These are not
to be won back by legal enactments. They
think the Christian people and the Christian
ministers do not know them or care for them.
They think the Christian churches are a
mere luxury of the rich. (I except the
Roman CathoHc Church. She is not leaving
working people or putting them in mission
chapels, as we have sought to do.) We
cannot convince them of our care for them
by going to Albany, there to pass laws
to make them good.

Oh, look round you and see what the
city is. See what the lives of the people
are. And then kneel to God for wisdom

156 The Reasonableness of Faith

and for courage to use your best endeavour,
your persistent example, so that the rest
day may be the real Lord's day to all the
people of the community. Ah, God bless
New York ! The destinies of a great people
are largely in her keeping. As she pushes
forward to the great unexplored future,
she needs — if any city of the earth needs — a
rest day. But it must be baptized and
Christianized afresh, a day of repose, a day
to re-knit tender ties, a day to serve men
and worship God, the day of the Lord Jesus.

PHILLIPS BROOKS

"Know ye not that there is a prince and a great
man fallen this day in Israel?" — // Samuel, Hi, j8.

If we can gauge a man's greatness by our
sorrow at his loss, then in PhilHps Brooks,
Bishop of Massachusetts, the Christian
Church and the nation have lost one of the
greatest. The death of the great financier
moves the market. Men speculate on what
he made, and how he made it. The death
of the great politician makes men talk
more. It arouses the widest range of
interest. The death of the great teacher
and preacher makes sad hearts. And this
should be so, for he is by far the rarest of
the three.

Phillips Brooks was a preacher. Let
me briefly glance at some of the elements
of his power. Many have spoken some-
what slightingly of his power and gifts as a
theologian; and if the chopped straw that
often passes for theological learning, and
the only sort of theological learning worth
157

158 The Reasonableness of Faith

the name — if acquaintance with this and
successful handling of it be necessary in the
theologian, there was much in the criticism
that was just. But to-day, surely, we test
things by results, and so tested, the great
man who is gone was far from lacking as a
theologian. It seems to be beyond argu-
ment, that the main value of theology lies
in the attainment of one aim and end,
that is, the bringing near and making real
of God to man. If it is a science dealing
with the past, it must so deal with it that
it record and arrange human thought con-
cerning God, so as to bring the record of
man's thinking in the past to the knowledge
of man in the present in such a way that
one generation in some sort inherits the
prayers, heavenward strivings, and holiest
and highest speculation of all the generations
preceding it.

If this be the scope and meaning of the-
ology, then surely one who moved so con-
tinuously and permanently what was best
in the religious and intellectual thought of
New England, helping vast numbers toward
a living belief in the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ — he surely shall not be

Phillips Brooks 159

denied a place among the theologians of
his time. To the stiff churchman, de-
manding before all things clear-cut defini-
tions of doctrinal belief, Phillips Brooks
naturally seemed hazy as a thinker, and
sometimes loosely heterodox. To the scien-
tific spirit, demanding impossible assurances
in the physical realm of spiritual realities,
he also naturally seemed a visionary dreamer,
eloquent, but fanciful. Neither of these
positions could he understand; to those
holding them he was not perhaps sufficiently
sympathetic. Each in its own way seemed
to him inexcusably irreverent, since it
was the effort to define the Infinite in terms
of the finite. With neither could he be in-
duced to discuss or to argue. Definitions and
discussions he abhorred. But his convic-
tion was contagious. With his whole soul
he believed in the infinite God, and in his
case it was proved once again, that the
victory that overcometh the world is our
faith. His faith was sublimely simple.

And so to the hesitating mind of New
England, somewhat given to over definition,
he came as a divinely empowered messenger.
He brought to much that was best in that

i6o The Reasonableness of Faith

mind what it most needed — the warmth
and fire of an ennobled and ennobHng
Christian emotion; for emotional in the
best sense Phillips Brooks was. Beyond
doubt, he was Massachusetts' truest, great-
est pastor and teacher. Born from Puritan
stock, living among the descendants of the
Puritan, he seems fit successor to that
noble man, John Robinson, who, in his
own day, with spiritual instinct rising
above all narrowness of the time, to that
little band embarking at Delftshaven more
than two hundred years ago for these
shores, delivered as a final and solemn in-
junction the words: ''Beloved brethren,
I charge you to believe that God has yet
more light to break forth from His Word. "
To Phillips Brooks that Word was no mere
book, but the Man, the everlasting Son of
the Father, ever revealing Himself as His
brethren are able to bear His light, in all
great books, true histories, good men —
God once for all revealed in Jesus, ever and
always immanent in His world.

More light to break forth. Here he
based his message. With girded loins he
was looking for his Lord, seeing Him ever

Phillips Brooks i6i

coming, clothed in His new Messiahship,
to each new age, in each new year, in each
new duty. Here lay his power. He be-
lieved, and he made men believe in the
Living God, divinely immanent; as he
preached he knew God was to be found of us,
and no man failed in finding Him who
honestly looked within. "Say not in thine
heart, Who shall ascend into heaven ? (That
is, to bring Christ down from above) or,
Who shall descend into the deep? (That is,
to bring up Christ again from the dead.)
The word is nigh thee, even in thy heart:
the word of faith which we preach."

Let me repeat it. This was the beginning
and end of his theology : the God and Father
of Jesus Christ upholding all things by the
word of His power, Whose nature is love,
Whose home is the heart of man. He
based his thought squarely and fairly on
the immanence of God. Because there is
divine immanence, there must be ever
divine evolution. Men are looking in vain
for Him without, because they have for-
gotten Him within. God revealing in Jesus
those laws, that life, by which ever and
always, whether in the darkest past or

1 62 The Reasonableness of Faith

remotest future, He must mould and woo
mankind to Himself.

Yes, he was a preacher, easily our first.
Nor, to my mind, since Frederick Robertson
died in Brighton, England, thirty-six years
ago, has there been his equal across the
water.

Three elements of power were his. Genius
of insight, wonderful gifts of expression,
and soul-compelling love. Cried Matthew
Arnold :

•' We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the soul resides."

Ah, true, so true. And just because it is
so, we reverence the genius, that, like the
fabled demagogue of old, brings heavenly
fire to the cold ashes of our poor human
hearths. Those who listened to the rich
tones of his voice, carried beyond them-
selves, lost to all outer things, the man
himself forgotten by them, were wont to
say, as were said by the men in the company
of the Greatest one evening long ago:
"Did not our hearts bum within us as He
talked with us by the way and opened to us
the Scriptures?" He lived for men and
loved them and knew them; and he lived

Phillips Brooks 163

with God. And so the worship of God was
after all beautiful and possible, and His
service was perfect freedom. So much he
made you feel. You felt that he spoke,
not as one standing on an impossible height
(he never made that most common and
fatal clerical mistake of talking down to
his people) ; but what he knew he did, what
he said he was.

His power was rare. It was the power
-of moving men. I shall never forget an
instance of it, which, in a poor way, I must
try to recal to you. It was at the Church
Congress at Providence, if I remember
rightly. He was pleading for the larger
use of extemporary prayer in the fixed
services of the Church; and as his speech
drew to a close, he clinched all that had
gone before with the following illustration:
"The General Convention of our church
was in session in 187 1, when the news was
flashed — 'Chicago burning.' It was moved
at once that the order of business be sus-
pended, and that both houses proceed to
prayer. What form, as led by their pre-
siding bishop, should the supplications of
that representative body take? All knelt

164 The Reasonableness of Faith

and joined in the Litany, a noble prayer,
comprehensive beyond all others, hallowed
to us by undying memories of ages past;
yet perhaps the only woe it does not deal
with is the woe of a burning city. " I shall
never forget the closing moments of that
speech, or the thrill that took us all, as his
words seemed to have real, stinging points
to them, making themselves felt in the
bodies as well as the souls of men. The
dusk of the evening was coming on, and a^
spell was on the assembly as he sat down.

His was not only the power of a very
pure eloquence, but of an utter simplicity.
When I heard that he had been elected
Bishop of Massachusetts, feeling how much
that election meant for the whole Church
in this land, I could not but telegraph:
" Praise God from whom all blessings flow. "
And back came his simple answer: " Thank
you. I will be as good a Bishop as I can. "
How he dreaded that in some way the ec-
clesiastical traditions of the Episcopate
might hedge him off somewhat from his
companions and friends. Alas ! too often
they do. On the day of his consecration,
some of us were sitting in his study in the

Phillips Brooks 165

evening. When we rose to go I shall never
forget the pressure of his great, big hand,
and the look in his eye as he said: " Please
God, I will be just the same, just the same. "

I know no words that bring him back to
me, bring back all he strove for, more
clearly than those spoken shortly before
his death: ''We must come back to our
Lord again, and everything becomes clearer
in that very clearest life, which is our per-
petual inspiration and study. Christ was
cultivating Jesus of Nazareth, and yet
was remembering His fellow men who
were around him in Jerusalem and Galilee;
but all this was subject to and governed by
His entire consecration to God. And so,
my friends, the secret and solution of it lies
here. You are to cultivate yourselves for
the sake of your fellow-men, and you are
to serve your fellow-men for the sake of
your own self -culture ; but you are to save
both these efforts from the self-conscious-
ness which is the taint and poison of them
both, by forgetting both of them and by
lifting both of them into the very life of
God."

Shortly before his election as Bishop of

1 66 The Reasonableness of Faith

Massachusetts, I spent a day and night
with him. Even to his intimate friends
he never readily and with ease spoke of
himself. When, therefore, late into the
night (it was Sunday, and he loved to sit
up chatting with a friend or two, after
Sunday work was over), we were left alone,
I was deeply moved when he himself let
our talk take a personal drift. I had known
him since 1876 when, a very green and
imaccustomed English stranger, he had
taken me in and made me preach at Trinity.
In a hundred ways since then he had helped
me to larger views of the truth of God.
I had many times tried to speak about my
own personal wants and fears, and had
found that such confidences seemed to be
rather unwelcome and difficult to him.
But this evening I felt near the great, good
heart of the man, as he passed from dis-
cussion of the work we were given to that
of his own experience and life. He spoke
frankly of the possibility of his leaving
Trinity. I said something about the deep
pain such a move would cause. "Yes,"
said he, "but I have said all I know. I
have delivered what was given me to say,

Phillips Brooks 167

and now nothing remains for me but to
amplify it."

Wisely and accurately he summed up his
life, so it seemed to me that night; so it
seems to me now. Bitterly as we mourn
him, greatly as we need him, much as w^e
expected from him, within our House of
Bishops and without, no man could doubt
of all those who loved him and learned
from him, that his own view of his ministry
was true. You might say it had one text.
Indeed, for seven consecutive days he
preached on it, but a year ago, in Boston.
" I am come that ye may have life, and that
ye may have it more abundantly." To all
the mean, engrossing, atrophying, narrowing
influences of modern life, he brought the
gospel of largeness of life in Christ. He
knew the struggle for men to-day was
pretty much as Bunyan depicted it long
ago — the struggle in the choice between
the muck-heap and the muck-rake, while
the unseen angel offered the unnoticed
crown. Brooks saw, as was given to few
to see, the utter worthlessness of the muck-
heap and the glistening glory of the crown;
but well he knew that the man who would

i68 The Reasonableness of Faith

save his fellows from the one, and win them
to choice of the other, must spend his time,
not in denouncing the lowest, but in offering
the highest; not in dwelling on the worth-
lessness of the muck-heap, but the glisten-
ing glory of the crown. This he did with
splendid persistency again and again.

Let no man then say that the days of
preacher and of preaching are over; that
amid the hurry and stress of our time the
opportunities of the preacher are passed or
are passing away. To a man who under-
stands his age and believes in his God,
men will, as they did to him, reverently
listen. They will hail him as leader, they
will trust him and love him as friend, and
among the very chiefest of their benefactors
they will delight to count him.

He died as he would have liked to die.
To some of His great ones God does even
here give the desire of their hearts; and he
had his desire. There was a dread on him
of dying slowly, a dread of outliving his
full vigour. With manhood at full tide,
a manhood that had never known the
touch of soilure, he has gone from us. His
strength was firm, his natural force un-

Phillips Brooks 169

abated, when the post from the celestial
city sounded his horn at his chamber door.
From his splendid personality, there shall
down here no more ring forth that jubilee
challenge of his to all things mean, un-
worthy and unmanly; but the memory of
him abides with us and will abide. Tens of
thousands who have never seen or heard
him will in years to come think of Phillips
Brooks as perhaps the best evidence of
what our nineteenth century manhood at
its highest was capable. And all over
this broad land the multitude of those who
knew and loved him and were helped by him
will talk of Phillips Brooks as of one, who,
like Great Heart in the Immortal Progress,
was specially chosen of his king to guide
pilgrims to that celestial city which, with
inspired eye, he so clearly saw.

I stood in his study on Thursday mxorning,
the room he lived and worked in, where
many of us had listened to his genial, hope-
ful, inspiring talk, in times gone by, and
looked across the open space to Trinity
Church. It was thronged. Silently, in the
cold Winter sunlight, the people stood there.
Down the long street to the Common the

170 The Reasonableness of Faith

lines of those who wished to see his face for
the last time patiently stood waiting. Flags
were at half-mast, shops and exchanges
closed or closing. Boston was indeed mourn-
ing her great dead. And as I stood and
looked, the triumphant lines closing Tenny-
son's splendid poem of ''Arthur" came to
me. I shall never again probably see them so
illustrated. It was:

"As though a mighty city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars. '

January, 30, 1893.

OUR DUTY TO CIVILIZATION, OR
WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?

" But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus,
And who is my neighbour ?

"And Jesus answering said, A certain man went
down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among
thieves.which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded
him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

"And by chance there came down a certain priest
that way; and when he saw him, he passed by on the
other side.

"And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place,
came and looked on him, and passed by on the other
side.

"But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came
where he was; and when he saw him, he had com-
passion on him.

"And went to him, and bound up his wounds,
pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast,
and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

"And on the morrow when he departed, he took
out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said
unto him, Take care of him: and whatsoever thou
spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

"Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was
neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves ?

"And he said. He that shewed mercy on him.
Then said Jesus unto him. Go, and do thou likewise. "

— Luke x: zg-^'j.

The Jewish sense of obligation to his fel-
low man was tribal only : to their own people,
to their own fellow religionists they owed
something ; to the rest of the world, nothing.
171

T72 The Reasonableness of Faith

Little as we yet understand and acknowl-
edge it, Christ's teaching of neighbourly
obligation is nothing less than world wide.
At first, man's conception of what he owes
to his fellow-man is a very inadequate and
limited conception. He is prepared to serve
those who are dependent on him, or, per-
haps, I had better say, those on whose well-
being he is dependent, whose happiness or
misery affects himself. Now, in the provi-
dence of God, every advantage in civiliza-
tion means a widening of this circle of in-
fluence, means a constant increasing of the
number of people whose well-being or
ill-being intimately affects us. Human law
lags a long way behind human conscience;
and yet law, to-day, in a thousand ways
enforces neighbourly obligations on us, be-
cause those obligations are recognized by
all which, a few generations ago, would
scarcely be recognized at all, or by the very
few whose sense of responsibility to their
fellow-man was specially high, peculiarly
Christian. To-day, a religion that ignores
duty to our neighbour contents us not, is
no longer true to us. Whatever charges
may be brought against our generation this

Our Duty to Civilization 173

much, at least, is true of it, that it sees, far
more clearly than other generations saw,
the absolute truth of what Jesus Christ
said, that "he who would save his life shall
lose it," and that they who would enjoy
life, whole, sound, and abundant, are men,
or are peoples, most ready to discharge
their obligations to others.

But in spite of this growing sense of
neighbourly obligation, the responsibilities
of nationhood many good men still ignore
and deny. It is scarcely too much to say
that these obHgations are abhorrent to
them. Their minds have been so much
occupied with the pursuit of their own
immediate well-being, so taken up in the
excessive activity of their routine duties,
that they have formed no clear or adequate
conception of any obHgations Jesus Christ
has imposed on them to others than those
who form their immediate circle. To them-
selves it seems a very plain case, to them-
selves the argument is unanswerable.
"What have we to do with other peoples?
See our own evils, our own shortcomings,
see the evidence of corruption and failure
in our own land, in our own institutions.

174 The Reasonableness of Faith

Having failed, or only partially succeeded
here, what have we to do with others?"
And when, in the providence of God, the
obligations of our nation to other people
have gradually drifted us into the position
in which we find ourselves to-day, and war
is an accomplished fact, these people wake
up with a start of horror. They forget
that what is taking place is the inevitable
consequence of a long course of previous
events, and instead of going to the root of
the matter and protesting against those
sins of self-seeking which have made war
inevitable, they cry out against war itself.
It would be just as sane to cry out against
the surgeon, or to protest against the opera-
tion which alone can save life. There was a
time when it might have been prevented,
but, that time having passed, to the knife
alone we must look for what medicine
might once have done.

Let us sanely look at the situation as it
really is and ask ourselves what duty we
have to perform.

What is war? War is not only con-
flict carried on with rifles and warships. It
is a state of things in which, unduly and un-

Our Duty to Civilization 175

fairly, a man urges his claims against an-
other man. War is not confined to nations.
Unfortunately, it is resident in what is
called civilized society. There is consider-
able war going on in the world all the time.
The generations to come will speak of the
nineteenth century as a century of constant
war. War is taking more than is right,
withholding what is due, pushing the weak
to the wall. Under this larger idea of war,
much that passes as legitimate competition
in commerce is war. To push business
as many push it is war. To prosecute the
fortunes of monopoly as these are commonly
prosecuted to-day is war. To acquire vast
wealth by pitiless competition is war.
Stealing franchises by bribery, or obtaining
them by lobbying, or the illegitimate use
of money, is war. This being so, therefore,
say some, open, declared war, according to
your own showing, between peoples, is not
such a bad thing after all. War is stimulat-
ing, is good for the nation, means manliness,
etc., etc. A silly, ignorant lie, all this.
War at best is but the survival of a state
of being out of which man must emerge and
is emerging. Moreover, war brings all sorts

176 The Reasonableness of Faith

of evil in its train. On these I cannot en-
large this morning; but think of the terrible
suffering to the innocent, as those innocent
now suffer in Cuba. Think sanely, I say,
of war and you can be no defender of it.
As I have already said, war at best is a
surgeon's knife and a knife used without
anaesthetics, too. To follow my idea further.
Operations may not be good things in
themselves, but they may be absolutely
necessary. There are worse things than
cutting out a cancer or removing a diseased
limb. Compliance with evil is worse than
war. Shutting our eyes to manifest duty
is worse than war. Don't suffer any con-
fusion in your mind about this. These
things are worse than war, they are the
very poisonous breath of the disease which
ultimately makes war necessary. They are
the microbe which rots the soul. These are
the treacherous, secret war, war at its very
vilest; war, the villain that stabs in the
dark or poisons the cup.

More than a hundred years ago, in this
land, some one fell among thieves — it is
the old parable of Jesus over again. His
skin was black and he had few friends;

Our Duty to Civilization 177

and stealing, robbing him of his man-
hood and of his right to Hberty and
life and happiness, the thieves held him fast.
It is none of our business, said the Northern
and Western States, and they kept repeating
it for long years. "The question of slavery
may be all wrong, we admit it is brutal, we
admit it is immoral, we admit it is cruel;
but to interfere with it is to interfere with
property." Now the one fundamental idea
of Anglo-Saxon law is that it safeguards
property, and Anglo-Saxon law is the bul-
wark of Anglo-Saxon civilization, and Anglo-
Saxon civilization is the hope of the world.
Therefore, we are justified, said they, in
non-interference, and the Church cried
'*Amen. " And so things went on, and
men were gradually being blinded to an
awful sin. It was the sin of confusing two
things that can never be confused — what
was pleasant and seemed proper, and
what was right. Property and its safe-
guards might seem for a time to be the
bulwark of civilization; but if Jesus Christ
was sent from God to men, if He had any
real message for us, the burden of it was
this: That the safeguards of society were

178 The Reasonableness of Faith

not to be found in safeguarding property
merely but in making men. The law of
Anglo-Saxon conscience is one thing, but
the law of the Lord Jesus Christ towards
which Anglo-Saxon conscience is slowly
moving, is a higher, holier, and more lasting
thing. The first safeguards property; this
is a good and necessary thing enough. The
second creates men. There is little fear
that property will not be protected; there
is great fear that our manhood may not
be developed. Law made property safe
enough in Rome, long ago ; but Rome fell, and
great was the fall of it, when Roman citizens
learned to put their propert}^ and their
luxury in the first place, and the claims of
their State in the second.

Some men, mere enthusiasts the public
called them, tried to say these things, or
better things than these, generations ago.
They said that to sit down tamely, con-
doning a wrong, was to be untrue both to
themselves and to their nation. They said
that man was more than property, that
property was accidental; that the main
question was not how much a man or nation
had, but how the man or nation got it.

Our Duty to Civilization 179

And these enthusiasts kept repeating these
things, in spite of the contempt of the great
and the stones of the small. The clubs
would not have them, their friends made
excuses for them; but to their aid in
a little time there came a small group of
poets that some people fancied were quite
the best poets the country had. These
few voices would be heard, would not down.
They had their song to sing and they sung it
— men like Whittier, Lowell and Longfellow,
just to name a few — and they, in their own
way told the same story of individual and
national obligation. And some politicians
there were, too, who said the very worth of
the American people and the stability of
their institutions, depended on casting out
the thieves, and succouring the black men
that hacj fallen among them. But great
as was the combined protest of all these
three parties, individualism reigned. Puri-
tanism survived and Puritanism had noth-
ing to say against slavery. The masses
of the people, belonging to a young and
undeveloped nation, were too busy with
their own affairs to interfere with the affairs
of others. The one aim they had was to

i8o The Reasonableness of Faith

get on. The golden flood of money was
pouring in. The West remained to be won.
And so America's priest and Levite came
and looked at the man fallen among thieves,
and passed by on the other side. It was
the old story, the story not that I tell but
which Jesus told — the wounded man had
to wait, and costly was the waiting. If
we leave God's wounded, be sure we shall
have to pay God's doctor's bill. Disease
breeds disease and then comes death.
Slavery was moral typhus, and typhus
spreads. It seemed but one small, dark
pimple on the fair young cheek of a maiden
nation; but the pimple carried in it the
seeds of death. For an evil thing allowed
is not content to hold its own; it spreads.

The policy of slavery and the policy of
freedom could not combine any more than
oil and water can combine, or alkali and
acid. And so in time another cry was
heard in the land; that cry was separation.
And then, indeed, things began to look
serious. Separation meant a divided people,
a weakened nation, a thwarted civilization.
Slavery was a dull pain, separation was a
sharp pain, and at last the sting of it roused

Our Duty to Civilization i8i

the land, and the country was awake. And
then there came war, the bloodiest of all
modem wars, because between brother and
brother. Father against son, neighbour
against neighbour. South against North !
Then were terrible and protracted battles,
for each was brave and each was strong.
And even more awful than these battles
were the evils following in their train —
hideous prison pens, where, under the blight
of famine and disease, life faded away.
]\Ian's heart was hardened against his fellow
man. A man's foes became those of his own
household. And following still in the foot-
steps of that war came the blight of evil
principles that ever accompany war — cor-
ruption, private and public, cowardice and
selfishness. Men who should have gone
themselves, buying exemption — the rich
taking advantage of their riches. Then
the standard of business morality fell — the
scheming man, the dishonest man taking
advantage of his country's woes to steal
from his country — dishonest contracts —
those who meanly stayed at home, fattening
on those who went to battle. Then, too,
owing to the stringency of money, evil and

1 82 The Reasonableness of Faith

foolish ideas became prevalent as to what
money was. Men said it was in the power
of the Government to make money. And
thus were laid deeply in the minds of millions
of people the germs of an impossible and
immoral conception of our public obliga-
tions. A man must pay his debts honestly,
but a great country need not.

Now paus3 with me. From what cause
did all these evil things arise ? Look straight,
I pray you. Don't confuse secondary causes
with primary causes. Don't confuse the
leaves of a thing with the root. All these
evils came not from war but from the de-
liberate condoning of an evil that made, at
last, war necessary. They came from yield-
ing to a wrong, yielding to a wrong for
comfort's sake, giving in to unrighteousness
so that people might be saved the trouble
and loss of driving it forth. This was the
sin against God and man. This, and not
war, was the real cause of all the train of
woes which any man who knows anything
whatever of the history of these United
States is well aware follows and followed
in the history of our war. I sum it up in
these words of Jesus. The whole, horrid,

Our Duty to Civilization 183

spreading, blasting evil of it was rooted in
one thing, and one thing alone — and this,
standing in a Christian pulpit, I defy an}^
man to deny — it was the denial of our duty
to our neighbour, it was the deliberate
breaking of the second commandment.

But now I hear someone say, ''Admitted
all this, there is no parallel between the
condition of things to which you refer, and
the obligations of our people in the past, and
this Cuban question. The Cuban business
is none of ours." Is it not? I ask myself.
What would the Master say to that? I
turn back, I ask you to turn back to what
He did say. How does He lay down the
law of neighbourly obHgation? You own
Him as your teacher — don't mind my
conclusions — what are His ? Who was neigh-
bour to him that fell among thieves? The
priest was, the Levite was; but they had so
successfully cultivated individualism, so
blinded their eyes, so hardened their hearts,
so killed their consciences, that their own
mean interests were paramount, and they
passed by on the other side. But a Samari-
tan, that is to say, one whom the wounded
man had learned to abhor, one whom, in

184 The Reasonableness of Faith

his religious service he was in the habit of
daily cursing, one whom he counted a worse
enemy than even the Romans themselves —
he came where he was, and he saw not an
enemy, but a poor, forsaken, crushed, out-
raged, dying stranger, and he had pity on
him. He forgot his journey, his own safety
even, and certainly his convenience. He
took him on his own beast, he took him to
his own inn, he spent his money on him,
he gave him his time. He cast aside the
traditions and prejudices of his people to
succour his fellow man. He had mercy on
him. And down all the ages rolls the
command of Jesus — Wouldst thou please
Me, wouldst thou really be a man, go and do
thou likewise. We may differ as to the
means used. We may approve or disap-
prove of some of the actions of the Presi-
dent and Congress. One thing, as Christian
men, I hold, we cannot do. We cannot, as
Christian men, tolerate the statement that
the unendurable woes of Cuba are no busi-
ness of these United States. Are we blind
to what God is doing in the world every-
where? Do we utterly fail to see those
sympathetic relations between people and

Our Duty to Civilization 185

people, which are binding men together all
over the world? Have we forgotten that
geographically these people are our neigh-
bours ? More than that, politically we have
declared ourselves to be in some sort their
Suzerains, accepted them as our wards.

As I have said before, I am far from advo-
cating unnecessary war. War is an evil
and brings great evils in its train. But again
I repeat there is one thing far worse than
war, for it is the fruitful womb from which
all wars are born: it is the spirit which
selfishly, supinely, sits at home in comfort
and national plenty, when the divinely
given rights of freedom and justice are
denied to our next-door neighbour; it is
the growing, sluggish indifference to torture
and wrong. This in the eyes of God is far
worse than war; for it inevitably leads to
wholesale death, death of the soul, and the
blasting and decay of all that is worthy in
civilization.

It is not so long since Armenia cried aloud
to God and men, and Europe heard her
wailing; but jealousy and mingled fear,
then, too, made the priest and Levite leave
the dying Armenian to the Turk that still

i86 The Reasonableness of Faith

robs and still tortures. European powers
were afraid of each other and afraid of the
thieves. I ask you this morning how did
you feel about it ? You felt that the Anglo-
Saxon race was shamed. You felt that if
Turkey had seized one small colony of
England, in that case the thieves would
have had short shrift.

On this I need not dwell. In our case
there is no such excuse. We are told that
in this immediate case, this special poor
man may fall among thieves again, and
Cuba become a second Hayti. We are told
that we will have to look after her, prop her
up, spend money for her, take care of her;
in all likelihood we will indeed; that is just
what Jesus said He commended the stranger
Samaritan for doing. Our business is to do
right, and leave the consequence to Al-
mighty God.

I feel full well this morning that some of
you may not agree with the general princi-
ples I have laid down; but do not be mis-
taken about this: they are the principles of
Jesus Christ. You are not quarrelling with
my conclusions, but with His commands.
The men who are crying out, *'It is no

Our Duty to Civilization 187

business of ours, this Cuban trouble ! ' ' are
mistaken men. They may think themselves
to be, but they really are not, patriotic men.
They are not the men most willing to undergo
hardship for God's cause or man's cause.
They are men who have fallen into the habit
of thinking that civilization and wealth are
one and the same thing ; and that is a foolish,
un-Christian, unhistoric, immoral lie. They
are not fitted to lead or represent a progres-
sive people. Yet I thank God that through
the length and breadth of this land there is
a marvellous unanimity of feeling about
the righteousness of the issue before us.
We had a war scare three years ago. An
evil and wicked spirit was stirred up in the
land. Unthinking and designing men, and
some ignorant, self-seeking politicians were
willing to fan it, too often, I fear, for the
sake of personal ambition. If I remember
rightly it was on a Friday that President
Cleveland's message startled the world.
On Sunday almost all the leading Christian
ministers and almost all those who direct
the universities of learning in our country,
without any opportunity for mutual con-
sultation, protested in the name of God

1 88 The Reasonableness of Faith

and civilization both against the message
and the spirit in which it was received.
Where are those protesting voices now?
I say that, almost without exception, they
are agreed that the cause of freedom in Cuba
is the cause of God and man. Almost
without exception, these lovers of peace,
these men whose lives and work are their
record that they abhor all spirit of blood
and strife — these men are agreed. To them
and to me it appears that this cry of the
weak and the weary (a cry so feeble from
long-continued torture, that it is almost
inarticulate) — this cry for man's sake and
for Christ's sake we must answer and bind
ourselves by solemn covenant that we will
suffer the evil thing that causes it no more.

And lastly, what is the duty of the hour ?

(/). It is to see plainly, and to try and
make other men see the issue before us. It
is only the other day that Signor Crispi,
while he openly avowed that his natural
sympathies were with the sister Latin
nation of his own people, the Spaniard, said :
** Spain has committed monstrous sins, and
she must pay the price of sin." The dis-
appearance of her last greatness has come,

Our Duty to Civilization 189

the end of an awful rule has come. She
has slaughtered God's saints, she has per-
sistently stood in the path of man's progress,
and from that path she must be swept aside.
To remove her from it is our duty. Our
cause is as plain as day. The issue will
appear as clear to our children as the issue
of '61 appears to us. Good men hesitated
then, some good men hesitate to-day; but
we are not playing for our own hand or
forcing a war of conquest. This trouble
that has come to us has not been cunningly
devised by anybody. It is the outcome of
an old evil, it is the breaking forth of an
ancient and intolerable wrong. We are
being pushed on to do the work of God by
elemental forces which no politician, how-
ever shrewd, could create, control or gain-
say.

(2). Steps taken by our Executive we
may criticise. Let us, however, not be too
hasty with our criticism until we know all
the facts, and these we do not know yet.
We must stand by those in authority, and we
ought all to stand together and stand as
one man. Our President has surely proved
himself patient, wise and strong, and far

190 The Reasonableness of Faith

from lacking in that rare ability to with-
stand pressure. Let us support him.

( j) . We must protest against this wicked,
unchristian, barbarous spirit of vengeance.
We must denounce and oppose all such
unworthy cries as, "Remember the Maine!''
These Spaniards whom we are called to
sweep aside are scarcely less pitiable in their
ignorance, their suffering or their destitu-
tion, than the poor Cubans they have
blighted. Oh, think of those poor Spanish
boys, torn from their homes in their teens,
carried away from their sunny valleys and
plains to wage a war in which they are not
interested, and to die by tens of thousands
in a pestilential climate ! Think of the
bereaved homes of Spain, and who shall
dare to speak of vengeance !

(4). Let us put away all this mere
hysteria — it is unworthy of a great people —
all this silly shouting over the capture of un-
armed vessels which an honest Government
will promptly restore to their lawful owners.
I say it is entirely unworthy of a great people
engaged in a great cause — and the cause is
great. So let the best men go where they
are needed, and let them go quietly. For if,

Our Duty to Civilization 191

in these last days, a great and rich people,
lapped in luxury, sheltered from evil by the
wide sea, proved callous to such a pitiful
call, such a plea for succour at their door,
then, indeed, it would seem to me that the
first sign had been given that free Govern-
men of the people, by the people, and for
the people, deserved to perish from the
earth.

May 2, 1898.

LEANNESS OF SOUL

"He gave them their re(juest; but sent leanness
into their souls." — Psalm, cvi: i§.

Some nations have no robustness about
them. They are of the nature of the na-
tional fungi, quickly sprung and quickly
passed. Others have just this quality of
robustness — a certain constitutional strength
by which they refuse to succumb to the
evils, the forces of disintegration, that visit
and test all peoples. These are the nations
who make history. The histories of such
are peculiarly valuable to us. We see
in them the interplay of forces which we
find still active in our own time. These
nations are our real teachers. And when
in addition to this they produce, as usually
they do, great teachers, artists, poets,
prophets, then they supply us with the
very best guides that we poor, doubtful
men, living in the tortuous and difficult
pathways of our own time, can know of.

No race, except perhaps our own Anglo-

193

194 The Reasonableness of Faith

Saxon race, has so distinctly manifested
so much of this robustness, this national
strength, this peculiar fittedness for living,
as has the Jewish nation. They have
national bone and sinew enough, as it were,
to last out other races and yet the quality
of their life is fine enough to leaven this
robust fieshliness with spiritual fire, purpose
and aspiration. History with them, there-
fore, is not a mere repository of fact, but
fact ever viewed in spiritual light. They
are worldly, but religious, too — practical
and also ideal.

This old wilderness legend to which my
text refers is an instance of this. For our
purpose, it is altogether unimportant whether
those quails were miraculously sent, or
whether in process of natural migration they
reached the Jews in an hour of need, or
whether after the visit of the quails came a
miraculous or altogether natural sickness.
This old preacher, ascending the pulpit of
perhaps three thousand years ago, with true
spiritual insight at once lays hold of the
main point of the story. The wilderness
tradition serves to point a great moral;
serves in his mind to illustrate a tremendous

Leanness of Soul 195

fact. It is this: "Thou gavest them their
request, and sent leanness into their souls."
There was nothing unreasonable or wrong
in this request of Israel for flesh. It was
the natural craving of hungry men fed for
too long a time on farinaceous food ex-
clusively. But after excessive indulgence
came satiety, and quickly passing from
the physical realm to the spiritual which it
indicated, with true instinct the Psalmist
sees before him, in the old wilderness story
of human longing and human loathing, a
picture of the unsatisfied yearning that fills
all his life. The eye is not satisfied with
seeing, nor the ear with hearing. Man can-
not live by bread alone. No, not though
it be the very bread he cried and craved for.
This following of gratified desire by
intense sense of new-begotten desire, which
is summed up in the old word and compre-
hensive— leanness — is true of life. In the
highest gifts God gives, in answer to the
most natural cravings man knows, there
springs up as resultant this leanness. This
property of leanness accompanies the grant-
ing of longings that are not only not hurtful
in themselves, but are most reasonable and

196 The Reasonableness of Faith

should be entertained. It is in the satis-
faction of the legitimate hunger for legitimate
food that we feel this growing leanness at-
tacking us — and what is the meaning of it?
Look a little closer and see how true the
statement is, that this leanness follows
longings higher than those for quail. Take
for instance one of the highest forms of it.
It is the very property of all processes of
education known to us to give us our re-
quest and send leanness into our souls.
The property of all education is to make the
educated want more; and surely it is a
divine property; whether it is the education
of man in the mastery over the physical;
whether there falls on him the fascination
of that splendid spirit of searching, which
God authorized to man when He said:
"Have thou dominion;" or whether man
pushes his exhaustless search for knowledge
among other spheres than those which
physical science offers — in all cases the more
absolute, the more signal his mastery is,
the more really the wings of his aspiration
seem to strike against bars that more
cruelly draw themselves close. As in the
process of man's development he gathers

Leanness of Soul 197

the forces of dominion in his right hand,
there is a new-born hunger in his heart,
there is a deeper emptiness in his soul,
there is a further-off yearning in his eye.
And he knows and feels, as he mounts from
step to step, as request after request is satis-
fied, as height after height is measured and
ascended — it is still true — leanness in his
soul. Each attainment of mastery means
for him the strife for a deeper sight, the
craving for a newer and larger dominion.
Truth is his mistress, and if wholly he could
hold and possess her she would lose for him
half her charm. And therefore, if you
offer him truth in the one hand and the
search for truth in the other, reverently he
will bow and take the search rather than
the possession.

We are told by some who have not girded
up the loins of their mind and braced them-
selves to pursue on lofty and sometimes
dangerous paths the beauty of truth — we
are told by these that they do not rise and
follow her, "Because," say they, "this
unsatisfied and unsatisfiable property in
life is evidence that we are only here to be
thwarted. Why encourage a yearning which

198 The Reasonableness of Faith

must be followed by sharper hunger?" I
answer, our requests are not thwartings
merely : they are incitements. The very ele-
ments of dissatisfaction and incompleteness
which mingle with them and which forbid
the sluggard to strive, supply the necessary
spur and stimulus to further effort which
the normal human mind requires. Men
whose environment is for the time being a
wilderness environment would lose the best
properties of their manhood, if they could
be wafted from a quail feast to a Capua.

Let our conquests be won in the school-
room or in Wall Street, at Washington or
in the laboratory — the conquests of politics
or of science, in winning of priceless treas-
ures from some mountain mine, or wringing
a new secret from the half visible flickerings
of a star — we feel as we achieve them all
that it is well that they should afford us but
a temporary platform for our feet, and not
a meadow on whose soft breast we may lay
us down to rest the whole length of a Summer
day. We are like climbers who, for a
moment on a dangerous ascent, find their
feet at last based on some firm though
narrow jut of crag, and so wipe the sweat

Leanness of Soul 199

from their brow, fill their lungs with in-
spiring mountain air and once again look up.
Let me take a modem instance, somewhat
hackneyed it may be, though it seems to
me peculiarly valuable and useful to-day,
because his life was so really a part of what
we hold as best. Darwin confesses this
sense of leanness with a pathetic frankness
that few are great and true enough to be
capable of. In his autobiography, he notes
down the result on his own disposition
of the tremendous intensity of his devotion
to one realm of research. Physics and
physical research had robbed him, so he
believed, of some of his finest perceptions —
music, colour, poetry. He was naturally
but needlessly severe in his self-judgment.
He could not have been the great man he
was if he had not accurately recorded his
sensations. But if he had drunk into the
source and fount of the inspiration of Jesus
Christ, as God grant he is drinking now, he
would have known — what, alas ! the wisest of
us forget again and again — that not even sen-
sations are verbally inspired . There is no such
thing on God's earth as verbal inspiration,
either in your sensations or in your Bibles.

200 The Reasonableness of Faith

Darwin forgot — no doubt he knows it now,
and knows it with a new delight — that a
man has lost nothing that he mourns for,
any more than he can cease to love while
he mourns. The tear that drops from the
eye of memory is the evidence that memory
clasps in her soul arms the things she mourns.
This is not fancy; it is deepest truth. A
man can not mourn lovelessly. It is love
that makes mourning real. Those powers
are doubtless only laid aside for awhile,
overlaid perhaps a little, but the steel of
our souls does not decay because the scab-
bard in which we hide it is rusted a little.

The more we study, I think, the great
facts of life, the more we shall be assured
that many of our worthiest longings, long-
ings by which we rise toward the attain-
ment of desires beneficial to ourselves and
to our kin — the more fully they are granted
to us the more we know a deepening hunger
Why should it not be so? 'Tis but the
foretaste of our immortality. 'Tis the proof
that we, even we, are a spark of God. Can
that spark go out? Can it utterly die?
Even in the presence of One, all-present, of
whom it is said, *'a bruised reed will He

Leanness of Soul 201

not break and smoking flax will He not
quench," He himself seemed to fear that
it could. And hence, in loving warning,
the estate of man is burdened with an un-
rest meant to fan the flame.

There is another leanness, a leanness that
fails to recognize itself as lean, a hunger that
kills its own craving, a cold so mortal that
he stricken by it believes himself to be
warm, while life is dying at the touch of
frost. The dying soul ceases to aspire.
The aspirations and ideals of youth are
laid aside. Those early aims that came to
us in life's morningtide are quite forgotten.
That splendid and inspiring vision of life's
possibilities that once was ours has passed
and left not a wrack behind. And what was
it after all given up for? Some poor quail
feast, indeed ! Birds of passage for a passing
lust ! Some position to be won, some for-
tune gained, some social ambition claimed,
some prize, tinsel or golden, snatched ! And
for these, high gifts, persistent purpose,
self-denial that would have been noble were
its end a noble one, and all the resources of
life used up. Ah, prayer itself prayed out —
for, "Thou gavest them their request."

202 The Reasonableness of Faith

Where life is fattest and fullest, there is
it most dangerous. Oh, it is where life is
fattest that the hot wrath of God comes !
No pause between His lightning flash and
His thunderbolt ! It is not a jaundiced
view of life to say that if there is one fair
spot on God's fair earth to-day where the
quail-feast is being urged — aye, even by
our strongest and best — it is in our metropoli-
tan city. Until the sense of hunger itself
is gone, the sense of distance from God is
gone, and all that was most precious, most
buoyant in them years ago, is gone.

Yes, it is tremendously true, by virtue of
our own immortal nature, we must get what
we want, we must go where we will, we
must be what we aim — for this is to be man.

'A thread of law runs through our prayers
Stronger than iron cables are,
And love and longing towards the goal
Are pilots strong to steer the soul."

Man chooses his mistress and at last she is
given him to wife. He has his request. She
is his very own to have and to hold, to test
and to know thoroughly. Well for him,
if there still remains some sense of leanness
in his soul. Alas ! the hunger, the sense

Leanness of Soul 203

of leanness which is itself the evidence of
the Divine presence, which is itself the
proof that God who led us into the wilderness
will, by means of loving and all-wise plaguing,
purge us and lead us at last out, does not
always, so far as we can see, survive the
marriage with its lust. So far as we can
tell, there can then in such a case be no
Canaan for that soul. No distant gleam of
Eden can rouse a longing in that eye. It
already hath the fulfilment complete and
sufficient of its desire. Life for it is

"A life of aspiration furled,

Of self in petty self deep curled;
Amid the struggles of a world

A narrow life, a dreamless eye
That hath no glance on earth or sky

Save for the pleasures passing by."

God in His infinite mercy grant that we
may ever know the incitement of a hunger
that bids us strive and live and pray and
hope and serve, and not in the loss of it all,
taste the beginning of a dead — twice dead
soul.

February 21, 1892.

SACRIFICE TO THEIR NET

"They sacrificed to their net, burned incense to
their drag. " — H.abakkuk i: i6.

The simile, you will see, is a fisherman's.
He sweeps the sea with wide net. This he
uses for the upper waters, and having
caught what fish he can in these, he drags
his trawl along the bottom. With open
mouth and long purse it catches everything
small and great. His haul is enormous,
and stupid, idolatrous that he is, the prophet
warns him of his danger, tells him he is so
intent on his own success that his net and
his trawl have become to him a god, as
really a false god as though on the sea
sand he built an altar and burned incense
before the tools of his craft.

You will agree with me, friends in St.
George's, that these closing days of the
year shall be thoughtful days, and surely
many things have conspired to make us
specially thoughtful at the close of 1895,
whether we will or no. Now what I am
205

2o6 The Reasonableness of Faith

afraid of is, that we are not as thoughtful
a people as we suppose we are, that, on the
contrary, we are more mercurial and less
intelligently sober-minded than we ourselves
would admit. We are apt to take life too
much by fits and starts. And so I think we
will do well this morning to take to heart
the words that the great apostle spoke
long ago when he said: "I say, through
the grace given to me, to every man that
is among you, not to think of himself more
highly than he ought to think; but to think
soberly." Sober thinking is timely and
necessary, and in it the Church must lead
the world. And it seems that, to-day,
outside the Church as well as inside it there
is a concensus of thought among all those
men who, without difference of opinion, we
should judge to be sober minded, that we
in these great United States have a very
special danger, have a strong tendency to
fall into a disastrous sin — a danger which,
I think, is distinctly pointed out, a sin
which is strikingly illustrated in the text I
have read to you.

Our idol is our own success. This danger
which I venture to point out exists not alone

Sacrifice to Their Net 207

in the enthusiastic mind of a few religionists;
but go to men who think as well as to men who
pray and you find them agreed. Go to the
greatest living philosopher, Herbert Spencer,
the great poets of our century on both sides
the iVtlantic— Tennyson, Browning, Matthew
Arnold, Lowell and Whittier— the great
literary men, or to artists, and in art, poetry,
literature and philosophy the warning is
repeated : we are in danger of worshipping
our trawl.

This worship of success sometimes assumes
a grotesque and ridiculous phase, as when
(not to go further back than last week to
find an instance) a Senator of the United
States by way of allaying the war panic
gravely rose in the chamber of that delibera-
tive body and moved that we, the people
of the United States, should, without any fur-
ther regard to any other people or peoples of
any other land, proceed to the unlimited coin-
age of silver at the ratio of sixteen to one. I
claim, of course, no special knowledge in
financial matters; but that such a move-
ment would be a display of folly is evident
to every intelHgent public school boy.
Here the worship of success is seen in vain

2o8 The Reasonableness of Faith

and vulgar boastfulness, an utter failure to
recognize the simplest truths of life; a for-
getfulness that it is not possible for nations
any more than individuals to stand alone
and be a law to themselves. God has not
set us alone in the earth to go our own way,
regardless of the history or experience of
the nations of the earth. We cannot live
by different laws. No happy divinity spe-
cially superintends our destiny. It is not
true that we are quite unlike any other
people, much less that we may safely pre-
sume on that unlikeness.

Yet the spirit of so-called Americanism
which finds an expression so grotesque in
the motion of the Senator, is a spirit which,
if I mistake not, is widespread in our land.
It is an unclean and evil spirit and if it is
not driven forth by a cleaner, wiser, and
in the best sense holier spirit, it will yet work
us or our children great harm. It does not
always take a form so palpably dangerous
or grotesque as that which I have quoted, yet
I believe it pervades our 75,000,000 of people.
It lowers our standard of national responsi-
bility; it makes us careless and indifferent
often as to our own obedience to the calls of

Sacrifice to Their Net 209

public duty. It is a sin of overconfidence
in ourselves, our resources, our manner of
life, our methods of government. "There
never was a net like ours, or a trawl with
as big a mouth or so long a sack;" and so
we cry ''hurrah," and the incense of a false
worship rises. The whole land bows to the
great trawl, loses its head when confronted
with some gigantic success, and forgets how
the success was won; marvels at some vast
fortune, never asks how it was made, does
not indeed care so much how it was made,
and if a little of it goes to the public at the
death of the maker, why, then, the end is
certain, that vast fortune must be a good
thing for the people, and the man who made
it could not have been a bad man or a bad
citizen.

And the natural result of such mushy
and sentimental thinking is this: that we
are treated every now and then to a display
of vulgarity on a large scale. We laugh,
sneeringly at other nations for their enjoy-
ment of display; but let me ask where on
earth would such a wearisome and vulgar
noise have been made — not by one class, but
by all classes — over the wedding of two young

2IO The Reasonableness of Faith

people, as we with disgust and weariness en-
dured this late Fall. I hold it proven that
the worship of the net is a vulgar worship.

Furthermore, the adoption of a false
standard means the abandonment of a true
standard. Let success once be a national
aim, and then every consideration but suc-
cess is laid aside. It makes the business
man unscrupulous. It makes the working
man reckless and destructive. In obedience
to it, solemn contracts binding capitalist
and labourer are torn up as the interests of
either party dictate. In politics, national
honour and even national well-being are for-
gotten, in order to push private ambition.
And in the field of sport where gentlemen
meet or ought to meet (will the young men
in the church bear with me, this morning,
will they believe me when I say I speak that
which I know and testify to that which I
have seen), they do not race or row as they
did twenty years ago. The true idea of
sport, in its right place a healthy and ennob-
ling thing, is too often laid aside in obedience
to this inexcusable worship of success. Let
us win, no matter what happens, strain
rules or alter rules, play with professional-

Sacrifice to Their Net 211

ism, hunt over the land to get Hkely athletes
for our college, pay men's way through,
pile up great sums in our club funds — for
win we must. Yes, ''our own company,
right or wrong," says the business man.
*'My own fortune, right or wrong," says the
financier. ' ' My own college, right or wrong, ' '
cries the youth. "My own party, right or
wrong, "cries the politician. And "our own
country, right or wrong," cry we all.

What are we saying? Do we remember
how near for the Christian man this comes
to blasphemy? Were you baptized in the
name of your company, or your fortune,
or your college, or your party, or the United
States? I beg and pray you, my brothers
and sisters, let no such talk as this any
more pass unchallenged. To be a Christian
means in some small but real sense to be
the follower of Him Who said (and when He
said those words He gave us the watchword
for all time): "For this cause was I bom,
for this cause came I into the world, to bear
witness to the truth. ' ' And if, for any sake —
company, fortune, college, party, interest, or
even country's sake, w^e take sides against
the truth, then do we take sides against the

212 The Reasonableness of Faith

living Lord God of all righteousness and
right, and we undertake a pretty big con-
tract.

But yet a moment further. The worship
of the trawl blinds us to reality, closes our
eyes to great truths, stops our ears to the
calls of pressing dut^ which our very in-
terests make imperative. In this land of
ours are people of good brain and at least
average intelligence ; but if brain and intelli-
gence be concentrated on ourselves and our
own affairs, we shall not have time to think
sufficiently over the affairs of those who
are our immediate neighbours, and 'in whose
success and well-being our own is indissolu-
bly connected. We are pursuing, I beg to
say, a dangerous course in relation to the
labouring class in this country, a class on
whose developing prosperity the prosperity
of the whole community depends. Bear
with me, if you do not agree with me. I
am speaking with intense conviction. The
labouring people in this country need the
help and sympathy of the church. How
shall it be given to them, how shall we aid
them ? All the charities, public benefactions,
art galleries, museums, nay, the churches

Sacrifice to Their Net 213

themselves, cannot help the labouring people
as they can help themselves. The only
possible development of any class in this
country must come from within. We must
help them to help themselves.

Now what is the note of to-day ? Here you
all will agree with me — it is combination.
Larger combinations and more combinations
are inevitable. No doubt in the end the
result to the whole will be good; but times
of growth and change are times of pain
and danger, and disturbance and unsettle-
ment only imply that inevitable change is
making way. But how shall the principle
of combination — this inevitable principle —
how shall it have fair play among all our
people? Only by its application to all.
Let part combine, let the strong and the
wealthy combine, as they are doing, and
let opportunities for combination be grudg-
ingly afforded or denied altogether to the
poorer and the weaker elements in our
nation, and the unrighteousness and wrong
of this will not fail to produce widespread
evil and disaster. I am alluding to no
fancied danger, but to a very real danger
at our door. I speak with greatest plain-

214 The Reasonableness of Faith

ness. I hold it to be the duty of the Christian
Church and of Christian bishops and clergy
everywhere to help and encourage the poor
people of this land to continue in and to
develop their labour unions. Only by
these will they educate themselves, only
through them, or, rather, chiefly through
them, will they become truly American.
Labour unions will do more to break up
multi-nationalism than all the churches
can do. Let us have the American flag in
all the public schools, let it stand for what
it means ; but when the boys and girls leave
school let us help them to recognize that they
have no chance whatever to assert them-
selves and develop their own education and
prosperity in the future, but by recognizing
the law — and it is God's law — of association.
I repeat again, if the rich and the strong
find it necessary to combine, it must be
evident to all that there is further and more
pressing need for the poor and the weak to
do so.

Oh, things are not always going as they
should in this country of ours, and the time
has come when we must turn our attention
to other things than the great hauls of our net

Sacrifice to Their Net 215

and our trawl and recognize these sad facts.
We speak of our liberty, our prosperity,
and our greatness ; but we forget the hundreds
of thousands of those who are crushed into
misery and vice. In our own city there are
many whose earnings for fourteen hours'
work daily do not amount to more than a
dollar and a half a week. England is re-
ducing child labour enormously. Here —
and I know you will be startled to learn this —
child labour has absolutely increased a
hundred per cent, in the last fifteen years.
There were no tramps to speak of, twenty
years ago, in this country. The best esti-
mate, perhaps, says there are probably
thirty thousand in the State of New York
to-day. In England, arrests for drunken-
ness have enormously decreased; here they
increase. There are more homicides in the
State of New York, with its 6,000,000
people, than in the British Isles, with 40,-
000,000. And we cannot delude ourselves
into thinking that the foreign populations
produce the criminals. The very reverse
is true. These few facts — and they are
only a few of many thai might be adduced —
surely are worth thinking about.

2i6 The Reasonableness of Faith

Yet for the recognition of one more I
plead. More thought, more time, more
teaching and better for the children. Let
us give the children of this great city a
chance. I cannot close the sermons of
this year without once again pleading for
the children — the children that our neglect
in this city has grievously wronged — the
children whom we have left to the evil
chances of politics — the children whom
we are leaving in inadequate and often bad
schools, with no proper provision and often
no provision at all for physical or technical
training. Can we not make time to leave
the worship of the net and the trawl and give
some attention to Christ's lambs? I tell
you we cannot do better for the children,
till we have intelligent and honest city
government. We cannot have that till all
join to get it. We shall not do that till the
flower of our city's manhood and youth live
and work less exclusively to burn incense to
their trawl.

It is not pleasant, my friends, to dwell on
these things; but God knows I do so, this
morning, because I believe in my soul that
the man who poses as a teacher of men and

Sacrifice to Their Net 217

fails to do so is either, to-day, a fool and
does not know, or else a coward and does
not dare. And I hold that the worst of all
social enemies — and from such may God
deliver His Church — is the false prophet;
he indeed prophesies deceits.

Yes, we have a war on hand — what sort of
a war? We have no time so much as to
think on a wicked war that would be a dis-
grace everlasting to our nation and a set-back
to all mankind.. But there is a righteous
war, one in which we may not hire a sub-
stitute and for service in which let us, in the
name of God, gird up our wills. A war
from which, if we shrink back, future ages
will proclaim us traitors to the great cause
of mankind. War against the rough places
— though they be mountain high, they
must be laid low. War against the waste
wildernesses of evil — war against ignorance,
misery, selfishness and sin. To this war
we would pledge ourselves, O God. So
through Thy grace shall we yet do in this
broadest and fairest of Thy lands something
great for the human race, and so shall we
ourselves be not only the biggest and the
richest, but the greatest among the nations

2i8 The Reasonableness of Faith

of the earth. Help us, then, we pray Thee,
to cease from the worship of our net and our
trawl, and to kneel to the Son of Man.

December 29, 1895.

CLAIMS AND DUTIES OF OUR TIME

"And the men of the city said unto EHsha, Behold,
I pray thee, the situation of this city is pleasant, as
my lord seeth: but the water is naught, and the ground
barren,

" And he said. Bring me a new cruse, and put salt
therein. And they brought it to him.

"And he went forth unto the spring of the waters,
and cast the salt in there, and said. Thus saith the
Lord, I have healed these waters; there shall not be
from thence any more death or barren land.

" So the waters were healed unto this day, according
to the saying of Elisha which he spake." — // Kings,
it: ig-22.

Here we have the claim of the community
on the prophet, and the prophet's answer
to that claim. Both, it seems to me, sug-
gest to us vividly the circumstances, claims
and duties of our own time — society's
claims on us and our best answer to those
claims.

The distinctive feature of our modern
life in these United States has been individ-
ualism, an individualism perhaps more vig-
orous and in many ways more complete
than any that the history of our race has
yet afforded. All things have combined
219

2 20 The Reasonableness of Faith

to develop the individual. The religion
of each nation is part and parcel of its life.
Of necessity it fits that life as the glove fits
the hand, and each hand must have its
own glove. Hence our religious life has
also been individualistic.

Geographically, we are individualists. The
bigness of our national estate discovered
in the fulness of time and offering its rich
bosom to the industry of man, when man
began to be aware of the limitations of his
condition in Europe, beckoned him to an
enlargement of individual energy, offered
such rich rewards to him who had manli-
ness and wisdom to win them as had never
been offered man before.

Politically, our institutions predispose
us to individualism. The great and wise
men who laid the foundations of our free-
dom were deeply impressed with the failure
of those forms of government in Europe
that to them represented repression of the
individual rights of mankind.

Thus it comes to pass, that the bigness of
our land, the progressiveness of our found-
ers, and the timeliness of the discovery of a
virgin continent all combined to give a

Claims and Duties op Our Time 221

hopeful start and large reward to the push,
energy and courage of man. It is no exag-
geration then to say that what we see around
us to-day is chiefly the result of a generous
individualism. Our greatness, our wealth,
our boundless energy^a national expan-
sion that never had or is likely to have a
parallel — all witness what the intelligent
individual can accomplish.

Instinctively I think most intelligent
men feel this and, standing amazed at the
wonderful results achieved, they are not
prepared to give anything more than a very
grudging hearing to the voice of any teacher
or any movement that suggests that indi-
vidualism itself is not a goal, but only a way
of approach ; is not a final end, but one of the
means only to a great end. And yet,
beyond question, this is all individuahsm
is, and to claim more for it than this is to
turn the hands of progress backward, or to
seek to turn them to read amiss the lessons
of the past and the teachings of the present.
We Christians believe that the life and
teachings of Jesus Christ have for their
object the vindication of God's laws and
plans to men; and in that life and teaching

222 The Reasonableness of Faith

we find, as we would expect to find, fullest
provision for individual development, and
yet at the same time the clearest possible
sort of statement that this is not all. Christ
declares the inalienable right of each man
to self -fulfilment, to possession of himself,
to live at his fullest and best, to eat the
fruit of all his own labour under the sun.
The right to be, to think my own thoughts
unreproved of any, and so to live that at
last I may stand before the Son of ^lan.
Yes, stand; not cower or crawl, or even in
this sense kneel: but in the fulness of the
consecrated manhood of w^hich He in His
mercy has deemed me worthy — stand be-
fore the Son of Man, unrebuked, approved
at last by the Lord and King of men.

Let me be explicit here. I do not wish
anything I say should be misunderstood as
in the least derogating from the importance
of individual development, and the right to
the very fullest development under the law
of Christ. But I do say, beyond question,
that is not the whole of His teaching.
Any one who runs can read the significant
fact that larger ideas pervade it. The
social side of His gospel is at least as promi-

Claims and Duties of Our Time 223

nent as is the individual side. The crown
and end of all individuaHstic effort is found
in the sanctified and redeemed society. Lib-
erty there is, liberty everywhere, but liberty
within society. The end and aim of liberty —
the creation of the glorious, lasting and
pure society, justifying all the agonies and
satisfying all the longings of all the past.
Salvation itself is not the safety of the
individual only or chiefly. It is the creation
of a purified and stable social state. This
society Christ proclaimed. Its law He il-
lustrated and expounded. Its sure and
final triumph He predicted. He founded
and inspired His Church to be witness to it,
and here on earth we His followers are con-
secrated and called to make His words and
promises good. How shall we then dis-
charge our duty to the society and time in
which we find ourselves?

First, I think we shall do so by recognizing
the imperfect nature of the Christianity
which these circumstances and times have
specially tended to produce. The vast in-
dividual energy of our people moulds and
profoundly influences of course the religious
life of the people; and this life is at present

224 The Reasonableness of Faith

too individualistic. It could not but be so.
It works too much for its own hand, seeks
to achieve too much its own fortune, to fill
its own mouth, and be its own law. It is
hyperprotestant, in short. It stands rooted
in such adages as: **The first law of devel-
opment is the law of self-preservation."
No doubt it is the first law, but rudimentary
law, a law that belongs in its fullest applica-
tion to barbarous times and incoherent
civilizations. It is the law that gives claws
and teeth to the tiger; and strong hands
and feet to swing it out of danger, to the ape.
But surely the slow though almighty tides
of divine purpose have lifted us at least to a
point where we can see the beginnings of
the working of some larger, higher law than
this.

Protestant religions had their root idea in
conscience. Fidelity to conscience was the
motive power of their splendid past. The
times were stormy and dark, and in the
providence of God the starlight of con-
science was the best light of which the bulk
of men were capable. But starshine is not
sunshine, and it is wont to be obscured by
dark clouds. Conscience unassisted, un-

Claims and Duties of Our Time 225

inspired by love, may become a baleful fire.
Strength, often pitiless, characterizes its
rule. It is God's chosen instrument to
dash in pieces and lay low the evil growths
of time. It carries the blast of destruction
with it often, and that blast is indiscrimina-
ting. Every scholar knows that England
endured the enormities and follies of Charles
the Second, and for a time James the Second,
rather than risk the return to the too -iron
rule of a Puritan conscience. Conscience
ends in laws of prescription and proscrip-
tion, and in a law that cannot tie man to man.
Conscience is negative and delights in the
'Thou shalt not." It lacks balance, discrimi-
nation, proportion. It is magnificently brave
in the hour of trial and never shrinks before
calamity; but is almost as pitiless to the
cry of the child as it is to the cursing of the
blasphemer. It launches its Mayflower;
but it also burns its great and good Servetus
with green wood: and the poor, foolish
crones of Salem are not too small'or despicable
to escape its vindictiveness.

Conscience is the very mainspring of the
religion of individualism and marks and
stamps that religion always and every-

226 The Reasonableness of Faith

where, both with its splendid powers and
its great incompleteness. It cares little for
the law of love and repudiates its watch-
word of fellowship.

Now the simple fact to-day is, that much
of the popular and orthodox religion preva-
lent in our modern Protestant bodies is only-
Puritanism more or less watered down.
It lacks its rugged strength and it suffers
grievously from a want of adaptiveness.
Not all the preaching or writing or persecu-
ting or heresy trials of those who oppose it
make it fit comfortably or reasonably on
the limbs of the present.

Of course the chief reason for this is plain
enough. Men's thoughts, instincts and aims
are more and more consciously drawing
them into more involved and complex
social relations. The aim of every good
man is to help his fellow. There is more
pity for the weak, more comfort for the
sorrowing, more offers of aid to the over-
burdened, than ever before. Men no longer
willingly pass by the unfortunate who has
fallen among thieves. They are anxious
to help him and even bring him to their
own inn and put him on their own beast, if

Claims and Duties of Our Time 227

they only knew how. And instinctively
they feel that this is the best thing,
the most religious instinct within them.
They turn naturally to leaders and thinkers
in religious matters for vindication and
direction: and too often they are met
by these mere expounders of a more or less
dead Protestantism, who add to their con-
fusion by trying to direct the influences of
one age in language that altogether belongs
and has shaped itself to the impulses of
another.

The thing to do is to get back to Christ,
to study afresh His idea of what the Church
should be. And as I tried to say when I
began, as we do this, we find that the well-
being of the individual is subordinate to,
and exists for, the well-being of the body.
The idea of the Church is the idea of the
body; and this idea Protestantism has
almost lost. It has given us a bundle of
contending sects, each staking its existence
and its reason for being on some doc-
trinal statement of truth; some partial
statement of a partially apprehended truth.
There is no platform for permanent unity
to be made out of such thin, rotten boards

2 28 The Reasonableness of Faith

of perishable statement, and the moth and
the rust of time find among them congenial
food. We have surely to get back to
the simple idea that so splendidly mastered
the earliest age — a body having many
members, illustrating one Christian law,
and standing for that law against all the
world, because the world can only be
saved and advanced by accepting that
divine law.

My friends, believe me, I do not seek to
detract from the glory of the past, from the
splendid results achieved by all that Protes-
tant struggle stands for, when I speak thus.
I know something of the costliness of the
effort which has given us this land,

"Where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will."

God's spirit gave that struggle birth
and guided it to its triumphant conclusion.
Liberty is ours, and without cost to us we
reap that on which we bestow no labour.
But every age must have its own purgatory,
and know its own searching, purifying
power. What we have to achieve is not
liberty, but unity; and the struggle to win

Claims and Duties of Our Time 229

unity, lasting and precious, will search and
purify us, as the struggle to achieve liberty
purged the dross from our fathers.

This, I conceive, is the claim that the
community has a right to make on us; nay,
the claim that often unconsciously the com-
munity has made and is making on Christian
thought. The salt and saving power of the
religion of Jesus Christ must be put by us
in the fountain head of life, even as long ago
the prophet put it.

Briefly, three things, it seems to me, we
must do. They are the spring head of all
our life. The Church must educate and
the meaning of education must widen and
deepen for us all. If I believe in my con-
science that the purpose of God for me
is to spend my life in making men see that
they can only live perfectly with each other
in obeying Christ's law, this will profoundly
change my ideas as to the way I should
bring up my boys and girls. It will no
longer be a desirable thing to me to bring
up a son, if I have one, with the idea that the
first end and purpose of his life is to make a
fortune or to keep intact the fortune I give
him. To bring him up with an idea so

230 The Reasonableness of Faith

partial and imperfect as that, is to do what
I can to make him a moral cripple, who
must limp behind and not lead the thought
of his time. The education that God in-
trusts me to impart to that life of his, must
be one that seeks to bring out and lead up
all that is best and most helpful in his nature,
all that can serve his generation best, be-
cause it understands and is ready to obey
its divinely ordained law of growth.

Again, to accept Christ's law as the law
for all life, means to be separate, means to
be vowed to a holy separateness from evil of
which the most consecrated Puritan scarcely
dreamed. The separateness proscribed by
Protestantism no longer satisfies us. It is
not something merely done or left undone,
some religious observance kept, some gift
rendered, some creed repeated or profession
made; but we stand amazed and inspired
before the certainty and unalterableness
of the divine law. The law of God is the
law of the universe. The world was made
to order, the very atoms march to tune, and
I am called intelligently to place my atom
life within the splendid obedience of that
law. I came from God and to God I must

Claims and Duties of Our Time 231

come — not part of me, not a seventh of me,
not come to Him in my Church, in my
family prayers, or even at His holy table;
but come to Him with all my life, from the
first cry of babyhood to the last weary sob
with which the tired man puts off his body.
With all between these I must come to God
with the tale of all I have done or left undone
and His law must search me and try me,
even as silver is tried in the fire, and to the
judgment of Infinite Wisdom, Mercy and
Love, I must yield myself up. I cannot
escape. I cannot palter — I dare not if I
could.

Tell me, is this not separateness ? As I
realize it, I get a holy contempt for the
pett}^ laws and maxims by which men live;
for I know myself to be a sharer in the vast
law of God revealed in Jesus Christ His Son.
So, too, as I realize the forces that are be-
hind me and how truly I am a fellow-worker
with God, weak and sinful though I be, I
can know myself brave — brave to speak
that which I hear from Him, bravely in-
dependent of self-interest or worldly policy;
careless of whether few men or many, great
men or poor men, are my associates in

232 The Reasonableness of Faith

tasks that are divinely set and shall surely
be divinely crowned. I may only see a few
yards before my face; but I know that the
forces of the universe itself are obeying the
wish and will of the King. That though life
seems often a purposeless struggle, yet amid
all its confusion and murk man must at last,
since He is the one child of God, born of one
Father and heir of one home — must be
aware of his brotherhood. And that knowl-
edge must profoundly alter and save, purify
and inspire every relation with his fellow.

All life is God's life, and all law divine
law. Love, not hate, is at the heart of things ;
and unity, not division; fellowship, not
conflict, shall be the result of things. All
of self-seeking and self-seekers must at last
die. They who love their own souls only
must perish; but they who wait on the
Lord of all love and law shall renew their
strength, till at last they shall dare to stand
crowned with a radiant and immortal man-
hood before the Son of Man.

March, 1892.

CREATION AND THE FALL

I AM to try, this evening, my friends and
fellow- workers, to say some things to you
about the Creation and Fall. I think we
might sum up what we know about the
first of these in this sentence: Matter is
the cradle of spirit. There was a time, as
you know, when it was supposed to be
necessary to divide all creation, so far as
its history is concerned, into definite and
clearly traced epochs. Well, one thing at
least we know, that the conclusions as to
the process and method of creation which
obtained among best informed people but a
few generations ago are now provably
wrong. It is not the business of the
Christian Church — and therefore it is not
our business on Ash Wednesday after-
noon— to bother our heads about various
theories of how things came to be. What
we want to do is only to deal with these
things so far as in the dealing with them we
will gain light and help for the conduct of
233

234 The Reasonableness of Faith

our own lives, for the building up and the
deepening of our own faith, for the prosecu-
tion of the difficult work which confessedly
lies before us. I might recommend to you
some books that are interesting and in-
spiring on the questions suggested by Cre-
ation and the Fall, and you might read
them with profit; but when you have
read them all through, and boiled them
down, it just comes to this: the advan-
tage to you — not intellectually, but spirit-
ually— will be an advantage that can be
measured just by the amount in which your
own spiritual life is made to you reasonable,
useful, purposeful. There are one or two
things we may be clear about.

First, God did not in the past work in a
different way, on the whole, from the way He
works in the present. There is one thing
that we are slowly coming to the conclusion
about with certitude. It is this: God's
work is continuous. He works by certain
methods. We gather our experiences to-
gether— those experiences stretching over
perhaps thirty centuries with which his-
tory deals, scarcely perhaps quite so many
as thirty — and having compared and tab-

Creation and the Fall 235

ulated our experiences, we call the record
of them laws, and we say God works by law.
We merely mean by this, that we have no
other record of the way God works than
the records which our experiences for a few
centuries have enabled us to gather. As
we study these records, we see an in variable-
ness in God's way of working. We see a
continuity — one thing leads to another.
We see that God does not work by jerks
and fits and starts; but in the true sense of
the word His work is orderly. We do not
mean by this that God does not employ
the sudden forces any more than He em-
ploys His slow forces; He employs both.
To illustrate. A storm is a sudden force.
An earthquake which strikes us as some-
thing absolutely instantaneous is instantane-
ous only from our standpoint. Ages and ages
have been preparing it. And so the fact that
we see sometimes a suddenness in God's
(I am speaking now of the physical uni-
verse) revelations of Himself in the phys-
ical universe does not a bit mean — ex-
cept we see in a very childish way — that
God's power is broken up, but simply that
the processes of what we speak of as in-

236 The Reasonableness of Faith

finite slowness have at last made them-
selves evident to us.

When we come to think of our relation-
ship to created things, we have got to recog-
nize the fact that the very same laws or
record of experiences which obtain in cre-
ated things obtain among ourselves. We
cannot expect to live in a world which took
millions and millions of ages to bring it to a
certain point, and then by any crying and
praying on our part to suddenly change it.
There are lots of people who seem half the
time at feud with the work God has given
them to do. They want those forces, that,
in the infinite wisdom of God, made them
what they are, to suddenly change things
for them. It is specially the peculiarity of
an active age. There is no God or hope
or eternity for us anywhere, except we see
God working always and every day. And
if that is so, how silly for us, instead of
remembering that we are but fellow-workers
with God, to start out to work after our
own idea. Ah ! friends, that may sound to
some of you a far away theory; but it is a
working theory. It is all very well, so long
as the trend of daily life happens to suit our

Creation and the Fall 237

emotions for the time being, but when it
strikes athwart the current of our wishes
and suddenly the sun goes in and the flowers
bloom no more, and the sweetness dies out
of life's breeze, then we want a change, and
cry and wail because we cannot have things
the way we want them.

If we do not see that God is as truly in
the wind that blows and whistles around
our life's tree as in the breeze that
spreads its boughs to the Spring air, we
have not got a working faith to carry us
through life. It is all very well when life
is at high tide and youth at the helm and
each little wave seems a reflected smile of
God — ^but we cannot live always that way,
because life must put on its dark and dull
face for us and must put its heavy hand on
us, and the sorrows of others, as dear Long-
fellow said — "Do more than cast a pitying
shadow over us;" — for we are part of the
world, its sorrow and joy, its passion and
pain, part of its great throbbing life. Woe
to us, if we cannot see it, that that life is
ruled by God. Peace to us, if we know,
that neither things present nor things to
come can make it anything else but ruled

238 The Reasonableness of Faith

by God. God won't work in jerks spiritu-
ally with us any more than He will work
so physically. The things that we do are
part of His purpose, the things that we suffer
are part of His will, the tasks on which He
sends us are chosen tasks. And yet, there
exists in us, just by virtue of the position
we hold in creation, that wonderful likeness
to God which means the independence of
each, that we are not bound down to any
tasks, not tied by fetters to any duty.

Take a simple illustration. It helped me.
Columbus four centuries ago sailed across
the deep, and since then ten thousand times
ten thousand keels have followed in his
wake; and every keel drove its own furrow,
every helmsman had to hold his own rudder
true. Millions of hands spread the sails,
sometimes in the cold and bitter blasts. A
thousand times ten thousand men with ex-
pectant eyes looked across the sea to catch
the first sight of land. They were all fol-
lowers of the first great discoverer. That
is one way.

There is another. That is man's way of
doing things. He sets to work with spade
and blasting powder and riven rock re-

Creation and the Fall 239

spends to his blow. A broad pathway is
opened in the land, and on a narrow space
iron rails are laid down and on them men
put narrow cars, and the cars are put on
wheels, and each wheel has got its flange,
and each flange clasps its steel rail, and
each car is linked with its coupling to the
potency of the engine and that, obedient to a
lever, rushes impetuously on, and, without
wreck and ruin, the car cannot leave the
rail or the flange slip from its steel grip.
Impetuously and irresistibly, beyond all
choice of its own, the iron horse does its
work and drags across the face of earth
the will, the purpose, the toil of man. That
is the way in which man works for his end — •
useful and necessary in itself.

But it cannot be the way he directs his
life. It is the way he is called on to exer-
cise his will, the way he conquers nature,
the way in which God whispers to him of
his likeness to Himself. But in his higher
law of being, in the working out of the destiny
of his own immortality, he has got to be the
discoverer, who, with trembling, cold hand,
with questioning eye, with aching frame, with
peering glance tries to follow other great

240 The Reasonableness of Faith

discoverers, and not simply the pounding
carriage back of the irresistible power
bound by an iron chain to a dull track.

Follow out the simile and you get some-
thing, it seems to me, of the idea in which
we stand, brothers and sisters, to the things
around us. We are not bound as cars to
engines. We are laid as keels in the stormy
sea by the men who discover the continent
to which they go, each making its own voy-
age, each steering its own ship, each trying
to get to its own goal, each guided by its
own star, with this difference, that for those
who bravely follow — as the hymn puts it —

*' All journeys end in welcome to the weary."

We have clearly to recognize the fact
that while God allows us to possess these
instinctive, directing powers, they never mas-
ter us in the blind way in which the engine
drags the truck. They do serve as guides
and general directors of life. That is the
relation, it seems to me, in which we stand
to created things. All creation obeys, first
of all, without hesitation and without
sin. It has no power to do aught else but
trundle after the fiat of God drawn by ir-

Creation and the Fall 241

resistible force to a goal of which it is in-
sensible but which may be very good.

Such cannot be our work. There comes
from the tremendous and mystic likeness
which we have got to God that which links
us to Him in purpose, or allows us to divorce
ourselves from Him — the possibility of un-
righteousness in order to the possibility of
righteousness.

We do not want to ignore the fact that
everything in God's universe — His very
dust — exists for a purpose, exists as the
result of God's act. There are a great
many people to-day who have a sort of
hopeless idea that the universe somehow
came to be, long ago, by the will of God, and
every now and then, like a meddling friend,
He puts His fingers down to see that the
old ball rolls in even groove. That simply
leads to atheism. The wise and reverent
long ago felt it could not be so. As Emer-
son says: —

"God of the granite and the rose,
Soul of the sparrow and the bee,
The ceaseless tide of being flows
Through countless channels, Lord, from Thee,
It leaps to life in grass and flowers,
Through every stage of being runs;
While from creation's radiant towers
Its glory shines in stars and suns. "

242 The Reasonableness of Faith

Some people turn away from that sort of
idea and say that it is Pantheism. That
is all wrong. It is extraordinary how
people fail to see that Pantheism does not
mean that God is in everything. On the
contrary, Pantheism says that everything
is God. To use a simple illustation, Pan-
theism says: *'I and my clothes are one.
My coat is I." Paulinism says, Christian-
ity says: ''God clothes Himself with light
like a garment; but the light is not God.'*
Do not be afraid to hold on, in these days,
when the immensity of creation is opening
up to us the blessed thought that God's
clothing is what you see. He is in it.
Every outline of it speaks of the majesty
of His proportions. To use again a physical
illustration, every beam of it speaks of the
Divine Soul within. Every beauty of it
hides and veils a greater beauty.

You remember the old legend. How
true it is of truth here. They say truth
first of all appears as only a shadow to those
who seek it, a shadowy form that brings
with her some suggestion of purity, of
aspiration, of infinite desire. And then,
after years, the man seeks her with single

Creation and the Fall 243

eye and more self-sacrificing purpose, and
the shadow becomes more substantial — to
the ancients that was the outline of the
gods. And then still from his hands there
drop things that have grown insignificant
and unimportant to him, and he lays still
aside every weight and gives himself up
still more to the pursuit of truth, and at
last he sees a glorious woman before him.
And as years go on, from time to time she
lifts her veil and gives him a glance from her
starry eyes. And he still pursues her, for
he knows, in the far beyond, that he
shall possess her, and have her for his very
own.

How exquisitely true of what God is !
First a shadow, then a veil partially drawn,
then a glowing face, and then a possessed
life. That is not Pantheism; it is only the
veil. We have got to hold it fast. There
is nothing else to bring us face to face with
truth to-day. All that is, is of God. Noth-
ing exists but by His permission. Nothing
is held together but by His holy will, He
is in all, or the all could not be. He must be
in pain and death as He is in life. And,
therefore, as David said long ago, God to

244 The Reasonableness of Faith

him was as much in hell as He was in
heaven.

One more thought about this, one sug-
gested by creation. This being so, why is
it that all nature seems to be given up to
expression? Everything expresses itself.
The flower is the expression of the root.
The grass, the expression of the earth.
The blue sky, the expression of the sun-
light. So the sea and so on. But when I
look into myself, there seems to be another
law. Why is it that I cannot get this ex-
pression? Why is it that again and again
I am under constant and ceaseless repres-
sion that is my daily duty? Why must I
get up in the morning and feel I cannot ex-
press what I have got to express? My
whole hope to do and be good is to keep the
cork in life and repress myself. Here is
the lesson creation teaches. How many
ages the world we see took before it found
its expression ! They said long ago, that it
took seven days; we know better now.
Later, they said it took seven ages; we
know better now. Later, they said per-
haps it took seven millions of years. We
know now that we have no arithmetic by

Creation and the Fall 245

which the ages could be traced. The world
went on before the birds sang or the flowers
bloomed — ages and ages were laid in pain
before the completion of nature which you
look on with delight could be yours to
teach you. Oh, what infinitude of years
had each to make its own deposit and live
its own life ! What time it took before the
grass of earth grew to the glory of man !

Can we foolishly think, that if it took
ages and ages and ages to make this
bulb of creation, we are going to get the
flower of man in a week ? That he is going
to blossom out here into all God intended
him to know and do? Science is going to
come as the voice of God and say, ''Thus
saith the Lord." You people who want
the full expression of your life before you
are thirty, thirty millions of years may pass
before you get the full expression of your
life — the life that came from, and goes to
God.

"All things that the Father hath are
mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of
mine, and shall shew it unto you." Jesus
Christ Himself says that every single thing
which the Creator Father had was His.

246 The Reasonableness of Faith

The simile, you know, is the first-born son.
The first-born son got the inheritance.
The end and object of creation — what
is it? It is to give to the Son. He
is speaking of creation as it affected
Christ. Here is a whole world, perhaps a
whole bunch of races — all that the Father
hath given to His Son. The end of creation,
the purpose and meaning of it, that He
should enter into it and possess it. O
friends, when we grasp what that means !
That God has given over everything to
Christ, that through all His members,
through all His weak children, through all
the different co-operative parts that go to
make His body, the possession of God may
come. Thus we find Him spoken of again
and again as the First-born among many
brethren — leading out these brethren, show-
ing what the purpose of their life is, ex-
plaining what their future is to be. The
brethren existed to produce Him — that is
what it amounts to. If we could grasp the
meaning of that ! Man existed to produce
Christ — the First-born among many breth-
ren. The family idea existed to produce
Christ. We go back a little bit and we say,

Creation and the Fall 247

just in the same way, matter existed to
produce mind. Then, it seems to me, you
get some idea of the co-partnership of things.
All God's vast world-matter existing at last
to produce a thought — something that was
able to enter into the secret of the Divine
and share His rule. All God's vast world of
men existed, that there should rise at last
a flower from the midst of them capable of
explaining to them all the purpose of the
existence of all of them.

Just as you see a boy bring home a round,
ugly root and put it in a glass jar, and
through the hole in the bottom the long
trailing roots depend into the water, and
it looks like a thing without life or beauty.
But as weeks and months pass there springs
from it the waxy greenness of a stem and a
pyramid of buds, and at last it bursts into
a bouquet of sweetness. Jesus exists in His
sweetness, in His life, in His power, in His
beauty, in His divinity, to explain to the
bulbs of men their purpose, their value —
their God.

Again, there was a round bulb of earth
which seemed impossible of life — rough,
torn, rent with internal convulsion. Ages

248 The Reasonableness of Faith

pass — will it ever be anything but a lifeless
ball ? At last there came a shoot, and there
shot forth a strange thing called life. And
again it shot forth a strange thing called
beauty. And still again it shot forth, and
there was a stranger thing called man. All
those ages the bulb existed that man might
come, and for untold ages man existed that
Christ might come. And everything lifts
itself up w^hen it looks at that last flower of
creation, and says — ''Why, life is worth
living that Christ may come!" — and that
is the meaning of Creation.

And what is the meaning of that strange
struggle of life called in Genesis the Fall?
In the moral sphere there must be a parallel
to the physical. That is all I understand
about it. Physical excellence is only
achieved by struggle. Moral excellence is
only achieved by struggle. There is no other
way. You have got to have the possibility
of sin that you may have the power of
righteousness. Yon have got to forego in-
nocence, that you may have character. There
is nothing in the Bible, as I understand it,
nothing in the teaching of Christ to the
Apostles, which makes it necessary for me

Creation and the Fall 249

to believe that men were ever better than
they are now. Men never fell consciously
from a higher state into a lower. Their fall
was only a change of experience. There is
no other way in which men could be men
but by sharing the law that went to make
the bulb blossom. The very principles
under which the bulb must blossom effected
all blossom, effected the blossom of the
planet, the blossom of the race, the blossom
of the man, the blossom of the God-Man.
Jesus would not live a different life from us.
How did He get His holiness, His perfection ?
By pain and death. He had to die as He
had to be bom. He learned obedience —
how ? Only by one way — suffering, the law
of the bulb to the lily, the law of the planet
to man, of man to God.

Created us that we should be conformed
to the image of His Son through all the
falls, through all the cataclysms, physical
or moral. We ourselves know the rising of
the bulb life into the lily.

WHOSOEVER SHALL SEEK TO SAVE
HIS LIFE SHALL LOSE IT

"Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it:
and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it."

— St. Luke, xvii: jj.

At least eight times, with sHghtly vary-
ing emphasis, Jesus Christ gave this thought
to His disciples. It was difficult, it seemed
contradictory; they did not understand it.
I do not think we understand it to-day.
The Church has failed not so much for
want of zeal or charity, or even from com-
prehensiveness; but more largely, I believe,
from want of adaptability than anything
else — the faith of adaptability, the faith that
believes in the truth given her — and so
confidently assured of that truth that she
goes forth under the direction of the Spirit
of God to adapt herself, age by age — adapt
her teaching, her worship, her methods her
formularies of doctrine, to the growing,
and so to the changing needs of mankind.
That is the faith that the Church has lacked,
which I believe we lack to-day.
251

252 The Reasonableness of Faith

I do not think any of us can do much
good in the world except we find out what
that one good thing is that God wants us
to do. It is not given to many men to do
many things. It is given to all men and
women to do some things; and the one
thing I think we want to try to do is to find
out the thing that God has given us to do.
Let each man speak for and judge himself.
The one thing I believe God has given me
to speak about, to work for persistently,
with such strength as I have got, is this
gospel of adaptation — is to tell men, as I
believe it to be a message from the living
God, that faith in God has no fear of the
changes which God himself must work
under His law of life, which is a law^ of ever
changing adaptation. A man may work
till he dies, yet if he does not adapt his tools
to his toil he will achieve little. He does
not take a rake to open a coal mine, nor
does he set about tending a violet-bed with
pick and dynamite. And just so in the
work which God has given His Church to do.
She may not lack faithful men, nor learned.
Money may be at her disposal, prestige
behind her efforts; but if she have not faith

Whosoever Shall Seek His Life 253

enough to adapt herself to the times in
which she lives, she will fail to witness as
the voice of the living God to those times.

We are trying — we have tried — to adapt to
our little comer of the great world near
our church, our teaching and methods and
service. We believe that the public salva-
tion— I use the word in its widest sense —
the well-being of city, of state and of the
union itself, depends on the acceptance of
our gospel by the people at large. If we do
not succeed in commending the truth for
which we are professors to the age in which
we live, it does not matter, to my mind, in
what we do succeed. In home, in school, in
city and in state, in business and commercial
life, in law or in the Senate, there can be no
steady advance, there can be no permanent
prosperity, unless all of these institutions
are builded on, supported by, the princi-
ples of Jesus Christ. Do you realize this
is revolutionary doctrine? I do not think
you do; none of us do. At most, we
have at times but an inkling of how revo-
lutionary it is. Individual salvation was
not Christ's aim on earth, must not be
the Church's aim now. I have said noth-

254 The Reasonableness of Faith

ing tending to make little of individual
salvation. It is the beginning of God,
not His end. The saved man is saved
that he may strive for the saved society.
A mere truism, you say. Yes, but a truism
which, if accepted, revolutionizes our prac-
tice.

One of the deadliest of the weapons of evil,
one of the most successful in opposing the
kingdom of God, is to make men believe
in a salvation that, though true in letter,
is lying in spirit, which so uses the word of
the gospel as to deny the spirit of its Christ.
As Shakespeare long ago put it,

**Be those juggling fiends no more believed
Who palter to us in a double sense,
Who keep the word of promise to our ear
And break it to our hope. "

We call on Christ to save our souls, and
under our breaths pray that He may let our
lives alone. We have praised a Christ and
prayed to a Saviour who long ago did all
things for us, while we half inwardly hope
that Pie v/ill not demand too much of us in
personal self-denial or action. And so a
scheme of salvation, as it is called, dubbed
with His ever blessed name, has too often

Whosoever Shall Seek His Life 255

become a thing to sneer at. And not merely
sneerers, but many honest, God-loving souls —
feeling how utterly alien it is to the mission
and purpose of Jesus, and yet deeply dis-
trustful of their own ability to state the
things which others state falsely in terms
that are more true and more forceful — sadly
turn away from a church they feel no longer
represents the ideals and purpose of the
Saviour. I do not scruple to say that
much that passes under the name of re-
ligion to-day is a hollow and blasphemous
sham.

What is the evident cause of failure in our
life to-day? We are a people where each
man works for himself, each for his own
hand chiefly or only. The surpassing temp-
tation of our land, our institutions, our
new, undeveloped country, with its freedom
of egress and ingress, and its vast capacities,
is to lure each man on to work for his own
hand. Amazed at our own temporary suc-
cess, drunken with the prospects of growing
fortune, we forget that a people and a
society where each man works for himself
alone cannot be made to hold together.
Egotism is the sin of the hour — self-seeking

256 The Reasonableness of Faith

the infidelity of to-day. And so long as
religion does not interfere with these our
plans and purposes, we welcome it, and,
welcoming it, make it a blasphemous per-
version of the religion of Jesus Christ.
However it keeps the word that is promised
to our ear, it breaks it to the world's hope;
and holy God and honest man will have
nothing to do with it.

The God of nations has called aloud to
us to cease mocking Him, to cease our
worship of gain. We are in danger of be-
coming a nation of money-makers, a nation
which honours money-makers because they
are money-makers, and for no other reason.
I say it advisedly — men honour the man
who makes money badly and makes lots
of it, more than they honour the man
who makes money honestly, makes money
so as to help his fellow-man, but makes
little of it. We depend on money for every-
thing. We are prepared to put so-called
Christian money to almost any use — willing
to put it even to a bad use, in order to win
great ends — good ends they would call them.
And so under conditions like these, life must
become one long contest, business nothing

Whosoever Shall Seek His Life 257

more than an effort to outwit each man
his fellow. It has become, in short, as
most of you know, too often little better
than a great gamble where successful players
are successful because they throw with
loaded dice.

Briefly let me repeat. I say nothing
against those blessed old doctrines which
we learned at our mother's knee. A reason-
able, humble hope in individual salvation
each of us may, nay, should entertain.
Those teachings of Jesus which convey to
us this priceless blessing are fraught with
larger, not lesser meanings as the times
roll on. We pray to Him that in His mercy
we may be saved, counted worthy of sharing
His everlasting life; we pray for the re-
mission of our sins. But let us not blind
ourselves. We cannot commend our Lord
to others by any mere acceptance of these
precious truths. We cannot escape our
duty in this existence by solacing ourselves
with comforting visions of what may await
us in the next. We dare not seek simply
to safeguard our life in this world, while
we let all that Jesus proclaimed to be His
Father's legacy to men be denied and

258 The Reasonableness of Faith

trampled under foot by the greedy crowd
which is striving at any cost for money.
His promises are not empty promises, His
laws not visionary laws.

"Whosoever shall save his life shall lose
it: whosoever shall lose his life shall pre-
serve it. " Such words cannot be mis-
taken. Go not away, this morning, my
friends, saying, "Ah! it is beautiful, but a
dream; a vision that gleams as the rainbow
gleams, and then vanishes away." No, it
is the very truth of the immutable God.
He whispers it to you in your conscience;
He presses it on you by all the teachings of
experience. And by a louder voice even
than these God is calling on us to-day —
the voice of events present and pressing.
Deaf, blind and sodden indeed of soul must
the man be who does not hear these voices.
Let us go on seeking chiefly each man his
own pleasure, power, wealth, and we are a
people undone. Yes, and for all our profes-
sions, however loudly we chant our creeds or
beautifully celebrate our worship, we are
a people that know not Christ and obey
not His law. He will be with us. He will
strengthen us. He will lead us forward; but

Whosoever Shall Seek His Life 259

only if we follow Him: and following Him
through all the confusions and doubts of the
present, duty will grow fairer and plainer
day by day. And through the growing
capacities of a great and a growing people,
we shall devote ourselves as fellow-workers
with the Christ to change the life of this
our country until it is more according to
His will; to bring not merely prosperity
after any mundane conception of it, but the
very life of God which is the life of man to the
acceptance and realization of mankind.

And so while we have time and energy
and voice and strength, let us struggle for a
fairer day, a purer state, a nobler manhood,
and a firmly united people.

November, 1896.

GOD'S IMAGE IN MAN

"And God said, Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness: and let them have dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

"So God created man in his own image, in the
image of God created he him ; male and female created
he them. " — Genesis, i: 26-27.

"Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth
not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that,
when he shall appear, we shall be Hke him; for we
shall see him as he is." — / John, Hi: 2-3.

The same story at the beginning and at
the end of the Bible. God could have
created a world painless, sinless, pure,
with seas of glass and skies of unchanging
azure, a world where struggle and death
never enter, a world of unruffled calm.
He could, too, have called into existence
beings fitted for that undisturbed, reposeful
land. But one thing He could not do,
though He be Almightiness itself — He could
not rear men in such a world. For, how-
ever our knowledge of ourselves may cause
us to distrust ourselves, to deplore what we
have been, or to fear what we may be,
261

262 The Reasonableness of Faith

we are coming more and more to believe
that man is a little God — God in minature,
God in embryo — that we are set here as seeds
to grow into plants, put into earth's ground as
cuttings to grow into fruit trees fair and
useful; put here as infants, through storm
and stress, to attain the fulness of man-
hood; beings, moreover, who carry in
their souls the divine instinct of rule; and
since they are her rulers, earth must offer
them but a rugged breast. She will yield
them nourishment, but only on compulsion.
The old fable of the Roman she-wolf has
got the true secret of manhood's struggle
at the root of it — a race born to rule must
be reared by an unkindly nurse. Only as
they squeeze her cruel breast can they grow
strong. And so for the rulers of the future.
For them the sea prepares her storms; for
only by ruling her can they become lords of
the ocean. And when man seeks to woo
him a bride more beautiful than sea or land
can be — Knowledge, his would-be partner,
turns from him her averted face, and he
only wins her by toil more arduous, that
entails a keener suffering, than to the con-
queror of earth or sea. And so the story

God's Image in Man 263

runs far back as we are able to trace it, far
into the future as we may imagine it. Life
itself is only to be held and enjoyed at the
cost of ceaseless care and toil. The school
down here is a hard school, and very
surely we know that there is no room within
nature's great school-room, wide as it is, for
the inefficient, the vicious or the lazy.

Yet, friends, let us look clearly at this
matter. What matters it? What school
can be too hard for those who are destined
to share powers that to-day we call divine?
What matters it that the struggle be fierce,
that wherever we turn, whatever progress
we propose to ourselves, our way seems to be
walled up; that physically I hold my life
as a challenge against death on all sides;
that intellectually, painfully, step by step, I
rise above my ignorance? Morally, I only
overcome the beast within by an unceasing
struggle that wrings from me many a groan ;
for there are two natures within me, and I
am torn first one way and then the other,
and this desperate strife rests on me more
heavily than the others — the moral strife.
Are these three realms of strife not suffi-
cient? Can any further struggle await me,

264 The Reasonableness of Faith

as I pass on toward fuller development?
Yes, assuredly, there is even a fourth. In
my advancement as a social being, terrible
conditions of conflict lie ahead. My higher,
my more finally adjusted relations to my
fellow man are only to be won as my physi-
cal, intellectual and moral prizes are won —
at the cost of perpetual vigilance and self-
denial. A social strife awaits us all. Where
it shall lead us we do not know. What
sacrifices, what travail pangs it may bring
forth, God only knows. But, 0 beloved,
let us meet the future with faith in God and
a big heart. Let us gird up the loins of our
minds to face whatever struggle God may
send to our race — a struggle not to be
avoided, but courted by the sons of God.
And now at once arises the question:
Is there anything in life that can justify
this fourfold struggle? Is the prize that
life offers me worth such a contest? How
shall we answer this question?

If we are proposing to ourselves the likeli-
hood of continuing our self-appointed toil
in the future, we naturally ask ourselves
how our race has fared in this regard in the
past; and, as we search into the subject,

God's Image in Man 265

we are confronted with some extraordinary
truths. We see that, beyond question, a
mere instinct to Hve has tided our race
over the most difficult times. When
life, according to our estimate, was most
worthless, when it was held by the
slightest thread, when awful plagues and
pestilence threatened it with obliteration
(just as, to-day, a whole part of the Hindoo
nation will be swept away by the inter-
fering hand of God), and the conditions
of living were so hard that man might be
said to have fared worse than the beasts —
this strange, this all-compelling instinct to
live, upheld, like a life-belt, the race. Men
could not be persuaded to take their lives.
No combination of hunger, or misery, or
desperate oppression justified the sin of
suicide. Only when their women were
shame-stricken, or their warriors conquered,
could the barbarian admit that self-sought
death was other than a shame. This
fact of an instinctive determination to live
is among the most wonderful that an in-
creasing knowledge of the past yields to us.
But to-day there is a certain looseness in
the sense of responsibility to life. We

266 The Reasonableness of Faith

feel, everywhere, that men do not condemn
the suicide quite as strongly as they used to.
We are passing from one method of thought
to another. We are beginning to see that
we must justify our lives to ourselves by
other means than that of instinct. We are
discovering new thoughts, new truths about
our life, and these seem at first to teach us
that the prize is not worth the ru.nning.
There is no question about it, I think, that
this new knowledge coming to men has
this effect — it loosens old ties, it has not
yet time to knit new ones, and in the interval
you have got to face doubt, fear, uncer-
tainty and disintegration. Instinct has
carried us on to our own age, or almost to it ;
but to-day, beyond question, we are aware
that instinct alone is not sufficient: it must
be reinforced. And the question has got
to be answered, where shall we from human
experience and human knowledge find sup-
port for our desire to live and grow at any
cost? Instinct must be justified by the
clearing light of reason.

Now here, at first sight, new knowledge
seems to contradict this old and most virile
impulse of living at any cost. It says,

God's Image in Man 267

with considerable insistence, I must shatter
your dream. You have dreamed of a
golden age behind you — far behind. Such
an age never existed. Aye, says pitiless
and remorseless truth, as your golden dream
has faded into the dim, you have dared to
transform it into one of a golden age before
you — I tell you it never can exist. It never
can exist, for the world that has seen your
rise, has contemplated your painful struggle,
the world whose children you are, which
has been your cradle and must be your
tomb — it is not a young, but an old, gray
world already. Its heart beats more slowly,
year by year; nay, it is owing to its dying
vitality that you can live on it at all. As
you point forward towards a golden age,
the earth slowly, but steadily, decays
beneath your feet. The chill of age is
creeping over its bosom already. Its central
fires, on the permanence of which your
existence depends, must at last die at its
heart. And then earth will care not for
you, nor even for your race. Noth-
ing can remain of all your strivings,
aspirings, prayings, but a small, outworn,
cold, dead planet, on which grows no green

268 The Reasonableness of Faith

blade of grass, on which ebbs and flows no
life-giving sea, a lonely and a dead thing,
so far as man is concerned, rolling purpose-
lessly through space — the deserted and
ruined home of a race that has risen wonder-
fully, striven marvellously, stood for a
brief time with a hope nothing less than
divine in its eyes, and at last sunk to the
dust from which it came forth. This
is probably all true. And when these facts
are held up to instinct, instinct begins to
tremble and people begin to commit suicide.
The man that loses his money blows out
his brains. Even the child that is corrected
at home, in some cases in this country, puts
an end to its little life. How can mere
instinct meet such terrible disclosures ? The
old virile strength that held the barbarian
to his life is gone, and the new strong strength
that makes us feel that life is worth living
has not yet fully come. Why, instinct is
trembling before the unconscious revela-
tions of nature, and the fact that the golden
age is doubtful makes man doubtful of
himself. He feels the breath of the coming
time whispering to him that the world, as
the old Bible puts it, and the things that

God's Image in Man 269

are within, must suffer change — even as
the dead, dry leaf falls from the tree. There-
fore, in view of this new knowledge, the
impulse and stimulus of instinct is quite
insufficient, and instinct is breaking down.

To the assistance, then, of instinct comes
religion, and religion tells us that it is true.
The struggle were not worth what it costs,
if the hope of our life ended here ; if all that
is noble and all that is base ends together
with the passing of that brief hour, in the
history of a briefly-lived planet which we
call earth. Since now are we the sons of
God, we can without fear steadfastly behold
the dissolution of the cradle of our race,
wherein for a little time we have been
rocked as babes are rocked. Long ere it
falls to pieces we have outgrown it. As
well suppose our life is ended with this
earth, as suppose our time of strength and
vigour is past because we have worn out a
suit of clothes. And, moreover, repeating
these truths which man has always ventured
to believe as of quite vital importance,
Christianity appeals to us not in its own
name only, but in the name of all relig-
ions, wherever hope has risen, wherever

2 70 The Reasonableness of Faith

civilization has advanced, wherever man-
hood has revealed itself as pure and brave
and holy — there in all ages, in all countries,
in all religions, in some sort at least this
being has dared to believe he is a son of God.
And because related to a force infinitely
vaster and more permanent than that
limited to a planet life, man may be, man
must be, as Tennyson so triumphantly
sings : —

"Ancient of the earth,
But in the morning of the times. "

Man's life is not pinned or dependent on
an}^ planet existence — for he is a son of God,
and because he is, his life goes on and on
forever.

"Let go the breath!

There is no death
To the living soul, nor loss, nor harm.

Not of the clod

Is the Hfe of God:
Let it mount, as it will, from form to form."

Yes, religion distinctly confirms what is
highest and best in the instinct of man-
kind. We are sons not of the universe, but
of God, who controls and is author of the
universe. Sons in a gray universe, if you
like, for as Kingsley says,

" Gray weather makes strong men. "

God's Image in Man 271

But sons with a future dependent not on
their cradle, but on their Father God.

"All mine is thine," the sky- soul saith;
"The wealth I am, must thou become;
Richer and richer, breath by breath, —
Immortal gain, immortal room !"
And since all his
Mine also is,
Life's gift outruns my fancies far,
And drowns the dream
In larger stream.
As morning drinks the morning-star."

So instinct and reHgion agree ; but still we
have not answered for knowledge. What
has this great inflood of new thought and
conception and experience to say to these
old religious sanctions that man never has
been without ? How does knowledge fortify
both instinct and religion, or does it fortify
them ? That is the question. Yes, I believe
it is only the language of moderation, of
reasonable certitude to say, to-day, that
the main trend of modern knowledge, of
scientific acquirement, is to cry amen to
the instinct of the future life so deeply im-
planted in man's soul; is to encourage and
fortify, and not contradict, those mysterious
voices that so continuously have sounded
within him. It is as though earth, our
mother, stooped over and in her cradle song

272 The Reasonableness of Faith

was bent on assuring us, that as her Hfe
grows gray and feeble, we must infinitely
outlive her.

But I must not speak in metaphors.
What lesson of hope for the future can we
gain from our increased knowledge of the
past ? I want to put this part of my subject
in a sentence or two, and then, if I may,
briefly amplify it. How did our life
come to be at all? How did all the
beauty we see, the music we hear, the
knowledge we have won, come to be?
I tell you, my friends, science speaks
on these points with no uncertain voice.
She claims authority, and, claiming it, she
makes on us a stupendous demand. She
expects us to accept, almost without
question, the truth of a miracle so great
that I do not hesitate to say all the miracles
of revelation are trivial by the side of it.
Science distinctly teaches us that, as I have
said, all the beauty, music, knowledge, that
go to make up what we understand of life
to-day, has come out of a swirling, formless
hurricane of fiery cosmic matter, and noth-
ing else — out of a chaos so dark and rude,
out of a blast so awful and death-dealing,

God's Image in Man 273

that not even to an educated imagination can
its fury be conceivable. In that long
ason of chaos death reigned, not life. Chaos
ruled, not order. Then were enthroned
powers surely utterly diabolic. Any sane,
over-looking intelligence, any man even of
genius, who, from some distant point of
vantage, might conceivably have surveyed
that chaotic storm, could have believed
nothing less than that he was hearing and
seeing, in its awful confusion and roaring
turmoil, nature's articulated curse. In vast
spaces, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the
fiery hurricane, with purposeless fury, prom-
ised to rage forever. So ages passed and
were followed by other ages, and some sort
of order grew, till in the sublime language of
the Bible, in the centre of dense vapour earth
lifted; but it was without form and void,
and darkness was on the face of the deep.
What has love or wisdom to do with such a
gray, lifeless world as this?

Then other ages passed and forth from the
ocean depths there came forms of life,
grotesque and awful, which lived but to de-
stroy. What has love and wisdom to do
with such a world ? Then other ages passed,

2 74 The Reasonableness of Faith

and lo ! Man at last stood upon his feet.
But what a man ! Is he a man ? Perhaps
he can Hft hands of prayer, "but they are
red with blood. He is dimly aware of his
better self, if he be aware at all. He is surely
likest far to the beasts. Cruel and lustful
is he, living on earth, far yet from ruling it,
barely holding his own against savage
beasts and threatening hunger, and without
love or faith or much hope — just the
blind instinct to live keeping him alive.
What has love and wisdom yet to do with
such a world, or such a product of the
world ?

I have not time, I need not go on to tell
the oft-told tale of man's later progress,
his defeats, his shames, the far ebbings
in the tide of his advance, the fair
hopes of men and of nations cast down
and betrayed, of civilizations at last
built up with much toil and blood,
only to crumble into the dust again and
forever be lost and forgotten. But, for
all these pitiful changes, the most careless
student can now conceive a rising in life's
scale, a growing towards a fuller self -con-
sciousness, a widening of the certainty of

God's Image in Man 275

responsibility, a vast increase of the sense of
pity, and a steady determination, even when
storms are at their height, to keep Hfe's
tiller true. Night is not yet passed, nor
are the storms yet over; but who could ever
have dreamed, in those ages so far behind
us that even man's intellect breaks down
in computing their longness, that out of that
chaos — out of that imgoverned chaos of
steam and cosmic matter that raved so
purposelessly ages ago, we should have come
forth — we and our wonderful order of law
and beauty and hope and increasing power
of man? Tell me, friends, where are
the miracles of any earthly revelation
when placed in comparison with a world-
miracle so stupendous as this? When
knowledge has said its last word, and
reverently or grumblingly cries amen to
instinct and religion, day may not yet have
dawned; but we see at least a rose of dawn
upon the gray sea : and on earth, once with-
out form and void, where undisturbed
darkness reigned, there is at least a promise
of the dawning of a day without clouds.
But who could have dared to dream it,
ages ago? Ah, who could have dared still

276 The Reasonableness of Faith

to hold to the dream, ages and ages after?
. I beHeve that the time will soon come when
men will see that miracle is not the breaking
of God's law, but the expression and fulfil-
ment of that law. // we came from chaos —
what may not come from us?

Briefly, then, I have tried to point out to
you what the results of knowledge are.
We are assured soberly to-day that the
wildest dreamer could never have con-
ceived of transformations so impossible as
those which our world cradle hath under-
gone in order to make us possible. And so
faith dares to hope it shall so be again.
Man has a right to hope, man has an au-
thority to love. Man looks backward — and,
though he knows no golden age lies there;
and, looking forward, knows also that on
this planet no golden age can ever be — by
these very facts he is assured that, as earth's
chaos gave way to him, as he more than
justifies that chaos, so the struggles and
pains which his instinct, his religion and
his growing knowledge call upon him
bravely to face, shall be justified; that
his struggles with death for his living, with
ignorance for his knowing, with the beast

God's Image in Man 277

for his moral growing, with the problems
of his relations to his fellows for his social
growing shall have their fair result at
last, for not one particle of his struggle
shall be lost or in vain ; and that
once again, a yet higher and holier order
from our present disorder shall be bom
and a kingdom established wherein dwelleth
righteousness. By the stupendous miracle
of what he is, he is emboldened to believe
in the still vaster miracle he is to be.

Yes, knowledge says Amen to man's in-
stinct and religion, and faith ventures to
believe and to declare, that as out of that
swirling chaos an order inconceivably beau-
tiful has come, a miracle inconceivably great
has been wrought, so once again out of
what seems to us much confusion and dis-
integration and death, in the advancing
evolution of God, is to emerge a new order
as much fairer than the present, as the
present is more beautiful than the past —
and the old Greek myth of Orpheus going
even into hell to claim his bride, which
stands for an everlasting truth, is to have
its fulfilment. None has dared to think
why God chose His bride from hell — but

278 The Reasonableness of Faith

out of very hell God has called the race, and
love can lift them out.

So runs the gospel of Jesus Christ to-day.
Since now we are the sons of God, imagina-
tion itself is bankrupt in dreaming of what
we shall be.

"Prophetic Hope, thy fine discourse
Foretold not half life's good to me;
Thy painter, Fancy, hath not force
To show how sweet it is to be !
Thy witching dream
And pictured scheme
To match the fact still want the power ;
Thy promise brave
From birth to grave
Life's boon may beggar in an hour. "

For God's life is now in us, and we are little
Gods, and over us spread the everlasting
and eternal powers, waiting to fill us and
inspire us, waiting to fit us for new tasks
and soul-satisfied living, as ages fulfil
themselves.

CHRIST SENT ME NOT TO BAPTIZE

"Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the
gospel." — / Cor., i: ly.

A SHARP distinction is drawn between
the highest and most sacred right of the
Christian reHgion and the soul and essence
of that religion itself. A distinction drawn
in the very earliest days of the Church's
history; for it is not now seriously disputed
that this letter was written by Paul about
thirty years after Christ's death. There is
a distinction, drawn between the out-
ward and necessary formularies of the
Christian religion and the spirit of that
religion. You must remember that we
cannot at all properly estimate now the
importance in those early days of that rite of
baptism. It was literally the passing from
an old into a new state. It was the sign
and evidence of the completest change of
character, of surrounding, of laws and cus-
toms that was possible. It was a rite
regarded not only as advisable but abso-
279

28o The Reasonableness of Faith

lutely obligatory. It was a rite so uni-
versally regarded as obligatory that then
and in all succeeding times the Catholic
Church has regarded baptism, no matter
when or how administered, if administered
in the name of the Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost, as valid. Baptism by a lay
person is just as valid as baptism by a
bishop or pope. I mention this simply to
indicate to you the supreme importance
in which this rite was held at the time in
which these words were written for the
guidance of the Corinthian Church.

St. Paul believes in the body, in-
sists on its order, enforces its discipline,
strives for its unity; and for that unity
sacrifices his wishes and subordinates his
own opinions, as all must who wish for
unity at all. But important as he believes
this visible expression of unity to be, high
as the place he gives to the Church, to the
body of Christ, there can be no possible
argument with St. Paul as to which of the
two is the more important. He is charged
with the very life of the Church itself.
"Christ sent me not to baptize, but to
preach the gospel. "

Christ Sent Me not to Baptize 281

What then is the gospel? It is all im-
portant to know what meaning St. Paul
attaches to the word. There may be many
gospels — as a matter of fact there have been —
for good news has come again and again
to man in his extremity, and all messages
delivered at all times and by divers manners
from the Everlasting Spirit to the growing
children of men, have been indeed their
true, good news. To say that Christianity
is the only gospel is to speak ignorantly.
But the Christian gospel is distinctive. It
sums up, explains and completes for us
the everlasting gospel in which God, from
time to time, by various methods and ways,
has made plain to man the truth about his
own destiny and about his own nature.
The Christian gospel is the good news which
Jesus brings, and that revelation of His
may be fairly described as having for its
scope and aim the good news as to the
nature of God and the nature of man. It
is very evident that on his views of the
nature of God and the nature of man de-
pend all man's views as to his duty and
responsibility, rest all his ideas as to his
nature and destiny. These, then, are the

282 The Reasonableness of Faith

truths that are taught and revealed by
Jesus Christ. Profoundly they changed the
life of the world; profoundly they continue
to change it.

Jesus Christ presented the truth con-
cerning the nature of God and the nature
of man in His own person. His teachings
were His gospel, for they were the explanation
of His person, of His Father, and of man's re-
lation both to Him and to His Father. No
words that I can use will go beyond the words
of Jesus Christ. You remember He says:
" He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.
Why sayest thou then, show us the Father?"
In the person of Jesus not only is truth
revealed about the nature of God, but there
is a visible presentation, so far as human
eyes can see it, of the nature of God. And
so when I ask myself that question, which
all times and races have propounded — how
am I to go to God — there comes the old
answer: *'I am the way, the truth, the
life; no man cometh to the Father but by
me." And so the way to God is absolutely
revealed to me in a man, whose personality
is as distinct as mine own. You may say
these things are old and trite, but I tell you

Christ Sent Me not to Baptize 283

the thought of man is only beginning to deal
with them. As we stand in wonder-
ment before the half revelations of our own
greatness, we are led back again with new
sense of their fulness to these old, inex-
haustible truths. The conception of man's
approach to God is not in a book, is not to
be found in a Church, is not wrapped up in a
creed. No definitions, however valuable,
are the main guides here. Mark it, no
sacraments even, however truly pronounced
and authorized and given by Jesus Christ
Himself, are main channels here. "Aye,
the study of Me, the walking in Me, the
obeying Me, the having and possessing Me —
I am the way, the truth and the life ; no man
cometh to the Father but by Me."

Now, what is Christ's kingdom? The
kingdom of Jesus is the presentation in the
person of one man, Jesus Christ, of the
very law and purpose of the living God.
There are no two laws in this world, no two
sources of life. Jesus Christ makes it quite
plain to us — "A house divided against
itself cannot stand." God's kingdom is
not divided against itself. Thus beyond
possibility of misunderstanding He states

2S4 The Reasonableness of Faith

His message, He declares His aim. This is
the truth which He has received from His
Father, and has come to declare to His
brethren. To accept this truth is to accept
His person. To accept His person is to
admit His rule, yield to Him obedience
of mind and will and heart, own Him
king of the soul. And all who so obey,
whether they join His outward society or
not, are subject to the Son of Man who has
become their king. This is the sort of
kingdom He comes to set up. These are
the simple laws on which it rests. But
simple as they seem,, these are the very laws
on which the whole universe rests. For
the universe is God's house and cannot be
divided against itself. " His Father worketh
hitherto, and He works."

This work he describes under a simile that
perhaps more clearly expresses His views of
the Father, of His Church and kingdom
than any other — the simile of sown and
growing seed. In this universe which is
His Father's He sows this seed of His truth ;
submitting it to the law and order of that
imiverse, as He submits Himself. '' I am
the Truth" — and so all He is and all He

Christ Sent Me not to Baptize 285

knows is yielded to the order of the world.
To quote again His simile — it is a corn seed,
and it grows, though you would not think
it growing. Mistaken by those who hastily
judge or see no further than they see, His
truth, His life. His person, in seeming to
die, take new hold on being.

Now let us look still a little more fully at
this gospel seed. The most confusing thing,
the most disheartening, in man's struggle
with man's surroundings and with himself
is the ever present, seeming defeat of death.
The body of truth — to refer to Christ's
simile, the casing of the seed embryo — that
has become so dear to us because we have
toiled for it, and with pain and tears reared
it and reaped it — this seed corn must die.
" Except a grain of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone." And
so in the person and teaching of Jesus is
first clearly revealed to men this light be-
yond the darkness of the grave. But His
disciples could not endure it; we may not
wonder at this. They had walked in His
light for a brief season. They had learned
to love and to worship. Must anything so
beautiful, so broad, so incomparable as

286 The Reasonableness of Faith

Jesus, die — die and leave no follower, none
at all like Him? None to fight for them,
love them, seek and save them as did He?
This be far from Thee, Lord. But Jesus
had to die. Death is not the breaking of
the law of God; death is the law of God.
There is only one law for the Lord and for
the servant. His apostles must die; and
we can well believe that a sense of strange
loneliness and disheartenment lay heavy on
the soul of the early Church, when she knew
that the last of those whose eyes had seen
and whose very hands had handled the
Word of Life must pass from her away.
They must die and leave no successors
for no Pauls or Johns came after them;
and we wonder still at the gap they left
behind. But the fact remains; for this is
the law of the seed's growth. Dying, it
is replaced by a poorer thing than itself;
or so it seems at first. After the greater
there follow the lesser men.

The Master has died, and His apostles.
But the gospel is not dead ; '' for the kingdom
of heaven is a seed which a man sowed in
his field; it groweth he knoweth not how,
first the blade, then the ear, then the full

CbrIvST Sent Me not to Baptize 287

com in the ear. " But as the Master passed
from one phase of Hfe into another, and
so departed from our ken; as the apostles
went and left none so great to succeed; so
the forms under which that gospel which
they loved and proclaimed is delivered
passes often with the deliverers. For it is
not only true of the messengers, but Jesus
teaches us true of the truth itself, that
"except a com of wheat fall into the ground
and die, it abideth alone. "

As we look back on the ages that have
preceded us, again and again that seed
seemed to die past all power of resurrection.
Darkness, misery, debauchery and crime of
those bloody and confused times, seemed
to overwhelm it and drag it down. Its
enemies are mighty and evil; its champions
are often far worse; its bitterest foes those
of its own household. But it cannot die,
for it carries within it the extraordinary
potentiality of the truth itself. You can
no more hinder its springing up in new vigour
and taking new form, rounding itself into
new beauty and completeness, than you
could have prevented, millions of years ago,
that whirling mist-storm, fiery, wildly lashed

288 The Reasonableness of Faith

to fury — a cyclone of earth-stuff cast forth
from some mighty sun crater — orbing itself
at last after changes that are bewildering
into a new planet, to spin for long ages
through realms of space and work out from
boyhood to manhood its fateful destiny.
Who could foresee in the fierce eruptions
of a glowing universe the mystery and
beauty of a human world? Who would
have dared to say that out of that wild,
whirling chaos of earth matter, millions
of ages hence a round and beautiful earth
would roll, with its greenery, its beauty,
its living things, and all the wonders of life ?
Yet all you are, all you dream of be-
ing, was contained in that whirling vortex
of earth-stuff, ages ago — the very seed of
God. And all the powers of the universe
were bent on at last making the cyclone
into a planet, and at last moulding the
planet into a garden, and at last leading
out of the beds of the garden God's sprouts
and seeds of men and women. But all that
makes up life lay hidden, awaiting its
development, in the fiery spume cast off
by some convulsed sun. And what works

Christ Sent Me not to Baptize 289

the miracle? The law of life in the atom.
Yet every single stage in this extraordinary
development has been a death. No one
single advance of life without death, any-
where, anywhere. My friends, the things
that men believe just as truly die as the men
that believe them.

So with the gospel truth which the Saviour
brought. Each generation brings to it
change, each change seems a death, and is
indeed a death of the outer part, and death
is ever greeted with trepidation; man being
so slow to learn that it is the necessary
precursor of change. There can be no two
laws, one for the church and the gospel,
and one for the universe — for the house of the
Father is not divided against itself. Again
and again, great and good men have taught
that there are two sorts of law, but we know
them to be wrong. We may wish it, we
may mourn for it; but it cannot be. And
the dearest truths we hold, as in the simpler
seeds we sow — neither one nor the other
can grow and be its fullest, best self, except
as it submit itself again and again to the
seeming defeat of death. Under this im-

2 go The Reasonableness of Faith

press of death it develops and re-develops.
In the unscientific language to be understood
of all simple folks Jesus taught this when
He said: "It is expedient for you that I go
away; if I go not away, the Comforter
cannot come to you; but if I depart I will
send him unto you." The doctrine of the
Holy Ghost is the assurance to the Church
of the continual presence and changeless
energy of the life of Christ.

So again I say, What is the gospel ? Truth
about the nature of man and the nature of
God, as Jesus revealed both. First the
tiny, yellow seed; then the morsel of dark
decay with white tendrils growing beneath
it; then the upspringing shaft of greenness,
weak and uncertain of itself; then the tall,
fair stalk waving in the light and air; and,
lastly, the ripened and completed grain
itself. That is the seed, and it is Jesus'
teaching about His kingdom. The seed dies
that it may live. This was how He sowed,
this was what He saw, this is what we are
here to work for and to be. This is His
gospel, the gospel of His teaching and His
person. Our views of the nature of God

Christ Sent Me not to Baptize 291

and the nature of man have passed and are
passing, again and again, through every one
of these stages, from the single seed com
cast into the ground, to the great harvest
of all nations and peoples and kindreds
and tongues, to gladden at last the heart of
God and fill to the full the destiny of man.

But, men and brethren, how shall we
proclaim this gospel ? Talk it, build churches
or cathedrals, publish Bibles and prayer-
books, repeat creeds and join in litanies?
Ah ! the French bishop said the truth when
he said: ''It is infinitely easy to say our
prayers ; it is infinitely hard to do our duty. "
We cannot satisfy the hungers of to-day
with the corn seeds of the past; we can
only satisfy them with the harvests which
we have sown and reaped from the per-
petual sowing and gardening of those corn
seeds. The com of past harvests cannot
satisfy present hungers. Duty done, ser-
vice given, life surrendered, the carrying
into a living confession of the splendid
truths Jesus taught us, the high revelation
of the nature of man in our own lives, in-
spiring belief in the nature of God, justifying

292 The Reasonableness of Faith

and rewarding our lives — these are what
the world wants. This is the gospel har-
vest of Christ's sowing which can feed its
hunger and satisfy its soul. It will avail us
little to bow before the forms of the past,
if we are not ourselves living in the power
of its spirit. I may be possessed of the
very forms that inspired lips once drew;
I may know the very words that once fell
from the dear lips of the Christ — yet having
the one and knowing the other, what am I
the better for these if His loving spirit does
not rule my life and move me mightily to
achieve His ends and obey His laws?

Life, not venerable death, w^e want — living
men for living issues. Men have borne into
battle the relics of the great dead; but it
was that they might inspire with the spirit
of the past the arms of the present. You
remember when Douglas and his little band
of Scotch crusader knights were beset by
the flower of Moorish cavalry, he hurled
Robert Bruce's heart which he earned
round his neck far into the fight, and then
followed it to die. Fine and true, that !
but what cheered him on his last desperate

Christ Sent Me not to Baptize 293

charge? It was not the dusty heart of
the dead hero of Bannockburn, but the
spirit of Bruce that had found a lodgment
in his very soul.

And to-day, thank God, we can tell
sometimes the same splendid story. It
is the spirit of present heroes, not the relics
of past heroes that win the battles; out-
lining the destinies of nations and move-
ments, and making men still proud that
they are men. Only a few weeks ago, in the
heart of what is called the Dark Continent
a little band of thirty-six African troopers
found themselves suddenly hemmed in by
three thousand of a brave, but pitiless foe ; cut
off from all hope of succour, home, love, life ;
the only barrier they could present, in their
last stand, their dead horses. None sur-
vived the short, bitter fight; mothers and
friends at home did not know how they died
till one of their own foes told the story ; and
what was the story? Thank God, again
and again, it is the story of man's endurance
and of a courage which at least is part of
the spirit of complete manhood revealed in
Jesus Christ. When the last cartridge is

2 94 The Reasonableness of Faith

spent and their strength spent, too, what
do they do? The very wounded and dying
struggle to their feet, and while the winning
foe for a brief moment gives pause, they
raise their shot-riddled hats and try to sing
with dying breath — *'God save the Queen."
What does it mean ? It means that the
spirit that has always risen in darkest
hours of storm and trial, conquering diffi-
culty, laughing at odds, bidding defiance to
death, is not a spirit given to the few great
leaders of a great people only; but given to
thirty-six unknown African troopers, plain
men, dying in an obscure war. It means
that God still lives His own supreme life
even in these brief lives of ours, closed in
for a short day with clay. The spirit of a
splendid courage which is at least in part
the spirit of the Son of Man, lies hidden, and
often forgotten, in hearts and souls of
common men — the spirit of goodness and of
God; the spirit that endures and hopes and
dares, giving its life to do life's duty; far,
far removed in its quality from that su-
preme goodness and courage combined which
spake in Him and lived in Him as never
man spake or lived; but still through all

Christ Sent Me not to Baptize 295

its changes claimed as akin to His own
nature, as witness to, and evidence of, man's
relationship to God.

"For the dear Christ dwells not afar,
The King of some remoter star,
Listening at times with flattered ear
To homage drawn from human fear;
But here among the weak and blind,
The torn and suffering of mankind,
In works we do, in words we say,
Life of our life, He lives to-day."

April, 1894.

WHAT MANNER OF MAN IS THIS?

" What manner of man is this ! that even the winds
and the sea obey him." — Luke, viii: 25.

God Speaking not only to man but in man
— this is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A
revelation of the divine in man — this is
the reason the revelation of Jesus Christ
is inexhaustible. From it each generation
of men must draw a new light and inspira-
tion. Prophecy shall cease, tongues shall
fail. The greatest messengers and greatest
messages are sometimes forgotten. But if
I am sure that God lives in man, then in
every unfolding of the wonderful life of our
race, in every single department of its activ-
ity, I am contemplating the real revelation
of the very life of God Himself. This is a
profound, a soul-inspiring thought.

In the teachings and person of Jesus,
God has given us an assurance that
this is true — not only that He did speak
to man, but that He does live and will live
in man to the end of the ages. And when
we come to be with Jesus, to study Him,
297

298 The Reasonableness of Faith

to understand Him a little, we find united
in His person these two great verities. He
is united to the Father as none other could
be. He is one with God, sent by His Father,
He knows His Father, does His Father's
will, speaks His Father's words. ** He that
hath seen me hath seen the Father." And
on the other hand. He Himself searches all
nature to find similes that should adequately
explain the inseparableness of His relation
to us. He is the root of our life tree — we its
branches. He is the elder brother, and we
the younger brethren. Aye, when He
chooses deliberately His own name, it is
"Son of Man."

It is absolutely essential for us to
remember this unity of Jesus with the
Father, for from it springs His authority to
make the tremendous declarations He does.
It is equally necessary for us to remember
His unity with us, for by this actual one-
ness alone are these vast commands of His
revealed as possible, as binding. In other
words, the teachings of His person must
supplement those of His doctrine. He in-
tended them to go together, and we must
never separate them.

What Manner of Man Is This? 299

The reason for this is very plain if you
will consider it a little. The moral height
of His moral teachings would discourage
us, they are so infinitely beyond our
present attainment. They lift us into a
region too high for human breathing almost.
They would leave us in despondency were
it not for the intimacy of His person. He
who sees these awful things, who sums up
His commands for us in: "Be ye therefore
perfect as your Father which is in Heaven is
perfect," is the same Who walks beside us in
the rough road, shares our thirst, our hunger
and our pain, is born of woman, is most
truly human of all the sons of men.

Teaching and personality must go hand
in hand. Last Sunday we glanced at
His teaching. Reverently this morning let
us a little regard His person. The note sus-
tained and dominant here is that One was
born on earth and yet was to be full of God.
Here is a human life really human, lacking
no single part or passion of manhood — ever
mark that — yet purely pervious to God.

Pause with me here a moment. It is not
true that the measure of any Hving thing's
perviousness is the best possible measure

300 The Reasonableness of Faith

of its advance in the scale of being. All
life stands veiled before the infinite life.
And life may be spoken as of lowly or of
high order in proportion to the thickness
of the veil that hangs between it and the
infinite life.

Here are creatures scarcely alive. Their
life is evident only to patient study. They
seem closely allied to the vegetable world.
They have little use for life and none for air.
Why? They are veiled from the sun and
from the air by the well-nigh impenetrable
veil of twenty thousand feet of sunless sea.
The depths of the ocean veil them from the
sun.

Rise up ages and ages in the scale of life,
and here you find the locust burrowing in
the wet, cold covering of the ground till
many inches of impervious soil cut it off
from the light and the day. Before it has
spread its wings, and sung its simimer song,
the frost of many a winter and the rains of
many a spring, and the persuasive warmth
of many a summer day must search for it in
the cold dank soil. For its veil, too, is
thick and impervious.

Rise a little higher, and you look with me

What Manner of Man Is This? 301

on the gauzy veil woven of the filmy thread
which the silkworm spins out of the rich
greenery of the leaf on which it feeds.
And so it is all through Creation. Some
veils are thick, and, we have thought, im-
penetrable, like the profound gulf of the
sea. And some are coarse and impervious
like the cold dank soil of earth. And some
are gauzy coverings that seem almost to in-
vite the warmth and light of the sun. And
so looking at life merely in this illustrative
way, we think the thickest veiling lies on
lower orders, thinner on higher orders, and,
thinnest of all, on the order of man. As
we rise, there is less and less lethargy and
more and more light.

Now, we Christians believe that back of
all veiling, penetrating His veils — for He
Himself has hung them — God our Father
lives — above all, through all, in all, over all
from the beginning; that all creation is but
the burying away of life. Whether it be
in the ravines of the great sea, or the gauzy
veiling of the silkworm, or the mysteriously
sensitive matter of the brain, all creation is
but a veiling of life from God; and that in
the past so in the present and in the future,

302 The Reasonableness of Faith

whether it be insect life struggling towards
the sunlit water, or monkeydom struggling
towards manhood, or manhood stretching
itself yearningly towards Godhood, all bury-
ing of life, as it were, is a burying that may
be unburied — a sowing of life that from
the sowing life may spring, the veiling of
the seed, that there may be the unveiling
of the flower, that the God in whom all
things live and move and have their being,
may, in calling His creatures forth to Himself
teach them to win some special quality, gain
some certain value known only to Him,
the inevitable struggle which life must make
to pierce its veil and rise in response to the
mysterious voice that calls it forth to the
joy of its own individual resurrection. So
we sing:

"God of the granite and the rose,

Soul of the sparrow and the bee,
The mighty tide of being rolls,

Through countless channels, Lord, from thee.
It springs to life in grass and flowers.

Through every grade of being runs,
While from Creation's utmost towers,

its glory streams in stars and suns. "

These are more than dreams. They are
hopes founded not only on growing knowl-
edge and widening experience, but on a

What Manner of Man Is This? 303

deeper understanding of the universal long-
ings and purposes of mankind. But oh,
my soul's athirst for God ! Not merely for
the God of theory or even hope, not even
as the poet's song seeks to praise Him, nor
the grave man's pondering would vision
Him forth, but here as the Son of Mary I
honour Him. I want Him as a hand, a
guide, a man. Yes, a guide more than a
teacher. For if He gave me only these
teachings of His, they so utterly transcend
me that they cast me down. I gasp in His
higher air. I must draw near to His person
and I must find in His person the equiva-
lent for His teaching.

Ah, we are such materialists to-day. Just
because we must have a Jesus with a person
that no more outrages our faith, that no more
outrages our reason than His teachings do,
just because so very much depends upon
His person, we prepare ourselves before-
hand with all sorts of doubts and fears as
we approach the contemplation of it. We
accept almost thoughtlessly the transcen-
dence of His teachings because they are not
half real enough to us. But when we come
to the transcendence of His person, we

304 The Reasonableness of Faith

halt fearfully, and draw back. Men begin
to shake their heads. Now they say:
*'You are in the unreal land of faith and
myth. Beware ! He was so great that all
the reverent fancy of the early time has
played round His person, misconceived
and misdrawn it. "

I am aware of all this. I am perfectly
aware that it is impossible to accept without
question the conclusions of a tradition
however reverent. I am fully aware that
a reasonable man cannot to-day be asked
to bow before mere authority. I am no
believer in such authority myself. Full
well I know that on the smallest of founda-
tions authority has too often built the
vastest of superstructures reversing the
pyramid of life. In building, the apex
takes the place of the foundation. Full
well I know that monstrous superstructures
have been reared under the reverent super-
intendency of tradition and authority.

By all means let us give full weight to all
such considerations. I try to do so. I do
not find myself able to believe all the miracles
ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels. But I am
more than ever convinced that at certain

What Manner of Man Is This? 305

periods of His life, Jesus was given to work
miracles in order to commend His message
and win for His message a reverent atten-
tion. And far from believing such miracles
to be impossible, I think it more than likely
that in the time to come, miracles will not
offer any real difficulty to the thoughtful
man, but our children or children's children
may yet see men on the earth who are good
enough and great enough to work them.

For I am sure of this — that miracles as
Jesus wrought them were altogether the
most beautiful and natural things possible.
To think of them as breaks in God's law is
illogical and absurd. To think of them as
natural operations wrought by higher good-
ness and higher power working in com-
pletest harmony with God's will, is reason-
ableness itself.

When Jesus stood before men, there stood
One Whom they knew not — One fully
pervious to Hght, knowledge, and power of
God, a will at one with His Father's, a
hand clasped in His Father's hand. Well
might they cry, "What manner of man is
this that even the winds and the sea obey
Him?" The rude forces of earth shaping

3o6 The Reasonableness of Faith

matter after the eternal will, plastic in the
hands of absolute God. For God is above
all. His greatness flows around our in-
completeness, His goodness round our frail-
ties, always seeking opportunities to express
itself and flow forth. Once upon a time
there were some who believed that the
larger and colder volume of the Mediter-
ranean Sea was higher than the Red Sea.
And travellers who ventured far said that
beyond the Mediterranean Sea there lay
a vaster and higher sea still. Hence arose
the fancy that if an opening were made
through the sandy spit of Suez, the waiting
Mediterranean would pour down the heated
channel of the Red Sea, and the volume of
the ocean beyond would fill up all loss.

Now, our poor life channels are tortuous,
weed-grown things and choked. Here and
there a little divinity trickles through, but
in Jesus the channels of life lay open to the
divine flood.

God ruled through Him. God filled Him.
He did not do His own will, work His own
work, or speak His own word. And the
miracles of Jesus amounted to just this—
that when a man is supremely good,

What Manner of Man Is This? 307

is full of God, matter is plastic to him.
He rules, and all things obey, for what is
God's whole order of rule but a giving to
each range of life a little bit of life to rule,
increasing its little kingdom as it has won the
capacity to govern it.

Here is a clover plant. It must have its
king, and the king lives only an hour or two.
It is but an insect; but for that insect's
coming and going, the clover-patch would
fade and die. The life of the clover-patch
and all its beauty and fertility, its wafting
odour to the breeze, its ministry to the
comfort of man, depends upon the successful
reign of the insect of a day.

Go higher with me. It is ever the same
story. The bird will rule its bush, and its
life in that bush largely determines that
bush's growth. And the monkey will rule a
grove, and the savage will rule a tribe, and
the man will rule himself or a race. And
Jesus will cry: ''Could not I now call to
my Father and He would give me more than
ten legions of angels. But how then could
Scripture be fulfilled?"

''Ah, what manner of man is this! For
even the winds and the sea obey him."

3o8 The Reasonableness of Faith

We are such materialists, my friends.
The mud on our shoes has so bemired the
very eyes of our souls, that we halt and pause
at anything that seems to promise us con-
trol of the material that wraps us in.

If we that merely control could see more
clearly, should we not regard with greater
reverence, should we not yield a more awe-
struck admiration to the power availing
somewhat to change and uplift the character
of one child, than that magic touch of
miracle that proves its control over matter ?

For which is greater — the veiling of the
soul, or the soul itself? "What manner of
man is this?" A man after God's own
heart, a real man, a man who at last possesses
that abimdant life which God intends for
His children, Jesus the Ruler — for He is fit
to rule ! Ah, how great and simple it all is !
How it answers to our deepest and our best
longings ! We, striving for our little reign
and agonizing to establish our little rule,
and moaning over our constant incapacity !
How

"He stands beside us like our youth, transforms
for us the real to the dream, clothing the palpable and
the familiar with golden exhalations of the dawn" —

What Manner of Man Is This ? 309

the Man, the Son of Mary, absolutely per-
vious to God, the Son to Whom the Father
at last can say confidingly: ''Thou art ever
with Me, and all that I have is Thine."

So runs human history. At first we are
boys getting our ten cents a week. Then
we grow a little older and our father makes
it fifty. Then we come to the borderland
of man's estate, and we have our allowance,
helping us to the responsibilities to come.
Then years pass, and we are taken into
minor partnership, begin to understand the
plans, begin to catch something of the pur-
poses of the Master, our Father. And yet
again years pass, and all those plans and
purposes become to us less strange and dim.
And we think and hope, yes, and believe,
that in His infinite mercy the time shall yet
be, when He shall explain to us, even as a
father does to his boy, that the treasures of
His kingdom, the resources of Creation
itself, are ours in their length and their
breadth, to know and to spend, just so far
as by His grace we have made ourselves fit
to be fellow-workers with the Father — the
God who made, fills, and sustains all things.

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