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B ^6^ 8
■\
u—
I
i
THE UNIVERSAL CHRIST,
^nb ot^tr Sittmmn.
THE UNIVERSAL CHRIST,
^nb oil^tx S^txmam :
*rf «# •# w
PREACHED IN LIVERPOOL.
BY
CHARLES BEARD, LL.D.
I
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,
14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON;
And 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH.
1888.
• t • » •• • c^* •• • • "•• • •
tf » <
318121
LONDON :
PRINTED BY C. GREEN AND SON,
178, STRAND.
After my husband's return from Bournemouth last
February, he yielded to the repeated wishes of many of his
hearers, and marked the greater part of these sermons for
publication. In completing the number which it was his
intention to include in the volume, I have chosen those
which seem to me to express his latest thoughts.
MARY ELLEN BEARD.
Liverpool, July, 1888,
CONTENTS.
* »i
I. The Universal Christ (i Cor. x. 4) . . .
11. Until He find it (Luke xv. 4) . . . ...
III. The Indian^ s Grave {i Cor. xiii. 3) . • .
IV. The Ointment of Spikenard very precious .
(Mark xiv
V. The Race that is set before us (Heb. xii. i) .
VI. Strange Fire (Lev. x. i — 3)
VI I. Great Cities (Jonah iv. 11)
VIII. Two Worlds (Ps. civ. 16, xxxi. 16) . . .
PAGE
I
13
26
• 38
3)
so
61
73
85
IX. Newness 0/ Life 97
(Rom. vi. 4; 2 Cor. v. 17; Gal. vi. 15)
X. God* s Helpful Judgments {?s, cyiu,. 1"]^) . . . 109
XI. Rejoice in the Lord (J^hJXv^i^. m. i) 121
XII. A Parable of Auvergne {?s. cxxxxiiL 14) , . . 139
Vlll
Contents,
XIII. All Sahits' Day (Ephes. ii. 19)
PAGE
XIV. The Dayspring from on High (Luke L 78) . .164
XV. Self{Q,^\. vL 2, 5) 176
XVI. Joy aver one Sinner that repenteth (Luke xv. 10) 188
XVII. Eternal Life (John xvii. 3) . . . .
XVIIL The Elder Son (Luke xv. 31) . . .
XIX. A Parable of Florence (EiZQ\i, viiL 12)
XX. The Irony of Christ {Udik yi, z^—Z^i)
XXI. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God (Matt. vi. 33) . 250
XXII. The Gifts of God without Repentance .
. 200
. 212
224
237
. . 262
(Rom. xi. 29)
XXIII. The Calling of God without Repentance . . .274
(Rom. xi. 29)
XXIV. The SouPs Loss of God {^ong of Sol. iii. i, 2) . 287
I Corinthians
^^S^N this somewhat obscure passage, Paul is
^1^ usually supposed to allude to a Rabbinical
tradition, which declares that in their wander-
ings through the desert the Israelites were accom-
panied by a miraculous rock, from which every night
and morning abundant water flowed for their use.
And of this legend, strange as it is in itself, he gives a
mystical interpretation : "And that Rock was Christ."
I will not attempt to decide what precise meaning we
should put upon the Apostle's words, or to what
extent we are to take the "spiritual meat" and the
"spiritual drink" of the wilderness as prefigurements
of the bread and the wine of the Lord's Supper. The
one point on which I wish to fix your attention is the
, idea that in some way or other — but at all events a
#1
• • ••
• • • •
2 The Universal Christ,
real >yay — Christ was with the Israelites in the desert,
and that the source of their spiritual nourishment was
the same as Paul made ^knpwn and offered to the
church of Corinth. In:Qther words, there was in the
.*. • •*•
Apostle's view a jA^^ Christ Jesus, a human figure
• *» •"
of the first centtKy, 'and a divine and universal Christ,
* . *, •
always playitfg '& part in the spiritual history of the
race/ -.There was a Christ who had been recently seen
irf'fhe. flesh by many, and a Christ who was a general
:Sf?iVitual fact And perhaps the latter was to Paul
•
the more real of the two. He thought less of Galilee
and Jerusalem as the scenes of Christ's activity, than
of the councils of Heaven and the long course of human
history. And, at all events, it was no marvel to him
that the Divine Personage who had long ago guided
his people through the desert to the land of promise,
slaking their daily thirst, and feeding them with food
convenient for them, should have stooped down from
heaven to remonstrate with his own obstinacy, and
with a heavenly compulsion pressed him into his
service.
The same idea appears in a more philosophical
form in the proem to the Fourth Gospel, whose author,
whoever he was, was much more of a systematic theo-
logian than Paul. Here the determining words are :
" That was the true Light which lighteth every man
that Cometh into the world." Paul, so far as it is fair
to speak of his method at all, goes back from the
The Universal Christ. 3
personal to the universal Christ : John, if it were
indeed he, begins with the universality, and makes it
the test of truth. A Light that was impersonate only
in a single Christ, no matter how brilliant its mani-
festation, would not be the true Light : it must be the
source of all illumination that men have ever received,
the single sun of the spiritual sky. And observe how
this author begins with the Word, the Light, in its
union and companionship with God, in its relation to
the all of things created, in its universal vivifying and
inspiring energy, and only then goes on to the moment
in time in which, as it were, confining itself within
bounds and assuming human limitations, " the Word
was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace
and truth." But with whatever minor differences, the
Evangelist and the Apostle are at one in their central
idea. There was a Christ that did marvels in Galilee,
and taught in the streets of Jerusalem. There was a
Word, a Light, always at work in the hearts and lives
of men, holding up God before them, and pouring into
them the impulse of love and service. And these two
were the same Christ, in his particular and in his
general manifestation.
I do not wonder that from this idea was developed
in due time a metaphysical doctrine of Christ's pre-
existence ; that pre-existence, logically formulated,
was felt to be an impossible resting-place for the sys-
tematizing intellect ; and that finally, to avoid the
B 2
4 The Universal Christ.
clanger of Ditheism — a supreme and a subordinate
Deity side by side — the Athanasian theory of an
equality of Divine Persons in the Trinity was adopted.
The steps of the process are quite clear, both in their
abstract justification and as written in the history of
the first Christian centuries. This is, indeed, the way
in which dogmas always grow up. First, there is a
profound and pregnant conception, answering, so far
as a human thought can answer, to a divine truth.
It is not adequate : it does not embrace every aspect
of the fact : it is not always consistent with itself : but
it is a new light : it is a clue out of perplexity : it is
felt to resolve many difficulties. Then come the theo-
logians, and re-cast it in the mould of their logic.
They are for the most part system-makers ; and to
build up a system asks for no divine intuition, no
piercing gaze into the mingled light and darkness in
which faith dwells, no meditative waiting for God's
dispersion of the gloom. On the contrary, men who
are profoundly convinced of the depth and darkness
of Divine Being, and the inadequacy of human powers
to sound it, do not build systems at all : if there comes
light enough to live by, they are content. So, it seems
to me, all those philosophical definitions of the nature
of God of which the creeds are full, are just hardened
and coarsened statements of great truths, which seers
have seen in a moment of divine enlightenment, and
which contract a taint of falseness and narrowness from
The Universal Christ. 5
the form into which they are thrown. And reh'gion
is, in them, exposed to a double danger. The ortho-
dox believer may very well mistake the shell for the
kernel : the heterodox critic, rejecting the shell, may
forget that there is still a kernel within it
It is in this way that, over against and in opposition
to the doctrine of the Deity of Christ, has been deve-
loped that of his pure and absolute humanity. In
more than one very important sense, the latter doc-
trine must be accepted as true : believers in the Trinity
will tell you that they are as far as possible from
denying it. And yet at the same time it may very
well, in some of the forms which under the exigencies
of controversy it has assumed, miss elements of truth
which are of the greatest importance, and become
almost as false as the doctrine which it is intended to
deny. For the age-long controversies of theologians
have succeeded in completely hiding the real point at
issue ; and the known facts of the case are buried
beneath successive layers of theory which have been
heaped upon them by men whose words ill expressed
their thoughts, and whose thoughts had no exact cor-
respondence with things. That point is, What are
the conditions of inspired humanity ? How are we to
understand and account for the Christ ? What makes
the prophet ? Whence the uplifting which sometimes
comes even to feeble souls like ours ? Are all these
things part of one series of spiritual phenomena, and
6 The Universal Christ.
if so, what law holds them together ? To repeat any
or all the clauses of the Athanasian Creed, teaches us,
it seems to me, absolutely nothing — nay, leads us
astray, in as far as it persuades us that the repetition
of words which we do not understand has taught us
something. But to answer the questions which I have
asked, though never so imperfectly, will lead us, step
by step, into such secret places of Divine purpose as
are accessible to mortal foot.
The great thing is to believe that there is " a Light
which lighteth every man that cometh into the world :"
what we call that Light — God, or Christ, or the Word,
or the Spirit — a; matter of quite secondary importance.
This belief includes two main points : first, that the
source of all inspiration and enlightenment is one and
the same ; and next, that no human soul is without
Its connection with the Divine Fountain. The first
thought takes us to a point of view from which we see
that there are not many truths, but one truth ; not
many strengths, but one strength ; not many good-
nesses, but one goodness ; not many religions, but one
religion. All we know of God, whether it be much or
little, comes from God : it is not that what I know is
true, and what you think you know, false ; but that
both of us are looking up to the same central Sun,
and each receiving what light he can. There are tra-
vesties of religion, I know, which do not deserve the
name — devil-worships, which make men fouller and
The Universal Christ. 7
crueller than they were before ; but of real religions,
breathing awe into the soul, quickening the sense of
duty, bridling unruly passions, nerving the shrinking
will, none can rightly be called false. Whatever lifts
man nearer to a perfect God must be true : it is only
a question of more or less, of comparative purity or
large alloy. It would not be too much to say —
strangely as the word may clash upon Christian pre-
judice — that the truth of religion varies from man to
man ; for what to any soul is true, of this kind, is also
compelling, and measures its truth by its power of
transforming it into something better than itself. Is
Buddhism false to one man, whom it makes patient,
pure, pitiful, humble, full of a sacred awe ? Is Chris-
tianity true to another, whom it leaves hard, cold,
selfish, cruel, foul? There is but one Light that
lighteth every man that cometh into the world, and
where it dwells is plain, because darkness abideth not
with it.
And the second great point is, that no man is
wholly without this Light AH the disputes which
arise out of the theology of the Fall we brush away :
all allegations that if man is by nature in direct com-
munication with God, he lost that high privilege by
fault of Adam's transgression, have been deprived of
their force by the new light that streams upon pri-
meval history. I have sometimes thought that the
early Quakers put this part of the truth in the clearest
8 The Universal Christ.
way, when they said that in every man there was a
seed of Christ, which under fit cultivation blossomed
and bore fruit, but which under no conceivable circum-
stances lost the possibility of germination. Or, again,
as some of the much maligned Anabaptists, who raised
a spiritual rebellion against the rigid and formal scrip-
turalism of Luther and Melancthon, put it — there is
in every soul an inner Word, a secret Christ, which
contact with the personal Christ wakes into life and
activity. And it is manifest that this is a spiritual
fact which exists in every stage and degree of deve-
lopment. There, covered up by the ruins of a base
and self-indulgent life, is some poor remnant of better
feeling, some latent possibility of repentance and
reform, some sleeping faculty of moral growth, which
may prove the beginning of better things, in another
life, if not in this. And here, again, the light is strug-
gling with the darkness, strength with weakness, the
attraction of God with the temptations of the flesh,
the beauty of Christ with the inertia of the world,
producing everywhere that mixed result of which we
never dare to be too hopeful, of which we will not
venture to despair, the life of man in the body. Some-
times the light streams through the rifts and cracks
of the poor human lantern in which it is tabernacled,
with such pure effulgence as to approve to all men its
divine origin and power; as when a prophet, other-
wise a poor, feeble, ignorant mortal, speaks of divine
The Universal Christ. 9
things in so sweet and piercing a voice that men listen
and obey, knowing that it is a word of God. And
once at least in human history, the Light in which is
no darkness at all has manifested itself in a splendour
so steady and so unsullied, that seers and sages have
bowed down before it, rejoicing in its brightness, and
saying, Lo, now hath the Divine Word taken flesh
and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth !
Looked at in the light of this broad principle, how
many of the controversies which have most deeply
agitated Christendom are seen to be matters of nomen-
clature only ! I am what is called a humanitarian :
I believe in the pure humanity of Christ : and while
I am ready to offer to him all the homage that is due
to consummate goodness, while I place him on a pin-
nacle above all other teachers, while I own that no
other obligations to my fellow-men approach in width
and weight those under which I stand to him, I do
not address to him the worship which, in my view,
belongs only to God. I distinguish between God Him-
self and His most signal self-manifestations : I can see
Him in nature, in history, in humanity, in my own
soul : but under none of these forms, behind none of
these veils, can I worship Him : if I am to worship
Him at all, I must breathe my prayer into the silent
and boundless heaven, trusting that it will reach, how
I know not, an ear of infinite compassion. But for all
that, I understand what Paul meant when he said,
lo The Universal Christ.
"And that Rock was Christ," even though I might
now choose other words to express the same thought.
When a man has once learned to believe and say that
Christ was strength, purity, goodness, he will not think
it much if another inverts the phrase, and whenever
he sees strength, purity, goodness, calls them Christ
Men needed these things in that long and toilsome
passage through the wilderness. The mass of the
people were foolish, fickle, ungrateful : demoralized by
long servitude in Egypt : apt to remember the luxu-
riant fertility of the river-land as they encamped in
the sun-smitten and barren gorges of Sinai: accus-
tomed to a thousand majestic idols, and therefore
slow to believe in the unseen God who dwelt between
the Cherubim. For a moment they had acclaimed and
trusted a hero ; and some began to lament their too
enthusiastic faith, as food and water grew scarce, and
the Jhostile tribes pressed upon them, and the land of
promise seemed very far off. Out of one strong, stead-
fast soul had to come patience, fortitude, inspiration
for all : the almost impossible work which Moses had
to accomplish Wcis to make a nation of free men out
of a horde of fugitive slaves. He accomplished his
life's work : do you think in his own strength, or in
that which God gave him ? And so long as we recog-
nize the central fact that his strength was not his own,
but given from on high, is it a great thing that we
should call it Word, or Spirit, or Light, or Christ?
The Universal Christ. 1 1
For all these are the manifestations of the Living
God.
So, again, in regard to the Quaker doctrine of the
Divine Seed, to the Anabaptist theory of the inner
Word, in their relation to ourselves and our own reli-
gious life, the one thing is that we should recognize
the divine possibility within and strive to make it
more. What matter names in relation to that which
is essentially nameless ? All the words which I have
been using, all the words that I could possibly use,
are metaphors more or less inapt, taken from physical
facts, and corresponding only by analogy to the phe-
nomena of the spiritual life, which will not be named,
and in their essence defy definition and description.
There is a word, an intellectual principle within us,
which corresponds in a marvellous way with the
organized and ordered universe outside of us. There
is a faint and feeble light of conscience which, flicker
as it may, is yet kindled from the supernal light, in
which is no darkness at all. There is a seed of grace
which may sleep within us through years of dull selfish-
ness, yet wake to life and growth at last. There is
a spark of enthusiasm for holiness which may glimmer
long without breaking into a blaze, and yet some day,
breathed upon by the breath of God, may burn up all
that is mean and base within us. There is a Spirit —
not our own — blowing like the wind as it listeth,
coming and going in obedience to no law that we
1 2 The Universal Christ.
can detect, to which, if we yield ourselves without
reservation, we find ourselves filled with the strength
of God. And even in the worst and weakest of us, in
the besotted and the fallen, in those over whom love
mourns as hopeless, and patience wrings her hands
in despair, there is a Christ, defamed, contemned,
mocked, crucified, yet never without a divine energy
of salvation. Do these things seem overstrained to
you? It is because you have not faith enough in
yourselves, in human nature, in God. We are more
and better than we know. We are children of the
King, even though we have forgotten our royal inhe-
ritance. It is for ourselves to raise the nobleness of
our life to the nobleness of our origin. Quench the
Spirit, extinguish the Light, deny the Word, make of
no avail the Christ, we cannot — for that, God is too
good ; but if only we could enter upon our birthright,
if only we could yield ourselves wholly up to life!
O come, thou Spirit of the Living God, rebuke our
cowardice and faithlessness, and make us all Thine
own !
Bi^^l^^^S
^B ^\w/^ /iT^BiSvS^k^^^ii ^_ ^^^*
j^^
^Plfl
u'"^^^^^^Mt
L
II.
!♦•
Luke XV. 4:
« Until he find it."
HAVE mentioned to you more than once
before, what a powerful hold the idea of the
Good Shepherd, as presented here and further
developed in the Fourth Gospel, took of the imagina-
tion of the first century. The Roman Catacombs,
those touching and strangely significant memorials
of early Christian thought and feeling, are full of it.
Among many scriptural symbols, all easily lending
themselves to pictorial illustration, this indisputably
takes the first place. It came with its divine lesson
of love upon minds which had not yet wholly eman-
cipated themselves from pagan associations ; and I
dare not say that the Good Shepherd of the Cata-
combs does not sometimes remind the critical eye of
the young Apollo, who, as old poets sang, once fed
the flocks of Admetus, or of Pan, the god of all jocund
1 4 Until He fi^id it.
and happy rural life. He is there in every variety of
his occupation : going before his flock, as they seek
or return from the green pastures : giving them drink
at the clear streams of eternal life : carrying the lambs
in his bosom, bringing back the lost sheep upon his
shoulder. The imagery is so simple, so winning, so
easy of interpretation, so redolent of love and peace
and safety, as to be necessarily among the very first
to inspire the efforts of sacred art. And possibly at
a later time, when persecution had already begun to
accomplish its hateful work, and it became a question
in the Church whether those who had once failed in
their allegiance were ever to be received back again
into communion, it was a divine instinct of pity which,
in one instance at least, portrayed the Good Shepherd
as bearing back to the fold, safely sheltered in his
own arms, not a sheep, but a goat.
"Until he find it" These words, repeated a few
verses further on in the parable of the Lost Piece of
Silver — as if to show how completely they belonged
to the essence of the lesson — flashed upon me, the
other day, from the page of the Gospel, as if they, and
they alone, had been printed in letters of gold. And
they seemed to me, all at once, instinct with a great
fact and a wonderful promise. For Christ's life is all
a parable of God's purposes : and if naturally all
Christian ages have personified him as the Good Shep-
herd, that similitude must much more belong to God,
Until He find it. 1 5
and describe His dealings with His human children.
And what a comfortable thought is this, that the
Divine Love is always seeking for the lost sheep, nor
will cease to seek till all are brought back and safely
folded : that not one, even the lowest, the most de-
graded, the most brutalized, is forgotten, or neglected,
or left without needful warning or kind invitation :
that God is at work with us whenever we try to take
a fallen fellow-creature by the hand, and to lift him
into a nobler conception of his humanity : nay, that
He is perpetually working in wider and deeper and
subtler ways, which shame and perhaps sometimes
even thwart our poor and shallow schemes ! Do we
then cry out that we would see this more clearly, and
ask for more evident result of all this expenditure of
an energy which we must think of as omnipotent ?
In all our theories of God's moral relation to the world
which are to be in the true sense of the word religious,
we must assume, I think, a free will in man, a power
of choice, a faculty of resistance even to grace : the
All-powerful compels no one, but wins where He
might coerce, persuades where He might command,
and asks for the willing allegiance of the spirits which
He has created free. It is not for us to prescribe
times and to fix occasions. Possibly in no other way
could we so effectually ensure ourselves against dis-
appointment, as in concentrating our energies upon
work and love, and leaving success to God. Or if this
1 6 Until He find it.
be too high a flight of faith to be always sustained —
perhaps ever to be reached except by a strong wing
here and there — may we not find some consolation in
the thought, that there is not a soul in this great city
of ours — no child born in corruption and bred in vice,
and irretrievably soiled by sin ere ever it knew what
whiteness was — no miserable drunkard, long aban-
doned to the hopeless slavery of his own weakness —
no lost woman who can never expect restoration to the
self-respect which has passed from her like a forgotten
dream of girlhood — no single soul, which the patient
love of God is not seeking " until He find it" ?
This is a view of things from which such religion
as calls itself liberal is to some extent slipping away.
I am heartily sorry for it. For a thousand reasons
I shrink from defining what religion is, and much
more from branding any views which my neighbour
holds as irreligious. If he honestly holds them, and
draws from them some measure of strength and com-
fort, I can find no fault with him, even though I feel
that they would hardly be so helpful to me. Still I
must speak from my own point of view, and it is
impossible that I should see without regret religion
descending, as it seems to me, to a lower plane of
vividness, and penetration, and efficacy among men.
I know too well that it is possible to believe with a
very firm faith in God, and yet to conceive of His
moral action as much more characterized by the sweep-
Until He find it. 1 7
ing universality of law than by the changeful flexi-
bility — if I dare use such a phrase — of love. We are
subjects, says this theory, of a very wise, even if of a
stern and inexorable rule : all is for the best, on the
large scale and in the long run, though it may be
doubted whether the good of all includes the good of
each, and whether the losers in the game have any
other consolation than that heroic one of self-sacrifice.
It is of no use praying : God will not turn out of His
course an hair's-breadth for us : and spiritual blessings
descend by unchangeable law as surely as the fertiliz-
ing rains. I do not say that this theory has not an
inestimable advantage over that which would reduce
everything to law without a God ; which would take
away praise and aspiration as well as petition ; which
would make us mere links in a chain of necessity, and
bid us confine our thoughts and hopes to our poor
threescore years and ten. But if it is religion, it cer-
tainly is not Christianity; for that is, above everything
else, the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. It is not
enough, judging belief from the Christian standpoint,
to believe that God is : that He is a rewarder of them
that diligently seek Him, in the general sense that
"somehow good will be the final goal of ill:" that the
affairs of mankind are so ordained from the beginning
as to produce the effect of a law of moral gravitation.
To place ourselves where Christ stood, we must go
back to the thought of an earlier and a simpler time —
C
1 8 Until He find it.
a time, perhaps, of less astute speculation and less
finished logic, but a time of deeper and truer insight —
and feel that, insignificant units as we are of the mass
of humanity, light and unimportant as is our impact
upon the general fate, God yet loves us, and bends
down to us, and helps us to play our personal part in
the development of his wise designs. The world is
the empire of the Omnipotent, we know ; but we want
it also to be the home of our souls. We live under
the sway of a wise and just King, but we need too to
feel the touch of our Father's hand.
These things, it is superfluous to remark, are not
mutually exclusive — the wider includes the narrower,
the greater the less. But I cannot help thinking that
whether Law or Love makes the first and deepest
impression upon our minds, greatly depends upon the
side on which we approach the problem of existence.
Look at the world in the mass, and it is very difficult
to reconcile its incontrovertible facts with the thought
of God's fatherly love patiently searching for the erring
soul "until He find it" We cannot help admitting
that, from the human and practical point of view, much
of the sin and misery which surround us is hopeless.
We fall back indeed, and rightly, upon the omni-
potence of God's grace, and the fact that, to the heart's
last feeble beat, there is always the possibility of re-
pentance and return. We accuse ourselves, and again
rightly, of a selfish and cowardly inertness in the cause
Until He find it. 1 9
of humanity, and confess that our irresolution delays
the kingdom of God. But at the same time we know
that if we, and all like-minded with us, did our best,
there would be much that remained undone, and that
woful defeat would still balance and sadden our victory.
There are hardened and befouled natures which we
do not even know how to approach, to which our
exhortations have no meaning, and our persuasions
no sweetness. There are others in which a natural, a
swift, an irresistible gravitation towards vice, almost
startles us into a belief in a destiny which will not be
gainsayed. There is the large class of what I may
call victims : the weaklings whom the ponderous car
of what we suppose to be social progress crushes
beneath its wheels : too feeble either to grasp the op-
portunities or to resist the temptations of our fevered
civilization, and who strew its path with human wreck
and ruin. We see these things here on the large scale :
it seems to be the law of great cities that on the
very skirts of wealth and luxury and high culture and
fine aspirations and eager charity, should sit squalid
poverty, blank despair of life, reckless self-indulgence,
insolent vice. And it is very hard to believe, I sor-
rowfully admit, that in the midst of that moral chaos
God's love is always patiently at work, changing it
into a beautiful and orderly world, of which nothing
shall be wasted, in which nothing shall be lost.
But begin at the other end, confine your inquiry to
C 2
2 o Until He find it.
the only life of which you really know anything, go
down into the depths of your own memory, and con-
fess whether or not God has not often sought and
found you, I am not speaking now of visions and
revelations : these are not days of spiritual upturning,
and we are but ordinary folk : and yet I do not deny
that in some lives these may have a natural and pro-
fitable place. But is there any one amongst us who
does not feel that some circumstances of his lot have
had a strange personal reference, which seemed, as it
were, to be a secret between himself and the unseen
Orderer of his fate — in which, to put it religiously, God
sought and found and laid His hand upon him ? I
cannot enumerate all possible cases of this kind, and
so touch a sympathetic chord in every heart ; yet you
all, I think, cannot help knowing what I mean. Two
human beings are brought face to face by what seems
a mere freak of circumstance, and at the same time
two hearts find each a mate, and two lives are knit
evermore in one. The same rule holds in friendship
as in love : here companionship is bom at school and
survives all separation : here friends are drawn toge-
ther, as by subtle magnetic attraction, from the very
ends of the world. A book taken up to amuse an
idle hour changes the current of a life ; and sometimes
a word, of no special force or edge, yet spoken when
the soul was sensitive to every passing air of influence.
There is a side of most men's natures on which they
Until He find it. 21
are more open to God than on others : wise words of
old time win some, when freshly spoken ; and others,
words which they have heard a thousand times before,
yet which all at once seem full of new meaning : a
glorious work of art lifts some spirits heavenward, as
music enfolds and carries aloft others, in a storm of
pious ecstasy : this soul is flooded with God as it hangs
between wild sky and wilder sea, the plaything of the
tempest — ^that, as from commanding height it looks
out upon fertile plain and winding river and deep
woods, and wonders at the beauty and the bounty
which God lavishes upon man. Is it not a common-
place to insist upon the constancy with which God
seeks and finds us in adversity and disappointment
and death, not so much as if He were tired of being
good to us, as resolved to make Himself known in
privation to hearts that rejected or only half-accepted
Him in blessing? Have I read your souls aright?
Have I, with any approach to accuracy, interpreted
your own experience? Are you not able, so far as
you have yet advanced on life's journey, to say at this
point, Here God led me — and at that. Here He bid
me stay ? Do you not feel that in so far as you have
discerned and obeyed the Divine guidance, life has
been strong and peaceful and happy, and that all
error and weakness and unrest have sprung, only too
manifestly, from self-will ? And if this is, as I believe
it to be, the secret history of every religious heart, why
2 2 Until He find it.
should we suppose our own experience to be singular
and like no other ? Does God care for us alone, or
set our souls at a higher price than those of the harlot
or the thief?
At the same time, it is important to remember that
we cannot separate in thought our own work from
God's. In so far as we are able to do any good work
at all, we are His instruments : it is by men, at least
in part, that He works upon men ; and the faithful-
ness of the preacher, the patient toil of the missionary,
the unwearied kindness of the nurse, the long labour
of the schoolmaster, are, whatever may seem to be
their dependence upon human goodwill, in another
sense manifestations of His omnipresent activity. And
I cannot but think it another proof of the truth
of this fundamental principle of religion on which I
am insisting, that when it lives upon persuasive lips
and in an eager spirit of charity, men's hearts, even
the foulest and the coldest, leap up in answer to it.
If only you can persuade men or women that, no matter
how far gone they may be in defiance of Him and
His will, God still loves them — that if only they will
turn to Him in sorrow and contrition. He is willing
and waiting to forgive — that it is never too late to
repent, and the way always open to unblamed life —
your words will come down like summer's rain upon
the thirsty soil, and the seeds of good, that no drought
of the Spirit can wholly kill, may yet spring to life.
Until He find it. 2 3
and blossom and bear fruit in their season. Believe
me, this is the secret of the power which revivalist
preachers, crude and coarse as we may think them,
sometimes exercise upon hard and brutal minds, which
more refined ministrations are powerless to touch. It
is not that they are scared by the flames of hell —
fear saves no souls : they are not whipped back to
goodness, like beaten hounds crouching under the lash.
All that the image of the pit can do is to heighten by
contrast the winning charm of Divine Love. They do
not ask if the theory of atonement will logically hold
together, or inquire from whom they are saved, or
what moral principles are observed or violated in the
transaction. The one fact that shines clearly forth is,
that after a life of weakness, wickedness, neglect of
God, contempt of duty — sinking ever into profounder
depths of sin against themselves and humanity — God
still loves them, and has sent His Son to seek and to
save them. And that is enough.
"Until He find it." Surely this word involves a
promise as well as states a fact. So far, perhaps half-
unconsciously, we have chiefly dwelt upon God's search
of men : we have felt that He stretches out His hands
upon us, and so have found it not impossible to believe
that He works also in that thick darkness where we
cannot follow Him. But He searches until He finds.
His love is not baffled, even by man's utmost stretch
of perversity. The Good Shepherd cannot be content
2 4 Until He find it.
until every sheep is safely folded ; even if He spend
the night in watch and search, a daybreak there will
surely be at last at which the flock shall be for ever
complete. Do you not discern what great doctrinal
inference is involved in this thought? We cannot
prove the future life by any arguments based on
Science : much rather does Science coldly turn her
back upon our wistfulness, and is even unwilling that
we should " faintly trust the larger hope." Physical
difficulties seem to roll a stone over the mouth of every
grave : all we can do, in face of them, is to fall back on
our own ignorance, and trust that material things may
not be what they seem. But if there be a God of
omnipotent Love, can we believe that that Love is
mocked ? And mocked it undoubtedly is if this life
be all : if into the same blank nothingness with the
hero, the philanthropist, the philosopher, the saint,
descend all maimed and shattered lives, the wrecks
and the failures of humanity — those who have never
known God here, and, if this dark unfaith be true,
shall never know Him. Those whom He has enriched
with blessing — those who have lived a strong and
rounded life — those who have fed full upon know-
ledge — those from whom life has gone forth — those,
in a word, whom God has found — may go down to
the grave without hope of rising again, and yet with
the feeling that the purposes of existence have, in
their day of light, been at least in part realized ;
Until He find it. 2 5
though here, too, comes in the thought that there are
no bounds to life in God and knowledge of God, and
that His touch upon the spirit once felt is eternal life.
But the lost who on earth are not saved, the weak who
are not made strong, the foul who are not purified, the
brutal who are not reclaimed to humanity — these the
Good Shepherd seeks, I cannot but think, even through
an eternity, "until He find them." Would that we,
from whom in our plenitude of blessing He is never
far off, might go forth to meet Him in the way, and
follow Him with docile steps to the fold where the
pastures are always green and the waters of life never
cease to flow !
"And though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity,
it profiteth me nothing."
^SJfS^T is not impossible that in these words, which
^1^ are usually taken as only an example of the
Apostle's vivid an d impetuous rhetoric, we have
an accidental meeting-point^the only one, so far as
I know, that exists — between Buddhism and Chris-
tianity. A story is toLd by classical writers of an
embassy sent to Augustijs by Porus, an Indian king,
attached to which was a fanatic, who, under what
circumstances we are not informed, publicly bumed
himself at Athens, The sacrifice was by no means
without precedent. Plutarch tells us of one Calanus,
ati Indian sage, Brahman or Buddhist, who, accom-
panying Alexander the Great westwards, deliberately
bumed himself alive at Babylon, rather than undergo
the annoyance of a disease which does not appear to
The Indian^ s Grave. 2 7^.
have been either very painful or very dangerous. And
Josephus puts a speech into the mouth of Eleazar, in
the last agony of the Jewish war, in which he fortifies
the fellow-countrymen whom he was addressing in the
intention of suicide, by the example of Indian wise
men who avoided the ills of disease and old age by a
voluntary exit at the gate of fire. But we are able to
establish a possible connection between Paul and the
Hindoo who burned himself at Athens in Augustus*
time. According to Plutarch, his tomb was one of
the sights of the city. It bore the inscription : " Zar-
manochegas, the Indian, from Bargosa, who, after the
fashion of his Indian forefathers, made himself immor-
tal, lies here." Now Zarmanochegas is evidently the
same word as Iramana-karja, which means " teacher
of the ascetics," and shows that its owner was not
Brahman, but Buddhist ; while Bargosa may be taken
as identical with Barygaza, a city in which we know
Buddhism flourished at the beginning of the Christian
era. What more likely than that Paul, whose eye had
been attracted by the inscription, " To the Unknown
God," should have seen this also, and should have
heard the story of the strange self-immolation, which
was yet fresh in the minds of men ?
This point of contact between Buddhism and Chris-
tianity cannot count for much : it is purely accidental ;
and however probable the interpretation of Paul's
words, there is still an element of uncertainty in it
28 The Indian's Grave.
But at least it touches the imagination ; and I am not
sure that, to the student of history, that is not the
great thing. Familiar as we are with Buddhism, in
its vast Eastern ramifications, as a contemporary
religious fact, we are apt to forget that it is five
hundred years older than Christianity, and before
Christ was born had run its first triumphant course,
and undergone corruption and reform, and developed
into sects, and manifested its whole character, though
not its whole efficacy, as a world -religion. There are
some eccentric theorists who wish to make out that,
through Essenism, Buddhism may have had a direct
influence upon Christianity. But the connection be-
tween Christianity and Essenism is much more one
of conjecture than of proved fact; while the little
we know of the Essenes has at all periods of active
criticism encouraged wild statements as to the origin
and effect of their characteristic doctrines. No ; there
is a very real interest in the strange similarities between
Buddhism and Christianity, but it does not lie in the
attempt to connect them by any line of historical
affiliation, so much as in the testimony which they
bear to the identical development of the religious
principle in man at all ages and under all circum-
stances. Buddhism is Aryan ; Christianity, Semitic :
the one traces its origin to the impressions of the
natural beauty and grandeur made upon the fore-
fathers of our own race under the shadow of the
The IndiatCs Grave. 29
Himalayas ; the other's story is written in those re-
cords of Hebrew faith and life with which we are so
familiar : each appeals to different peculiarities of race
and character, and it is not till the first centuries of
the Christian era that the Aryan learns to think Semitic
thoughts and to speak with a Semitic tongue. But
no one can help being struck with the similarity
between the stories of Christ's life and those of the
Buddha; while centuries after, when Jesuit missionaries
pursued their proselytizing work in the farthest East,
they marvelled at the apparent imitations of their own
developed Catholicism which they found there, and
declared Buddhism a thing invented of the devil to
make a mock of Christianity and to delude true
believers. And all the while, if only they had known,
there was very little marvellous in the matter. Reli-
gions, both in the dawn of their strength and in the
maturity of their corruption, necessarily have a root
of likeness in them. All reformers burn with indigna-
tion against the same woes and wrongs, and attempt
to redress them in the same way. The primitive faiths
on which their own souls are stayed, and to which
they labour to bring back their fellows, do not vary
from land to land, or from age to age. Presently the
same slackness steals over men's hearts, the same
spiritual misapprehensions are made : the external is
confounded with the internal, asceticism displaces
duty : belief supersedes faith, forms smother life. The
30 The Indian^ s Grave.
sublimity of Buddhist morals, the absurdities of Bud-
dhist monasticism, belong to the same order of facts
as the like things in the history of Christianity : they
spring from the same human roots, and are developed
under the pressure of the same laws. But there is no
reason to suppose that either has been copied from
the other.
There is a subtle transition of meaning between the
first and second clause of this verse which must not
be neglected if we would catch the Apostle's full inten-
tion. "Though I bestow all my goods to feed the
poor — and have not charity :" — here the antithesis
strikes at one of the commonest of all religious illu-
sions, and an illusion into which it is particularly easy
to fall in regard to this special grace of life — the con-
fusion of the outer act with the inner spirit There
are a thousand ways in which we may simulate the
effects of love ; but without love itself, the inspiring,
informing, regulating, purifying affection, they are all
unprofitable. And this is so much a commonplace of
our condition of religious thought and life ; so warns
us against a danger which lies in wait for us every
day, as to hide from us the fact, that when Paul goes
on to say, " though I give my body to be burned," he
has passed on to other moral ground. Why Zarma-
nochegas burned himself, we are not told : it may have
been, as in the case of Calanus, utter contempt of death,
mingled with impatient weariness of life : it may have
The Indian^ s Grave. 3 1
been — such manifestations are not unknown in the
East — the proud exhibition of a fierce and self-reh'ant
fanaticism. No doubt the Athenians hardly under-
stood the spectacle on which they wonderingly gazed :
the fashion of suicide which infected the first century
was much more Roman than Greek, and was wont to
find for itself easier ways than that of fire ; and pro-
bably before Paul's time the " Indian's Grave " at
Athens was a sight at which strangers stared without
asking or receiving any moral explanation of its story.
But I fancy that Paul would feel a certain impatience,
not distantly akin to contempt, at such an unpractical
manifestation of religion. When Plutarch tells the
story of the self-immolation of Calanus, we are cheated
into a certain brief admiration of his heroism, as we
hear how he calmly walked up to the funeral pyre
which he had caused to be erected for himself, and lay
down upon it, wrapped in his cloak, nor betrayed by
sound or motion any consciousness that the lapping
flames were folding him in their deadly embrace. And
it is only when we recollect that all this was to escape
from bodily inconvenience and pain, which men of a
less theatrical bravery bear every day without com-
plaint or neglect of duty, that the unreality of the
whole thing breaks in upon us, and we perceive that
our admiration is thrown away. Paul, I think, was
eminently resolute and patient The period of his
active ministry was not long, but it was filled to the
32 The Indian^ s Grave.
brim, as we know, with perils and persecutions. He
made equal trial of the long languors of delay and
disappointment and prison, and the sharp spasms of
bodily danger and anguish. His sensitive spirit laid
him peculiarly open to every kind of moral depression
and disquietude. He always carried about with him
the mysterious trouble of "the thorn in the flesh."
Yet he never ceases to think life worth living, if only
he can accomplish anything in his divine vocation.
Though he is " in a strait betwixt two, having a desire
to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better,"
yet so long as he is assured that " to abide in the flesh"
is better for those to whom his life is given, he knows
"that he shall abide and continue with them for all
their furtherance and joy of faith." The fact is, that
he has escaped from the personal ground of religion
altogether ; and in so escaping has not only set his
soul in a large place, but has found a clear and autho-
ritative rule of life. He lives for others — to serve
Christ, to hasten the kingdom of God, to bring good
news to the weary and heavy-laden ; and what does
it matter how weary and heavy-laden with the dis-
tresses of the spirit and the infirmities of the flesh he
may himself be, so long as he can speak one true word
for good, against evil strike one stout and faithful blow?
So far, then, as I can read Paul's thought in this
place, the contrast in his mind is that between the
practical and the unpractical. He is impatient of
The Indiat^s Grave. 33
sacrifices without a purpose. He thinks little of self-
denials in which all that is not gymnastic is self-dis-
play. An action which, whatever the fine qualities
which it requires and involves, begins and ends in the
region of self, has no attractiveness for him. I sup-
pose that many men have felt that James* celebrated
definition of true religion, " to visit the fatherless and
widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted
from the world," laid somewhat too much stress upon
its outward manifestation, too little upon its inner
spring ; yet here Paul, if I interpret him rightly, is in
full accord with it. No doubt there is another point
of view from which it is all-important that we should
be something, and the building up of character is the
chief thing : is it not this which Paul himself means
when in this very verse he contrasts the spirit of love
with the form of charity ? I know it : it is in this
way that we have to look at great moral and religious
truths, first on this side and then on that, till at last
we compel them to reveal their whole harmonious,
symmetrical meaning. But the particular aspect of
truth upon which Paul is dwelling in the words of the
text is, that human life is made up of many affections,
many interests, many duties ; that society is a busy,
living, complex organism, moved in many ways by
competing and conflicting forces ; and that no man
has attained the secret of existence who is not willing
and able to go down into the turmoil, and there to
D
The Indian* s Grave.
think and act and endure as wisely and as faithfully
as he can for the general good. On one side, it is
true, religion is the personal communion of the soul
with God ; but on the other, it is a social instinct, per-
petually seeking and finding work and gratification :
prayer is its undoubted voice, yet no less work ; purity
is the very breath of its nostrils, but it cannot live
without kindness. If, indeed, a man have unconquer-
able resolution, I can fancy Paul saying. Let him use
it, not in building and mounting his own funeral pyre,
but in some strong conflict with evil for the brethren's
sake. Courageous patience may be best displayed,
not in the sharp agony of self-conscious asceticism,
but in the forgetfulness of self in the quiet discharge
of daily duty. What object in the gymnastic of the
soul, if the thews and sinews which it develops are
never to be put to any nobler use than to bear with
unyielding rigidity the blows of fate ? All things are
ours, the Apostle would have said, and we are Christ's:
let us gather up our treasure of occasion, affection,
faculty, only that we may lay them down at his feet,
to be spent in the service of struggling, suffering
humanity.
To find Christian parallels to the self-immolation
of Zarmanochegas, we must go to the Roman Catholic
Church, and there perhaps our lesson, though true
enough, will miss appHcability to ourselves. Paul,
we are wont to think, not without justification, was a
i
The IndiafCs Grave. 35
Protestant Apostle ; yet it would not be difficult to
show that he has been greatly misapprehended by
Protestants. There is the doctrine of personal salva-
tion, for instance, which is supposed to find its chief
support in his writings — a doctrine which, if nowhere
formulated in exact words, yet runs through the whole
of evangelical practice. According to it, the first
question which a man has to ask himself is. What
must I do to be saved ? and thereafter, whether that
question be satisfactorily answered or not, the chief
object of his attention .and concern is the state of his
own soul. It may seem a bold affirmation to make, but
I believe Paul thought very little about his own soul at
all, and would probably have been better satisfied with
himself if he had been able to think less. Inward fears
and doubts and irresolutions, any turning within of
thought and affection, he would have regarded, I am
persuaded, as so much weakening and hindering of
his proper work, and therefore as a thing to be as far
as possible trampled under foot and got rid of Why
am I halting here, he would have said, troubled, per-
plexed, distressed about my wretched self, while all
outside God's fields are white unto harvest, and the
labourers so few ? Let me cast off my fears and my
hesitations, and, steadily doing my best through the
toil and heat of the day, leave the reward at eventide
to God's infinite justice and mercy. " He saved others,
himself he cannot save," said the chief priests and the
D 2
36 The Indian^ 5 Grave.
scribes mocking, as Christ hung in torture upon the
cross, and knew not that they were uttering the great
law of human salvation. No true man ever tries to
save himself : if he can save another, it is enough for
him. To accomplish that, he would, were it possible,
lose himself: as Paul wished that, for the sake of his
brethren according to the flesh, he might be accursed
for Christ. Only, in the providence of God, it is not
possible : whoso can forget himself, is evermore safe in
the arms of eternal and omnipotent Love.
Most of God's gifts to men (all, I dare not say) are
ambiguous, and it rests with ourselves whether they
shall be bane or blessing. And the sharp dividing-
line is drawn at this point — can we, and will we, share
them with others ? There is health, surely an unmixed
good, the physical root of all strength and happiness,
the blessing which, more than any other, enters into
the whole warp and woof of existence. Is, then, a
thoroughly, frankly selfish health a good thing : a
health which can afford to disregard all moral checks
and signals of danger : a health which is brutal
towards suffering and infirmity, simply because it
cannot understand them : a health which pursues its
vigorous way without a thought of the weakness
which it elbows aside, and the sorrow which it tramples
under foot ? Great bodily, no less than great mental
capacities only become sweet and safe by consecration
to unselfish uses ; and your giant first learns the true
The Indian^ s Grave. 3 7
application of his strength when he takes the child
Christ upon his shoulders — and in him all weakness —
to bear it through the raging torrent of life. Money ?
— the moral is absolutely too trite to draw : nothing
on earth festers into foul corruption so surely as an
unused heap of gold. The knowledge which a man
accumulates simply in the gratification of his own
instincts, and which he neither seeks to share with
others nor to turn to practical account, avenges itself
by taking possession of him wholly, and making him,
instead of a man with human affections and emotions,
a poor blinking bookworm, living in the dark and
feeding upon perpetual paper. But knowledge rarely
IS, and art can never be, the treasure which a single
soul hugs to itself and gloats over in solitude: their
spirit is essentially one of expansion and communion :
what new thing any man discovers, he calls the whole
world to share with him, and " a thing of beauty is a
joy for ever" and to all. Whatever good thing a man
keeps to himself, stands neither him nor the world in
much stead : all true riches grow by division : and he
who spends much, has more. The funeral pyre at
Athens is forgotten because its courage and its con-
stancy had none but a personal reference : the cross
on Calvary still and for ever draws the eyes of men
and thrills their hearts, for there an all-daring love
sacrificed itself and was content
^t ©inlmeirf of ^pifetnaxii berg grediraB.
Maek X
V.3:
"And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he
sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box
of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the
box, and poured it on his head."
^H?^ WILL not trouble you to-day with any disqui-
S^^ sition upon the forms which this story assumes
in the three Gospels which contain it, or ask
whether it is the same story as that which is told in the
seventh chapter of Luke. For my present purpose we
only take it as it stands here. It comes to us from the
old days with a charming freshness and life-likeness ;
it is full of the odour of the East, and yet it might have
been invented as a parable of modern utilitarianism.
Whether the "woman" was Mary^as John has it —
brimming over with joy and thankfulness for the resto-
ration of her brother ; whether we are to identify her
with the " sinner" who is the heroine of Luke's tale —
she was in a mood of mind which bade her devise and
The Ointment of Spikenard. 39
adopt the costliest and the most signal method of
showing her love and gratitude to Jesus. And of
course the spikenard might have been sold for three
hundred pence and given to the poor — an application
of the money as to which, in those days, no one would
have had either moral or economical doubts. From
one point of view, it was little better than sheer waste
to pour it out on head and feet of one who was
profoundly indifferent to such luxurious appliances.
Certain calculations might well pass quickly through
bystanders' minds as to how many loaves of bread were
the equivalent of that moment's extravagance, or how
many widows' hearts might be made to sing for joy
had it been foregone. I am on the side of the extrava-
gance myself — and so was Christ ; but the peculiarity
of the case is, that the side which any one takes
depends largely on his natural disposition and general
way of looking at things : that some of us need no
argument to justify this woman in our own hearts,
and that to the rest of us no argument will ever
justify her. Let self-sacrificing love have free course
and be glorified, say some : Nay, say the others, let us
have no leaping in the dark, but a careful calculation
and balance of consequence, and a regulation of action
in accord with that. What motive, high or low, what
impulse from the better or baser part of my nature,
bids me do it ? ask these : What will come of it if I
do? is the careful question of those. And each point
40 The Ointment of Spikenard,
of view seems tote right and reasonable until we place
ourselves at the other.
I am not going to enter into any disquisition as to
the precise meaning and compass of the word utility.
The calculation of consequences may be on the nar-
rowest or the widest scale : we may unblushingly con-
fine it to the forces of our own personal pleasure or
advantage, or extend it to mean the greatest happiness
pf the greatest number. And again, we may admit
that the right action is always useful also, taking the
word useful in its best sense, without admitting that
its rightness consists in its usefulness, or that the only
way to test its rightness is to determine its utility.
But it is very curious and instructive to note how the
best and noblest-minded defenders of utilitarianism
have felt compelled by a kind of inner necessity so
to define it and to fence it with conditions — ^yes, we
might almost say, so to explain it away — as to make
it resemble the opposite doctrine as much as possible.
For about all avowedly utilitarian morals there is an
element of prose, which, except to eminently prosaic
minds, is apt to be unsatisfactory sometimes. Such
goodness is very calm, very reasonable, very steady :
for what it is, you can always rely upon it implicitly :
its decisions are not very open to criticism, its argu-
ments are not easy to answer. But it excites no
enthusiasm, it exercises no contagion. Everybody
respects it ; but to apply to the feeling which it calls
The Ointment of Spikenard. 41,
up the word love, would be an abuse of terms. It is
incapable of folly ; and shall I not venture to say that
in all the highest and sweetest goodness there is an
element of foolishness ? It is shy of self-sacrifice ; and
self-sacrifice is the mark for which men instinctively
look in all that claims to be virtue, and are dissatisfied
if they do not find it. Somehow, nice calculation of
conduct is felt to be inconsistent with the highest
achievement : if you would stir men's hearts as with
the sound of a trumpet, it must be by the proclamation
of duty as duty, " clear of consequence."
Put the ideas of utilitarianism and of heroism side
by side, and see how little they will agree. A standing
difficulty with utilitarian moralists is to make their
principle carry them into those highest regions of
human feeling and conduct, where nevertheless the
common conscience demands that they shall go : it
is hard to justify self-sacrifice, and especially to the
extent of self-immolation in the cause of country or
of kindness. Love, indeed, every day bids men and
women throw away their lives, and asks no justification
or indemnity; but that is quite another matter. Some-
times theorists, as I have already said, so manipulate
their favourite principle of utility as virtually to change
it into the very opposite of itself ; others I have known
to meet the difficulty in a far less satisfactory way, by
denying that self-sacrifice can ever be right. That
heresy, I think, may be safely left to the general judg-
42 The Ointment of Spikenard.
ment of mankind ; and when a philosopher, as Mr.
Herbert Spencer, in his " Data of Ethics," lays it
down that nothing can be right which would In any
way abridge the actor's life, and implies that a mother
is departing from the path of duty when she nurses her
sick child to the detriment of her own health, the
judgment passed upon him will probably be that,
whatever the extent of his other knowledge, he has
still to learn the meaning of the word " Ethics." For
by an universal instinct of mankind, all morals are
felt to grow up into heroism, and culminate in it : we
distrust the morality out of which we are sure that no
heroism could by possibility grow. We measure the
lower by its capacity of producing the higher : we
reject a mode of moral thought which implicitly ex-
cludes Christ. I do not deny that Christ's toil and
disappointment and sufferings and death were in the
end the best thing for mankind : I think it possible
that in some moment of exalted faith and far-reaching
insight he may have seen that it was so. What I
deny is, that such a conclusion, which I take to be
of the purely intellectual kind, could have transformed
itself into his prevailing motive, or infused into him
the strength necessary for his self-devotion. Only pure
ignorance of human nature — or, on the other hand,
blind allegiance to a philosophical theory— could ever
persuade any one so. We are moved to great deeds,
or nerved to long endurance, only by two things, love
i
The Ointment of Spikenard. 43
and duty. It is our passions — and our noblest passions
the most strongly — that carry us away and give us
a strength and a courage not our own. I think of
Christ as, throughout his too brief ministry, absolutely
faithful to the convictions in which he had begun
it : encountering unexpected difficulties, suffering un-
looked-for disappointments, seeing his work open
before him in ways of which he had not thought — yet
holding on : seeing the horizon gradually darken
around him, finding himself and his mission involved
in a mist of uncertainty — yet holding on: at last
aware that the sacrifice of life itself could not honour-
ably be avoided, and that he must leave the task which
God had committed to his charge, to hands of which
he best knew the feebleness — yet still holding on,
through the Agony and to the Cross, in the unshaken
assurance that fidelity En word and act was, come
what would, the only thing possible for him. But
that reading of a great life and death is not consistent
with the theory which makes duty a calculation of uti-
lities, and seeks to prove a sacrifice expedient before
you can pronounce it right
The fact Is, that any complete calculation of conse-
quences is a thing quite impossible to us. Nothing
is more certain than that, on the one hand, a man's
action, so to speak, goes out from him to live an
independent life, which he can neither trace nor con-
trol, and that, on the other, it is connected by a
The Ointm£nt of Spikenard.
thousand ramifications of cause and effect with other
actors and other actions to the end of time. Physicists
have reached the grand generalization that the slightest
change in any particle of matter affects in its degree
the whole universe for all subsequent time ; that,
for instance, the winds and rains which sweep over
us from the Atlantic now, were implicitly contained,
in a given degree, in the unrecorded weather of a
thousand years ago. So our self-indulgence or our
self-denial, our idleness or our industry, our wrath or
our patience, once they have taken shape in act, go
on, as it were, modifying others' acts and others'
characters, and Introducing a fresh and individual
element into the equilibrium of the moral world. But
nothing is less true than that we can predict what the
precise consequences of our actions will be, or gather
them ali into one sum, of which we can say that it is
good or bad. The effects of our worst or our best
actions vary, and sometimes even change their cha-
racter, in accordance with the natures upon which they
work : we have known a mother's unbounded self-
sacrifice make her children selfish, and a violent temper
run to such excesses of rage as to teach in the most
effectual way the lesson of self-control The very
Gospel, as Paul keenly discerned, is not only a " savour
of life unto life," but of "death unto death ;" and the
spiritual nourishment on which Peter and James and
John grew in strength and grace, was poison to the
The Ointment of Spikenard. 45
unhappy soul of Judas. No; the consequence of our
actions is precisely that of which we can never be sure,
and which we must leave in the hands of God : the
one thing which we can know is the inner source from
which they spring. And here there need be no mis-
take. To have honestly tried to do right is, for all
purposes that we need care about, to have done it.
And from the Christian point of view there is always
safety in self-spending.
I know the reply which some of you are already
secretly making to me in your own hearts. You are
protesting against extravagances of toil, against fana-
ticisms of generosity, against follies of self-devotion,
which refuse to calculate any proportion or adaptation
of means to ends, and so have no other result than
that of moral waste. I would not, however, be too
sure even of that : a great faith is never wasted, even
though you cannot discern its achievement : an un-
conscious, a self- forgetful display of human noble-
ness has in it at least this, that it helps men to be
nobler. There is contagion in heroic goodness ; but
I never heard that there was anything of the kind
about even the most consummate prudence. But
recollect that all preaching which is not pedantic, and
aiming after a philosophical completeness which does
not belong to it, must be one-sided ; and then ask to
which bias it were expedient that I should give myself.
Do we any of us need to be exhorted to a nice calcu-
The Ointment of Spikenard.
lation of the results of our actions? Do we not all
pride ourselves upon wary walking? Foolish we may
be ; but are our follies too often the follies of good-
ness ? Do we wear ourselves out in unselfish labour,
or put a too implicit trust in human nature, or believe
with an overweening faith in the kingdom of God ?
Do we need to be warned against a too exclusive
absorption in the things that make for the general
good, or to be reminded of nearer interests and our
private welfare? I am inclined to think that even
when we are minded to do good, we usually set about
it in too humdrum, too prosaic, too utilitarian a way :
we should look askance at an apostle if he could not
make his accounts balance : and we call him rather
fool than saint who pours out his strength and his life
like water whenever the vineyard of God is athirst.
And yet, as far as the experience of my own life goes,
these are the men who have accomplished something.
Often it happens that their enterprizes do not succeed,
but the memory and the charm of their character
remain. Faith is a stronger thing than committees,
and one man's self-forgetfulness than the collective
wisdom of many councillors. Whoever has known
such men is the better for it. The recollection of
what they were rebukes cowardice and unfaithfulness
and self-indulgence, and makes life nobler than it
would have been had they not lived.
Our story brings into the strongest contrast use
The Ointment of Spikenard. 47
and sentiment, and we feel that between them is a
real opposition. But is there any such opposition
between the right and the sentimental, or do we not
acknowledge that many of our best feelings, many of
our noblest affections, are closely allied to the sen-
timental, and must accept whatever opprobrium is
bound up in that word ? There is utility in a wife :
she keeps one's house, she attends to one's comforts,
she stands between one and a thousand petty neces-
sities of life : you can look at her from this point of
view until you discern her as the most trusted, the
most useful, the most necessary, of upper servants.
And I can imagine a time when her kind and watchful
usefulness shall be utterly at an end, or shall have
given place to a sad dependence : when she is com-
pelled to ask from others that constant service which
she was once so prompt to render : when she is nothing
more than the wreck of her former self, a mournful
memory of a bright and beautiful activity, — and yet
when she shall call out from any not ignoble spirit
a tenderness, a loving care, a gratitude that keeps
heart and hand ever on the alert, a loyal homage, a
submissive allegiance, which, if not better things than
the love of youth, are at least freer from the alloy of
self. It is an old story that men do foolish things
when they are in love, and smile at themselves when
in after years love has grown cold ; but they are the
better for having done them, and their criticism is on
a lower level than their folly was. We are made thus :
we cannot help it, and we would not help it if we could.
Things are signs to us, containing more than their
apparent meaning : a flag stands for loyalty ; a lock
of hair, for a lost love ; an old letter, for a friend
estranged ; a chance word calls up a world of forgot-
ten emotions ; bread and wine are no longer them-
selves, but a sacrament, Christ's body and Christ's
blood. And under the influence of thoughts and me-
mories which these things suggest, we do not closely
measure our words, or ask what our actions, rigidly
interpreted, may be taken to mean. For a little while
we are above criticism, and content to be so. If it
were the woman that had been a sinner who brake
the box of ointment, very precious, on the head of the
Master, she did it because she thought no sacrifice
too costly to express in the feeblest and most partial
fashion her love for one whose pure goodness had
shown her the way back to womanhood. Christ, as he
sat at the Pharisee's feast, stood to her for self-respect,
and the quieting of remorse, and God's smile again
lighting up her life, and the hope of unstained years
to come. But to the bystanders he was only a wan-
dering prophet from Galilee, whom they wanted to
look at for the strange things that he said and did,
and they naturally murmured at the fraud practised
on the poor.
Of one thing we may be sure, that we cannot rcgu-
The Ointment of Spikenard. 49
late the utilities of the universe. We see into its
complexities only a very little way, and understand
only a small part of what we see. I believe that they
are regulated for us much better than we could do it
for ourselves, and that the true sphere of our activity
lies in quite another direction. What we have to do
is, not so much to attempt to play the part of a con-
trolling providence outside of our own life, as to keep
sweet within the fountains of pure sympathy, and just
to let them flow. If we love goodness, our actions
will naturally, and quite infallibly, range themselves
on the side of goodness. Then happy is it for us if
we possess, in addition, the rare faculty of discerning
a true King of men, and acknowledging that for us
there can be no better thing than to pour out all the
riches of our heart upon him. The days of "the
alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious,"
are for the most part gone : what is asked of us now
is self-surrender, strong enthusiasm, untiring patience,
faithfulness even unto death. We give them, it may
be, and the world murmurs at the waste : fidelity to a
hopeless cause : a foolish extravagance of strength :
a needless sacrifice of happiness. But the Master's
word is, " He hath done what he could" — and whoso-
ever hears it, needs no more.
E
(
u
"Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about by so great a
cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin
which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience
the race that is set before us."
^B^HE authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews
gF^ fi IS one of the unsolved and insoluble problems
of New Testament literature. The common
hypothesis now, that it is the work of Paul, was pre-
cisely that which the literary sense of the first centuries
forbade them to entertain : by them its apostolic
authorship was long held to be doubtful, and it was
one of the last books to find an unquestioned place
in the Canon. Some said Apollos was its author;
some, Barnabas : till at last the desire to annex a great
name to what is really an anonymous book, fathered
it upon Paul. Internally, it does not suggest itself as
his : the style, the mode of thought, the line of treat-
The Race that is set before us. 5 1
ment, are dififerent : all other books ascribed to him,
authentic and unauthentic, are duly signed by his
name. Besides, there is one passage (ii. 3) which, as
Luther saw long ago, conclusively proves that the
author of the Epistle belonged to the generation after
the apostolic : " How shall we escape, if we neglect so
great salvation ; which at the first began to be spoken
by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that
heard him?" So, beyond the negative conclusions to
which we are thus led, we may give up the question
in despair. We may connect the book, with equal
probability and equal lack of evidence, with any of
the great names of the early Christian ages. There
is nothing to induce us to give the preference to any.
I will not pause upon the general character of the
book. It is an attempt — as indeed is indicated by the
title which it usually bears — to recommend Christian-
ity to those who still clung to the old ritual ; and, if
the whole truth is to be spoken, is as unsuccessful as
such attempts to pour new wine into old bottles com-
monly are. The apologist is caught in the meshes
of his own allegory ; and we have an adaptation of
Christian facts to Jewish forms, in which Christ ap-
pears, now as the sacrificing priest, now as the victim
offered up. Of course the Epistle, especially if taken
piecemeal, as Protestant expositors are wont to take
Scripture, affords much support to the sacrificial theory
of Christ's death ; and in one passage, " without shed-
£ 2
5 2 The Race that is set before "us.
ding of blood there is no remission," gives counte-
nance to some of the coarsest and most repulsive
exaggerations of modem Evangelical theology. But
its author was happily Capable of better things than
the laboured allegory which fills so many of his pages.
I, for one, cannot doubt that he was a Jew who, though
full of the new faith, saw how it had grown out of the
old, and was profoundly unwilling to let go the fine
spiritual traditions which were the glory and the life
of Israel. This faith, this reaching forth of the soul
to things unseen and unproved, without which it is
impossible to please God, is no new thing, no fresh
aspiration of humanity, no gift for the first time brought
down from heaven to earth by Christ. It was the
light in which the Fathers dwelt : it was the strength
in which Moses had liberated the people : it was the
inspiration of heroes, prophets, martyrs, more than
tongue could tell. But a shadowy light, it is true ;
only a chequered strength ; an inspiration that looked
forward to something better and completer than itself.
But the same breath of the Lord was upon all the
ages, strengthening and purifying and making them
one. And the end of all is, the responsibility of the
fuller light, the inspiration of God's great day. " Where-
fore, seeing we also are compassed about by so great
a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and
the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run
with patience the race that is set before us."
The Race that is set before us. 5 3
In these words there is to me, to-day, a sound as of
a trumpet-call. Their effect, like that of every other
deep and pregnant phrase, varies with the mood of
the recipient mind : we read them sometimes, and they
are little more than a succession of familiar sounds
falling upon the ear, hardly touching even the brain ;
and then again, as if a fresh electric current were
passing through them, they quicken the pulse, and stir
the heart, and fire the conscience. And what do they
now seem to mean ? First, there is. the cloud of wit-
nesses. No doubt the writer had in his mind one of
those solemn athletic contests in which the Greeks
delighted, which were closely associated with the forms
of popular religion, and to which their theories of
physical education gave a great practical importance.
There was the wide course stretching far beneath the
unclouded sky, adorned with statues of famous victors
of old, stately with the temples of the immortal gods,
and, all around, the people come together from many
a city far and near, to watch the efforts of their own
youths, and to cheer them as, with muscles strained
and labouring chests, they flew towards the goal. So,
if our life be a race, it is not without its attendant and
sympathizing witnesses. I do not mean the living:
they are struggling in the arena at our side: they
share our hopes and fears, and are involved in our
fate. It is those who have toiled in the race, and
reached the goal : who have known every quick alter-
I
54 The Race that is set before us.
nation of hope and despondency and despair: who have
felt at one moment as if they could not bear up an
instant longer, and at the next were full of a strange
celestial strength : and who, now at last at rest from
their labours, free for ever from their fears, know in
whom they have believed, acknowledge in whose
strength they have conquered. And upon us they
look down with eyes of serene encouragement, bidding
us remember that a crown of life remains for them
that endure unto the end.
Yes, reply the faithful lips, we see them, but do they
see us ? The way by which the race has travelled is
illumined by many shining stars : we come of a noble
lineage; we have inherited great wealth of goodness.
If we lived more habitually with the best men and
their best thoughts, our lives could not so easily drop
to the level of the selfish and the commonplace : we
should feel far more than we do how it is an obliga-
tion upon those who stand in a noble line, to be noble.
But have not the heroes and the saints, the martyrs
and the prophets, the men and women who stood near
to God, and upon whose faces the light of His glory
was reflected, so that weaker eyes could see it — have
they not gone to their reward ? Have they not passed
out of sight and hearing of our poor earthly efforts,
to be employed by God in the ampler ministries of
heaven ? I cannot tell : these are the mysteries of
faith, into which the keenest eye can see only a little
The Race that is set before us. 5 5
way. But if I take counsel of my own heart, it would
seem to me, unless the gift of eternal life wake a com-
plete change in my nature, a quite impossible thing
ever to become indifferent — no matter how many ages
may roll away, no matter what progress I may make
in Divine service — t;o the toils and sorrows of my race,
as here upon earth it slowly lifts itself a little nearer
to the kingdom of God. And so I cannot but think
that the immortal ones never lose sight of us. Ours
is not a lonely race, a solitary struggle. " A cloud of
witnesses around, holds us in full survey." Our toils
and stumblings, our faintings and discouragements,
are theirs too : they mourn over our failures, they
rejoice in our success.
" Laying aside every weight, and the sin which doth
so easily beset us." The last phrase is one which, by
its singular force and aptness, has made itself a fixed
place in our religious language : we speak of " the
besetting sin" as that which lies nearest to every one
of us, and is promptest and subtlest of assault. I
think that the one Greek word which is the equivalent
of "which doth so easily beset us," is rightly trans-
lated, though It occurs nowhere else in the whole
compass of the language. Other proposed renderings
seem to me to be at once less justified by the etymo-
logy, and far inferior in religious force and application.
But I am persuaded that we should make a mistake
in treating the reference as to any special sin in each
56 The Race that is set before us.
individual case. No doubt there are besetting sins
which call for peculiar vigilance, and each man knows
his own. There are points, so to speak, in each indi-
vidual life in which the horizon is clear, and again
points from which an attack may be momentarily
expected, and it would be folly indeed not to keep
the sharpest watch where the danger is most immi-
nent. But I think it is an universal experience that
the moral foes with which we have to deal are singu-
larly active and subtle 1 that on no side are we safe :
■End that at the very moment at which we may be
keeping watch and ward against some temptation of
which we know and fear the strength, an attack from
a side quite uiilooked for may leave us helpless and
ashamed. And I take the meaning of the phrase
which we are discussing to be, that sin, not in the
special but in the general sense, always besets us :
that in the present state of being we are subject to a
thousand temptations, vulnerable at athousand points:
and that if we are to run the race that is set before us
with any chance of success, it must be in the strength
of a single-minded striving after holiness.
But there is more in it than this. What of the "every
weight" of which the athlete naturally disencumbers
himself? It is not sin, from which it is distinguished,
and yet, like sin, it is to be resolutely laid aside. The
interpretation is not difficult. If there be any way of
life which, innocent according to a worldly standard
J
The Race that is set before us. 5 7
and as tried by the common custom of men, is yet
inconsistent with the highest requirements of duty, or
felt to bring with it peculiar temptations, it is to be
renounced. If there be any habit which, defensible
in itself, carries with it a possibility of sullying the
pure lustre of a Christian profession, or troubles the
quiet depths of conscience, or even involves misunder-
standing and offence in others, it is to be cast off. If
there be worldly interests or worldly affections which
so completely occupy the heart as to cool its love of
God and slacken the ardour of its aspiration after the
one true end of life, they must be laid aside or reduced
to that place of subordination which is their due. He
who contends for the prize of swiftness and endurance
carries no needless burthens. And yet, in so saying,
I would not be supposed to advocate any ascetic and
unearthly holiness, or to inculcate that whoever would
run the Christian race must hold himself separate from
the world. To every man's conscience must be left
the task of interfusing life with a high moral purpose
which shall animate and govern the whole — a test
here, an inspiration there, but everywhere first, last,
best To live nobly is the chief thing : if only we
knew how much the chiefest of all, all ignobleness
would drop away out of our lives of itself.
There is yet another phrase on which I am tempted
to delay for a moment — "with patience." We are
wont to complain that life is short ; and indeed, as we
58 The Race that is set before us.
look back upon it from near its close, years seem but
months, and months dwindle into days. But much
patience goes to the making of seventy years sweet,
strong, consistent, holy. One of the unexpected expe-
riences which comes with advancing years is, I think,
that of the changefulness of life. When we are young,
we think that we can predict it all : but when they
come, our middle years are not what we thought they
would be, and age creeps on, mingling youth with it
in a fashion for which we are not prepared. All the
sharper crises, all the deeper experiences of life, have
an unexpected element in them : and there are long
and arid tracts of existence to be traversed, of which
the fresh energies, the bounding impulses of youth,
give no warning. And strange as the assertion may
at first seem to be, I do not think that it is our sharpest
agonies which most put our patience to the proof,
God is good to His own when they are in trouble :
and they that find Him, though naked of all else, feel
no need. It is the monotony of life that tries us : the
sense of bounded opportunities and bounded powers :
the slackness of interest that comes of constantly
performing the same duties in the same way : the
growing stiffness of faculty ; the feeling of dissatis-
faction with ourselves, and yet the impossibility of
being other than ourselves. And so the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews does well to interpose that
warning note, " with patience," in the stirring harmony
The Race that is set before us. 59
of his exhortation. Not in one short, sharp burst of
effort is the race to be run. To the succour of the
swift limb must come the stout heart and the resolute
will. Often he struggles best who struggles longest,
and the slowest foot may soonest reach the goal.
To-day, which to you is only one in the ordinary
succession of Sundays, is to me one of the most
solemn of the year, for it is that on which, with powers
once more re-invigorated by rest, I begin my work
afresh. And so you will easily understand how much
of niy exhortation has been directed to my own heart.
I own the inspiring presence of the cloud of witnesses :
I would, with God*s help, lay aside every weight, and
the so easily besetting sin ; with patience I would run
the race that is set before me, looking unto Jesus, the
author and finisher of my faith. But though there be
seasons of the Christian year which make an equal
appeal to all hearts, and again crises of the individual
spirit with which no man can meddle, is it not also
true that every moment may, under the quickening
inspiration of God, be a point of new spiritual depar-
ture ? What but this is the meaning of that perpetual
divine ministry, in which God is always trying to find
His way to His children's souls ? What but this the
significance of that preaching of the Word, in which it
is my duty and my privilege to persevere ? All other
functions of the pulpit are subordinate to the one chief
end of touching hearts: of sending through consciences
6o The Race that is set before us.
an awakening thrill : of winning an irresolute will
to the side of righteousness : of raising in common
existences a fresh sense of the dignity of life. And
so, brethren and sisters, the Lord be with us to-day !
May He give us all a new insight into what we are,
and what, by His help, we may be ! May He call to
our recollection all the bright and beautiful and strong
souls that have gone before and still look down upon
us, and make us feel that we are of the household of
God and the fellowship of saints ! May He help us
to lay aside every weight, and the sin that doth so
easily beset us, and, not in the quickly fading strength
of a brief enthusiasm, but with courage and patience,
run the race that is set before us ! Then He, who has
inspired the strength and sustained the endurance, will
not fail to give the crown.
VI,
strange Jfirt.
Leviticus x. 1—3:
"And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took cither of them
his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon,
and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he com-
manded them not. And there went out fire from the Lord,
and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. Then
Moses said unto Aaron, This is it that the Lord spake,
saying, 1 will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and
before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held
his peace."
^^[[55 WILL begin by frankly confessing that I do
^1^ not know how to re-translate this legend into
sober, credible history. Something lies at the
back of it, but whether a substratum of actual fact, or
the unconscious desire to account for a peculiarity of
ritual, or a mythical explanation of some anomaly in
the Aaronic family history, I cannot tell. The more
we penetrate into the secret places of primeval history,
the more do we find causes of this kind at work in the
62 Strange Fire.
production of those vivid and picturesque narratives
which were once accepted as exact transcripts of an
earlier world. The results of such criticism are often,
I admit, disenchanting. It is hard to find fading away
into the dim and distant mists of the past, scenes
and figures which had laid a powerful hold upon our
childish imagination, and to have to substitute for a
region in which living men moved and spoke, one
peopled by unsubstantial ghosts. There was a wide-
spread and not unnatural feeling of resentment when
Bishop Colenso applied his hard-and-fast arithmetical
tests to the Pentateuch narratives : and only a few
devoted lovers of truth, everywhere and under all
circumstances, have welcomed the attempt to show
that the mythological instincts of mankind have been
active upon this as upon other fields. And yet per-
haps even the imagination gains more than it loses
by this procedure. For the first time we are able to
feel that we have a real past behind us. We can
re-construct the history of the human mind. We can
penetrate to the birth and watch the growth of reli-
gious instincts and emotions. And if the picture of
the primeval world thus becomes a parable rather
than a narrative, it is a parable full of beauty and of
meaning.
As a parable, then, I take the story of the text. It
condenses into a living form the eternal contention
between the priest and the prophet, the orthodox
Strange Fire. 63
doctor and the heresiarch. Both assume to bring fire
before the Lord : each claims to be able to present an
acceptable ofifering. But when the priest angrily and
contemptuously declares the censer of his brother to
smoke with "strange fire," he thinks that he has uttered
a sufficient word of condemnation. And, on the other
hand, the contention of the heretic is, that any fire
which bums up the impure and the unclean must
flame acceptably before a pure and holy God.
The old chemists, with their doctrine of the four
elements of which all things were composed — earth,
air, water and fire — ascribed, we are told, to the last a
peculiar character of purity. Fire does not present
itself to the imagination as susceptible of adulteration.
It puts on no variety of outward aspect : wherever or
however it manifests itself, it is one and the same.
For ever dying out and perpetually renewed, it has
even a character of individuality : there are not many
fires, but one : an early and coveted secret of savage
life is to be able to call forth at will, and yet to keep
within bounds, a beneficent, which at any moment
may reveal itself as a destroying, force. Add to this
its power of utterly annihilating whatever is of coarser
and less ethereal nature than itself, and you have
reasons enough why fire should enter, in very varied
shapes, into religious ritual. There was the altar of
Burnt-offering in the Temple of the Hebrews, which
recalls, in a shape hardly different, the sacrificial feasts
64 Strange Fire.
which the Homeric heroes prepared and enjoyed on
the sea-shore before windy Troy. There was the per-
petual flame on the Roman altar, which it was the
business of the vestal virgins to keep alight, and whose
extinction meant the ruin of the city. There are the
votive candles which play so large a part in Roman
Catholic worship : the dim lamps, ever lighted, which
hang before the holiest shrines : the candlesticks, the
empty remnants of a worn-out superstition, which find
a legal place — so long as they give no light — on
Anglican altars. And, last of all, there are the censers,
which fill the air of the church with that faint, stifling
smell of incense, which seems to be to some spirits the
very breath of worship, the air in which God dwells.
But all these, it appears to me, are but pale and feeble
symbolic fancies, compared with that ancient Persian
cult which boldly takes Fire, the beneficent, the de-
stroying, the immaterial, the pure, the immortal, as the
fittest presentment of Deity, and bows in grateful and
yet awe-stricken reverence before the all-quickening
orb which flames upon the noon-day heavens.
But it is necessary, for the sake of my parable, to
connect fire with religion in yet another sense. We
cannot describe religion without using metaphors
drawn from this source. The ardour of faith, the heat
of love, the flame of a righteous indignation, are phrases
which rise, not only naturally but necessarily, to our
lips whenever we are dealing with the phenomena of
Strange Fire. 65
religious passion. Said Christ himself, in the first
fresh enthusiasm of his ministry, when his word had
free course and all went well with him, and he beheld
Satan as lightning fall from heaven : " The kingdom
of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by
force." So, without forgetting the quieter moods of
peace and trust and resignation which also have their
place in the Christian life, it is undeniably true that
we accomplish most of what is good for God and man
and ourselves in seasons of enthusiasm and passion.
I have dwelt upon this before, and I need not delay
upon the thought now. And I know, too, that there
is unholy as well as holy fire : that passion takes every
form, from the brightest to the basest : that rage will
kindle as well as love, and sensual lust burn to whitest
heat, no less than self-denying affection. But " strange "
is not necessarily "unholy" fire, as the priests would
have us believe. Not the censer in which it is offered,
but the brightness with which it burns, makes it accept-
able to God. The true fire in human hearts is always
kindled from the altar that burns day and night before
the Lord in heaven, and finds its way back to its
heavenly source as by a kind of supernal attraction.
But flames lighted on earth, though offered to heaven
by every exquisite device of worship, on earth wane
and flicker and expire.
Strange fire ! Is there, then, more than one awe of
the Supreme ? Is not all passionate love of righteous-
F
66 Strange Fire.
ness a single impulse? Can any just distinction be
drawn between self-forgetting love in East and West,
now and three thousand years ago ? When we read
wonderful and beautiful tales of self-sacrifice in the
life of the Buddha-— call them legend, myth or sober
history, as you will — are they less true to the inmost
spiritual reality of human nature than the story of the
Christ? When the Greek patriot throws away his
life for his country, believing that this life is all, shall
we rank him below the Christian martyr, who sees the
angels stooping down upon his funeral pyre, and in
their hands an unfading crown ? Suppose some savage
mother, in whose heart burn only untaught instincts
of love and faithfulness, true to her child even unto
death — shall not her self-immolation stand equal, in
the sight of God and man, with hers who, not more,
not less faithful, lives in the inmost cell of church
fellowship ? Ay, but it will be said, these know not
God : they are outside the scope of sacramental bless-
ing : they have not appropriated the benefits of Christ's
atonement. We hardly know through what strange
regions of speculation the Buddha wandered ere he
found the Nirvana that he sought How purely human
in passion, in caprice, in lust, were those gods and
goddesses to whom Hellas reared such stately shrines,
whom she perpetuated in such consummate and undy-
ing beauty ! And that savage mother, whose touching
faithfulness was yet so blind, did she not bow down
Strange Fire. 67
before stocks and stones, the rude fetishes of a terror-
stricken superstition ? It is all true from the human
point of view ; but what if we look upon it from
heaven ? I seem to see the One God, who, dwelling
in light inaccessible and full of glory, is altogether
beyond and above our thought, who may be other and
must be better than we conceive Him, looking down
upon this poor earth from its beginning, as He looks
down upon a thousand other worlds infinitely brighter
and more beautiful. He is the only reality : and all
human gods mere shadows of hope and fear, of awe
and expectation, painted upon the changeful clouds.
Does any sincere prayer break from men's lips ? It
finds His eternal ear. Does any true heart pour itself
forth in love? It enters into fellowship with Him.
Is the fire of genuine charity kindled anywhere ? It
burns with the light of those eternal flames in which
is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
And yet all down the Christian ages I seem to hear
the cry of contempt and condemnation, " Strange fire!"
It was raised at the very beginning : the Twelve could
not comprehend the erratic brother who, once a per-
secutor of the Church, would only serve it after a
fashion of his own, and to the last went on his way
mistrusted, perhaps mistrusting. The reconciling and
moderating mind to which we owe the " Acts of the
Apostles" assures us that these differences were all
smoothed away in a formal contract ; but the rift may
F 2
68 Strange Fire.
easily be traced under the surface of the apostolic age,
and in one form or another has lasted down to our
own time. Presently, as the idea of orthodoxy took
shape and consistence, that of heresy grew into form
over against it : Christians forgot the time, not yet
distant, at which Christianity itself had been but
" strange fire :" and men never stayed to inquire whe-
ther the incense which was offered to God was pure
and good, in their anxiety as to the shape of the
censer in which it burned* When Luther disinterred
the Pauline Gospel, and preached faith for works
Christ for the Church, the living soul for sacraments,
the Bible for the Fathers and the Schoolmen, what a
cry went up from the men who held the belief of
Europe in their hands^ that this new fire of faith was
only a destroying flame, lighted from the very pit of
hell, and greedy to bum up all that was holy and
good ! " Strange fire !" was the Reformers' word to
Zwinglian and Anabaptist, to Servetus and Socinus :
it taught them nothing that the reproach which they
directed against their own heretics. Catholics hurled
at them. " Strange fire !" said all England to George
Fox, as,- clad in his suit of leather, he wandered from
shire to shire, fanning the half-extinct embers of spi-
ritual life ; and again to Wesley, as, under the magic
of his appeal, the tears niade furrows down the cheeks
of the colliers of Kingswood. " Strange fire !" was,
sad to confess, what the Unitarian ministers of Boston
Strange Fire. 69
said to Theodore Parker, when he tried to deliver in
their hearing the message which God, he thought, had
put upon his lips : he believed in law, not in miracle :
what, then, did it matter that his heart was all aflame
with enthusiasm for humanity, and molten with the
love of God? And all around me I hear the same
cry still — ^bandied about between Catholics and Pro-
testants, between Churchmen and Dissenters, between
those who believe little and those who believe less —
until presently another fire begins to burn, which,
whether strange or not, is at least unholy, destroying
fellowship and parching love.
Fire of some sort, I have said, there must needs be.
A religion that kindled none, that never made the
heart throb faster, or gave a fresh energy to the will,
or inspired a new tenderness into the conscience, or
set the affections aglow — a religion that allowed life
to jog on contentedly in old ruts of habit, never
awakening dissatisfaction with what is, never revealing
the brighter world that may be— would hardly be
worthy of the name. And it is by this test that all
heresies and all heresiarchs must ultimately be tried.
Nothing is more difficult than to bring them to the
standard of abstract truth. What is truth? asked
Pilate, not jesting, as I think, but in a mood of truly
human sadness ; nor is it in its least wise moments
that humanity repeats the question, and, like the
Roman procurator, does not attempt to answer it.
70 Strange Fire.
Something indeed we know — enough to live, enough
to die by: truths that have an energy of inspiration in
them, truths that reveal the possibility and teach us the
method of growth. But these creeds descending from
the childhood of our present civilization : these church
systems abundantly deformed by the rust and moss
of the middle ages : these " bodies of divinity," which
are little more than the ridges of sand heaped up by
the great living wave of the Reformation : these con-
fident assertions as to God and spiritual things, in
which phrases are made to do duty for facts, and the
counters of theological debate to pass current for ster-
ling coin of faith, — do not seem to me to be so rooted
in the nature of things, so to rest upon an immovable
foundation, as to supply the standard by which the
truth of new opinions can be tried. If philosophy and
natural science are teaching this age anything, it is
that divine names have more meaning in them than
we can grasp, that divine realities are too many-sided
for our apprehension. We are learning, too, that we
are largely the intellectual creatures of our time : that
by one generation after another, truth is being slowly
beaten out : that we know more than our fathers, that
our children will know more than we. A new theory
in chemistry I try by its accordance with acknow-
ledged truth, by the evidence of fact which it can
show, by its own inherent probability. But when I
hear of a new mot*-*** * -^ItVion, I have another
Strange Fire. 7 r
and a quite different series of questions to ask. Does
it kindle the fire of love ? Does it refine, strengthen,
sweeten the life ? Does it run through society with a
cleansing flame, burning up the mean, the base,' the
selfish, the impure ? It is no heresy if it stands this
test There is but one church of the children of God,
and unfaithfulness is the only infidelity.
And observe, in the last place, that this is a test
which will apply and which is unerring. Men are
beginning to try it everywhere with singular boldness,
sometimes with unexpected results. Protestants have
been wont to assume, without much inquiry, the jus-
tifiableness of that great movement which we call the
Reformation : to believe that it was in the direction of
truth, and away from superstition : in the direction of
simplicity, and away from corruption : in the direction
of liberty, and away from enslavement : in the direc-
tion of holiness, and away from immorality. I think
that the more minutely and impartially it is investi-
gated, the more it will turn out to be all this ; but the
inquiry will have to be conducted on a wider ground
thai? it has hitherto occupied, and it will end by esta-
blishing that Catholicism too produced great saints,
nurtured sweet souls, cultivated the fruits of the spirit
in the garden of human life. On this principle, it may
even turn out that a system is true at one stage of its
development and false at another : true, as long as it
is living, operative, a fire in the individual heart, a
72 Strange Fire.
renovating power in society ; false, when the life is in
it no longer, when its creeds cease to express pas-
sionate convictions, when its principles inspire no
strength of self-sacrifice, when it retreats upon autho-
rity, and falls back upon denunciation. Truth is ours
only so long as we can fill it with life. It is better
to believe a half-truth with all our heart, than to be
in possession of the supreme reality, and bow down
before it with careless allegiance, or none. And we
have sunk to the lowest when we do not know awe,
love, sweetness, patience, self-devotion, when we see
them, and accuse of offering "strange fire" those who
bring them to the God who in these things lives and
moves and has His being.
Jonah i
"And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are
more than six-score thousand persons that cannot discern
between their right hand and their left hand, and also much
cattle ?"
WS^HEN summer comes out upon the land, and
^^^ days are long and hot, and efficient work is
every day harder to do, and weary labourers
with brain and hand begin to think with great longing
of shady trees, and deep meadows, and tides swinging
to and fro upon sandy shores, and cool breezes blowing
in from the evening sea, — one is tempted to ask, why
should men herd themselves together in great cities ?
Is it not natural for human beings to feci the touch,
as it were, of mother earth : a wholesome and a peace-
ful thing that they should live in contact with nature,
and the natural processes of which, in a sense, their
74 Great Cities.
own life is a part ? These stony streets beneath our
feet ; these long lines of dull houses, which bar the
view except in one direction ; this destruction of natu-
ral beauty, with but the poorest possible compensation
from human art ; this close contact with men, in which
is no companionship ; these crowds, which are only
the most hateful form of solitude — are at once artifi-
cial and unrefreshing : they take us out of our natural
environment and give us nothing that can fill its place.
And great cities seem to bring to a focus all that is
weak and perplexing in our civilization. Nowhere
else is wealth so selfishly luxurious : nowhere else
is poverty so hopelessly squalid. The rich herd with
the rich, the poor with the poor : yet, though side by
side, they live apart. The mass and bulk of wretched-
ness in a great city are an element of perplexity in
themselves : one may dream of playing Providence to
a village, but who is to lift the East-end of London,
the North-end of Liverpool, out of the mire? We
do not think of a poor quarter as made up of men
and women, of families, having each an individuality
of its own — its size appals us, and we come to look
upon it as a natural phenomenon, like an earthquake
or an inundation, with which it is impossible to deal.
We sigh for scattered homesteads, village communi-
ties, where life is simple, and human companionship
possible, and Nature's voice is always audible by the
ear that listens for it. We think it is not wholly a
itk
J
Great Cities.
poetic antithesis to say that God made the country,
man the town. At all events, we feel that in great
cities it is possible to have too much of human handi-
work, and to realize in existence fewer possibilities
than God gave it.
And yet, if we are to consult the experience of
history, the tendency of men, in any developed stage
of civilization, to draw together into great cities seems
practically irresistible. Nor is this tendency peculiar
to any country or any age. Nineveh and Babylon,
Alexandria and Rome, are the precise analogues of
London and Liverpool and New York, I have no
doubt that if we could penetrate beneath the surface
splendours of history to the soberer details that lie
below — if, behind the rise and fall of dynasties, the
bloodshed of war, the ruin of revolutions, we could see
how the people toiled and hungered and died — we
should find in every ancient capital the contrasts of
wealth and poverty which shock us at home, and the
vicious squalor which now daunts our faith in human
progress. I do not believe that these evils have grown
greater or more obstinate with lapse of time : the chief
difference is in the keener apprehension of their peril,
the more resolute effort to overcome them. I will not
pretend to give an exhaustive enumeration of the
causes which build up great cities, or which, when
they have reached a certain point of development,
seem to bid them grow, as an avalanche gathers mass
Great Cities.
by its own weight and velocity. Sometimes a site for
a great human settlement, like that of Constantinople,
is pointed out by the finger of nature : sometimes a
prescient genius, like Alexander, bids a city arise, and
it continues to be a centre of trade for more than
twenty centuries : sometimes chance points out to a
robber horde the opportunity of a hill fortress by a
river-side, and Rome becomes the capital of the world.
But there comes a time, in the history of every great
city, when, independent of any advantage of site, apart
from any definite individuality of attraction, It draws
men to it, and grows without apparent limit to its
greatness. The rich flock to London, to float in the
central current of wealth and pleasure and excitement ;
and the poor lose themselves in its depths, thinking
that to their share must fall some crumbs from the
full table of its prosperity. Wealth that would make
itself richer, poverty that would escape from its own
limitations, every ambition that wants a career, the
actor asking a stage, the poet a public, the painter an
admiring crowd, the politician who is tired of playing
the part of a village Hampden, the preacher who
disdains a rural audience — and, besides these, thou-
sands more, swayed by what secret attraction they
know not, all tend citywards. And in the majority
of cases it is only to be lost in the crowd, only to
swell a statistical table of population, only to find that
the strong man carries the secret of his own life with
J
Great Cities. 77
him, and is the same upon the solitary heath and in
the thickest of the jostling street.
I hold it, then, quite useless to try to stem or turn
aside a general tendency of human nature. In a stage
of civilization such as that which we have now reached,
the country is necessarily depleted in favour of the
town ; and though there is a reflex current, it is
always by comparison weak and intermittent. And
I have already by implication given a powerful reason
why this should be so. There is an universal convic-
tion — even though sometimes one that can neither
understand nor express itself — that life is more vivid
in the town than in the country: that more can be
got out of existence : that the contacts and exchanges
of men are closer, quicker, more lively : that the com-
mon life is more completely organized, and movements
of thought more rapidly contagious. And all this is
the truer in proportion as men are more dependent
for intellectual stimulus and provision upon others,
and less able to live a solitary, self-centred, meditative
life. I can fancy, for example, one who, from some
physical peculiarity, did not very keenly feel the joy
of energy, and was not compelled by an inner neces-
sity to be up and doing, living an ample and full life
in country retirement : coming, in books and news-
papers, as much in contact with the outer world as
he needed and desired ; finding complete and happy
occupation for his mind in the succession of the seasons
and the changeful aspects of nature : noting the ways
of beast and bird and insect : marking the sweet pro-
cessions of the flowers, and meditating much and well,
as his days went swiftly by, on the riddle of life and
the secrets of human fate. But unless there were
welling up in such an one a clear, strong spring of
intellectual energy, I think he would be very apt to
grow dull and indifferent : that his habits would finally
rule him, not he his habits : and that he would come
to be assimilate at last with the flowers which he cul-
tivated, and the trees under whose shade he rested.
And the keenest, strongest souls always, I think, long
for the battle of life— desire the contact of their fellow-
men, even if hostile— want to be where the crowd is
thickest, and thought most agile, and action readiest
to the hand. "Better fifty years of Europe than a
cycle of Cathay," said the poet, and all vivid spirits
accept the word. It is not altogether the ignoble
passion for excitement that bids men prefer living to
dawdling through life, 1 think that this motive, in a
somewhat different form, is as potent on the lower as
Lot! the higher levels of intellectual life. Men all want,
tnot only to live, but to feel that they are living : to be
[conscious of a strong tide of energy flowing through
■ their veins ; or, if that cannot be, at least to float upon
wift current of life, and to feel the impact of vital
ces. And so, it may be, the attraction to great
titles is strongest in those who have least self-centred
Great Cities, 79
force. The strong man is himself everywhere : the
weak and dependent nature first reaches full self-
consciousness in a crowd. Here is one who can stand
apart in the isolation of an individual opinion ; but
there are many more who have no opinion till the
majority carries them away and they can shout with
a multitude. We invest the lot of a cottager who
lives far from the throng of men, with an idyllic
simplicity and purity : we think almost with envy of
the few demands life makes upon him, and the per-
fectness with which he can perform his daily duties :
we imagine existence flowing on for him with peace-
ful current, as the seasons come in their turn, and
manhood declines into old age. But this is our town
view of things — our estimate made from a standpoint
of hurry and turmoil and over-excitement : what he
vaguely feels is, that his wants are too few, that his
life holds less than it might do, and he fancies a more
vivid existence beneath the canopy of smoke that
overhangs the great city. The time comes, no doubt,
for .such an one, whether he succeeds or fails in his
attempt, to be disenchanted. Soon to him there will
be " a distant dearness in the hill, a secret sweetness
in the stream," which were once unacknowledged ele-
ments in his daily existence. He will long for the
simplicity which he has given up, the rest which he
has renounced. But not the less will the fever of
human intercourse burn in his veins, and until he is
K
8o Great Cities.
utterly beaten down and trampled under foot, he will
prefer to struggle on in the throng of men.
And as the progress of humanity is largely depen-
dent upon the contacts of men with one another, upon
interchanges of thought, and reactions of influence,
and contagions of sympathy, great cities play an
important part in civilization. You cannot fancy a
country divided among village communities, which
should occupy a foremost place in science or literature
or art, or the application of any of these to the deve-
lopment and perfecting of life. Such a country might
be well tilled, and therefore fairly rich : the comforts
of life might be evenly spread over its whole surface,
and contrasts of wealth and poverty happily absent :
it might be far removed from dangers of civic commo-
tion and revolution : it might have reached a political
equilibrium, which would not only secure it a long
national existence, but leave room and opportunity for
the play of all forces of development that were in it.
I do not say that this would not be from some points
of view a very desirable state of things : it would even
approach the social ideal on which we, shocked by
the actual state of things amongst us, are beginning
to fix our eyes. But I think that life in such a country
would move very slowly, and tend on the whole to
decline to a lower level. Or if it never sank very low,
I doubt if it would ever rise very high : it would have
much comfort and little heroism : and if any lightning
Great Cities. 8i
flashes of genius shot across it, few would understand
or care for them. All this, of course, is only relatively
true, and liable to be crossed by exceptions. But it
is impossible for the student of history not to see the
prevailing influence of great cities in all that makes
for human progress, and the attraction which they
have always exercised on the master spirits of the race.
The men whose thoughts burn, whose words live, whose
achievement has a permanent quality, are often nur-
tured in the country, often return to the country to rest
awhile and die, but they do not spend their days there.
At first sight, it would seem as if this were less true
of religion than of anything else. The Spirit knows
no limitations of time or place ; and, in especial, there
are moments at which, to a devout soul. Nature
becomes the very presence-chamber of God. We
think of Abraham in his tent-door at nightfall, with
the infinite sky overhead, and the great desert spaces
round about : of Moses keeping sheep in Midian : of
Amos, who was a herdsman and a gatherer of syca-
more fruit : of Christ in the Galilean village : of John
Baptist in the wilderness beyond Jordan : of Mahomet,
tending the camels of Khadijah : of mediaeval saints
innumerable, in rude hermitage and remote cloister :
of Tyndale meditating among the Gloucestershire
fields, and Fox wandering from one midland hamlet
to another. Yes, there is a sense in which great souls
•
are nearest to God when vexed and lowered by no
G
82 Great Cities.
human companionship : moments at which the awe of
Divine Presence so takes possession of them, as to
leave no room for any meaner experience. But then
there is another stage in the history of religious move-
ments at which the prophet, the reformer, the preacher,
necessarily seeks his fellow-men, and finds them out
where they are thickest — there delivering his message,
and committing it, as it were, to the contagion of
sympathy and enthusiasm. What a part in the history
of thought has been played by Jerusalem and Athens,
by Alexandria and Antioch, by Rome and Constan-
tinople ! There is no more significant fact in the
first history of Christianity than that the word pagan
simply means villager — showing that while the cities
led the way in the reception of the new faith, the
country lagged stolidly behind. So still, I suppose,
our hope for vivid theological thought, for fresh reli-
gious life, for a solution of difficulties, for a new breath
of inspiration, lies chiefly in the towns. There, the
evils of our social st^te are the most appalling ; but
there, too, the tide of heroic self-devotion rises highest.
I have often spoken of the religious charm of natural
beauty and solitude; and how the mountains that
stand fast for ever, the sea with its endless murmur
and moan, the sky gorgeous with all the splendours of
sunset, or even the humblest flower, in which lie
thoughts too deep for tears, may fill the soul with God.
And it is easy to lose sight of Him in the town — not
merely in the press of worldly work, the seduction of
meaner interests eating out our own strength, but in
the feeling of a misery which it is hard to reconcile
with a belief in His goodness, and a vice that stamps
upon humanity the brand of failure. And yet to a
faith which, happily, these things cannot daunt, is it
possible that He should be far off, when hundreds of
thousands of men and women, made in His image, love
and hate, and grieve and suffer, and lift up praying
hands to Heaven, and struggle half-blmdty on to the
consummation of their fate ?
I may be wrong, and what I am about to say may
not command your universal assent, but I do not
think that the conditions of moral life are radically dif-
ferent in town and country. We compare the ivy-clad
cottage, with its neat garden in front, its fresh country
air blowing about it, its pleasant outlook upon the
fields, with the close, dull, court-house, round which the
dirt gathers grimily, and the voices of rude revel and
ruder contention always echo, and ask whether it is
possible that men should live here as they do there ?
I concede all that is asked as to the force of external
circumstance : I have already said, more than once,
that contagion is quickest and most deadly where men
are most crowded together. But, allowance made for
this, I think that the chief difference betiveen town
and country is, that the former necessarily draws
together, and presents in a mass, elements of life that
G 2
84 Great Cities.
in the latter are scattered and therefore incDnspicHous.
Is there no village drunkenness, no rural unchastity ?
The baser class gravitate to the towns, where they
think they can hide themselves ; but they are not all
produced there, and are perhaps not least manageable
in the light of day. But these things fill me with a
conviction that grows deeper every hour, that when
we have done whatever law, whatever philanthropy,
can do to improve the external life of the very poor
in our large towns — when houses are what they should
be, and all the appliances of decent living within reach
— a revolution will still have to be effected which only
education and religion can work. The true kingdom
of God grows, not from without but from within.
Hearts need cleansing more even than houses. For
out of men's hearts are the issues of their lives.
And tak^ courage, I beseech you, from the quaint
words with which my text, and the book of Jonah
also, closes. "Shall I not," saith God, "have mercy
upon Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than
six-score thousand persons that cannot discern be-
tween their right hand and their left hand, and also
much cattle ?" Doth God, then, care for oxen ? Yea,
for the meanest thing that breathes. And how much
more, therefore, for' the drunkard and the harlot, in
whom His image is being daily defaced, and for all
who are willing to take the burthen of their misery
and their wretchedness upon their own shoulders !
VIII.
MO Morlbs.
s of the Lord are fiill of sap ; the cedai's of Lebanon
which He hath planted."
" Make Thy face to shine upon Thy se
Thy mercies' sake."
?^r3S WAS joining not long ago in the service of a
gi|^ country church, full of a congregation that was
to all appearance devout. It was the very
height of summer: all the doors were open : and as
we knelt we could see the green leaves flickering in
the sun, and no great effort of imagination was neces-
sary to body forth the warm, quick life that was all
about us : butterfly and beetle sporting through their
little day, birds on household cares intent, flowers in
their orderly succession of blcrom, fruit ripening in the
: warmth. It was one of those days, one of
86 Two Worlds.
those seasons, in which the earth seems to lie serenely
in the smile of God — when all physical vitality is at
its quietest and its fullest — and the thought of storm
and conflict and loss never suggests itself. And we
had only to wander a little way, I knew, through
leafy lanes or by sunny meadows, to reach a sea, still,
translucent, changing, opal-like, from palest green to
brightest purple, which gently rose and fell upon sands
which it hardly stirred except to smooth them for the
bather's foot. But within ? Ah, we were singing none
but sad songs : and the burthen of the Litany rose
and fell — Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy! Good
Lord, deliver us ! and when there was a fuller anthem
of praise, it was for redemption from sin, and the ran-
som of humanity, by God's goodness, from powers of
evil, And the contrast between gladness without and
gloom within, struck home to my conscience and my
heart
In the sharpness which I have given it, it was, I
know, but a momentary contrast. Had the wind been
howling round the tower, had the lightning been crash-
ing among the trees, had the thunder drowned the
music of our orisons, had the sea dashed itself in un-
availing rage against the cliff, there would have been
a felt accord between the stern face which Nature
turned to us, and our attempts to placate a God who
always needs propitiation. But look at the matter a
little more narrowly, and you will see that the con-
Two Worlds. 87
trast remains true at a deeper level of thought and
feeling. Nature is the realm of Law. Things continue
as they have been since the beginning of the creation.
The present is developed out of the past. Flowers
have blossomed, fruit has ripened, birds have built
their nests, butterflies have fluttered in the sun, tides
have risen and fallen, for more centuries than we can
count The order of things, if good at all, is good as a
whole: it is animated by one purpose, it moves towards
one end. And religion, as it is ordinarily conceived,
belongs not to the realm of law, but of catastrophe.
There is a human race that has fallen away from the
height of its destiny. There is a divine plan for
frustrating one knows not what powers of evil, and
restoring man to his place. There is a whole crea-
tion groaning and travailing together till its wrong be
righted. There are an agony, a bloody sweat, a cross,
which throw their shadow forward upon a!! genera-
tions. There is a God who still turns an angry face to
men, unless His anger be appeased in the right way.
And so it is that when Religion utters her most cha-
racteristic voice, it is to say, "Come, enter the darkness
with me : clothe yourselves with sackcloth, scatter
ashes upon your heads, and see whether it is not
possible to lay hold on the great salvation of which
you are so sorely in need." And all the while God,
in the great world outside, is painting the lily and
marking the falling sparrow.
Two Worlds.
We shall, however, fail to do justice to Christianity,
even in the forms which it commonly assumes, unless
we follow the thoughts which I have suggested a little
further. In what mood docs man really stand over
against nature ? I am not now speaking of such a
natural theology as men invented in England a hun-
dred years ago. It was an attempt to force nature,
by logical methods, to reveal the secret of God : an
attempt which, whether successful or the reverse, is
felt now to represent but a small and hardly a cha-
racteristic part of the complex relation between man
and the universe. Nay, we may even begin by asking.
Does man really stand over against nature at all? It
seems to be the supreme effort of modern science to
convince him that he does not : that he is himself a
part of all that he sees : that not only is he subject to
physical laws and confined within the cycle of growth
and decay, but that this statement covers the whole of
his being and fate. There is but one hierarchy of Ufe,
in which it ascends, by infinitely slow gradations, from
the lowest to the highest : and an added fulness of
organization, a larger range of function, cannot break
the chain which binds man to the ascidian from which
he sprang. And so, if you carry out this theory to its
furthest developments, free-will is a delusion, and con-
science part of an automatic arrangement, and we, in
every way, are bound within the iron rigidity of phy-
sical forces and laws, as the snow which seeks the
i
Two Worlds. 89
valley when the avalanche is full, or the climbing
tendril which twists itself towards the light. Nor can
we predicate of ourselves any duration but the change-
ful eternity which belongs to all matter. We dissolve
into our component parts, and they again are welded
into fresh combinations. But all that has constituted
the I, this self which is so separate an island of being,
the consciousness that has been its basis, the con-
science in which it has chosen between opposing
world-forces, the will in which it has made its weight
felt — all this has been a delusion, and disappears as
the mirage of the desert disappears when the tired
traveller pitches his camp at nightfall.
How little I believe all this, you know : and yet I
cannot help sympathizing, up to a certain point, with
its view of nature. For there are moods, and these
perhaps too rare, in which the overpowering sense of
human individuality within us becomes for a while less
keen, and we are better able to feel ourselves a part of
the All of things. I know that we cannot help it :
but we are too absolutely occupied with ourselves ; we
revolve too much round a fixed centre of gravity within ;
our own joys and sorrows, our own sins and sufferings,
our own gains and losses, fill us too exclusively. To
say that they are very near to us, is not enough : they
are ourselves : apart from them we should be other
than we are. Do you not know what it is to feel shut
up in self as in a prison ? Do you never think what
Two Worlds.
a deliverance it would be to look out of other eyes, to '
see men and things from a different point of view ? ^
This is a vain wish, I know : what we are, we must be
as long as being lasts : but we come nearest to the
liberty of which I speak when, if ever, we are able to
conceive of ourselves as part of the mighty whole :
when we do not so much judge, or admire, or investi-
gate, or question Nature, as sink into her, owning the
impact of iier forces, and feeling her juices circulating
in our veins : acknowledging a common life with bird
and beast and insect, and knowing that there is that
within us which is akin to the ordered restlessness of
the sea, and the no less ordered rest of the crag that
frowns upon it Nor is this a mere mystical fancy,
as some of you might be prompt to suppose : I am
subject, in my place and degree, to natural laws : and
the universal sap of things mounts and sinks in me too.
And it is when I am most able thus to pass out of
the narrow and fretful region of self into a larger and |
serener world, that I feel most content to be the subject ;j
of law and involved in a general order. What is best I
for the universe, I then am able to recognize as good
enough for me. It is sufficient that I, in common
with all other things, from the least to the greatest,
" live and move and have my being in God."
Except in very rare cases, however, this can only be
a passing mood. Every now and then, it may be, a
life may be lived in entire and uninterrupted com-
^ i
Two Worlds.
with Nature, but it must be of the meditative
much more than of the active type, and, either from
circumstance or some peculiarity of constitution,
unvexed by inward storms. For the one fact which,
as it seems to me, conclusively disposes of the scientific
fiction that man is a part of nature, as the oak is, or
even the most sagacious of creatures, is that the
moment a vivid sense of his own personality is
awakened within him, his sympathy with the ordered
All of things outside suffers sudden and complete
interruption. It does not matter in what way that
consciousness is aroused : when once it is aroused, the
centre of gravity of things is for him changed : he is
no longer an insignificant part of an infinitely greater
whole, but the centre round which the universe revolves,
and the beating of his own heart more to him than the
movement of the spheres. It is an old story that
when a great sorrow takes possession of us, we rebel
against what we call the impassiveness of nature : the
sun shines, the rain falls, day follows night, the tides
observe their order, and leave us behind in our anguish,
as if we were of no account — as, in truth, we are not.
We bask in the summer warmth and are glad in the
universal peace, when some sudden blow strikes us,
and in a moment we loathe the light that was before
I so grateful. Even some petty yet clinging annoyance,
■ or a mood of fretfulness that can be traced to a body
L iU at ease, is enough to disturb our accord with nature:
92
Two Worlds.
our thoughts are all turned within, and the physical
framework and scenery of hfe become indifferent, if
not positively irritating, to us. And there can be no
better proof of the way in which sin dislocates the
natural relations of life, than its power of utterly de-
stroying our sympathy with the external grandeur and
beauty. Sin, of course I mean, distinctly recognized
as sin : not a mere casual missing of the way, but
a felt offence against the holiness of God : not only
present in the heart and eating out its strength, but
discerned as actual weakness and degradation. In
the throes of remorse, a man passes from the purely
natural region into a higher, where the eternal gulf
fixed between right and wrong is clearly discerned, in
a gleam that comes from the throne of God. It is
nothing to him then that seas are purple, and clouds
changeful, and western skies full of glory : he sees a
light that never was on sea or land, and beside it an
awful gloom.
In this way it is that the world reveals itself to us
as not single, but double. There is a natural world
and a moral world, and we are denizens of both. They
are strangely and subtly intermingled ; it is only at
crises of our fate that either vanishes for a moment
and leaves us face to face with the other only. And
from this peculiarity of our being it arises that so
many attempts have been made, by metaphor, by
analogy, by logic, to bind these two worlds in one : to
Two Worlds. 93
show that the physical is but the visible presentation
of the moral, or to prove that the same truths are valid,
the same laws authoritative, in both. Two worlds are
ours, sings Keble, in one of his simplest and sweetest
strains :
Two worlds are ours — 'tis only sin
Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth within.
Plain as the sea and sky :
and then comes the logician, impatient of what he
thinks to be mere flimsy metaphor, and tries to prove
that natural laws are identical with moral government,
and that the universe is no more than a veil through
which we can dimly see the face of God. Perhaps we
are not as confident in the statement of these coinci-
dences as we once were. We build fewer metaphysical
systems than we did, and are more content to rest in
hints and similarities. But the two worlds remain for
us, however incompletely we are able to bring them
into relation : on this side of our being we are a part
of Nature ; on that, we stand apart from her and
above her.
The contrast, then, remains between the gloom
within the church and the gladness without : between
the sad litany of men and the joyous song of birds.
They belong to different worlds : these, to one in
which law is never broken — those, to one in which it
can never be completely kept. Here, "the trees of
the Lord are full of sap ;" He plants them. He bids
them grow upwards to the sky, and spread abroad
their branches, and blossom and bear fruit in their
season : and there, the word is, " Make Thy face to
shine upon Thy servant : save me for Thy mercies'
sake." I do not say that religion has no other utter-
ance than this — God forbid ! — but only that man on
his religious side belongs to a world which at some
time or other forces this cry from his lips. For when
we go into the sanctuary of God, and there meditate
upon what He is, and turn a quiet light of scrutiny
upon ourselves, we are conscious of laws broken, with
the inevitable penalty, of ideals unattained and un-
attainable, and a necessary sadness hanging over us.
I do not know that it is always true to our religious
consciousness that public worship should begin with
the confession of sin and imperfectness : I turn away
in repugnance from litanies whose aim it seems to be
to weary into mercy One whose mercifulness is prompt
and free beyond our best conception. But so long as
we are what we are, this under-note of sadness must
always mingle with our praise. It lies in the very
nature of our strength that it should be plentifully
dashed with weakness. It is involved in the grandeur
of our fate that it should be crossed with gloom. The
good that we have not done, the good that we see and
cannot do, alike sadden us. Our mounting aspirations
bear us upward to the very throne of God, and yet our
feet refuse to leave this lower earth. It is not fear of
J
Two Worlds. 95
God that daunts us, but distrust of oursblves, and the
very constancy of His help brings into sharper relief
our own helplessness.
Yet, is there no exit for us into the sunlight outside,
the quick life, the happy peace, the joyous voice, of
the natural world? The answer to the question all
depends upon whether God is to us the God of nature,
as well as what theologians call the God of grace. If
I am to think of Him as angry and appeased : as
rejecting humanity from His love, and taking it back
again upon due propitiation made : as suffering His
creative purposes to be frustrated, and again suffering
them to be made efficacious, — I cannot make the tran-
sition from the gloom of the church to the summer
sunshine beyond. The two worlds will not be brought
into correspondence. Here, all is law; there, all cata-
strophe. Theologians in some of their least reasonable
moods tell us that the contrast does not exist : that
the blight of sin is on the world's beauty : that no
landscape is so fair as that the shadow of God's dis-
pleasure does not rest upon it : that the orderly cycle
of birth, growth, decay, death, reveal what they call
the trail of the serpent : and that, were it not for man's
sin, the physical world itself would be infinitely brighter
and more beautiful than it is. I cannot see it : were
it not that beauty never satisfies, I should say that
man might well be sated with the world's loveliness ;
and as its marvellous order slowly reveals itself to him.
96 Two Worlds.
he can conceive no intellectual beauty that should
surpass it And so while I believe with all my heart
in grace, in divine helps and leadings, and tides of
strength, and inflowings of peace coming out of the
infinite depths of God's goodness into poor, tempted,
struggling human souls — ^the God of grace is to me
the God of nature too, whose work is one from the
beginning, and whose purposes never fail. And the
more I can feel myself in His hands, as are the cedars
of Lebanon which He has planted — come sunshine,
come storm — the more I am content. There are times
when, in the bitterness of an alienation from Him
which is my own making, not His, I must cry, " Make
Thy face to shine upon Thy servant : save me for Thy
mercies' sake :" but again, in the mountains that stand
fast for -ever, I see an image of His faithfulness — in
the sea that runs round the earth, holding it in a grasp
gentle at once and strong, a symbol of His all-em-
bracing love. The trees of the Lord are full of sap,
and to love Him is the secret of all our life.
SttonesB of f ift.
NEW YEAR E
become new."
Romans vi. 4
"Even so we also should walk ii
2 CORIKTHIANS V. 17;
"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he Is a new
things are passed away ; behold, all things
Galatians vi. 15:
" For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor
uncircumcision, but a new creature."
^[^ HAVE put these passages together — though
^1^ any one of them singly would have served
my purpose^because they express in various
phrase a characteristic mood of Pauline Christianity.
A wonderful revolution in things human and divine
had taken place. True, the world in its ordinary
aspects went on as before : the sun did not forget
his rising and his setting, the seasons followed their
wonted round : the civilized Mediterranean earth lay
prostrate at the feet of its Ronnan conquerors, and no
98 Newness of Life.
man lifted up a voice of remonstrance, much less an
arm of rebellion. It was in no sense a period of
political or literary or philosophical crisis ; old forces
were in mingled operation : what we see, as we look
back, is development, transition, incipient decay. I
ajn sure that no Greek moralist, no Roman thinker,
would then have confessed to any consciousness of
new thought, new life, new hope : he would have said
much more that philosophical speculation had run all
its possible round, and that there was no political hope
for humanity but the Empire. It was reserved for
Paul, the insignificant, mean - looking Rabbi, who
journeyed always from city to city, purchasing by the
labour of his hands the privilege of free teaching, for
the Jewish sectaries whom he gathered about him, for
the slaves who came secretly by night to listen to him,
for the women who dared not speak of what he taught
them above their breath, — it was reserved for them to
feel the blood of a new life circulating in their veins,
to breathe the intoxicating air of a new era of hope
and effort for humanity. "If any man be in Christ,
he is a new creature." There is another translation
of these words which gives them the same and yet a
wider significance : " If any man be in Christ, there is
a new creation." Not only is he, so to speak, made
over again, but the whole universe is transfigured for
him into fresh beauty and filled with a new meaning.
It is as if he stood in the morning of the world, and
i
Newness of Life. 99
saw, with the eyes of God, that all things were very-
good. And these are the moments in which great
thoughts fill the mind, and brave deeds arc done.
It is not difficult to understand how Paul should
have been in this mood. I do not suppose that,
whatever Gentile training he had had, he took a very
wide survey of what was going on in the world : the
Jews were sectaries to their hearts' core, and measured
the worth of all things by their effect upon themselves.
The universal prevalence of Greek culture, the slow
evolution of philosophical thought, the apparent sta-
bility of Roman institutions, would strike him less
than the revolution which had suddenly taken place
in the world which chiefly occupied his heart and hope.
That the Temple, with all its ceremonial splendour,
should pass away ; that God's covenant with Abraham
should assume a new form and a wider application ;
that an eternal and universal Gospel should take the
place of a temporary and local Law ; that Israel, in
the impulse of a new inspiration, should suddenly
fulfil the sublimest vaticinations of Isaiah, and stand
out as the teacher of the nations — were things that,
taken by themselves, might well persuade a Jew that
he had been born at the very crisis of his country's
fate, and was permitted to see the dawn of its triumph.
And with Paul all this must have been enhanced by
the profound consciousness of a new life which he
felt stirring within him. He had passed from one
I oo Newness of L ife.
passionate allegiance to another. He had replaced
old motives, old affections, old passions, by new ones.
He was no longer the man who had listened in the
school of Gamaliel, and kept the clothes of them that
slew Stephen. He hated what he once loved, and
loved what he once hated But something more than
change was working in him : a new life, a fresh prin-
ciple of growth : he can do all things through Christ
that strengtheneth him : he laughs at labour, he mocks
at peril, he rises serene above discouragement, he is
ready to welcome even death. What does it matter
to him that Rome lies, as with a leaden load of
oppression, upon the world? He has the secret of
the only liberty which it is worth a man's while to
gain. What concerns it him that Stoics and Epicu-
reans dispute about things too high for them ? He is
convinced that in Christ he has entered into the mind
and purposes of God. The external form of things
is wearily and monotonously the same : cruelty still
reigns in high places, and selfishness pursues its way
unchecked ; but to the eye of faith " there is a new
creation:" "old things are passed away; behold, all
things are become new :" before long the bud will
break upon the branch, the fruit will be developed out
of the flower, and the very wildernesses of humanity
shake and sway with golden harvests.
Periods of revolution can be understood only by
times like themselves : when the wheels of fate roll
Newness- pf^iL ife. i o i
heavily, when only common foct^^* are in operation,
when to-day seems the natural and*'i[>e!cessary develop-
ment of yesterday, heroic efforts are vjapossible, and
heroic expectations seem overstrained. Su^pOkp I were
to tell you that now, even now, the kingdom o^*God
is at our doors, and that it needed only a hearty'de^Ine
for its blessed rule to bring it in? You would ftt5t-l.*
believe me: your imaginations would be far more"*--
caught by the hindrances in the way than kindled by
the undoubted possibility, and you would think far
more of an election to be won to-morrow, or of a
speculation that may turn out well next week. And
the new kind of philosophers (not, I admit, without
some show of right on their side also) would occupy
themselves in proving that the fate of nations and of
races depends on a thousand slowly working forces,
all of which are physical in their origin, and which,
never hasting, never resting, accomplish their effect at
last. But it was not quite in this mood that the young
Galilean Prophet, in the first glad beginning of his
ministry, declared that he saw Satan, like lightning,
fall from heaven ; or that Paul, feeling in himself the
operation of omnipotent spiritual forces, exclaimed,
" Old things are passed away ; behold, all things are
become new." The world, in more senses than one,
has been too much for Christianity, and not least in
this, that it has lost its faith in divine possibilities for
men on the largest scale, and has learned to be shame-
I02 Nert'ifesi of Life.
fully content wittr.'tHe day of small things. What is
its doctrine of ssj-fation ? A rescuing of one or two
favoured _squli' from the deck of the burning ship,
leaving.'the-rest to go down to the everlasting depths,
unpltjed and forgotten. What its theory of the king-
.dgra Of God ? A dim and doubtful heaven, offered to
'.;-th6* weary and the sorrowful, in place of a reformed
■■'and renovated earth. What its teaching of the things
that are to come ? Not a gradual lifting up of human-
ity to the comprehension of Christ and the loving
service of God, but a decline into a corruption so
desperate as to evoke at last the destroying anger of
the Judge. At what a woful distance do we stand now
from the faith which bade those poor Hebrew teachers
of the first century, ignorant of the world, and of the
world unknown, believe in the new creation that was
at hand I
The philosophers are right, you will say ; even if
you hesitate to pronounce Paul wrong. Eighteen
hundred years have passed away, and all things con-
tinue as they were from the beginning, except in so
far as they have been modified by the slowly working
forces aforesaid. But are you quitesure of that? I.too,
believe in the slowly working forces — I were blind and
foolish if I did not : but are they the only thing in
the universe that moves and acts? It is against this
narrow supposition that I understand Christianity to
make a perpetual protest : it believes in great waves
Newness of Life.
of spiritual influence, of which it is itself a signal
example : it holds up to view the interference of God
in human aflfairs : it makes much of strong individual-
ities, divine persons. We are pursuing the same line
of argument when we note that there are times in the
history of every noble race in which it is, as it were,
fused to white heat by some self- forgetting passion,
and, in the strength of patriotic self-defence or the
upward flight of social aspiration, accomplishes great
things. Heroism is common then : the ignorant and
the lowly are lifted above the ordinary level i and it is
seen of what daring, patience, fortitude, self-sacrifice,
even average humanity is capable. But all this
depends, you must notice, upon faith and constancy
of men. It is only in and by human souls that God
can work upon humanity. We cannot define the
measure of divine and human action in the history of
any single soul ; but it is hardly too much to say that
there are times of stolid self-satisfaction, of contented
absorption in the material interests of life, which God
leaves to themselves and the working out of their own
fate. Whereas, on the other side, effort draws down
inspiration, faith compels blessing, self-sacrifice unseals
the fountain of strength, and men, doing all they
can, find that God is on their side, and that nothing
is impossible to them. And so, if the new creation
be yet unaccomplished, what delays it but human
cowardice and faithlessness? If once we really believed
1
t04 Newness of Life.
the kingdom of God possible, it would be already
established.
The same things apply, and in precisely the same
way, to the individual life. We are, we are told, slow
growths, gradual developments, in mind and character,
as well as in body. We have been in preparation for
generations past ; what our fathers and mothers were,
that are we : nor is it any reason for doubting the
reality of the process that we cannot trace its every
step. Circumstance, education, habit, occupation, have
been forming us from the beginning: all our past
achievements, all our old failures, are with us yet,
woven, as it were, into the stuff of our nature. We
cannot start off on new lines, we cannot break into
unwonted activities, any more than we can change our
identityor jump off our own shadow: except in a very
limited sense, what we have been, we are, and must
continue to be, I hardly expect ray younger hearers
to feel the full force of these considerations, but I
know I need not urge them upon the elder : we feel
every day more acutely the loss of versatility, move-
ableness, originality ; and are wont to consider character
as a kind of shell that thickens round us, limiting and
hindering growth. And, again, it is against these
opinions and experiences, true and real in their place
and degree, that Christianity makes its protest. It
persists in regarding all the possibilities of humanity
as being always before every soul. It despairs of
J
Newness of Life.
neither the blackest wickedness, nor the most stoHd
indifference, nor the most heart-broken weariness, nor
the most absolute slavery to habit " If any man be
in Christ, he is a new creature." Nay, the " new crea-
ture" is the one thing needful, in comparison of which
nothing external, neither circumcision nor uncircum-
cision, availeth anything. To-day, it says to all the
weary and heavy-laden — to-day, you may, if you will,
cast off al! your burthen, and enter into the liberty of
the sons of God.
Paul proclaims this truth : but Christ had already
acted upon it. All his dealings with sin and shame
were based upon this, that he never despaired of
humanity. But somehow we almost always fail to
realize the full depth and meaning of the example :
we fancy, for instance, that Mary Magdalen, if she
be indeed the woman that was a sinner, had the pre-
destined saint hidden beneath the cloak of her offence,
and that what the Master did was to discern the fair
and fragrant flower within the brown and scaly bud.
But what if he did not so much discern the saint as
create her? I think that it was under the magic of
his generous faith in human goodness, even in the
midst of sin, that goodness began to grow, and shame-
faced modesty to return to her ancient seats, till at
last grateful love broke forth in a stream that could
not be stayed, melting the heart and changing all the
life. You, who believe in Christ, are soberly convinced
1 06 Newness of L tfe.
that to him no moral miracle could be impossible.
You would trust his charm implicitly in any exigency
of human nature. You are sure that, were he here
to-day, the most petrified conscience would thrill to his
touch, the coldest heart be surprised into a sudden
glow. It was his divine prerogative, you say: yes,
but only divine in the sense that into the divine rises
whatever is most truly and intensely human. Believe,
as Christ believed, that to faith, love, sympathy, all
things are possible, and you will find that the age of
miracles has come back.
Yet with Scribes and Pharisees even Christ could
do nothing ; and the very band of the Apostles, who
lived all day in the light of his presence, and drank in
every word of his lips, held a traitor. Must we then
sin deeply ere we can walk in newness of life, and
pass through moral death that we may rise again ?
Some notion of this kind has been very prevalent in
all Christian ages : great saints have taken a kind of
delight in proving that they had first been great sin-
ners ; and a common and superficial religiousness of
our own day teaches its neophytes to blacken their
own character, that they may enhance the glory of
their deliverance. What I take to be the truth is, that
newness of life, if ever attained, is born of a certain
passion in the soul, that may indeed be produced by
the smart of remorse and the self-abasement of repent-
ance, yet may have another genesis also. The time
i
I^ewness^ of L ife.
107
of self-abasement always comes, I know, to one who
enters at all deeply into the new existence : in its light,
the old life shows so unspeakably poor and mean,
in its strength, the old effort so nerveless and com-
monplace, as to make retrospect one long occasion
of self-reproach. But my thesis is, that it is to the
stolid, the self-satisfied, the cold of heart, the dull of
conscience — respectable men and women often, as
were the Pharisees too in their day, holding high
positions in society, and universally well spoken of —
to these the word of Christ never comes with vivifying
and renovating power. It glances off their self-con-
ceit like an arrow from a mailed corslet. It finds no
tender spot in which it can fix, and quiver with a
healing smart Why should they desire a new crea-
tion, when they are so supremely satisfied with the
old ? So they continue to move through the mechan-
ical round of dull compliance, and miss the raptures
and the throes, the agonies and ecstasies, of life.
You know already why I have said these things to
you to-day : the thought of the new year has been in
all our minds as I have spoken and you have listened.
Shall it be the only new thing in us and about us ?
A changed date, and, beyond that, all things as they
have been? Are we so well satisfied with our lives as
\ to believe that we stand in need of nothing new, or so
K lame in faith as to doubt whether any new thing is
I possible to us? The first I cannot believe, when I
io8 Newness of Life.
look into my own heart. A new spring of faith in
God and the wise goodness of His providence, a new
energy of obedience, a new power of aspiration, a new
trust in the future of humanity, a new outflowing of
sympathy towards all suffering and sin, a new prin-
ciple of growth, a new conception of service — all these
things I need to lift me a little nearer the ideal of my
life. Is it I alone who need them ? The same kind
of service is not asked of all : the same temptations
do not beset us all : the same faculties have not been
given to us all : but the problem of our life is one and
the same, and so too its strength and weakness. And
if there be any here who doubt whether newness of
life be not the dream of a prophet, rather than the
experience of waking common sense, I point them to
a thousand victories won over self and the world, a
thousand grand things achieved for suffering humanity,
in the strength that can only come of yielding oneself
captive, in willing faith, in eager expectation, to the
charm of Christ and all goodness. Yes, once more, at
the beginning of a new year, I repeat the old Pauline
word, believing it to be true, and desiring to prove its
truth by happy experience, " If any man be in Christ,
he is a new creature."
foil's Pflpfiil Jitbgratnta.
" Let my soul live, and it shall praise Thee ; and let Thy judg-
^^?5 HAVE found a quaint and pathetic fragment of
^1^ Catholic legend in a strange place — embedded,
namely, in those ninety- five Theses against
Indulgences, which were the first blow struck by
Luther In the battle of the Reformation. The story
is there alluded to that St. Paschal and St. Severin
were unwilling to be released from purgatorial fires,
preferring the further endurance of the cleansing pain,
to the risk of encountering the Beatific Vision with
hearts not yet wholly purged of earthly sin and pas-
sion. "A true contrition," says Luther in the fortieth
Thesis, throwing the same principle into abstract shape,
"loves and desires punishment" And I find the same
deep spiritual truth exquisitely expressed by Cardinal
Newman in his poem of the " Dream of Gerontius."
i
1 1 o God^s Helpful judgments.
There the departed soul, which has already left earth
behind and is about to enter the place of fiery pro-
bation, sings :
Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be.
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep
Told out for me.
There, motionless and happy in my pain.
Lone, not forlorn, —
There will I sing my sad perpetual strain.
Until the mom.
There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne'er can cease
To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest
Of its Sole Peace.
There will I sing my absent Lord and Love : —
Take me away,
That sooner 1 may rise, and go above.
And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.
i
There is a certain materia! distinctness in Catholic
presentationsof religious truth, which, ifit often offends
the finer spiritual sense, and encourages the growth
of gross superstitions in the popular mind, at the
same time brings out itioral contrasts into strong
relief. This doctrine of Purgatory, for example, is
crude enough as popularly apprehended. It seems
to be a sheer misapplication of an obvious figure of
speech to conceive of evil affections and desires as
being burned out of the soul, as you throw something
hard and indestructible into the fire that it may be
cleansed of stains that will not yield to any less
God^s Helpful yudgments. 1 1 1
rigorous and searching treatment. And yet I have
often felt that the idea of an interposed period of
sharper and more conscious probation than is possible
here, is truer to the spiritual facts of the case than the
Protestant notion of the sharp division of all souls
into two classes of saved and lost, and the immediate
transference of the spirit either to hopeless com-
panionship with evil or absolute enjoyment of good.
Nor, surely, could anything bring before the mind
with greater vividness the essential sympathy of a
righteous soul with righteousness, than this story of
old saints so submissive to the judgments of God, so
eager to try His discipline to the uttermost, so full of
passionate desire for the holiness that could be won
in no easier way, as to be willing to put off deliverance
from the cleansing pain, if it were to be bought at the
slightest cost of derogation from final achievement.
Can you not easily conceive of them as taking the
Psalmist's word upon their lips, "Let my soul live,
and it shall praise Thee ;" as if the life of the soul, its
lively awe, its quick sympathy with good, its eagerness
for effectual service, were indeed everything : and "Let
Thy judgments help me," since no way that truly leads
to life is too hard for faithful feet to tread ?
In days like these, when men take no shame in
slipping from under whatever is painful and disagree-
able, when pleasure is openly formulated as the main-
spring of life, and even goodness is resolved into a
L
112 GocTs Helpful judgments.
form of self-pleasing, it is not easy to go back to the
old thought that righteousness is the chief thing, and
that righteousness is to be bought only at the price of
toil and conflict and pain. And especially it is not
easy to believe and act as if God's judgments could
help us. We know, those of us at least who take in
any way a religious view of life, that they are there :
that there is no escaping them : that they will work
themselves out : that, after some fashion or other,
we must bear them. But I doubt whether we often
rise beyond a passive submission to the inevitable.
We are apt to wish that they were not inevitable, and
are quite ready to get out of them if only we could.
If God would only take His hand off us, we should
rejoice in His goodness with a much freer heart
than we praise His justice. We make our punish-
ments too much a matter of His personal, almost
arbitrary, judgment of us : we do not rise to the
conception of a world-order which is essentially best
for us and all other men, and against which, if we
offend, we must take the consequences. Somehow
we are able to dissociate in thought our own right-
eousness from the general Tightness, and think that
that can be preserved, though for the moment we and
our lives stand outside of it And all the while it is
not a hard, impersonal Fate, compassing us about as
with bands of iron, with which we have to deal : or a
variable God, who now yields and now resists, accord-
GocPs Helpful yudgments. 113
ing to the urgency of our prayer or the motions of
His own compassion : but One who, having stayed all
things on righteousness, knowing that righteousness
is highest and best, trains His children in firm kind-
ness, by compelling them, so far as may be, to live
through and live down their weakness and their sin.
And so any conception of an Atonement which inter-
poses to save men from the consequences of their
actions, is condemned as contrary to the ordinary
and necessary course of God's providence. What-
ever restores a human soul to that communion with
and trust in Divine Love which is the highest privi-
lege and best strength of humanity, is an atonement
indeed. But not only must we reap as we have sown,
but such retribution, rightly borne, is our highest
spiritual good. To relieve us from it, the boon which
so many men eagerly desire, would be the act of
cruelty masquerading in the shape of pity.
The judgments of the Lord will come — of that there
can be no doubt ; but whether they will help us
depends largely upon ourselves. The longer I live,
the more I think about religion, the more inseparable
does it seem to be from the existence of free choice
and self-determination in man. By no effort of thought
can I construct on any other basis a scheme of moral
relation between man and God ; and I note that others,
who claim to be more successful in this respect than
myself, still cannot speak of religion without using
I
I T 4 God's Helpful yndgments.
language that runs counter to their theory. And so,
although the retributions, or, if you like to call them
so, the judgments of God, exist and must run their
course, the moral application which we make of them
is largely our own affair. Many men use them — if,
indeed, the phrase use is not here inapplicable^ — as the
beasts would, kicking against the pain that they bring
with them, but neither recognizing the violated law
nor discerning that they contain a lesson. Or some
perhaps never find out their meaning till it is too late:
till the will is hopelessly enfeebled, till the springs of
moral renovation are utterly relaxed, and nothing is
left but to die in a weakness and despair to which
they have condemned themselves. And some, again,
in the very madness of self-will, will not acknowledge
that they are pitting their feeble and transient strength
against forces that are omnipotent and eternal, and
persevere in rebellion, till at last they are forced to the
earth, helpless, crushed, broken. For effectual teaching
there must be some accessibility of mind, some docility
of heart, on the part of the learner. God cannot com-
pel a free spirit : He can only warn, rebuke, persuade,
discipline. And it depends upon this fundamental
fact of human freedom, apart from which we cannot
even conceive of a divine education of man, that so
many lives seem to end in failure, and that the best
objects of existence are so rarely reached.
Is it not upon the conviction that all punishments
of God must be educational, remedial, medicinal, that
the essential immorality of endless punishment rests ?
I am not speaking now of its relation to God's good-
ness — that is quite another side of the discussion —
but to His justice. And the moral quality of the end-
1 lessness is brought out by the contrasted idea of pur-
I gatory, which is essentially a transitory state, with an
, end of reformation in view : the torment may in any
I particular case last for tens, hundreds, thousands of
I years, but the result at last is that the purified soul
i betakes itself, all earthly stain purged away, all possi-
i bility of falling back escaped, to the eternal enjoyment
of God, But hell, if it exists, is filled with the utter
failures of the Divine method. It is a seething mass
of unredeemed evil, growing fouler and blacker in its
own company and self- contemplation. It has no
worthy object, for, by its very hypothesis, no faintest
end of good can by it be realized. In it, retribution
becomes mere cruelty — divine punishment, blank ven-
geance. "Forsake all hope, O ye who enter here!"
was the dread inscription which Dante read upon the
portal of his Inferno. But in so reading he con-
demned it to the realm of things wholly hideous and
impossible. For so long as God lives, and wherever
His power extends, there is always hope for man.
I once read an exposition, and, as I suppose he
thought it, a defence of endless punishment, by the
great Anglo-Catholic divine whom we lost a year or
J
1 1 6 GocPs Helpful judgments.
two ago. But Dr. Pusey in his use of current religious
phrases, and Dr. Pusey in the spiritual meaning which
he put upon them, were two different men ; and he
showed sometimes how nfear the orthodox Doctor could
approach the heresiarch. He gave up the material
flame, the physical torture. The true hell-^so sharp
that men wanted no other — ^was conscious alienation
from God. A soul that possessed and loved God
would praise Him joyfully in the very midst of the
lapping fires, while, to one incapable of such divine
communion, no heaven that could be conceived would
be other than a pain and a weariness. But suppose,
he said, a soul that, in the exercise of its indubitable
liberty of choice, for ever rebelled against God, for ever
preferred evil to good, for ever was deaf to rebuke,
intractable to discipline, callous to the pleading of
love, untouched by the thrill of moral sympathy. What
then ? If its revolt was eternal, must not the hell to
which it was self-condemned be eternal too? How
can the gates of heaven unclose to receive one who
obstinately refuses to put on a wedding garment ? It
is all true : there can be no deeper or more spiritual
theory of retribution than is involved in this statement.
But then all its depth and spirituality depend upon
the tacit supposition that Divine punishment is not
necessarily and in itself endless, but that it ceases
when its work is done, and always looks forward to
its own cessation. So that Dr. Pusey, if he were still
GocTs Helpful Judgments. i t 7
willing to defend the endlessness of punishment, could
do so only by denying the moral omnipotence of God.
If hell were to repent, it would in that very act cease
to be hell : and it can continue to be hell only on the
supposition that God wills the perpetuation — nay, the
eternity of evil.
But to return from these high speculations to matters
with which we are in daily touch, we must do some-
thing more than submit ourselves to God's judgments
if they are to help us. I have already said that there
are many negative ways of taking the^n, ranging from
a brutal insensibility to their true nature, to a mad
rebellion against their force which perishes in its mad-
ness. On the other hand, we enter on the right path
when we recognize the retributive, the disciplinary,
the medicinal element vc\ trouble, and set ourselves to
work together with God's will in regard to us. " Why
am I afflicted ?" is a question that may be asked with
a double voice: it may be the n^ere petulance of
resentment accusing the justice of God, or, again, an
inarticulate cry of self-accus^tion,^ an acknowledgment
that all sorrow veils a Divine moral purpose. I do
not say that sorrow is always the fruit of sin, in the
sense that we can take our trouble and lay our hand
on the weakness, the self-indulgence, the transgression,
that produced it : the moral world is the theatre of
action of many crossing forces, many mingled effects :
the fathers eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth
God's Help/ul y udgments.
are set on edge: we smart for others' offences, and
pay the penalty of others' irresolution. But I do say
that we do not even begin to realize the moral purpose
of life, so long as we look upon our pains and sorrows
as sent upon us out of the mere volition of God : so
long as we regard them only as proof of His personal
kindness or unkindness to us : so long as we do not
recognize them as part of a general moral order, from
which we cannot emancipate ourselves, and in con-
formity with which lie our best strength, our only
stable peace. It is the very purpose of God's judg-
ments to help us : He is never kinder to us than when
He seems sternest and hardest, for then He is mould-
ing us to fortitude, inuring us to patience, burning into
us the majesty of righteousness.
Have you not noticed that there is a region of
human endurance above complaint? We complain
most, I think, of petty vexations, small annoyances,
trifling pains : often our mourning voice is hushed
when a great grief takes hold of us and fills us wholly.
A strong soul feels that about its own tragedy there
can be nothing mean and small : it is an elemental
struggle that is going on within it, and the forces
involved — life and death, love and loss, sin and right-
eousness — are those that move the world. And even
in the case of pure suffering, unalloyed, undeserved,
hopeless of relief, there is often a quietness of patience,
a resolvedness of endurance, that puts to shame the
God^s Helpful judgments.
uneasy frctfulness with which men meet lesser and
transient troubles. It comes of the profound belief
in the helpfulness of God's judgments. Such patient
sufferers do not ask the why or the wherefore : in all
likelihood they have no other prospect than patience
to the last, and beyond the last a firm reliance on
the Divine goodness : their way of life is hopelessly
blocked : the world for them is all within the four
walls of their room, and their bed their battle-field.
But they are learning to be patient, even cheerful
under pain : to accept small benefits at the hand of
God with a great gratitude : to win, in constant depen-
dence upon the kindness of others, the blessing of the
poor in spirit: to feci that the God who to the more
worldly judgment may seem to have forsaken them,
was never so near to them as in this their extremity.
And if to live with God be the chief thing, then have
they more completely solved the problem of existence
than those whom His judgments have apparently
passed by.
Are you beginning to see now why those old saints
were said to have been unwilling to be redeemed from
purgatorial fires? They not only submitted them-
selves to the judgments of God, but they recognized
their helpfulness, they desired them with a great desire.
And this, I think, is the best and highest nobleness of
which human nature is capable: to be so fired with
the love of righteousness, to be so profoundly con-
1 20 God^s Helpful Judgments.
vinced that with holiness no other good thing can be
compared, as almost to fear lest God should use us
too mercifully, that He should not expend upon us all
the resources of His discipline, that He should leave
upon us some stain of earth not wholly purged away.
It is a moral extravagance, you say : an effort of self-
renunciation which, looked at in the light of common
sense, shows itself as impossible : after all, only a
mediaeval legend, embodying an unreal aspiration.
Perhaps so : but the foolishness of faith is often more
instructive, more inspiring, than the wisdom of the
world ; and I think with wonder, not untempered with
love, of Paschal and Severin asking for a longer trial
of fire, that in the end they might perfectly love God.
Rejoice in t^e ^oxif.
" My brethren, rejoice in the Lord."
r "My
I ^I^HIS is the key-note of the Epistle to the Phi-
^1 r | | lippians. It is struck at the very beginning :
"always in every prayer of mine for you all,
making request with joy," It makes itself heard
i through the Apostle's story of the envy and strife which
mingled with some preaching of the gospel : " What
then ? Notwithstanding every way, whether in pre-
tence or in truth, Christ is preached, and I therein do
rejoice, yea, and will rejoice." When he is in a strait
betwixt two, not knowing whether he should not desire
to depart and be with Christ, he knows that he shall
I abide and continue with his children, for their "further-
1 ance and joy of faith." Even the uttermost extremity
■ of self-spending is a fresh occasion of rejoicing : "Yea,
1 and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of
I your faith, I joy and rejoice with you all. For the
Rejoice in the Lord.
same cause also do ye joy and rejoice with me." And
as if the exhortation of the text were not enough,
" For the rest, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord," he
recurs to the theme a little further on, in a. clarion note
that rings out high and pure, above all dulness of
despondency, above all weakness of discouragement,
above all murmur of complaint, above all sullenness
of distrust, " Rejoice in the Lord a!way ; and again I
say. Rejoice."
Yet Paul was a prisoner in Rome, waiting till his
appeal to Ca:sar should be heard, and in the mean
time chained day and night to some legionary, who,
probably brutal, surely careless, could not but resent
his own imprisonment on the captive he was set to
guard. And thus the Apostle passes into the darkness.
I do not in the least believe the tradition which sets
him free for a second period of missionary labour in
the West, and then brings him back to Rome to die ;
but even if it be true, he is practically lost to our sight
from this moment From the time at which he first
appears, keeping the clothes of them that stoned
righteous Stephen, till now, we know him as we know
few great men of a distant past : he has himself opened
his soul to us : the subtle workings of his mind, the
anxieties of his conscience, the passionate throbbings
of liis heart — we can watch and weigh them all. And
now that the end is almost come, what has he accom-
plished? Intheeyesof men, not much: he has founded
i
i
Rejoice in the Lord. i 23
certain obscure communities, half-Jewish, half-Gentile,
in a few Greek cities ; but they are divided against
themselves, and it is doubtful whether the acknow-
ledged representatives of the Christian tradition will
own them. Jerusalem, which he loved with so passion-
ate an affection, has been deaf to his pleading ; and,
except a faithful soul here and there, Rome is hardly
more disposed to listen. At the very moment when
the flame of evangelic enthusiasm was burning most
brightly in his heart, he had lain two years in hold In
Cscsarea, helpless, hopeless, silent ; and after a voyage
to Italy, in which it seemed as if the very waves and
winds had conspired against him, he had again found
the delays, the inaction, the fretting limitations, of what
was little better than a prison. The great Roman
world rolled on its luxurious way in utter carelessness
of him or the message which he had to deliver : his
brethren of Israel looked on him with more than
doubtful eyes : it seemed as if the shroud of failure
were already wrapped around him, and death could
not be very far off. Yet in this Epistle of the Capti-
vity there is no downcast word. It is full of a courage
which is not only stem, resolute, patient, but bright
and cheerful. If we were to Judge from it alone, we
should say that for Paul life had no leaden hours of
despondency, no moments of passionate complaint
against God, no pangs of sorrow which faith could not
bravely meet and overcome. Like a caged lark, if he
Rejoice in the Lord.
cannot soar, he can still sing ; and his song; is of the
heavens and the joys thereof — ringing combat and
bright victory — a patience that cannot be daunted, a
love that cannot be shaken. And his words — to us
his last words — are irradiate with "the light that never
was on sea or land."
Did you ever read the Meditations of Marcus Aure-
lius? It is one of the great religious books of the
world ; and I think I see signs of its becoming, in
certain exclusive and distinguished intellectual circles,
a fashionable manual of devotion. It was a strange
accident that placed one who was at once a philosopher
and the best of men upon the throne of the world ; or
shall I say that it was the design of God to exhibit,
once for all, the contrast between the kingliness that
is bom to a throne, and that which can find none, save
the mockery of the cross and an everlasting place in
the hearts of men ? However this may be, it was a
sweet and noble character, carefully trained in the
precepts of the Stoical philosophy, that made Marcus
Aurelius what he was : what his imperial destiny did,
was only to lift him up to a pinnacle of human obser-
vation, laying upon his shoulders the burthen of a vast
responsibility, and bidding him attempt the perform-
ance of duties too hard, too various, for any single
will. We can hardly judge his actions in detail ; his
reign is one that lacks contemporary record ; and we
know his troubles better than the way in which he
A
Rejoice in the Lord. 125
met them. His colleague in the empire was worthless:
his son and successor, a disgrace to humanity : scandal
busied itself with his wife's fair fame : storm, pestilence,
earthquake, united to persuade a superstitious people
that the gods had abandoned Rome : he spent a large
part of his reign in inglorious frontier wars, and mutiny
in his own legions aided the barbarian beyond the
Danube. But if his policy is often obscure to us, we
know his mind and his heart. We owe to the hours
in which he retired to the solitude of his tent, and
there questioned his own soul, the self-drawn picture
of a singularly lofty and noble character, of which no
lapse of time can dim the charm. There is not a trace
of boastful egotism in it : the lines are few and of a
severe simplicity: a genuine humility breathes through
it all, as becomes a man who. Emperor though he be,
feels the perpetual presence of more august realities,
and a power more stable. His incredulity of evil
almost frets the reader ; one is tempted to accuse his
patience of unmanly sluggishness. But we close the
book with the thought, Here is a man upon whom
came the greatest of earthly destinies, and who has
shown himself equal to a greater !
And yet it is all so sad. No irrepressible note of
joy breaks through here ; no gleam of light, that will
not be denied, rests upon the page. I have told you
that fate tried Marcus Aurelius hardly, though not
more hardly than Paul ; and he meets his destiny with
J26
Rejoice in the Lord.
a quiet courage, a steady patience, which are beyond
praise. But it is plain that life is a burthen to him.
He will not voluntarily lay it down, as so many
Romans, and those not the unworthiest, did in that
day; he has the feeling of a soldier, who may not
leave his post till the word of command comes. The
clouds overhead are one dull grey : he can discern no
pilot stars. No word of complaint escapes him as to
what we think must have been his troubles : on the
contrary, he is full of love and gratitude to friends and
teachers ; and thanks the gods for having given him a
perfect wife. It is life itself, under any conditions,
that is profoundly mysterious and unsatisfactory to
him : to the last he will leave no duty unfulfilled ; to
the last he will bear up bravely against the shocks of
fortune; but he is unfeignedly glad when the summons
of release comes, and he can slip his neck out of the
yoke at nightfall, as a tired ox that has toiled all day
in the furrow.
And now it seems as if the cloud of philosophic
sadness were beginning to overshadow men once more.
Perhaps this is part of a larger phenomenon than
itself: our age is excited, feverish, burnt up now by
hot enthusiasms, and again shivering in chills of un-
belief, proud of its knowledge, exultant in its freedom,
but hardly able to rejoice in God, in man, in life, with
a strong and serene joy. At one prevalent form of
melancholy I do not wonder : the dull sadness which
Rejoice in the Lord. 127
comes, when the initial impulse of life is exhausted
over men who have drunk the cup of common plea-
sures to the dregs, nor have ever learned the secret of
nobler delights. The story of their despondency is
one which every age has to tell : they have mistaken
the moral purpose and method of existence, and do
not find out their error till it is too late to repair it.
But what strikes me at the present moment is the
growing sadness of men whom I cannot refrain from
calling good. They are not, it is true, believing men
in the old sense of the word : that is the root of the
whole matter. They take life on the naturalistic side :
but they try to fill it with noble purposes and fine
actions ; they measure themselves by a high moral
standard : often they burn with the enthusiasm of
humanity. But the note of difference between men
and women like these and the Christian saints, is
precisely their want of joyfulness. Their hopes and
expectations have a sombre cast. They endure life
much more than enjoy it. They are severe in apply-
ing to themselves the spur of duty, but it is because
they do not feel within the untiring impulse of love.
All this, it may be, is little visible, so long as the
blood courses healthfully in their veins, and youth
will recognize no obstacles, and sorrow and failure
and disappointment are things in the far future : but
for philosophers and saints alike, life is one : its griefs
must be borne, its hindrances must be surmounted, its
128 Rejoice in the Lord.
losses cannot be evaded, its decay must be patiently
endured. I suppose that a certain shade of sadness
comes over us all as we grow older : if it were not
so, we should be more or less than human : memory
begins to prevail over anticipation : love claims the
right of looking back ; and the contrast between what
we are and what we would have been is always present
But in the case of those of whom I am speaking, there
is something more than this : sorrow seems to strike
them to the ground with disabling force : there is
always the doubt whether life, even at its best, be
worth living ; and as for life at its worst — when hope-
less failure closes it round, when slow agony gnaws
shrinking tissues as day wanes into night, and night
wakens into day — when the light of love is quenched
in utter darkness — ah ! what is life at its worst but a
restless weariness, a clinging curse ?
I was looking with almost fond admiration, only
the other day, at the Venus of Milo, in the Louvre,
and I thought of Heinrich Heine prostrate at her feet.
He, the most brilliant, the most sarcastic, the most
audacious of all mockers, he loved her too, and found
in her the embodiment of all that Hellas had to teach
of beauty. This is not the place to try to describe
what is in truth indescribable : broken, roughened,
armless as she is, she returns your gaze with a perfect
loveliness, a consummate grace, which seem to belong
to another and a less troubled world. And it was to
her pedestal that Heine drag-ged himself when the
terrible disease which made his last years one long,
slow, growing agony, had laid hold on him, yet still
left him able to move ; till looking up into her face
with pitiful desire of comfort, and yet with a mind
and heart in which some longing for a living God
was beginning to stir, she said to him, or seemed to
say, " Do you not see that I have no arms and cannot
help you?" Men are finding out now, slowly perhaps
but surely, that philosophy too is armless and helpless,
and that in the great crises of life, the agonies of a
man's soul, they need the outstretched arms of one
who cries, " Come unto me."
"Better," some will say, "better meet an inexpli-
cable fate, with which so many strands of sadness are
interwoven, with such natural patience, such inborn
heroism, as we can command, than trust the deceitful
anodyne of unsubstantial hopes and unfounded faiths!
If it be a man's intellectual lot to believe nothing, let
him at least honestly regulate his life on that footing :
regulate it by lies or half-beliefs he cannot." I have
no rejoinder to make; life and faith, I admit, must
correspond. But I am not conducting an argument,
so much as exhibiting a contrast, and that is not
invalidated by the moral integrity which is so often
an honourable characteristic of unbelief. And it re-
mains true that the Christian does not sadly succumb
to life, or patiently bear it, but conquers it. Deride
1 30 Rejoice in the Lord.
the intellectual basis of his faith as you may — demon-
strate that he believes far more than he can prove —
show that he relies upon instincts which you treat as
fallacious, and lives upon hopes which earth and time
can never realize — the fact abides that he rejoices in
the Lord. He cannot fear for his own safety, for he
feels beneath him the Everlasting Arms. No failure
daunts him, for he knows that his poor efforts succeed
in the precise proportion in which they accord with
the Divine purposes. Even the world's sin and misery
do not depress him out of measure, for he discerns
"the one far- off divine event, to which the whole
creation moves," and believes that with his toil and
prayer the better day draws nearer. And for the
sorrows that will come, the blows that must be borne,
the losses that must be faced, doubtless they are hard
to him as to other men. But if he knows that he has
a Father of an infinite compassion and a very perfect
wisdom, who for all men ordereth all things aright, —
One, moreover, into whose divine heart he can breathe
his sorrows and despondencies, and whence he can
draw comfort as from a perennial spring, — and if he
can let his own fate go, believing that there are better
things, things even nearer to him^ than his personal
joys and sorrows, and that the main thing after all
is that God*s kingdom should come and His will be
done in earth as it is in heaven, — why should he not
cry, even at the moment of his bitterest desolation.
Rejoice in the Lord. 131
even when the cloud lies heaviest on his life, " Halle-
lujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth"?
You will have discerned already that I take the
word joy in its highest sense. We speak, with no
feeling of incongruity, of the joy of God : and the
parallel phrase on the human side is, "rejoice in the
Lord." There is the half-unconscious joy of animated
nature : the sportive leap of the lamb by its mother's
side : the quick dart of the trout in the transparent
brook : the clear, bright laughter of little children.
There is the joy of love, in which the youth folds to
his heart the maiden who is henceforth all in all to
him : and the sweet rapture of content with which the
mother looks upon her new-born child. There is the
joy of successful effort, as when the painter sees his
dream begin to grow upon the canvas, and the poet
first sings the song that has murmured itself into his
ear : or, as these joys are always dashed with partial
failure, there is the joy of struggle for some worthy
object, long, stern, asking perpetual sacrifice, in itself
perhaps sweeter (for such is the mystery of human
life) than the joy of attainment There is the joy of
self-surrender, more poignant in proportion as it is
complete, as when the patriot slowly dies in prison
sooner than betray one jot of ancestral freedom, or the
martyr smiles at the faggots that for him are to make
unfaithfulness to truth impossible evermore. And all
these rise up into and are consummate in the joy
K 2
132 Rejoice in the Lord.
which comes of sympathy with truth, goodness, right-
eousness : joy in the Divine order, joy in unbroken
law, joy in the gradual realization of God's purpose,
joy in the final triumph of God's will. And I suppose
it was Paul's ability to rise out of the narrowness of his
personal lot — the Roman prison, the chained legionary,
the jealous brethren, the near martyrdom — into this
ampler air of aspiration and affection, that made it
natural for him to bid the Philippians " rejoice in the
Lord." Nor do I believe that this highest and keenest
of all joys was long absent from the mind of him
whom a mistaken ideal persists in regarding as "a
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," even when
he hung in torture upon his solitary cross, and the
people, for whom he had given his life, mocked at his
long-drawn agony.
I present to you, then, the idea of religion as the
guarantee of the highest joys of humanity, and the
Church as their guardian. Nor am I here repeating
the familiar thought that " Religion never was designed
to make our pleasures less," or enforcing the distinc-
tion between an austere and a liberal view of life.
Something might well be said on that topic too. I
might expatiate on the asceticism of the Catholic, on
the other-worldliness of Protestant churches : I might
enumerate a long list of outrages which Christianity,
in one orthodox form or another, has committed
against the natural instincts, the innocent enjoyments
Rejoice in the Lord.
of humanity. But I think that for the most part we
have emerged from this phase of religious feeling, and
that the lesson would be at once trite and inappro-
priate. We have no sympathy with any form of
monastic self-maceration. We do not malign God's
earthly goodness as a means of propitiating His favour
in a heaven which He has wisely hidden from our
view. We do not divide our days, our literature, our
music, our occupations, into sacred and secular, except
in so far as the distinction arises out of the nature of
things, and is essential, not arbitrary — real, not formal.
We do not even separate the world from the church,
reserving for one all the pieties of life, banishing to
the other all its frivolities. All this is so little our
habit, that we may easily incur a danger of another
kind in forgetting that if the supernatural always
underlies and is interwoven with the natural world,
and God knows no distinction of times and places, it
cannot be so with us ; that if vwe would find Him who
is above us, we must lift up our hearts, and that we
cannot escape dependence upon seasons and occasions.
But apart from this controversy, which only touches
the surface of things, is it true that the Church, with
all its shortcomings, with all its sins, has been unfaith-
ful to the noblest joys of humanity ? I doubt whether
the great saints would say so. It is something to be
able to go to the theatre with a quiet conscience : to
read books which are in the best sense good, on Sun-
134 Rejoice in the Lord.
days and week-days alike : to taste with a thankful
enjoyment all the various pleasures of art : in a word,
to feel that in the cultivation of the faculties which
God has given us, we cannot run the risk of offending
the Giver. But one who with much toil and patience
and prayer, after a long struggle of self- discipline, with
many helps of grace, with backsUdings that cannot be
counted, and faintings of heart innumerable, has yet
reached the presence of God and lives in Him from
day to day, always gathering inspiration from fresh
effort, and going from strength to strength, — such an
one will tell you that a more level, an easier, a less
macerated life, can offer no such pure, poignant, rap-
turous joy as falls to his lot. Believe me, we who
habitually walk on life's lower slopes do not under-
stand the blessedness of the saints who stand upon
its summits. Just now, in that awful visitation of
pestilence which has devastated Spain, the Sisters of
Charity have been dying in the hospitals like flies.
They are poor ignorant women, I dare say: altogether
outside the culture and science of this boastful nine-
teenth century : grovelling in gross religious supersti-
tions, setting their faith on absurd legends and childish
marvels. But they know not only how to die when
death comes, but how to give their lives for suffering
men. There is no lack of volunteers : when one brave
soldier is stricken down, another steps into her place,
and the ranks are always full. Do you think there
i
Il
Rejoice in the Lord.
is no joy in dying for God, for Christ, for love, for
duty ? Would that I could rise to that height of
self-surrender I Would that I were worthy of such
a death !
It all rests upon a belief in the unspeakable wisdom
and tenderness of God's love. The older I grow, the
more deeply I meditate upon the mystery of religion,
the more clearly I see that this is the root of the
whole matter. Compared with the difference which
this sets up, all other religious distinctions between
men, no matter how apparently fundamental, are of
slight importance. You may bring all doctrine to be
tried by this touchstone, and learn thereby its claim
to divide or unite men : all who love God, and who
feel that God loves them, are on one side : tliey have
grasped the substance, all else is in comparison but
shadow. Nor let names deceive you : historical Chris-
tianity has deified Jesus, and men pour out before
Christ, in no stinted measure, the love, the veneration,
the devotion, which we think to be due only to the
Father. But are the love, the veneration, the devotion,
there ? Are they freely offered to the best that the
man knows, the homage of his soul to the Supreme
Good ? He is at one with the true worshippers, and
the true worshippers are at one with him : we all lift
up blind hands of aspiration : our best prayers are
but inarticulate and stammering petitions : we wor-
ship we know not what, but something higher than
1 36 Rejoice in tne Lord,
our highest, better than our best. I often think of
that great word of Angelique Arnauld's and make it
niy own, though possibly not precisely in her sense :
" I am of the church of all the saints, and all the saints
are of my church." And the prerogative of the saints is
to have a very real and constant sense of the great love
of God : to be persuaded that to those who love God
all things work together for good : in the strength of
that faith to throw themselves, with utter self- surrender,
into the battle which rages ever between good and
evil : to meet weal and woe with equal courage : to
live with joy, to die in peace.
I cannot dedicate this Church to the Divine Joy;
for, first, you have committed no such function to me ;
and next, such a dedication might possibly turn out
to be, as the swift years rolled by, only a profound
and melancholy irony. For if you plodded on your
dull and level way, achieving a success or a failure
equally poor and common : if you bartered away the
deep and wide things of the spiritual life for a mess
of denominational pottage : if no sweet household
saints were trained here, and no humble heroes went
out hence to do battle against the world's wretched-
ness : if you were content without the rapture of self-
surrender, and were unconscious of the bliss of giving
all for God — what a mockery and a reproach would
your name be! No, brethren and sisters, the true
dedication of this Church lies not in any poor words
Rejoice in the Lord. 137
of mine, but in what you make it in the years that arc
to come. Yet it seems to me that if in a society that
on the one hand is beginning' to care little about reli-
gion, and on the other would believe if it could, yet can-
not — and, being perplexed and troubled and feverish,
feels a sadness creeping over it for which it cannot
find a remedy — -you are able to vindicate the courage,
the cheerfulness, the Joy of faith, you will do a great
work for God and for humanity, I know that I am
offering you a counsel of perfection. I too feel that
life has not only its sharp pangs, its disabling priva-
tions, its blinding disappointments, but its long tracts
of languor, and an abiding sense of insufficiency. How
hard it is to keep its cheerful vigour unimpaired to the
last, and to move as eagerly through the restricted
circle of old age as once we expatiated within the
boundless horizon of youth! But still, O friends and
fellow-pilgrims, the key-note of the Christian life is
not silent resignation, not even filial trust, but cheerful
obedience, a joyous self-surrender to God's will, an
eager struggle for the right, an exultant belief that
better things are at hand. We are heirs of all the
ages : no man can rob us of the past, and faith holds
the future in fee. "All things are ours — whether Paul
or Apollos or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death,
or things present, or things to come— all are ours : and
we are Christ's, and Christ is God's."
And so my heart's desire and prayer for you arc.
J
138 Rejoice in the Lord.
that you may have strength and courage and patience
to enter upon your great inheritance ; and that, as the
years pass, this Church may be the spiritual home of
many strong and joyful souls. Rejoice, I pray you,
in the beautiful world in which God has given you to
live : rejoice in the fatherly love which heaps up your
lives with various blessing : rejoice in the Communion
of Saints, whereof you have your part, and in him,
the Chief of all saints, yet the Friend of all sinners
too : rejoice in the ringing battle of duty, into which
it behoves you to go down and quit yourselves like
men : rejoice in the coming kingdom of God, which
asks your toil, your patience and your prayer : rejoice
in the love that sweetens your homes, and the larger
hope which tells you that it cannot die ! For in God
Himself is joy, serene, unspeakable, unchangeable,
eternal.
■
I^^^^HJ
^M
r
WtMsM^^^^
L
XII.
% JataHe of Julwrjitt.
1
^^^^m Psalm cxxxix. ^^^|
" Marvellous are Thy works ; and that my soul knoweth right 1
well." I
^^1^ AM just come from a region of extinct vol- n
^j^ canos. They rise in an irre^lar row from the 1
central plain of France, itself no inconsiderable
height above the sea ; not standing shoulder to shoulder,
and bound together by high passes, as mountains are
wont to be, but each by itself, looking like the great
earth-bubble that it is. They are smooth enough,
quiet enough now, though to the geologist's eye their
outline tells their whole story : the craters which once
belched forth sulphurous flame and molten rock are
lined with grass, and cattle graze peacefully on slopes
from which every living thing fled in breathless terror.
These volcanos have no written history. No record,
no tradition, takes us back to the period of their activ-
ity. But the story is plain upon the surface of the
^^^^^^H
14© A Parable of Auvergne.
country, These great, bowl-shaped depressions which
meet you on the mountain-top — these long ridges
of lava, which have slowly flowed, with a gradually
cooling stream, into the valleys below — these stretches
of desolate, stony plain, which twenty centuries have
not sufficed to restore to fertility — all tell their own
tale. There must have been a time at which the most
destructive forces of which our earth has any experi-
ence were in full play here ; and whatever they found
Auvergne, they left it a scorched and barren wilder-
ness. And now it is, as it were, a parable of Nature's
reparative force. It is a land of vineyard and of
orchard, where you leave the meadows by the stream
sides to climb among great walnuts and chestnuts ;
where almost every rood of land is carefully tilled,
where almost every rood richly repays the labourer's
toil. Enough remains of the original desolation to
show how long, how gradual, has been the restorative
process : the old lava-streams can be traced, through
the cultivation which enshrouds them, from point to
point : and the dead volcanos rear themselves into the
sky, mute testimonies to a forgotten cataclysm. It
is as if Nature said, with calm, majestic voice : Lo, I
destroy, but I restore ; my very catastrophes open a
fresh era of life and growth ; my desolations are
sudden, far-reaching, complete; but to me centuries
are nothing, and presently the land laughs with
redoubled beauty.
i
This parable has more apph'cations than one. Shall
I give it an historical one, and find the analogue in
human affairs of the fertility that girds the dead vol-
canos ? It is not far to seek : not thousands of years,
but just one hundred, have rolled away since the poli-
tical volcano burst forth in France. Perhaps it is only
now that some few candid historical students are
beginning to see the Revolution in its true light: to
those who witnessed it with, living eyes, much more
who felt the scorching touch of its lava, or were over-
whelmed in its fiery ashes, it seemed a social convul-
sion wholly portentous, mournful, horrible, It levelled
all established things with the ground. It swept away,
as with a storm of fire, all ancient reverence and
beauty. It destroyed what seemed to men to be the
very foundations of life, and reduced all that was cus-
tomary and seemly to a weltering chaos. It sprang,
as it were, suddenly out of the earth : only one here
and there — and they were derided as fanatics — had
heard the low roar and trembling of warning; and
when it had wrecked innumerable homes, when it had
exacted an immeasurable sacrifice of life, it slowly
passed away, leaving behind it, what? What your
answer is will depend upon your knowledge of history
in the real sense of the word : your power of passing
by the romantic story of the g;reat, to fix your attention
upon the welfare and happiness of the multitude who
have neither name nor record : your ability to pene-
A Parable of Anvergne.
trate beneath the often idle tale of political vicissitude,
to the causes that really affect the fate of the people.
And the France of to-day lives, grows, organizes itself,
reaches forward to unseen possibilities, upon the lava-
stream of the Revolution, as yet hardly cold. I do
not pause to describe or to characterize It : I have my
own opinion of the justifiableness of the Revolution,
which is not that commonly held a century ago : nor
can I help feeling the liveliest sympathy with a state
of society which has at once passed beyond the recog-
nition of hereditary rank, and made the peasant the
owner of the soil which, he tills. That is not my
present theme. What I want to call your attention
to is the rapidity with which, in human affairs too, all
forces of reparation work. I suppose no country ever
looked back upon a storm ier century than France upon
that which has now come to its clos& It began in
volcanic forces of revolution : then, like a resistless
whirlwind, France swept over Europe : three times
has her capital been in possession of the invader :
again and again has civic war filled the streets of her
great towns with blood. But the foundations of life
stand sure : she is rich, prosperous, contented ; men
live within the bounds of well-assured liberties, which
answer all their needs and aspirations : the vine-dresser
peacefully gathers his grapes into the vat : the plough-
man toils quietly along the furrow. And the lesson
is, that the bases of society are not to be finally
A Parable of Auvergne. 143
destroyed even by the wildest violence, the bitterest
malignity of men.
Geologists tell us — if, indeed, their most confident
affirmations are more than apt conjecture — that the
forces which we call volcanic are always seething
together beneath the earth's quiet crust, and that at
any moment, almost at any place, they may burst
forth into sudden destruction. Is it not so with every
human life ? Who is safe from crushing misfortune,
from overwhelming sorrow, from benumbing bereave-
ment? In one sense, he is least safe who has the
largest hold upon life, whose sympathies have the
widest reach, whose argosies of love are upon many
seas ; but even when a man has striven to shut him-
self up in the narrowest and best-guarded citadel of
selfish personality, he can secure for himself no immu-
nity from shattering earthquake and fiery storm. Does
he love himself only? On his own head alone falls the
thunderbolt, and he is fain to sit among the potsherds
without comfort and without love. And it is a peculi-
arity of the most fatal and complete shipwrecks of affec-
tion, that they always come upon us unawares. We
are tilling life's peaceful surface in quiet expectation
of a harvest : the sun is bright overhead : the seasons
are following in their wonted order : the ground is firm
beneath our feet — ^when a day that began with as much
calm serenity as another, lands us at nightfall in bit-
terest anxiety, and, almost before a second has passed.
144 -^ Parable of Auvergne.
the light of life is darkened for us evermore. The
breast on which we were wont to lay our head throbs
no longer : the arm on which we leaned will never
again sustain us. The firm earth sways beneath our
feet, and the home of our affections topples into ruin i
the lava-stream, fiery, irresistible, all -destroying, con-
demns the fields on which we have spent our toil to
eternal barrenness.
And the first impulse in such a case — which is, alas !
too common — is to feel and to declare the misfortune
irremediable. There is nothing for it, we think, but
to put up with the new landscape of life, scorched,
blotted into hideous sterility, as it may be. Courage
and patience may make the best of it, but cannot
change it : the vineyards are covered up in ruin, the
trees are burned and blackened trunks, the very streams
have forgotten their courses and ceased their refresh-
ing flow. We resent all consolation, which falls as
with a hollow and empty sound upon our ears : espe-
cially we resent all consolation which whispers of the
restorative magic of time, for in that there seems to
lie a secret treason to the past, and a shameful forget-
fulness of what was so sweet and good. But all the
while God works in us, as He works where the hot
ashes lie thickest, and the burning lava takes its fur-
thest way through the plain. The grass and the fern
root themselves in the interstices of the rock. A thou-
sand wild weeds, content with scantiest sustenance
A Parable of Auvergne. 145
from mother earth, open their flowers to the sun, and
shed their seeds, perishing to live again in a more
luxuriant offspring. Among them the grasshopper
leaps and sings, and the lizard flashes in the sun ; the
little birds find refuge ; the hare crouches in her form ;
and the land is no longer lifeless. Then, as the long
years roll slowly by, a nut, dropped into some fit seed-
bed, grows into a mighty tree, and the shrubs climb
and push beneath its shelter — till the massive growth
attracts the bountiful rain, and another great force of
nature is enlisted on the side of restoration. Last of all
comes man, intent upon finishing for his own purposes
the work that nature has begun ; and slowly toiling,
patiently waiting, his orchards clothe the valleys, his
vineyards climb the slopes, his meadows smile by the
brook-side, and what were once the ineffaceable scars
upon the land need an educated eye to detect them.
Shall I pursue the analogy into its detail ? Shall I
tell you how silently, how softly, that great angel of
God whom we call Time does his ministering work
upon a desolate life — not offering importunate conso-
lations which would be indignantly refused, but letting
new thoughts, new interests, new hopes, new affections,
grow up round the ruins of the old, until the work is
so far complete that the sorrowful soul itself takes
heart of grace, and co-operates towards its successful
issue ? I do not know whether, after all, the new world
is as bright, as luxuriant, as the old. Its fiery scars
L
146 A Parable of Auvergne.
are never quite hidden. You can trace the course of
the lava-streams through the vegetation that hides and
adorns them. But it is at all events a world in which
it is possible to till the soil and lift up hands of grati-
tude to God,
It is strange to see how, in the country of which I
am speaking, the lava-streams have blocked up the
water-courses. Naturally, the slowly moving mass of
molten rock has taken the line of the valleys in which
the little brooks ran among the hills, and, as it cooled,
has closed up the waters in a prison through which
they could not break. But nature and time, working
together, will not be denied ; and at the lava's furthest
edge, where it had grown so cool that it could flow no
longer, and hung, a shapeless cliff, over the plain that
it had threatened, the water now wells up in springs,
copious, limpid, cold, taking their rejoicing way through
the meadows, and spreading verdure around them on
every side. Again I saw a parable of human sorrow.
A crushing grief is a searing and a scorching thing ;
it dries up a man's heart within him : the springs of
natural affection cease to flow : the one outlet of love
absolutely barred, it seems as if no other were worth
a thought It is very hard for sorrow not to be selfish :
its very characteristic is, that it cannot for a moment
forget or escape from self, and that remembrance is one
dull consciousness of pain, one abiding blackness of
despair. But I think that in almost every case — often
A Parable of Auvergne.
without our own co-operation, sometimes even against
our will — the springs break forth. They have been
running underground all the while, though we knew it
not, and preparing for us a refreshment which we were
not ready to welcome. Some renewed sense of the
beauty and mystery of nature, which restores to our
imprisoned spirit its communion with the All of
things : more efficacious still, some demand of dutiful
self-sacrifice, which, at first hardly answered, wakes at
last a fresh outflow of love : some impulse of pity,
which takes us out of the isolation of our ovm grief
into the great fellowship of all suffering souls — these
are the clear, cold waters which restore verdure and
fertility to life. It is as if Love came and touched with
healing hand the wounds which its own shaft had
inflicted.
And yet there are exceptions, real or apparent, to
every rule. I saw strange, stony tracts on which it
seemed as if the restorative forces of nature had spent
themselves in vain. Huge blocks of la\-a lay about,
encumbering the earth, around which the scantiest
herbage hardly grew ; the soil would not support bush
or tree : strange insects crawled or flitted over the
surface, as if some remnant of the old primeval fire
still glowed beneath. At least two thousand years
have passed since those fires were extinguished, and
still their work of destruction is not repaired : as if to
show what tortures she once suffered. Earth bears her
A Parable of Auvergne.
scars yet. And these islands of obstinate sterility in
a sea of fruitfulness made me think of the irremediable
wound which a great, shameful sin may inflict upon a
human life. I do not know that the precise case to
which I refer is one that often comes under our notice.
Tree and fruit are for the most part of one stock : a
wicked deed comes out of a wicked life, and therefore
stands in no strong contrast with it : for the awakening
of the moral consciousness, it is necessary that a man
should feci, not that he has been like himself, but infi-
nitely worse and meaner than himself Murder does
not mean much to one who always lives on the verge
of homicide ; and a trader who recoils before no sharp
practice has no real horror of what the law calls swin-
dling. But sometimes there is a great blot on what
has been before, and will be again, a life really strug-
gling towards goodness — -some sudden yielding to
overmastering temptation, some self- surrender to a
blind whirlwind of passion, some cardinal choice in
life deliberately made, yet seen as soon as made, and
ever after, to have been a treachery to duty and to
God, The sin may be all unknown to men, or, if
known, such as common opinion would lightly judge ;
but it burns itself into the conscience, it remains a
waste and barren spot in memory, which no sweet
growths will hide ; and even time, all-conquering time,
cannot make it other than it is, an abomination of
desolation. And yet, O brethren in weakness and in
i
A Parable of Auvergne. 149
sin, courage and patience! What are a few short
years to those who have eternity before them ? Sun
and rain, frost and snow, will yet disintegrate the
rock, however slowly: already the grass is beginning
to push, already the flowers to bloom : courage, I say,
and patience : if only we submit ourselves to God's
husbandry, it yet lies within the compass of His mar-
vellous methods to make the wilderness of our sins
the very garden of our souls !
One more analogy, and I have done. In some parts
of this strange country the volcanic forces have taken
other forms and produced other effects. Through the
superincumbent strata they have pushed up huge,
isolated rocks, which tower, pillar-like, into the sky,
crowned sometimes with church or castle, but always
standing out into the landscape with a kind of intrusive
distinctness, as if they belonged to another order of
things. Ages pass and leave their iron rigidity un-
touched : some scanty vegetation roots itself in their
crannies, the yellow lichen overspreads their clifis with
a golden glow : but the frost touches them not, nor
the rain, and the wind howls about them with only an
impotent rage. Nay, what process of disintegration
goes on attacks only the softer strata at their base ; so
that, as the ages pass, they seem to grow in height and
steadfastness, and to rear themselves ever more proudly
over the puny works of men below. Do they not bring
to mind the few great human personalities which no
150 A Parable of Auvergne.
time, no change of opinion, no progress of knowledge,
can dwarf? And as I gazed upon one, shooting up
hundreds of feet into the southern blue, and crowned
with a church dedicated to the archangel who loves
all sudden heights, do you wonder that my thoughts
turned, full of admiring love, to the greatest of all
human personalities, "Jesus Christ, the same yester-
day, to-day and for ever" ?
My parable is ended : do not reject it, I pray you,
as if it were frivolous or had no grave significance.
For to those who have the inner vision, all nature is a
parable always :
Two worlds are ours — ^*tis only sin
Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth within.
Plain as the sea and sky.
XIII.
^11 faints' gnu.
Ephesians ii. ig:
ivith the saints, and of the household of God."
^0-DAY is dedicated, in the calendars both of
j the Catholic and Anglican Church, to the com-
memoration of "all saints." The phrase has
a fine sound of breadth and liberality about it, as if
the fesb'val were intended to bring into one view all
various types of human holiness, irrespective of differ-
ences of faith or diversities of manifestation, and to
make them an occasion of rejoicing and gratitude to
God. I think, however, that the commemoration must
be admitted to have had a humbler origin. It began
when, in the year 6io, Pope Boniface IV. gathered
together from the Roman Catacombs the remains of
many nameless saints and martyrs, and, enshrining
them in that stately relic of pagan antiquity which
we still know as the Pantheon, re-dedicated it to
152 All Saints^ Day.
Christian worship. Perhaps, as time went on, the idea
took possession of pious minds, that if any pure and
sweet spirit, any brave but obscure witness for God,
had been passed over in the Church's calendar, it
might be fitly remembered in this one comprehensive
commemoration. At all events it is true that the
Latin Church approaches the celebration of this fes-
tival in a truly catholic spirit The hymn which the
Breviary assigns to the day is wide in its range of invo-
cation : it begins with Christ and the Virgin Mother :
it goes on to include apostles and prophets, martyrs,
virgins, confessors : it binds together in one the living
and the dead. And in this it accords with the clause
in the Apostles' Creed, " I believe in the Communion
of Saints," which does not appear in that Confes-
sion till at least the sixth century. For the phrase
has a more specific meaning than that which we
commonly put upon it : it was intended to indicate
a real unity and intercommunion between the militant
and the triumphant Church : between Christians still
tempted, toiling, struggling here below, and those who,
above, are at rest in the bosom of God, beyond reach
of sin and sorrow. So that if to-day, of all days, we
claim to be " fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the
household of God," we not only affirm in the most
practical way the majestic unity of the Church which
underlies and transcends all differences, but ask admit-
tance to a communion which is as wide as God's
All Saints^ Day, 153
dealings with mankind, and stretches from the Son,
who lies in the very bosom of the Father, to the
humblest of those little ones who try to follow him
with their whole heart.
What is it to be a Saint? Perhaps as the world
rolls on, and there Is a greater revulsion from a too
ecclesiastical idea of goodness, the word has begun to
lose something of its power of expressing the highest
ideal of manliness : and when society is summarily
divided into saints and sinners, a healthy moral
sympathy is not wholly with the former. But I am
going to disregard this : I shall take the word as I
think Christ and Paul would have taken it. Saint is
"sanctus," and "sanctus" means holy; what, then, is
the root-idea of holiness ? I think I cannot be mis-
taken in assuming a very close and essential connec-
tion between holiness and religious faith. There are
types of human goodness, strong, serene, consummate,
beautiful, in which this connection is not manifest : as,
for instance, the Stoicism of Epictetus and Marcus
Aurelius. You know what I think of that, and how
I look upon the books in which it is preserved as
among the most precious possessions of the human
race. But neither of these admirable men had any
faith in God that was not of the vaguest and cloudiest
kind : when by chance they speak of the gods, it is
as if it were a fashion of speech, from which they did
not choose wholly to break away. There is no gleam
L
1 54 All Saints' Day.
from heaven on their page : there is no consciousness
of being beset, behind and before, by a Power not only-
stronger but wiser and kinder than themselves : what
we see is a noble and resolved humanity, trying to
make itself equal to its fate. And therefore, though
I may be wrong, it is only by an arbitrary extension
of the term Saint that I could apply it to them : I
should have to call them Philosophic Saints, or Pagan
Saints, to distinguish the quality of their goodness. For
holiness differs from virtue, from goodness, from excel-
lence, from any other word which denotes an approach
to human perfectness, precisely in this, that it tacitly
involves the relation of the soul to a living God. It
implies an awful shrinking from all things evil, because
God is good : an eager effort to go from strength to
strength, because God is perfect : an outflow of love
to man that knows no bounds of self-surrender, because
God's love is infinite : and with all this, surrounding
it as it were with an atmosphere, and giving life its
whole tone and colour, an unceasing consciousness of
the Divine presence and help. So the true Saint lives
with and for and in God. His highest wisdom is
obedience. His best strength is trust There is a
supernatural element in all his life. He cannot sink,
for beneath him are the Everlasting Arms'; and when
he soars, it is in the might of the Spirit of God,
The Catholic conception of Saintliness, and to some
extent the Protestant conception too, certainly in-
i
eludes the idea of self-maceration. The ascetic ele-
ment, which is always ready to intrude itself into
religiousness, did not long spare Christianity : indeed,
if we may trust some hostile critics, was in it from the
very first. And from the time the monk appeared
upon the scene, there was something monastic in all
saintliness. The substitution of prayer for work, or,
if work were still deemed necessary, its withdrawal
from the stir and competition of human interests : the
subjection of the body by fasts and vigils— if need be,
by cruel self-discipline : the renunciation of natural
affections and domestic ties : so austere a preparation
for death as to make existence little more than a death
in life, — all these things came to be considered as the
only way of holiness, the single method by which the
Christian character could be built up and sustained.
And even among those Protestants who are the far-
thest from understanding and appreciating the Catholic
ideal, the Saint is never on good terms with the world.
There are books which he will not read, amusements
in which he will not join, aspirations which he thinks
futile, occupations which he brands as frivolous. He
lives a life apart ; and, snatching a brand from the
burning now and then, sees without despair humanity
roll on its careless way to perdition. And yet when
1 turn to the example of the great Master of Saint-
liness, I find no trace of this other-worldliness. He
was as ready to sit at rich men's feasts as to share the
156 All Salnls' Day.
cottage of the poor. I see no evidence of his having
separated himself from the common life and worship
of his people. It was a part of his nature, so to speak,
to keep himself in touch with the degraded and the
fallen. The feeling of humanity — simple, bare, human-
ity—was too strong in him that he should cut himself
off from any class of men, or fall into the Pharisaic
error of going into a sect apart Christ^I do not
hesitate to say it — was of the world, and meant his
kingdom of God to be realized in the world ; and the
true transforming power of the gospel upon society is
not from without but from within. Shalt I startle you
if I say that Paul was, in the best sense of the word,
a man of the world, who, moved by the instincts of a
Christian gentleman, made himself all things to all
men, if by any means he might win some : was full of
the culture of his time, and had a heart that beat in
accord with the various life of the motley society into
which he endeavoured to breathe a fresh spirit ? So
if on this side your conception of Saintliness be narrow,
I pray you to enlarge it Holiness does not involve
self-maceration, or retirement from the world, or con-
centration upon one's own salvation, or a lofty indif-
ference to what common men love and hate. I do
not desire to derogate from the beauty of the saints
who dwell apart, but I love more those who come
down to live the life of God in the throng of men. Is
goodness with them the main thing? Is it goodness
All Saints^ Day. 157
for God's sake and because God is good ? Does the
air of heaven accompany them wherever they are and
whatever they do? Then are they, whether or no
they bear external marks of holiness which common
eyes can recognize, "fellow -citizens with the saints,
and of the household of God."
One of the saddest things in a world that is often
sad is, that God's saints so seldom recognize each
other, at least across the dividing walls of churches
and systems. It is so much easier to discern a monk
than to know a soul. The shaven head, the sandaled
feet, the symbolic garb, the haggard countenance —
these are easy to recognize : prayers can be numbered,
penances and pilgrimages speak for themselves, I do
not say that true Saintliness is inconsistent with these
evident tokens, or others of a more Protestant com-
plexion ; but only that the tokens are too usually
accepted for the reality, and may be so accepted when
it is absent. No evangelical saint could possibly meet
with Catholic appreciation, nor would perhaps care for
it. We ourselves do not enter heartily into the kind
of holiness which is indisputably produced by a belief
in the Atonement ; and I need hardly say that ortho-
dox Christians find Unitarian goodness lacking in
warmth and unction. But if in any way this age of
ours, which is so constantly dwelling on its own reli-
gious difficulties and shortcomings, is rising into a
higher region of faith, it is in the growing recognition
158 All Saints' Day.
of the fact that there is in essence but one type of
human goodness, and that that consists in likeness to
God. Just in proportion as a man loves God, and is
like God, does he emerge into an upper air, where the
divisions between churches do not run, and the noise
of controversy cannot penetrate. We can see it in the
writings of the truly great saints : a part, it is true, is
given up to the differences which they thought impor-
tant and the disputes in which they took a share ; but
there is another part in which they speak but one lan-
guage, utter the same truths, breathe the same aspira-
tions. Channing is one with Augustine there ; George
Fox sees eye to eye with Pascal. We sometimes say
that all controversies will be laid to rest in heaven,
where, to tJieir mutual surprise, orthodox doctor and
heresiarch will find themselves side by side. What
is this but a blind and imperfect anticipation of the
judgment of God, who, Himself omniscient, notes our
feeble attempts to comprehend the infinite reality of
things, and estimates us, not by our conquest of truth,
but by our struggle for goodness ?
I greatly dislike the idea involved in the Catholic
canonization of Saints, and am glad to take refuge
from it in the comprehensive commemoration of to-
day, which I can make as wide as my own knowledge
and sympathy will let me. One easily brushes aside
the notion that any ecclesiastical organization has the
right to decide who are Saints and who are not : if the
i
A II Saints^ Day. 159
theory itself were not absurd, its practical results would
be enough to ensure its rejection. But I cannot allow
that it is right or possible to draw the sharp dividing-
line which this process contemplates. When I say, as
I do with a very real love and faith, " I believe in the
Communion of Saints," I am thinking not only of
those bright and supreme spirits to whom universal
Christendom offers its homage, but of the struggling
souls outside of any charmed interior circle, who yet
look to be strengthened and cheered and drawn up-
ward by contact with those who are stronger and
better than themselves. There are infinite gradations
in holiness, from the first faint stirring in the soul of
love for God and goodness, to the conscious, complete,
successful devotion of a life to the highest ends of
living ; but all are bound together and made one by
that breath of the Holy Spirit which is their single
strength. To whom does the neophyte, who is as yet
only beginning to try his untrained powers, so eagerly,
so hopefully look up, as to the elder brother who has
passed through his temptations, who has conquered
his weakness, and who, though still tempted, still
weak, is pressing forward to fresh achievements ? Who
regard with such peculiar and helpful tenderness the
toils and efforts of beginners with God, as those who
have made most ample trial of His goodness and
drunk deepest of His inexhaustible grace? And if
this be so, there is no presumption involved in the
All Saints' Day.
claim to be " fellow-citizens with the saints." The
moment I really begin to love God, and to try to be
like God, I am on their side, and can claim whatever
help and inspiration they have to give. If, to feel the
strength and brightness of the Communion of Saints,
a consummate holiness, a perfect walk with God, a
complete self-surrender, were necessary, what would be
left for us, tempted and wayworn and wounded as we
are, but to stand, silent and sad, in the outer darkness ?
And so this great word, the " Communion of Saints,"
becomes wider the longer we think of it and the more
we penetrate into its real meaning, I do not draw
back from the assertion that faith in God is of the
essence of Saintliness, as that idea has gradually taken
shape in men's minds during the last eighteen cen-
turies ; but could Christ have seen Epictetus in the
flesh, would he not have taken him by the hand as a
true son of God, even though he had never found his
Father's face? There are sides of our humanity on
which we must needs acknowledge our kindred with
the great philosophic Emperor ; and if I were to pray
to saints at all, I could join in Erasmus' half-serious
invocation, " Sancte Socrate, ora pro nobis I" But, on
another side, the thought which I have laid before you
unites us, with many good men and women of a sweet
and strong every-day goodness, in a very wide and
noble fellowship. One or two saints I have known in
my lifetime, men of such a pervading holiness, of such
J
All Saints^ Day, 1 6 1
rounded achieviement, as to silence dX\ ethical criticism
in affectionate admiration ; but many, many more
whom I felt to be better than myself, who were strong
when I was weak, serene when I was perturbed, self-
forgetting when I remembered myself. It is an un-
happy family that has not some household saints all
its own, whose goodness perhaps has been hidden
from the world, or which the world has only imper-
fectly understood, but whose memory, to the chosen
few, " smells sweet and blossoms in the dust" For,
on the one hand, there is a kind of holiness which
bears most fruit in quiet places ; and, on the other,
holiness finds in love its quickest and surest inter-
preter. Consult your own memories if you would
know what I mean : I am persuaded that you will not
consult them in vain. Those venerable and beautiful
forms that are silently rising up before you now, in-
stinct with a sweetness which you alone can fully see,
and bringing with them tender recollections in which
the best part of your lives is bound up — these are the
link which unites you with the Communion of Saints,
and gives you courage to believe that you too may be
of the household of God.
And lastly, if there be any bridge by which, in
thought and love, we can cross the silent river which
flows between the living and the dead, it is built for
us by this word, "I believe in the Communion of
Saints." Intercession of Saints ! I have no warrant
M
All Saints' Day.
for believing it : it is only dimly, and as in a vision,
that I can picture to myself the heavenly courts, and
guess the moods and occupations of those' who tread
them. But there is a sense in which even this most
Catholic of all beliefs comes home to my heart : If
there were those who, here below, remembered me in
their prayers and held me up in their hands before
God, shall I believe that now they love me less, or that
He turns a deaf ear to their pleadings ? For whatever
be the circumstances of that heavenly life for which
we look, there can be no doubt as to its essence : love
cannot change, duty is one and the same, the service
of God knows no variation. It is but a metaphor,
bom of human weaknes3 of conception, to say that
we shall find our heavenly occupation in one Eternal
Anthem : a metaphor, again, the saying of the great
French divine, that the celestial praise cannot be other
than one rapt silence. I think — with all reverence be
it spoken— that heaven would hardly be heaven to me
if I were bidden to forget and never more regard the
fate of those whom I had loved, of those whom 1 had
helped, of those with whom I had struggled shoulder
to shoulder : and so I too look up, mindful of fathers
and friends who are gone before, and trust that they
remember me. And into what a noble company does
not our mutual love give me admittance 1 Christ, first-
bom of many brethren : the prophets who hoped for
him ; the apostles who helped him : the confessors
All Saints* Day. 163
who witnessed for him : the martyrs who died for
him : the deep thinkers who have made his mysteries
plain : the sweet singers whose winged words still bear
our spirits upwards to God : strong and white souls
innumerable who have toiled and prayed for the king-
dom : patriots who have given their all for right and
liberty : sages who have found at last the truth which
they sought so painfully : little children, transplanted
early that they might grow up in the very garden of
God, — all, in their place and degree, loving, serving,
adoring, the Eternal Holiness ! Which of us is worthy
of so noble a companionship, or how shall we grow
into the glory of so great a hope ?
M 2
XIV.
C&e §a]|spriiig from on prg^.
Luke i. 78:
" Whereby the dayspring from on high hath visiled
J
5^fl?^ KNOW no literary fact more interesting, and in
^1^ a sense more pathetic, than those late blossoms
of Hebrew poetry, the "Benedictus" and the
"Magni6cat." Beyond the story which Luke alone
of the Evangelists tells, we know nothing of their
origin. In language, of course, they are Greek ; but
Hebrew in their conception, their form, their metrical
structure. It is difficult to say to how late a period
the book of Psalms, that great national hymn-book of
the Jews, remained open to fresh contributions : the
fact has been long recognized that, so far from belong-
ing only to the kingly and prophetic period, it covers
the whole history and answers to all the religious
development of the people. Had we met with these
two little poems among the Psalms, we should have
The Dayspring from on High, 1 65
felt no sense of incongruity : all we should have noted
would have been a certain precision of personal allu-
sion which we do not find in older utterances. There
is a well-known connection in the history of literature
between signal national events and achievements and
the outbreak of poetic inspiration : the splendid lite-
rary periods of Pericles, of Augustus, of Elizabeth, of
Louis Quatorze, are times at which the nations too
felt the thrill of a great destiny, and interposed deci-
sively in the affairs of the world. So the spirit of
Hebrew poetry that had been long asleep, woke once
more at the cradle of the Christ : and the voice of the
Psalmist was heard for the last time as the promise
of prophecy was being fulfilled in the announcement
of the Gospel.
" The dayspring from on high." We owe this beau-
tiful phrase to the genius of William Tyndale, the
martyr-scholar, whose labours are the firm foundation
of the English Bible. Wiclif, in 1380, has "the spring-
ing up from on high," which is a very literal transla-
tion ; Tyndale, in 1534, made it "the dayspring from
on high ;" and all subsequent translators have had the
good taste to follow his example. I figure to myself
humanity in the guise of a traveller toiling through
a long night along a difficult road. It is hard to find
the way : real obstacles are made more real by the
darkness, which at the same time creates a thousand
imaginary terrors. In the silence and solitude of night
l66 The Dayspring from on High.
the journey lengthens : and the fancy grows painfully
busy with the goal which it is desired to reach and
the welcome which is waiting. Beneath the stars'
cold light the landscape lies asleep : if any life stirs, it
is that of some obscure beast which stealthily snatches
its prey when other living things are off their guard.
And it grows colder as the night wears on, as the
sense of solitude deepens, and weariness creeps more
prevailingly over eye and limb : till it seems coldest
and darkest of all just when darkness is about to give
way to light. For see, there is a pale grey stealing
over the eastern heavens, which presently puts on a
rosy flush : a faint twitter of awakening birds makes
itself heard, and harmless living things begin to move
through the twilight. And then, little by little, a
strange pomp of colour invades the sky : clouds which
but now reflected the moon's silvery radiance, glow
with crimson splendour : and between the bars of
purple are depths of pale, translucent green : and
every moment the pageant changes, being transfigured
from glory to glory. Then, as light once more floods
the earth, it seems as if Nature awoke to greet it :
the birds' song grows more joyous : the dew-drops
glitter on every blade of grass : the flowers timidly
unfold their petals to the coming sun : from cottage
chimneys rises the light blue smoke, which announces
the re-awakening life of man. Last of all, the glory
fades away, as the sun himself, strong, bright, joyous
L
The DaysprtKg from on High. 167
in the plenitude of his power, rises above the horizon,
and with his level rays infuses warmth into the cool
sweet air, and gives the promise of a glorious mora.
And for the traveller, whose way is now clear before
him, dangers have vanished and toil seems light : there
is a hum of friendly voices round about him, and he
presses forward cheerfully to home and rest, "The
dayspring from on high hath visited him."
These words must have been very true to the feel-
ings of those "poor in spirit" to whom in the first
instance Christ came, and who must have given him
his earliest welcome. For though there was much
misery in Palestine in that age, a large part of it was
unconscious, and therefore not on the quest of a
remedy. It is always so in times of fierce political
and social excitement : when passion has free range,
and scruples are crushed into silence : when men have
come to believe that personal ambition is the all-pre-
vailing law of life, and that, in comparison with a
desire gratified, others' welfare, others' happiness, are
of small account. In such avi'hirl of excited interests,
even patriotism becomes fanaticism, and religion formal
bigotry: the very virtues of humanity are exaggerated
Into vices, and all its sweet juices fermented into poison.
I cannot convey to you in a few words the impression
which the story of that sad and shameful time makes
upon the impartial student : it Is all summed up in
the suggestion that the demoniacs who seem to fill
t68 The Dayspring from on High.
the pages of the Evangelists were the wrecks of its
unbridled passions, the victims of its cold cruelties.
But there were some, of whom aged Simeon and pious
Anna are the recorded types — nor haunters of the
temple courts alone, but simple dwellers among the
Galilean hills, or shepherds tending their flocks, like
father Abraham, in the silent wilderness beyond
Jordan, or merchants, perchance, cherishing their quiet
hope where Egypt filled Alexandria with trade, or the
Aventine Hill looked down upon yellow Tiber — there
were some whose thoughts were much with prophets
and their yet unfulfilled hopes : who longed for a
re-opened communication between earth and heaven,
and desired, above all things, that God should once
more visit His people. There are such in all ages,
pure and collected spirits, self- withdrawn from the
coarser interests and baser struggles of humanity, to
whom it is always the chief thing that God should
speak and men should listen, because they know
that in such speech and such hearing is enfolded all
the secret of life. Strength is what they want, and
patience and peace : a sense of harmony with the
Divine Force which vivifies and regulates the all of
things : in themselves, an ordered government answer-
ing to the fixed rule without : and for all human
wretchedness and wrong, a hope of better things to
come. And if we are to suppose that this song really
broke from the lips of Zacharias, it was the voice of
The Dayspring from on High. 1 6g
a hope so great as to have become prophetic. The
darkness and the chill that had overspread human life
were flying, away, and men were visited once more by
" the dayspring from on high."
With us it has been so long one unbroken day,
we are so used to the sun's warmth and light, as pos-
sibly to have lost something of our grateful surprise
at the "dayspring." We grow accustomed to what
are at once life's commonest and greatest blessings,
and come to think of them as conditions of existence
involved in the very right to live. How seldom do
we remember to thank God for fresh air and running
waters, for the nourishment of food and the recreation,
of sleep ! So in the spiritual world it is only too easy
to degrade "the dayspring from on high" into "the
light of common day ;" and not only to lose the sense
that it radiates from the throne of God, but to find
fault with its illuminating and vivifying power. There
are dark places, we think, which it leaves dark. There
are mysteries into which it does not help us to pene-
trate. There are stony tracts of life on which not
even its kindling warmth will persuade the grass to
grow. There are death-like chills of the heart which
will not be dissipated at its touch. How many thou-
sands are saying just now that the nineteenth century
is finding out to be a delusion what eighteen centuries
before have acclaimed as the very Jight of life ; and
that the world can do very well without principles that
1 70 The Dayspring from on High.
cannot prove a divine origin, and truths that human
progress is rendering obsolete ! Or, to put it in
another way, the old riddle of existence remains, but
Christianity is no longer admitted to have furnished
the answer to it : men must try to live their lives in a
new way, and to work out their fate on lines which
they have themselves chosen. For myself, if round
my soul the twilight should gather and the night
again darken, I cannot doubt what the ultimate result
will be Happy for us, my brethren, if we can abide
in it, or even attain to it, without so mournful an ex-
perience ! For here, as we are gathered together at
Christmas-tide to give utterance to the joy and grati-
tude which fill our hearts : now, with the spiritual
experience of another year, with all its troubles and
its trials behind us : in ioving recollection of our
fathers who have died in the faith, and with the chil-
dren round about us to whom we trust it will be an
inspiration — we turn to Christ with fresh affection as
the dayspring from on high, which, through the tender
mercy of our God, hath visited us, and are content
alike with the splendour of his dawning and the glory
of his perfect day.
But there is a night of our own preparing. We can
make darkness at mid-day if we will. We have only
of set purpose to turn our backs upon the bountiful
Sun, and straightway it will be night, in which all the
beasts of the forest do creep forth, and ravage and lay
i
The Dayspring from on High. 171
waste the soul. Nay, I might even ask whether it is
ever complete and glorious day with any of us : no
cloud of sin to hide the face of God, no mist of distrust
to intercept the warmth of His love, no grey over-
hanging canopy of indifference to shut out from us
the blessed infinity of heaven? But it is when we
plunge into conscious and deliberate transgression :
when we choose to live a lower life than the best
within our reach : when, ceasing to struggle with an
overmastering temptation, we own its strength and
our own weakness — ^that the twilight settles upon our
souls, soon to deepen into night I will not say in
how few cases it is that no gleam of day ever returns :
perhaps the twilight of cold worldliness is less often
visited by the ray than even the black night of pas-
sionate crime. But as one who has passed, and may
still have to pass, through periods of darkness and of
chill — alas ! self-evolved — speaking to men and women
of like experience, I must needs point out that it is
when we have emerged from them that we best dis-
cern the divineness of the day. Sin ! cry the new
theorists upon human life — sin ! it is only a theolo-
gian's figment : we do but miss our way, and strive to
find it again as soon as may be. Indifference, ingra-
titude, distrust — these are emotions which we feel
towards a person, and the universe reveals no Divine
Person, but only a changeless Law. Ah! whatever
may be the intellectual relation of Christianity to the
The Daysprin^ front on High.
mysteries of creation and providence, it is truer to
human nature than that : as to the darkness of the
sinful soul, the chill of the sluggish heart, there can
be no mistake. And it is when, by help of the out-
stretched hand of Christ, we are escaping from them ;
when we believe him that our banishment from the
light and warmth of the universe is our own act, and
that God is always waiting to be gracious, that we
realize most completely that the dayspring which
sends us on our way rejoicing is really from on high.
It is the same with the night of our sorrow, though
not quite in the same way. We do not make it for
ourselves : it comes upon us as a catastrophe, like the
sudden darkening of the sun at mid-day. It is a blow
from without, striking at our tenderest part : we are
overborne by an irresistible force, to which our own
will gives no consent. And upon that night, only this
dayspring can arise : there is no other. All newer
forms of practical philosophy agree in confessing their
impotence to deal with this, which is nevertheless an
integral part of human life, and always will be. No
cunning re-organization of society will improve death
out of the world, or prevent the smart of loss, or pro-
vide that hearts shall not be broken. And without
Christ, what comfort ? To say that loss is common
to the race, only leaves the wound more widely gaping
than before: love will not take loss into its account,
and asks to be enabled to defy it. To make the best
i
The Dayspring from on High. 1 73
of what we have had and to be content, is another
cold precept : true love is infinite, and, till unfaith has
clipped its wings, mocks at limitations of earth and
time. So before the heart's sorrow our new reading
of life is confessedly inadequate : if the sun withdraws
himself, there is nothing for it but to get used to
darkness as best we may, till death plunges us into
the night which knows no dawn. But if all the while
we are able to feel that we are in the hands of a
Divine Compassion, as well as compassed about by
immovable Law : if in the very crisis of our agony we
never lose our grasp of a helping hand, and always
have a heart on which to lean our aching head : if
through the cold solitude of bereavement pierces a
quiet voice, " In my Father's house are many man-
sions ; I go to prepare a place for you," we believe
in the return of the light — we can lift up our souls
towards the dayspring.
So in regard to the unbelief which is certainly
making way amongst us, I look to the darkness to
convince men of the beauty and the glory of the light.
That we were made for the light and not for the
darkness, I have never been more profoundly con-
vinced than now. And I think that ev^n amidst our
unbelief, which is largely a phase of intellectual honesty
and scrupulosity, men are rapidly coming to be of the
same opinion. You cannot explain sin out of exist-
ence, or water down remorse into a mere acknowledg-
The Dayspring from on High.
ment of intellectual error, or reduce the consciousness
of having offended against an infinite law of right to
the recognition of a miscalculation of prudential expe-
diences. Sorrow will have to be borne — and that can
hardly be unless it is also explained : an age which
is eagerly striving to penetrate the most recondite
secrets of matter, will scarcely consent to remain in
ignorance of the daily mysteries of the soul. Life
must be lived ; if not with divine helps and leadings,
then in the strength of the natural man, and with no
outlook beyond his three-score years and ten. Already
I see one result of this great experiment ; in many
fine and ardent spirits an eager wish to believe — even,
so far as it is consistent with honesty, a resolution
to live on the footing of belief, to strive that existence
shall lose no element of nobleness of which it is capable,
to shut the window to no light that may come from
any quarter of the heavens. Men and women who
feel thus are "the poor in spirit" of our questioning
and philosophical age : and it would be faithlessness
to God to believe that they will long and wait in vain.
But I look upon it that the deliberate attempt which
others make to live without a living God will end
in failure. I do not believe that noble life can be
sustained on such conditions through many genera-
tions. And those whom darkness slowly enwraps,
and who come to feel at last the chill depression of
the night, will learn to welcome that dayspring from
The Day spring from on High. 175
on high in which simpler souls have long unfeignedly
rejoiced
We are all, thank God, simple souls to-day. Children
of the common Father, we gather at the cradle of the
child Christ The spirit of Hebrew poetry is once
more vocal round about it, and a still stronger, sweeter
strain seems to fall upon it as if from heaven : Glory
to God in the highest ; and on earth peace, goodwill
toward men. To-day at least we will not dwell on
the corruptions of faith, the weaknesses of the Church,
the disappointments of Christianity : when the divine
descends to mingle with the human, it must needs
partake of its failures and limitations. It is enough
for us to know that we too have sat in darkness and
the shadow of death, and that the dayspring from on
high has guided our feet into the way of peace. In
some incomplete and intermittent fashion we have
been set free from the thraldom of our sins. In pro-
portion as we have trusted God's love, we have emerged
from the night of our sorrows. Whenever we have
been brave enough to follow in our Master's steps, our
restless passions have been hushed in peace. And
therefore, like the wise men of old, we bring our
homage of mystic gold and frankincense and myrrh -
gold for his royalty, for he is our king : frankincense
for his priesthood, for he presents us before God :
myrrh for his burial, because his death has been our
life.
" Bear ye one another's burthens, and so fulfil the law of
Christ For every man shall bear his own burthen."
^3fl^ HAVE chosen to speak of these contradictory
^1™ verses to-day because of their contradiction.
The writings of Paul abound in statements
which are more or less paradoxical ; but I do not know
of another instance in which he so boldly and directly
lays down an important religious principle, and then
straightway sets beside it another which seems to be
its antithesis. It all comes, I think, from his resolute
determination to be true to facts of human nature as
he was able to see them ; of his refusal to make those
facts fit into a logical system in which they did not
spontaneously find a place. If there are unresolved
contradictions in life, if character is the result of oppo-
site and irreconcilable forces, if facts of existence take
Self. 177
a different aspect according as they are looked at
from different sides, why not say so ? It is better to
admit the contradictions than to force them into an
artificial accord : once they are clearly seen and un-
derstood, there may be some hope of discovering a
reconciling principle. So in this case. The denial,
the abandonment, the forgetfulness of self is a funda-
mental law of the Christian life. When Paul says,
" They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with
the affections and lusts," he lays down the first maxim
of the counsel of perfection ; and from this beginning
the true disciple goes on into the enjoyment of the
larger life of sympathy, feeling others* joys sweeter,
others* sorrows sharper, than his own, till finally the
motions of his will are in complete accord with the
Divine purpose, and he loses himself in the sense of a
more stable Strength, a more comprehensive Wisdom,
a more vivid Personality. But, on the other hand, it
is equally true that self will not be denied, abandoned,
forgotten. The consciousness of personality is the
strongest, the most inalienable thing about us. We
cannot go back in memory to a period when it was
not with us, and we know that it will accompany us
to the very gates of death. Not the completest, the
most absolute, the most self-denying love that ever
united two human souls can abrogate it : each one of
us is a separate island of existence : between those
that are nearest and dearest flows ever "the unplumbed,
N
1 78 Self.
salt, estranging sea." How are these things to be
reconciled ?
Recollect, to begin with, that there must be a self
to give up self. Nor is this quite the truism that it
may seem to be at first hearing. One of the chief
demands which we make upon a man is, that he shall
be himself, and not the plaything of another's will, the
puppet of another's purpose. Whatever metaphysi-
cians may say, all our common language, all our ordi-
nary moral judgments, go upon the supposition that
every human life is a centre of original force ; and we
base our estimate of it on the energy, the constancy,
the consistency, with which that force is directed. Or,
again, every human character has an individuality of
its own, a mixture of qualities and faculties not quite
like any other : to use common religious metaphors,
a place to fill, a work to do. And so long as a life
does not overpass the line which separates the strength
of individuality from the exaggeration and the weak-
ness of eccentricity, we ask of it to be itself, to make
its own contribution to the sum of existence, to pre-
serve its centre of vital force quick, vivid, operative.
So we do not apply terms of moral praise — unselfish,
self-denying, self-forgetting — to those weak and plastic
spirits who, incapable of the effort of self-abnegation,
yield to superior force of will, are tossed hither and
thither by circumstance, and give up the citadel of
their personality to any resolute assault. We feel a
Self. 1 79
I
certain difference, which from the moral point of view
is all-important, between succumbing to a force which
we are not strong enough to resist, and voluntary
surrender of ourselves to an impulse which manifestly
comes from a nobler plane of being. In short, strange
as the paradox may sound, the more of self there is
in self-surrender, the more highly we estimate it
But self-surrender to what ? May not the secret of
which we are in search lie in the answer to this ques-
tion? A thousand forces beat upon a man, some
arising from without, some from within, but all attack-
ing that central focus of personality which we call
himself I am not called upon to speak of these things
with metaphysical, exactness, or to accommodate my
words to any received system of psychology ; it is
enough that my meaning is clear. Which of them
must he resist ? At what point can he yield without
loss of dignity and self-respect ? What are we to say
of what are commonly called temptations ? Is there
anything in common, for instance, between the solicit-
ations of self-indulgence, and the overwhelming influ-
ence of passion, and the slow operajtion of combined
forces which draw us after a multitude to do evil?
Surely this : that they lessen the energy and degrade
the quality of our personality. When we have given
way to them, we are less ourselves than we were
before. We have parted with some portion of our
self-control. We are not so completely our own mas-
N 2
ters. We yield more readily to the next solicitation
of self-indulgence : pass ion finds in us an easier victim :
we have a greater difficulty than we had in setting
conscience against the common opinion. Resistance
to these forces is felt to be in the line of self-develop-
ment : every victory over them leaves us stronger,
rounder, more self-poised. But now another attack
is made upon our personality by forces of a quite
different kind : it is no longer a question of not in-
dulging, but of denying ourselves : we are asked, not
to refrain from doubtful, but to give up innocent
pleasures : we are invited to transfer the focus of our
personality from the narrow ground of our own delight
and advantage to the broader field of the common
good ; and in the grandeur of this wider horizon to
allow the self which is ao near, which appears to us so
great, which reveals itself as so important, to fade into
insignificance. It is pity that pleads: it is love that
reasons with us : it is the enthusiasm of humanity
that would bear us away : it is the All that seeks to
prevail against the One. And then, if only we have
discernment, we find that at this point the taw of the
development of self is, as it were, reversed : that we
live by yielding, we grow by self-abandonment, we
become strong by seif-forgetfulness. Think, now:
does a man's character suffer, either in itself or
esteem of the wise and good, by this kind of self-
surrender ? You pity the poor, weak will that cannot
the J
self- J
inot I
Self. i8i
hold itself four-square against temptation : you have
a feeling of contempt for the unstable intellect that is
tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. But the
woman who cannot defend her own happiness if those
whom she is bound to love and protect demand its
sacrifice : the man who will give up some long-cherished
scheme of ambition because a near, common, unex-
pected duty suddenly lays claim to him : the patriot
who holds not his very life his own if his country ask
it of him — these you dare not think weak, or traitors
to their better selves. They have found the true line
of growth : they can go from strength to strength.
Every sacrifice they make renders them more masters
of themselves. Only when they have denuded them-
selves of all that they can call their own, do they enter
into the full inheritance of their humanity.
There are three successive stages of this develop-
ment — self- denial, unselfishness, self* forgetfulness.
And each of the threje has moral peculiarities of its own.
The first is a stage of rigorous self-discipline. We
do not all begin from the same starting-point. We
inherit tendencies, we are the subjects of education,
circumstances work upon us with various effect : and
it may be that at the moment at which it first dawns
upon us that we have to live in accordance with law
and in the spirit of principles, one may find himself
tied down by immovable cords of selfish habit, and
another, naturally open to the play of every sweet and
1 82 Self.
generous impulse. But even in the latter case, so
much of our life, as at present arranged and occupied,
is employed in the attainment of selfish objects, and
the temptation of self- gratification so waylays and
assaults us at every turn, as to make it necessary that
every man should look upon his own character and
habits with stern eyes of self-examination. I am no
preacher of self-denial for self-denial's sake : though
I do not see how the garb of that stem virtue can
suddenly be put on by self-indulgence, which is no
virtue at all : and I know that those who willingly
bury themselves in the lap of luxury must be prepared
for the enervation which is its sure infection. Nor
am I a sour ascetic, despising the world, frowning upon
the flesh, turning the sun's light into darkness, throw-
ing ashes upon the joy and the beauty of things : let
us stretch forth our hands to take whatever good God
offers us, and drink freely of the cup of innocent
pleasure which He holds to our lips. I do not brand
enjoyment as selfishness : that is solitary enjoyment,
enjoyment at the expense of others, enjoyment that
does not seek diffusion, but delights in concentration.
When a man (or a woman either), unconsciously per-
haps in accord with the wretchedly false philosophy
of the day, makes his own ease, his own pleasure, his
own delight in things noble or ignoble, the chief
thing : when it becomes the habit of his life to look
upon his own personality as the centre, and all the
Self. 183
universe beside only the circumference, of things :
when it is the rule of his household, not that he gives
way to others, but that others give way to him : when
petty personal disappointments disturb his temper, and
an enforced sacrifice makes him sullen and morose —
then the cancer of selfishness is entering into his soul.
I have used the wrong word : would that it were a
cancer! For then its long aches, and sharp spasms
of pain, and moments of agony unspeakable, would
reveal the disease, and bid the sufferer welcome any
knife, any cautery, that would rid him of it for ever.
But it goes on spreading, sending down deeper roots,
filling with its noxious influence the whole system, till
at last it poisons love itself, and makes pity only a
kind of self-regard : and the unhappy soul is dismissed
into the felt presence of the Infinite Loving-kindness,
having forgotten what loving-kindness is.
There is that in the relation of selfishness to cha-
racter which seems to demand the active reaction of
self-denial. I have said that it creeps subtly over a
man, tightening its grasp upon him every day, till,
without knowing that he has lost it, he finds his free-
dom of action gone : and one reason that this is so
is, that its natural retribution is of the negative kind.
The selfish man gains a certain immunity from the
hardness of sacrifice, but he loses the moral glow
which accompanies it : he knows not the thrill of
generous pity : no heat of love raises him into a
184
Self.
higher sphere: no large hopes release him from the
narrowness of his personal lot : no fine sympathies
associate him with the moral forces that move the
world and urge humanity to its final goal. He misses
none of these things : his petty daily pleasure is
enough for him — the supremacy of his own will within
narrow bounds, the increase of his own heap of advan-
tage. So the blind miss the form, the colour, the
variety, of the world : so the deaf are shut out from
the infinite suggestiveness of music, and we pity them
for a deprivation which they cannot help. Is not he
much more to be pitied who is wilfully blind in the
midst of beauty, and will not hear, though he might,
the music of the spheres ? And therefore it is that we
cannot afford to let our lives slide in this matter, and
take the moral hue that circumstances seem to give
them : that we must bring conscious self-denial to
counteract an ever insidious selfishness, and be con-
tent, for the sake of life and growth, to dea! hardly
with ourselves. We should have a care of all enjoy-
ments which we do not share with others. We should
accustom ourselves as far as possible to the common
lot. We should exercise ourselves in self-sacrifice til!
it not only ceases to be difficult, but becomes the un-
conscious law of our life. We should stand ever on
the watch against the encroachment of disabling habit.
Self-indulgence is the paralysis of the will, self-pleasing
the numbness of the heart,
Self. 185
I will suppose that by the discipline of self-denial
we have become unselfish : it is a matter of discipline,
a goal within the reach of any resolute endeavour.
But there is a counsel of perfection yet to be fulfilled :
we can deny ourselves, we can control ourselves, but
can we forget ourselves ? That is the hardest thing
of all, and yet the natural aim of a pure and strong
spirit. Because above the region in which a man
lives an unselfish life, curbing all unruly passions and
desires, full of courteous consideration for others,
moved by large hopes, consciously thrilled by wide
sympathies, — above that region, selfishness takes fresh
and attenuated shapes, and still subtly saps the springs
of spiritual strength. It is a habit of mind now which
does not issue in gross forms of action, but it bids a
man think of himself more highly than he ought to
think : it renders him sensitive, irritable, resentful : it
makes the world revolve round him, instead of sending
him to his unconsidered place in the world. And the
problem of all problems is, by what charm is a man
to be enabled to forget himself : those pains and lan-
guors and faintings of heart and disappointments that
are so near to him : those vexations which disturb the
balance of his soul : those sorrows which colour the
whole world for him, and compel him to see even God
through a mist of tears : those moods of unfaith in
which words of prayer will not rise to his lips, and his
hands drop nerveless to his side ? Or can we in any
1 86 Self.
case, with any divine help, part company with our
own shadow ? How should self-forgetfulness be more
than a paradox of faith ?
I do not think that pure morality has any answer
to give to these questions. On that ground some
thinkers find it possible to reason their way to disin-
terested virtue, or to what the common conscience
takes to be such, and they declare that they can kindle
the enthusiasm of humanity at the same fire. But
when I ask myself how I can rise from unselfishness
to self-forgetting, I am obliged to have recourse to a
fresh method, and to take another series of considera-
tions into account. I must surrender my will to a
Stronger than itself I must subordinate my judgment
to a more comprehensive, a more perfect Wisdom. I
must suffer my existence to be merged in a larger Life.
As a little child, that has not yet learned to guide its
own steps, trusts implicitly to a mother's wisdom and
tenderness : as a wife loyally follows her husband
through the darkness, believing where she cannot see :
as a husband trusts his wife's instinct of purity and
goodness before his own, — so I lay my life in the
hands of God. I try to do right ; I labour with my
whole soul to bring my will into accord with His ; and
the rest I leave with Him. It is the unrest of a
divided purpose, the ache of an unsatisfied conscience,
the uneasiness of a self-regarding spirit, that are so
hard to bear ; not the troubles that He sends, not the
Self. 187
discipline by which He trains us. Yes, we can escape
from ourselves into God : otherwhere there is no refuge
for us.
But mark, these things of which I have spoken may
be mere words, true and good, yet words still, or the
most blessed realities of life. For as words, they are,
however ordered and uttered, the commonplaces of
Christian faith : the question we have to ask is, whe-
ther, when the time of our trouble comes, we can put
life into them ? Can we, in our own throbbing, rest-
less, troubled personality, feel the larger Life in which
we too live and move and have our being ? Can we
take up our own sorrows, languors, disappointments,
and lay them in the radiance of that Love in which
they are all at once revealed as light afflictions which
are but for a moment ? Can we rise to the thought
that what is best for the world must be best for us too,
and that it would be cowardly and selfish to ask for
more and better than the common lot ? Can we lose
ourselves in the Divine purpose, and rejoice that,
come what may, the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth ?
Then peace, O troubled hearts and restless ! the secret
is found, the haven gained at last !
|ou obtr one Smn« i^'d rtgentet^.
" Likewise, I say unto you, there is Joy in the presence of the
angels of God over one sinner that repenteth."
^^[CffiF we were to hear that one of the poor creatures
^1^ who are the shame and sorrow of our streets —
lost to all pride of pure womanhood, and plung-
ing deeper and deeper into sin out of very despair of
rescue — had suddenly, caught up by some heavenward
impulse or drawn by a sweet and strong attraction,
"come to herself;" and, full of loathing of what she
had been, were minded to tread the steep and narrow
path of a goodness on which it was impossible that
any externa! brightness should ever shine, resting
humbly on the mercy of God, and resolute to cling to
Him at whatever cost of self-mastery — what should
we think and feel ? Not much, I suppose ; we should
not be greatly stirred out of our usual equanimity
J
yoy over one Sinner that repenteth, 1 89
the news would not move us enough to force us to
inquire into it, and to apprehend its real character,
and to make it our own. A rise in freights or cotton,
fluctuations of stocks and shares, a split in a Cabinet,
a brilliant new book, the success of a rival, the failure
of a friend, would touch us much more deeply, and go
nearer to the core of our life. I am not sure that we
might not show some moral faithlessness in regard to
this sudden repentance that healed a deeply diseased
soul : was it really a fact ? we might ask ; were its
motives what they were represented to be? was it
likely to last? At least I think the intelligence
would take its place among the innumerable items
of news that catch our eyes every day in the columns
of the newspapers, and pass at once out of sight and
mind : true or false, we should say that it did not
concern us much. And if this were so, it might teach
us how far below the level of the angelic joy we live
and move, for on that height pure spirits rejoice un-
feignedly over every sinner that repenteth.
It is, in part, want of imagination ; and, in so far,
an intellectual, not a moral defect For it is upon
imagination, the power of bodying forth the distant
and the unseen, the faculty of putting ourselves in
others' places and seeing out of others' eyes, that what
we call sympathy largely depends. And it is both
astonishing and sad the way in which men and women
live their own life only, or at least the life of their
1 90 Joy over one Sinner that repenteth.
family, their social clique, their religious sect, and are
quite unable to project themselves into the changeful
world of human passions and interests which lies
all around them. And if the thrill of moral joy of
which I am speaking is to touch them, it must be
generated from a point within the narrow circle of
their own experience. But if we had seen some one
whom we loved and honoured gradually falling away
from self-control and self-respect, till we had reason
to fear that a fine life was destined to be choked in
the mire of self-indulgence, and then all at once, when
hope was well-nigh dead within us, and we were
musing on the inscrutableness of God's ways with His
children, we were aware of a sharp spasm of self-
knowledge and repentance and recovery — »should we
not feel it to the very centre of our nature ? Should
we not be conscious of a great danger averted, a ter-
rible blot wiped out, a gnawing sorrow turned into
joy ? Could we put a price upon such a blessing, or
say for what meaner coin of personal advantage we
would exchange it ? And yet in such a case as this
it might be possible that our joy should not be wholly
untainted by self-regard. Some portion of a friend's
shame falls upon ourselves : common interests may
be injured, common purposes weakened. We may be
glad that a scandal has been averted : we may be
thinking more of decency than of goodness. I have
already said that the root of deficient moral sympathy
yoy over one Sinner that repentetJu 191
may lie in the sluggishness of our imagination : but
we may be sure that our joy in the repentant sinner
is purely ethical, only when the sin is one that casts
no shadow over our own life, only when the sinner
has no nearer claim upon us than that of a common
humanity. The angels, if angels there be, are on a
still higher plane of moral sympathy : they share no
weaknesses of human nature : they rejoice in every
victory of goodness purely for itself.
If I were called upon to find a title for this fifteenth
chapter of Luke, I should call it the Chapter of
Repentant Sinners. It begins with the disgust of the
Pharisees that the "publicans and sinners" should feel
a natural attraction to Jesus, and that he on his part
should " receive" and even eat with them. Then follow
in succession the parables of the Straying Sheep, of
the Lost Piece of Silver, the Prodigal Son — all of them
apologues too well known to you to need present
comment of mine. And yet as I read them the other
day, a new light seemed to gleam upon the page. A
new light that was yet the old ; for it was no fresh intel-
lectual illumination : I could not well understand the.
parables better than I had done before : their mean-
ing, so far as it requires a mental effort to grasp it,
is simple enough. But it is characteristic of spiritual
truths that their spiritual apprehension waxes and
wanes : and that what at one moment seems elemen-
tary, commonplace, even trite, is revealed at another
rga yoy over one Sinner that repenteth.
and a happier as an all-embracing, all-penetrating
truth, throwing a new light upon life, and supporting
duty by fresh and more awful sanctions. So it seemed
to me all at once as if I too had something to do
with this angelic joy: as if it were no mere distant,
ideal rapture of pure spirits, upon which no shadow of
human sorrow and weakness ever passes, but a cosmic
moral emotion, which finding its finest and least self-
regarding expression upon the heavenly heights, yet
thrills through all spirits capable of fellow-feeling with
goodness, and through those most who have most of
a divine and celestial quality in them. Bear with me,
then, a little, while I try to unfold this thought.
There are many ways of looking at life : one of the
most searching and comprehensive is to regard it as
the meeting-place and battle-iield of hostile moral
forces. Why it should be so is one of the difficulties
which we shall never wholly resolve, though we see into
it the farther the higher the ethical view which we take.
But so it is ; good and evil are in perpetual conflict
around and within us, and we are so framed as to
thrill with the excitement of the fight. Many will
contest this view of life, more perhaps will practically
ignore it: there is a disposition to believe that the
movements and issues of things depend upon larger
and more permanent forces than any with which we
can mingle : and an abiding temptation is to seek c
own ease and pleasure in the weltering chaos, and to
Joy over one Sinner that repenteth. 193
let the world's fate settle itself as it may. But to those
who have been brought up in the old Christian way
of thinking, and have been taught to look forward to
the kingdom of God as their supreme ideal and final
aim, it must always seem the best thing — not by any
means the easiest or the least painful, but the best —
to feel that an elemental, a cosmic, an eternal struggle
is going on all around them, in which good is being
slowly evolved out of evil, and humanity helped for-
ward to the goal of its destiny, in what better things
we know not. And in proportion as a man is able to
keep this view of life steadfastly before him, and to
prevent its being clouded or confused by any meaner
aspect of things : still more, in proportion as he is able
to throw himself unselfishly, unreservedly, into the
fight, to rejoice in the victories of goodness, to grow
sick at heart at its reverses, to believe all the while
that it must triumph at last — we think that he rises
into communion with the Eternal Divine Forces, and
places himself on the side of Omnipotence. Nor is it
a small matter that this one absorbing thought should
take possession of a man, that he should try all things
by this single touchstone. To see issues of righteous-
ness everywhere : to believe that the best thing is also
the most expedient: to be accustomed to postpone
happiness to Tightness, and to be persuaded that no-
thing can be permanently desirable on which con-
science does not set its approving seal — is to be
O
194 y°y ^^ 0^ Sinner that repentetk.
liberated from the innumerable disturbing motions of
self-will, into communion with the one steadfast Will on
which all things rest, in which all things live and move.
Do you not now see whither my thoughts have been
tending ? The repentance of a living soul is a triumph
of goodness, is a victory of God. For it Is in human
souls, one by one, that this great, fierce, eternal battle
is being fought ; no other field of conflict is possible :
there, in that silence and seclusion of the heart which
no other man invades, but only the coming of God, is
it lost and won. It is only in appearance that God's
wars are waged on the great scale ; that masses of
men are moved from side to side : that a single human
voice thrills through many hearts, and laws are built
up as an entrenchment against evil. At last the single
soul must speak for itself : it resists or yields itself to
guidance, it obeys or kicks against the taw. And so
when a will that has been enslaved by self-indulgence
re-asserts its power of determination : when a drugged
conscience re-awakes to the faculty of discernment and
rebuke : when a heart that has been wholly given to
self- pleasing, once more overflows with sweet and
generous passion : when a soul that has long grovelled
upon earth, finds wings again wherewith to mount into
the very presence of God : in a word, when a sinner
repents him and turns from the error of his ways, and
a life is won for Christ and duty — no more joyful a
thing can happen to the children of men. But the
Joy over one Sinner that repenteth. 195
joy may be like the music of the spheres, which is too
high, too sweet, too majestic, for our grosser organs :
in us also there must be something of a heavenly
temper if we are to feel it
And my next thought is, that Christianity has a
scale of worth of its own, which is not quite that of
modern thought. To it, there is nothing so precious as
a human soul. I wish that I could separate these words
from all associations that a theory of salvation, which
is partly coarse and partly unreal, has brought about
them : I am not thinking of an eternity of existence
now, and the infinite capacity of pain or pleasure
which that idea involves. What I mean is, that at
the very basis of Christian thought lies the assumption
that what thinks, feels, wills, is of indefinitely more
worth than that which is incapable of these things :
and next, that the highest function of even intellectual
beings is their capacity of moral and spiritual com-
munion with God. Do you think that this is quite
self-evident and commonplace? Ah, there are old-
fashioned notions which we unconsciously allow many
of our ordinary methods of estimate to traverse. As,
for instance, when we enumerate the triumphs of
modern civilization : our railways, that, bridging the
valley and piercing the hill, carry us with lightning
speed from one end of the land to the other : our
telegraphs, that emulate the poet's fairy feat and
"put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes :" the
O 2
Ii in
196 Joy over ofte Sinner tJiat repenteth.
astounding plenitude and vast variety of our materia!
resources : our swiftly recurring victories over shyly
resisting nature ; our conquest of an infinitely distant
past, and a thousand things more that are the trite
material of our modern vaunt — when we enumerate
these things, and forget all the while that man carries
the secret of his fate locked up in his own heart, a
secret which wealth or poverty, the richest intellectual
resource or the dullest want of curiosity, can do little
to touch. What a man is, is the chief thing : able to
bear his destiny bravely, or cowering beneath every
blow of misfortune : grovelling in the mire of self-
indulgence, or instinct with a divine energy of self-
spending : earthy, of the earth, caught in the net of
the moment's interests, or reaching forward to the
eternal holiness of God.
So I could conceive a severe and awful indictment
which might be laid at the bar of Heaven against a
great city like this, to which it would have little or no
answer. Every soul in it, the accusing Angel might
say, is equally dear to God, as concealing within itself,
no matter how deeply hidden, the same divine faculties :
the dock-labourer, whose rough physical enei^ies, un-
touched by intellectual culture, unguided by moral
enthusiasm, easily overstep the barrier between bru-
tality and crime : the professional thief, who in his
life-long war against society carries his life and liberty
in his hand, and cares not at what risk to others he
Joy over one Sinner that repenteth. 197
protects them : the street-walker, the victim — often, I
know, the half-willing victim, but still the victim —
slain by our civilization, and, in another rank of life,
the men who partake her sin, while unhappily escaping
her shame. What will it avail to plead against these
things the finest docks in the world,, and lines of ocean
steamers each more stately and wonderful than the
other, and quays heaped up with the riqhes of the
world, and museums and libraries and art -galleries,
and all the fine appliances of our civic life ? I blame
not these : I do not say that the poor are poor because
the rich are rich, or that ignorance dogs knowledge as
a shadow that it cannot shake off. But I assert,, in
the name of Christianity, that these two series of facts
belong to different orders of being ; and that if we
could purchase to-morrow, by the annihilation of our
wealth, the sacrifice of our luxury, that rough men in
the alleys and purlieus of our town, should cx>m.e to
love God and to feel the worth and mystery of life,
and that all poor women should be pure and sweet
and good, it would be a bargain at which the angels
in heaven would rejoice. The things of the body and
the things of the soul are beyond reach of comparison.
Pure hearts, clean lives, generous sympathies, fine
aspirations, the power of self-sacrifice, the enthusiasm
of humanity — these are the jewels of great price ; and
beside these, what we chiefly pride ourselves upon,,
glittering and worthless gewgaws.
igS Joy over one Sinner tkaf repenteih.
Then, in the last place, Christianity never despairs
of a human soul. And that, I think, is hardly the
mood of our prevalent philosophy, which, under the
influence of physical science, is more and more passing
into the pessimist mood. We are growing used to
sharp contrasts between wealth and poverty, and
coming to consider them inevitable. We apply to the
human race, too, the idea of the struggle for existence,
and believe that the victory of the few necessarily
involves the defeat of tlio many. Nature has her
spoiled work, her failures, her abortions, everywhere —
why not among men too ? Circumstances are power-
ful : heredity is an almost irresistible force : inherited
passions are too strong for- a weakened will : and we
begin to acquiesce in the idea that this poor child is
predestined to the streets, and that to be slain by
drink, and yet another to vicious idleness that passes
easily into crime. And it is against this mood of
despair, into which we allow ourselves to slide too
readily, that Christ and Christianity protest with in-
dignant voice Why should they not? Has there
ever been a time, since the Master moulded the repen-
tant Magdalen into a great saint, at which any miracle
has been impossible to love and faith ? Look down
the annals of the Church, and you will find innumer-
able such wonders : so many, indeed, that they have
disturbed the even balance of men's judgment, and
brought them to believe that hideous self-accusation
i
Joy over one Sinner that repenteth. 1 99
was the preliminary to healing repentance, and that
none but the sinner was ever developed into the saint
I know well — for in my own poor way I have tried it —
how difficult the task is of waking a new life beneath
the ribs of moral death : how dull natures resist plead-
ing, and shallow ones cannot be touched by sympathy :
how for some poor souls recurring temptation is all
too strong, and love seems wasted on the loveless :
and yet I am here to preach the gospel of eternal
hope. For I have always been made to feel that,
impossible as my self-imposed task might seem to be,
and my ill success certain, the fault lay in myself;
that with more faith, more patience, a finer hope, a
deeper love, I might have triumphed ; and that my
Master would assuredly have succeeded where I failed
ignominiously. The strayed sheep is brought back
upon the shoulders, of the rejoicing shepherd. The
lost piece of silver rewards the searcher's toil. The
Prodigal Son comes to himself again, and seeks his
father's house. And there is joy in the presence of
the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.
Shall no echo of that divine gladness drop down to
earth, and for a moment thrill and purify our cold and
sluggish hearts ?
XVII,
«ttiiti>I lift.
"And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent."
^^BSHERE are more ways than one of measuring
iP^i life; and perhaps the most superficial, as it is
also the most obvious, is to estimate it simply
by its duration. The contrast between an existence
that is prolonged to eighty or ninety years, surviving
all its own best interests, and hovering companionless
at the brink of the grave, and one that is suddenly cut
off in the first bright flush of strength and hope and
love, lies upon the very surface of things, and strikes
even the least thoughtful. But nothing is plainer than
that a distinction may be made between lives in respect
to their fulness and intensity which is just as real as
the other. It is a part of our own experience that we
live more in some months or years than in others :
Eternal Life, 201
sometimes that we drink of a deeper and sweeter cup
of enjoyment, sometimes that a larger demand is made
upon our powers of endurance, but still that the epoch
stands out as one of a more than average vitality.
So, of two lives of equal duration, who would think
of putting on the same level that which was slowly
passed within a confined round of habitual interests,
almost without communication with the great sur-
rounding world of speculation and passion, moved by
only sluggish affections, stirred by none but petty
excitements, and another which was in touch with all
that is human, raised on a strong wing of aspiration,
filled with the widest and the noblest hopes, thrilling
with the universal joy, saddened by the universal
sorrow? Then, again, of lives that are imprisoned,
whether necessarily or not, within narrow bounds, one
may be selfish, sluggish, set on the things of the flesh,
and another, intent on self-purification, animated by
the breath of the Spirit, hidden with Christ in God.
To quote once more the familiar lines of our fine old
poet :
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make Man better be ;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere :
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night —
It was the plant and flower of Light
In small proportions we just beauties see ;
And in short measures life may perfect be.
202 Eternal Life.
I think it is characteristic of the gospel to make a
qualitative estimate of life. It has passed out of the
range of the old Hebrew idea that length of days, and
temporal prosperity, and abundant offspring, are signs
of Divine favour, so that he who misses these obvious
blessings does well to ask wherein he has offended
God. Christ is himself, so to speak, the negation of
this thought. No life could well be more unsatisfac-
tory from this point of view than his, the chosen Son
of God. In one of the characteristic sayings of the
Fourth Gospel, he almost makes the distinction be-
tween the length and the fulness of life on which I
have been insisting : " I am come that they may have
life, and that they may have it more abundantly;" as
if what he could give was at once a new principle of
vitality, and would raise to a higher efficiency and in-
tensity every function of life before possessed. And
indeed the idea which runs through the whole of the
New Testament, variously expressed, approached from
different sides, exhibited in many lights, is that human
life acquires a new quality when touched and inter-
fused by the life of God ; that in this lies its true
nobleness, that here it first attains to a complete self-
consciousness, and finds out of what it is capable
There is but one distinction between lives, a distinc-
tion in presence of which all others fade away : are
they purely natural, or strengthened by a supernatural
grace, irradiated by a supernatural gloiy ?
i
Eternal Life, 203
And yet I suppose the minds of some people are
brought back to the idea of measuring existence by
its duration, by the phrase, "eternal life." It is a
characteristic word of the New Testament, common
to both the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel. " What
shall I do to inherit eternal life ?" is one of the forms
assumed by the Scribe's great question, which, with its
answer, constitutes what I may call the brief compend
or catechism of spiritual religion ; and in the text we
have a kind of parallel passage, only expressed in the
language and accommodated to the forms of thought
of the Fourth Gospel. Nor need I tell you that the
Greek word here translated "eternal" has been, in
connection with the question of everlasting punishment,
a subject of eager controversy among interpreters and
commentators. It is scarcely the classical word which
denotes endless duration : it is one of the many phrases
which Christianity chose out of the Greek vocabulary,
one hardly knows on what principle, and converted to
her own uses. This is a case of the constantly renewed
difficulty which arises from the fact that Christianity
did not think, though it was obliged to speak, in Greek,
and that it made its own linguistic precedents, as to
which a purely classical erudition can give little infor-
mation. So that even if it were appropriate in this
place to examine the etymology of the word which is
translated eternal, with a view of ascertaining whether
it ought to bear the meaning which we commonly put
204 Eternal Life.
upon it, I cannot promise that the process would end
in any certain result A much more hopeful thing
would be to examine the actual sense in which the
word is used, especially in such a passage as the text,
in which Christ actually gives a definition of it ; "And
this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the
only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent"
The idea which these words at first suggest is surely
not that of an endless duration of the natural life, but
of another and higher kind of life, which under certain
conditions may be added to the natural. And pro-
visionally I should take the word eternal to mean, that
while the natural life is determined by time relations —
as the fact that it has a fixed beginning, course, end,
is one that is essential to it — so, in some sense, the new
life is independent of lapse of time and the changes
which it brings with it Ought we not to conceive of
these two regions of eternity and of time as existing,
not successively, but simultaneously, so that at any
moment it is possible to pass from the lower to the
higher, from the less to the larger? There is, you
will observe, no hint given, either here or in Christ's
answer to the Scribe's question, that it is necessary for
a man to die to enter into eternal life, or that it is in
the nature of a deferred promise : it is a fact which
stands related to existence generally, and not merely
to its interruption or indefinite continuance. Or, in
other words, the change of which a man is conscious
Eternal L ife. 205
when he inherits eternal life, is not in his prospects,
but in himself: it is not that he shall live longer, but
that he shall live diflFerently. I do not say that there
may not eventually turn out to be some connection
between these two ideas ; but the one is essential, the
other only accessory. The main thing is, that there
is an inner, secret, invisible life — the access to which
is open to us — ^which is beyond change, exempt from
decay, in the strength of which, though the outward
man perish, the inward man is renewed from day to
day.
To know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom
He has sent, what is this ? Clearly the knowledge
spoken of is not merely a matter of the intellect, an
acceptance of the Divine existence and government,
a recognition of Christ's claims as God's Son and Mes-
senger, after any theological fashion whatever. The
time, I think, is past at which Christians, at least of
the thoughtful sort, can be content with the mere
juxtaposition of intellectual causes with moral effects,
and the assurance that these flow from those : they
demand that an actual connection shall be shown, they
ask to see forces at work. And there is nothing in
the acceptance of merely intellectual propositions —
whether that acceptance be thoughtful or thoughtless
— to lead a man upwards into a higher life that shall
be independent of time and change. But would it not
be different if his soul were really touched with the
2 o6 Eternal L ife.
awe of the All-holy : if he constantly felt God not
only above, but around and within him : if the thought
had perpetual possession of him that all the springs of
existence, material as well as spiritual, flowed from
the fountain of an Infinite Will : if he recognized in
his own conscience the echo of a Divine Voice, and
knew that consonance with the eternal purposes ele-
vated itself for him into a majestic and all-compelling
law of duty ? Would it not be different if his heart
were so melted by the sweetness and the tenderness
of Christ, that for love of that Friend and Master
he were willing to mould himself and to be moulded
into his likeness, following in his footsteps afar off",
with inextinguishable admiration and affection, and
ready to endure any wretchedness rather than the
wretchedness of even a momentary alienation from
him ? Can you not see how to know God and Christ
in this sense, which demands a profound and effectual
sympathy with the sanctity of their holiness and the
divineness of their divinity, should lift a man out of
himself into a higher region of being : and that in the
vital energy of such a communion he should go from
strength to strength, able to do what before was im-
possible, able to bear what before was unbearable,
and always conscious of a finer courage, a more perfect
peace? And this, it seems to me, is to enter into
eternal life.
Shall we change the phrase a little, and say that it
Eternal Life. 207
is to enter into the life of the Eternal ? We have
gained this advantage now, that we have dropped
altogether the idea of our own petty personality and
its continuance : we are swallowed up in something
unspeakably greater than ourselves. We exchange
our own life, so far as it is possible to shake it off, for
the life that God lives : or, if you will, we are trans-
ferred into a region of being where whatever is merely
earthly and temporal drops away from us, where the
pilot stars are always clear overhead, and we feel the
gales of heaven upon our cheek. Ah, do you reply,
but these things are altogether beyond us : our feet
are too firmly planted upon the solid earth for us ever
to begin to soar into the empyrean : the life of God
is little more than an empty phrase to us : all we can
conceive of is life within the limitations, cumbered by
the weaknesses, harassed by the temptations, of the
flesh. This is precisely the problem, I reply, which
Jesus Christ has solved for us. I do not say that the
Christian's moral and spiritual horizon is bounded by
the life of the Galilean Prophet ; or that it is not pos-
sible to see beyond, above, around the pure beauty of
a consummate human existence, the awful and infinite
splendours of the glory of God. But I do say that
Christ has, so to speak, translated the life of God for
us into the language of our own strivings and aspira-
tions, and shown us, once for all, the method by which
the Divine interpenetrates and informs the human
2o8 Eternal Life.
spirit. I suppose that if it were possible for any man
to know God through and through, he would in the
same act know Christ : and so in a very real, though
a less complete sense, to know Christ is to know
God. And this is the knowledge which all through
the Gospels, and especially in the Fourth, is described
as Life. It is insight to the conscience, vigour to the
will, purity to the affections, and, above and beyond
this, a fiery enthusiasm for righteousness, a constant
sense of an unseen Presence, an unwearied trust in
God.
The opposite of life is death. To what death tiien
is eternal life opposed ? To me, I confess, it stands
in no antithesis to physical death, the interruption of
the life of the body. What that is, in its moral aspects,
I do not know, nor will any of us know till in our
turn we pass through the gate which opens for no
returning steps : physically, it is an universal fact,
which comes equally to those who have inherited the
full privileges of eternal life, and those who live most
resolutely and with least compunction the life of the
flesh. Nor do I know whether eternal death — a
phrase, by the way, which is not scriptural — is either
possible or conceivable ; for it means an alienation
from God so absolute as to leave no hope that it can
ever be either lightened or removed. But it is clear
that the death which in our thought stands over
against eternal life is the chill and lethargy of the
Eternal Life. 209
spirit, which is quite untouched by any longing for the
higher, finer, wider life that is yet possible to it : an
existence that wallows with the swine and is content :
a heart that can listen to the plaint of distressed
humanity, yet throb no quicker for it : a soul that has
so lost all faculty of vision as to rest in the shows and
shadows of the material world, without even a passing
craving for a reality behind. Do you find that this
infinite and irreconcilable distinction between life and
death has any time reference at all, or would not sub-
sist in its infinity, in its irreconcilability, were all lives
limited to the same brief span, or all assured of endless
duration ? To know God is life ; to live apart from
God is death : in the light and darkness of that con-
trast, no other difference of human fate is visible.
At the same time, let us not forget that all the
attributes of Divine existence have a certain infinite
and eternal quality. It is of the essence of God's
being that He should be without beginning or end,
standing apart from time, not to be touched by change.
We say, in our stammering way, that past and future
are with Him one perpetual present, and all succes-
sions and relations of time summed up in an incon-
ceivable now. And I think that it is the experience
of those who least unsuccessfully strive to live the
divine life, that it ministers an entrance to them into
a realm of being which is above disturbance, beyond
change ; where they feel the settledness of law, and
p
2 1 o Eternal L ife.
the trustworthiness of love, and the invincibility of
righteousness. An imperfect glimpse of the character
and purposes of God is all that is vouchsafed even to
the best of us ; but what little we see infuses into. us
a feeling of serenity, we know that our feet are fixed
on the Everlasting Rock, and we discern far below
the weltering sea of things that change and pass. Do
we then expect God's wisdom to fail ? or His right-
eousness to go astray ? or His love to lose its tender-
ness ? or His patience to grow weary ? Such as they
have been from the beginning must they continue to
be evermore ; and when the obstacles which human
sin and folly have raised up against them are beaten
down, we know that they will manifest themselves in
their full beauty and brightness. This is the one
stable thing in a world of change : this, the Eternal,
which lies behind and sustains the temporal.
And so I cannot help thinking that to become
incorporate in any degree with the life of God must
be to partake in some sort of His unchangeableness.
Ask me not how it should be so : we are meddling
here with things too great for us : our words do not
reach the height and compass of our thoughts : we
are dealing with mysteries, we speak as in a figure.
But mark : it is on the side of that which is in God
most truly infinite and unchangeable that we draw
nigh to Him : wisdom and love and righteousness and
patience in us, are the same qualities as in Him, only
Eternal Life. 2 1 1
their poor shadow and pale presentment ; and we
touch Him, if I may say so in all reverence, at the
very heart of His being. And as, on the one hand,
it seems to me that to have once truly lived with God
is to live with Him always, to be independent of time,
to rise superior to change, — so, on the other, I cannot
think of Him as suffering those who have once known
Him to pass away into the abyss of non-existence :
that they should live only in His infinite recollection,
incapable of even an answering emotion of gratitude :
and that generation after generation of men, loving,
aspiring, praying, hoping, obeying, should pass away,
leaving Him absolutely alone in a silent and solitary
glory. Is heaven, then, a place peopled only by the
memories of God ? Nay, wherever He is, I seem to
see the choir of attendant saints, and to catch the far-
off echo of their perpetual hymn.
P 2
XVIII.
i
^^t^ DO not know any interpretation of Scripture
^1^ that is more inadequate, and therefore more
misleading, than that which finds in the parable
of the Prodiga! Son only an apologue of the relations
of Jews and Gentiles to the Christian dispensation.
Were it no more than that, I hardly see why Christ
should have ever uttered it. I am not in the least
disposed to assent to the theory, much in vogue with
a certain school of critics, which makes Luke's Gospel
a conscious modification of the Christian tradition in
favour of Pauline teaching and practice ; and bids us
see in it, not what Jesus actually said, but what a
friend and disciple of Paul's would have liked him to
say. No doubt, from the point of view of this theory,
the interpretation of the parable to which I have
The Elder Son. 213
alluded is far from unlikely. It, as it were, stamps
with the approval of the Master beforehand, the efforts
of the Apostle to the Gentiles to bring back the lost
children of God. And I can understand how, from
another point of view, men should prefer to put this
meaning upon the story. Looked at as an apologue
of the relation of sinful souls to God, it leaves no room
for a doctrine of atonement — to which, indeed, its
whole spirit is opposed. There is no anger of the
father which needs to be appeased. No sooner is he
assured of his son's repentance, than he goes half-way
to meet him. The prodigal slays no sacrifice, invokes
no mediation : that he is sorry and ashamed, is enough.
If the parable really is, as I believe it to be, the
plainest, the most vivid, the most accurate presentation
possible of what every erring spirit ought to be to
God, of what God will be to every erring spirit — it is
the completest and most effectual refutation of ordi-
nary Evangelical theology : and I do not wonder that
men who believe in that theology desire to pass it
by, or to show that it means something else. But in
so doing they miss the very centre-point of Christ's
thought of men and God, and are content to decline
upon Paul's.
One word more as to the structure of this parable.
In Christ's apologues, the outward form and the spiri-
tual meaning are very variously related. Sometimes
a parable is a mere figure of speech ; as when the
2 1 4 The Elder Son.
kingdom of heaven is compared to the grain of mustard-
seed, or Christ says of himself, I am the true vine,
Sometimes it is an analogy, in which the story, so
far as it is one, corresponds point by point with the
spiritual facts which it is intended to illustrate. But
the peculiarity of the parable of the Prodigal Son is,
that the spiritual significance is so interwoven with
the stuff and course of the narrative, that it cannot be
disentangled from them ; that the meaning can be
expressed in the words of the story without any pro-
cess of interpretation ; and that were we ourselves
placed in similar circumstances, its phrases would
naturally rise to our lips and say for us all that can
and need be said. The cry of the prodigal, " Father,
I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and
am no more worthy to be called thy son, make me as
one of thine hired servants," breaks from every peni-
tent spirit as its natural voice : there is no figurative
element in it : it is impossible to conceive of a contrite
heart that should not be ready to adopt it. It is a
peculiarity of Christ's spiritual method that, while
apparently confining himself to the local, the tem-
porary, the individual, he attains the general and the
eternal ; and so here, in the sorrows, the repentance,
the reconciliation of a single soul, he tells the stoiy
of the universal fate.
It is in this spirit that I take the words of my text
to-day : " Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I
The Elder Son. 2 1 5
have is thine." If they allude only to the religious
privileges of the Jewish people, they do not instruct
me much, and touch me not at all. But it is quite
otherwise when I look at them in their simple spiritual
significance. What words are these, " ever with me,"
"all that I have is thine"? To live always with God,
to be a partaker of the infinite riches of God — ^what
words can express more completely than these the
consummation of human growth, the height and ful-
ness of perfection to which the soul can aspire ? We
feel that they go beyond the strength and rapture of
the most accomplished saint, and are large enough,
if we fill up the full measure of their meaning, to
express the religious privileges of Christ himself.
What more is possible to the very angels of God than
to live always in the light of His presence, and to
drink with full draughts from the perennial fountain
of His holiness ? And after we have let our imagina-
tion settle upon this great thought, and have realized,
as far as is possible to us, all that is in it : when we
have strayed away in fancy into regions of religious
aspiration and achievement, where there is a clearer
and more invigorating air than ever we can hope to
breathe — it is almost startling to reflect that the very
words which have at once uplifted us and filled us
with despair, accurately describe our own relation to
God. Nor do I mean what our relation might be, but
what it. is. We are always with God. At every
moment of our existence. He besets us behind and
before. Not only are we sheep of His pasture, people
of His hand ; but His Spirit is " nearer to us than
breathing, closer than hands and feet," soliciting us in
a thousand varying voices, leading us in innumerable
unfelt acts of guidance, pressing upon us in countless
subtle influences of love. And all that He has is ours
already: the beauty of the world, the common bounties
of every day, the wisdom of the past, a grace that is
always waiting, a patience that cannot be wearied, a
strength that will bear us up to the very empyrean,
a spiritual communion which is perfect peace, a hope
that cannot be shamed. These are the ordinary con-
ditions of our existence. On God's side of the relation,
nothing is ever wanting. He says always to every
one of us, " Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I
have is thine."
And these are the privileges which we forfeit by
wilful, impenitent sin. I use the word forfeit : neglect
of privilege is one thing, forfeiture quite another.
Again, let us dismiss from our minds all thought of
punishment : retribution always pursues its slow and
sure way, whatever our spiritual state : alienation from
God does not hasten it, reconciliation with God does
not abrogate it : as we sow, we must reap. But as the
distinguishing quality of our privilege as sons is that
we live with God, and have an unlimited access to the
riches of His spiritual bounty, so any rebellion against
• J
J
The Elder Son. 217
Him, any turning away from Him, any conscious pre-
ference of our own will to His, carries with it, so long as
we persevere in it, the forfeiture of these things. I am
not now so much expounding the parable as declaring
a law of the religious life : our sin hangs a veil between
us and God : He vanishes, as it were, from the sphere
of our vision : and if we try to pray to Him, our words
are either frozen upon our tongue, or recognized, even
while we utter them, as quite perfunctory and formal.
Or, to put it in another way, the very characteristic of
this mood of mind is, that we do not want God ; we
have lost our perception of the blessedness of His
presence, and the riches of His grace are no longer
desirable to us. We are like the people of Israel of
whom Jeremiah complained : we have forsaken the
fountain of living waters, and hewn us out cisterns,
broken cisterns, that can hold no water. No effort
that we can make will avail to keep us living and
active on both sides of our nature at once : the service
of the flesh renders the service of God impossible : He
leaves us to ourselves, to make the best of the delights
which we have chosen. If we try to keep up a double
life, what should be the better half of it is a lie and a
pretence, which may deceive others, but cannot long
delude ourselves, and from the very beginning stands
confessed in its true character before God. And it is
only when, in some convincing way, the hollowness
and worthlessness of our self-pleasing is revealed to
The Elder Son.
us, and we turn back with anxious and humble longing
to the blessings which we have lost, that the possibility
of their restoration begins to be felt by us. The pro-
digal is always in a far country. He dwells of neces-
sity where he cannot see his Father.
But the elder son — are we not all elder sons ? We
remain quietly at home : we run no wild race of pro-
fligacy : we are not driven to herd with the swine and
to share their husks : no passion of penitence tears us,
we are thrilled through and through by no joy of
reconciliation. Possibly we are punctual in a self-
imposed round of duty, and do not fail in the decencies
of life : if we rise to no heights of rapturous self-devo-
tion, we sink into no abyss of self-indulgence and
degradation. The elder son of the parable was all
this and perhaps more : the gentleness of his father's
rebuke seems to imply that he had no serious fault to
find with him : and yet he was capable of so mean a
jealousy as to complain that what was done to welcome
the returning prodigal had never been done for him ;
and he had in him enough neither of natural affection
nor of sympathy with victorious goodness to rejoice in
his brother's repentance. Think, I pray you, what it
all means, and what a strange callousness of heart,
what a terrible dulness of conscience, this conduct
implies. For what more can a man desire or have
than to dwell always with God, and to possess alt that
God has to give ? Is it not characteristic of all true
The Elder Son. 2 1 9
human love, and much more of that divine affection
which is its archetype, that the more it gives, the more
it has to give ; that to drink freely at that fountain
does not exhaust but augments its flow ; and that it
is impossible to conceive of God's bounty to any single
soul being diminished by the fact that it is called upon
to share it with universal humanity ? If my brother
stands by my side repentant, purified, accepted, does
it push me further from God ? If God pours Himself
into my shallow spirit till the earthen vessel overflows
with its divine burthen, can He not still fill all hearts,
can He not still quicken all consciences ? When I
have all that I can hold and bear, have I done any-
thing to exhaust the infinite ocean of God's grace?
Surely to complain of another's privilege, is to prove
that I have not even begun to enter into my own !
And now we begin to see how neglect of privilege
may in the long-run be worse than its forfeiture. If
we were asked to choose which we would rather be —
the younger son, with the memory of his sin, it is true,
behind him, full of a trembling consciousness of his
own instability, knowing that he has still to face
inevitable retribution, but yet joyful in the restoration
of his father's love, and feeling how good a thing it is
to be at peace beneath the familiar roof, even though
as a hireling he should stoop to its meanest work ;
or the elder, with a record outwardly blameless, yet
within, cold-hearted, complaining, self-righteous, un-
220 The Elder Son.
worthy of the blessings which he had so long enjoyed,
and so sated with love as to have grown loveless —
could we for a moment hesitate ? Our pity goes forth
to the boy whom, as he sinks lower and lower, priva-
tion and disgrace at last bring to himself; and who,
when he has extricated himself by a mighty effort
from his slough of despond, turns sorrowfully and
doubtfully homewards, fearing to meet his father's
rebuke, yet knowing that even his righteous anger
was better than the delusive delights of self-indul-
gence. But a more tragic lot than his is that of the
elder brother, to whom could be spoken words of
infinite promise and compass, "Son, thou art ever
with me, and all that I have is thine" — yet past whose
careless feet the waters of life have flowed untasted,
before whose heedless eyes the banquet of Divine
privilege had been spread in vain ; and who, while
able to explore the heights and depths of perfectness,
had still to learn the first lisping lessons of humility
and love.
Do not mistake me, as if I thought that we were
likely to fall into the precise fault of the elder brother.
I fear we are far from the joy which the angels feel
in every sinner that repcntcth, and that our enthusiasm
for the triumph of goodness is but a faint and pallid
emotion. But we have no temptation to feel any
jealous grudge at the restoration to God's love of the
fallen and the degraded, or to imagine that His out-
i
The Elder Son. 221
stretched arms are not wide enough to embrace all
His children. It is the dull neglect of privileges which
are always waiting for us, of a love which continually
closes us round, of opportunities of growth which per-
petually beset us, that constitutes our danger. There
is a Catholic saying that the acolyte is too near the
altar to be filled with the awe of its mysteries ; so, too,
the very richness, continuity, impartiality of Divine
bounty, may prevent its natural effect upon our spirits.
And it is in a sense the sole and constant work of
religious teaching to awaken men's souls from the
insensibility thus engendered, and to quicken them to
a sense of that awful Reality in which they live and
move and have their being. We could not be what
we are, if we had faith even as a grain of mustard-
seed. God always round about us and within us : the
Quickener of our life, the Sustainer of our energies,
the Giver of every good and perfect gift : pleading
with us for our own souls, offering us, as the joy and
reward of communion with Himself, the possibility
of rounded growth, the harmonious development of
faculty : leading us into the way of peace, and promis-
ing us a sure safeguard against all sorrow and dis-
appointment: every circumstance of our lives His
guiding hand, every whisper of our conscience His
warning voice, every upward motion of our souls His
divine attraction — ^who could believe that these things
were real, and yet live the dull and sluggish life of sense?
222 The Elder Son,
" Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have Js
thine," Is there not something awful in this imper-
turbability of the Divine bounty? It recalls to my
mind that other phrase of the Psalmist, " But there is
forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared ;"
as if a love that could not be wearied, a placability
that no offence could move to unrelenting anger, a
long-suffering that no obstinacy of rebellion could
exhaust, rose so high above the shallow affections, the
impotent generosities of men, as in its grandeur to be
an object of dread. For eighteen hundred years we
have been saying that God's sun shines, and His rain
falls, upon just and unjust alike, and that He is kind
even to the evil and the unthankful, till the phrase has
little meaning in our ears and never reaches our
hearts. Who knows that science may not be about
to teach us the lesson which religion has been unable
to enforce? For slowly, but surely, the idea of the
invariability of law is being inculcated upon us ; that
we live within conditions which we are unable to
change or modify, and that these conditions are the
same for all. God does not go out of his way to
punish a sinner or to save a saint : both are citizens
of one moral commonwealth, both are subjects of the
same equal providence. To this conviction we are
coming ; and there only needs another, namely, that
the actual order of things, however we foolishly and
wickedly dash ourselves against it, is wisest, kindest,
i
The Elder Son. 223
best, to complete our instruction. And so science,
too, when once we have fully interpreted her teachings,
will lead us back to the God whose word to every one
of us is, " Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I
have is thine." The promise stands fast, however men
may neglect it : no ingratitude of ours can stay that
ever-flowing bounty : and all the answer the Father
makes to the sluggishness and carelessness of His
children, is to maintain His unvaried attitude of bene-
ficence. Have we ever found Him wanting ? Have
we ever drawn nigh to Him without His drawing nigh
to us ? Have we ever accepted any promise of His,
and had to complain of shortcoming ? Whenever we
have stooped down to drink at the fountain of life, has
it failed to quench our thirst ? Has not a little insight
been rewarded with larger light, and strength always
been developed into strength ? Would that we could
indeed discern the grandeur of our inheritance, and
lay hold with full arms of the unfailing promises of
God!
XIX.
% parable of Jflormct.
" Chambers of . , . imagery."
^^[Kg ONCE read a pathetic story, which, if I am to
^1^ tell it at all, I must tell in my own words. Sir
David Wilkie, visiting a convent in Spain, was
shown a noble fresco, representing what Scripture
scene I do not know, on the wall of the refectory.
And as he talked with the aged monk who was his
f[uide, of the still life-like forms, the still glowing
colours, " Ah !" said the latter, " it seems to me, who
have seen this picture day by day since I was a boy,
changeless always, and have watched one brother after
another drop out of our ranks and disappear, as if its
figures were the real and living men, and we but the
painted shadows of humanity."
I am newly come from a city of fading frescos,
which I visited for the first time almost twenty years
ago, and which, therefore, I could not look upon with
J
A Parable of Florence. 225
quite fresh eyes. And the impression, a prevailingly-
sad one, which it left upon my mind was, not that the
old pictured life mocked in its changelessness the in-
stability of the new, but that the new, coarser and
commoner by far, had left the old stranded in pathetic
helplessness. There was a time when Florence almost
vied with the Athens of Pericles in being the centre
of the most brilliant intellectual activity which the
world has ever seen. A pious, a decorous, a well-
governed city it never was : its passions ran high, its
feuds were fierce ; it was by turns capricious, fickle,
ungrateful. But all this means that it was capable,
too, of fine enthusiasms, and eager devotions, and large
self-sacrifice, which left indelible marks upon its civic
life. And it was characteristic of the Florence of which
I am speaking, that whatever it felt deeply should
find expression in beautiful art, and most of all the
art that appeals to the eye : it had its poets — one of
them among the greatest of all time — its scholars, its
historians ; but its truest children were its painters,
its sculptors, its architects, its goldsmiths, its potters —
sometimes men who plied every one of these tasks
at once, and, with whatever instruments they worked,
achieved marvels. So that it is not enough to say
that they made their own beloved city, and all the
cities on the Tuscan hills round about her, beautiful
exceedingly, but that they impressed ' upon them the
life of an intensely living age. It is as if the aspira-
Q
226 A Parable of Florence.
tions and beliefs and passions and affections of two or
three brilliant generations had become monumental
in stone and in marble, on storied wall and glowing
canvas. Two mediaival centuries live on into the cold,
scientific daylight of tkc nineteenth.
And still it is with a fading, a never more than half-
comprehended life. I do not so much speak of the
effects of physical decay, though they are visible
enough : the frescos are shrinking, as it were, into the
walls on which they are painted, and look out no more
than pale ghosts of their former brilliancy and beauty :
if some pictures still glow in undiminished splendour,
one is apt to suspect the restorer's touch : about many
of the buildings gathers a quite modern squalor, which
tells the tale of long neglect ; while the new and the
commonplace impudentiyelbow the old and the stately.
But what is sadder than this, and strikes more home
to the imagination, is the gulf — not of time merely,
but of feeling and purpose^that yawns between the
new Florence and the old. They do not love the same
things, they do not hate the same things, they do not
believe the same things, they do not strive after the
same things ; and to the eye of insight, the real diver-
gence between them is all the more marked when
antiquarian curiosity or a;sthetic dilettanteism apes
the form and takes the place of living sympathy. To
sum up all that I mean in a single illustration, how
much is shut up in the fact that St. Mark's is now
A Parable of Florence. 227
only a museum, where you pay your franc to a govern-
ment official at the door, and then wander at your
will through silent cell, and deserted refectory, and
shady cloister, gazing at the flowers of sacred art
which a more believing generation cast upon every
wall ! Yet it was once for a while almost the centre
of literary and religious and artistic life for Florence.
It pawned its income that the great collection of clas-
sical manuscripts which the re-birth of learning had
brought to its city should not be dispersed. You
may see there the cell from which the good Saint
Antonino was brought to be the poor man's Arch-
bishop of Florence. It was among the damask roses
of its cloister garden that Savonarola meditated the
sermons which set Italy ablaze. There Fra Angelico
painted happy angels upon his knees, and showed,
with Fra Bartolommeo, how it was possible to be con-
summate artist and consummate monk at once. Art
is a great thing, and beauty a supreme object of human
striving ; but art is noblest, and beauty most desirable,
when an inner life animates them : but when the life
has died out of the form, the form, perfect though it
may be, has lost its most signal worth. I do not know
anything that affected me more than the sight at St.
Mark's of a splendid collection of missals and other
service-books, brought from suppressed convents all
round about, and now carefully laid out in glass cases
for the inspection of the curious. Nothing could be
Q2
228 A Parable of Florence.
more gorgeous, more elaborate, more beautiful, than
their execution : there were single pages which, in the
delicate loveliness of the arabesques and miniatures
with which they were adorned, must have employed
the patient labour of months : they told of an age
when no expenditure of toil and time and skill was
thought excessive, so it were in God's service. But
they had been vocal once, and they are silent now.
To what heavenward aspirations may not their music
have given wings ! What tears of penitence may not
have dropped upon their rigid parchment! What
rapt thanksgivings, once thrilling the air in joyful
freedom, and now imprisoned for ever within their
quaint notation I But they have ceased to be inter-
mediaries between earth and heaven : they are objects
of cold aesthetic criticism, no better than a gazing-
stock for the ungodly.
But you are already wondering why, to-day, after
so long an interval of silence, I should be dwelling
on recollections of travel which appear to have little
connection with the thoughts and aspirations which
usually occupy us in this place. It is because it all
seemed to me to be a parable of what John Bunyan
called the City of Mansoul. Not, indeed, of your
souls, my younger hearers : yours is the city of aspi-
rations yet unfulfilled, of achievements still incomplete,
where pictures are being painted, and shapeless blocks
of marble are being hewn into breathing forms, and
A Parable of Florence^ 229
airy towers are still rising skywards. But I saw in
the Florence of to-day, in which the present and the
past are so subtly mingled, a figure of what such an
one as I must be, the formative part of whose life lies
behind him, and who at best can look forward to only
a few years more of thought and work. I will not
press the comparison too closely, or try to make out
that the analogy is perfect in all its parts : no man's
relation to his past is quite the same as another's :
here, there are violent breaks, sudden transitions, an
end which the beginning hardly seemed to involve :
there, the process is one of quiet, gradual development,
and the philosophic poet's desire is fulfilled —
For I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
But I should think that no one, not even the most
successful in carrying youth into old age, and making
old age the continuance and completion of youth,
could reach the downward slope of life's decline, with-
out feeling how much there was which he had left
irrecoverably behind, and that he was to a certain
extent out of touch with the new life around him.
Girt about as we may be by troops of loving friends,
there is a larger troop still of those who have gone
over to the majority. Those who would, in what we
call the course of nature, precede us behind the veil,
disappear one by one, till at last, with a kind of sa4
230 A ParaSle of Florence.
surprise, we find ourselves the oldest of our race, the
seniors of our class, with few with whom we can ex-
change contemporaneous memories, and fewer still to
whom we can look up. One by one, friends of our
own age drop out of the ranks, till we come to wonder
at the mystery of Providence, which seems to strike
at every sweet and saintly head, and leaves us in all
our unprofitableness. So, too, we have to look to the
past, at least in part, for our ideals : perhaps we seeni
now cold and un impassioned, unwilling to move from
the ancient ways, imbued with a cautious, conservative
wisdom. But we were full of divine folly once : we
thought no enterprize for the kingdom of God impos-
sible : we looked out on the world as if our sword
could speedily conquer it for Christ : we dreamed that
we could speak the piercing and reconciling word
which should heal the discords and stanch the wounds
of the Church. The predetermined course of humanity
was too strong for us, and carried us away on its irre-
sistible flood : our plans succeeded only as far as they
deserved to do, our faithfulness reaped no more than
a strictly measured harvest ; and it is our temptation
to feel that the schemes of younger men are no wiser
and better than ours were, and that at all events we
cannot throw ourselves into them with a full heart
And this leads me, at last, to the real dislocation of
feeling which manifests itself between separated gene-
rations. Young and old do not always understand
i
A Parable of Florence. 231
one another, and find it hard to live together on terms
of affectionate confidence. The fault, I admit, may
be on either side : all I am concerned to assert to-day
is, that it does not always attach to the elders. Our
grey hairs are a barrier between us and the young
hearts that we would so willingly touch, the young
lives that we would so gladly influence: where we
would conciliate confidence, we find ourselves uncon-
sciously inspiring fear : and those for whom no sacri-
fice on our part would be too great, pass us by as if
we had no concerns in common. So now, unless my
speech has been clumsy indeed, you begin to see how
I saw in the contrast between the old Florence and
the new, a parable of my own life.
But this is not all, though perhaps the saddest part,
of what I have to say. Florence is, almost more than
any other city, full of memories which perpetually
rush unbidden upon the instructed mind and fill it
with ghosts, in a sense more real than the poor human
phantasms which crowd its pavements to-day. It was
in that narrow street that Dante first met the little
Beatrice, " humbly and honestly clad in her crimson
frock," and loved her with the immortal love that
echoes down the ages. In that garden, Lorenzo de
Medici assembled his Platonic academy ; and one day
came to him. the boy Michael Angelo,with the satyr's
mask, apparently antique, but really wrought with his
own hands. Into that clear and lucid air Galileo first
232 A Parable of Florence.
raised his magic tube, and discovered — with infinite
loss of comfort to himself, with infinite gain of truth
to mankind— the fixedness of the sun, the swift whirl-
ing of the earth. It is easy to fancy that the last
echoes of Savonarola's prophetic eloquence have hardly
yet died away within the vast dome of the cathedral ;
and it was from the square that you cross every day
that his fiery soul fled on wings of fire to heaven.
Two beautiful forms, each in the sweet stateliness of
early manhood, 1 seem in fancy to meet, not Florentine,
j-et drawn to Florence by an irresistible attraction :
one is the young RafFaelle, come down from his
Umbrian hills to be the most perfect exponent in
form and colour of the divine beauty ; the other, not
less beautiful, John Milton, one day to be the peerless
singer of a lost Paradise. And so I might go on,
almost indefinitely, illustrating, stii! in the line of my
parable, how the peculiar and inalienable wealth of a
kindly old age lies in its memories. For myself, I
never regret advancing years so little as when I find,
in conversation with younger men, who hold, I own,
the promise of the future, that names which to them
are no more than shadowy traditions, bring up before
my memory venerable and beautiful forms which it
were an irreparable loss indeed not to have known.
Their time of reminiscence will come : meanwhile,
I have had mine. There is no love like that which
has shielded our own heads ; no goodness so in-
J
A Parable of Florence. 233
spiring as that from which we ourselves have drawn
the bfeath of life ; no heroism so heroic as that
whose contagious thrill we, in some poor measure,
have caught; no saintliness so sweet as that which
has rebuked and raised our own imperfectness. And
as posterity is never hard upon those who have
achieved much for humanity — as it forgives quarrels
of painters, and arrogance of poets, and weaknesses
of statesmen — so, as life wears on, the sordid stains
drop away from the figures that fill our chambers of
memory, and we recollect only the strength of manly
resolution, the sweetness of womanly sympathy, the
ardour of public spirit, the unwearied enthusiasm of
humanity, the eager upward rush to God, of those
whom we have known and loved ; while the issue is a
larger, rounder, more harmonious conception of life.
We dwell with serene pleasure upon the reflection that
men were better and wiser than once we thought them
to be. We see that, after ali, more has been accom-
plished than we feared, and that the future of society
is safe. If the yesterday in which we bore our own
part was noble, why not to-day, even though we do
not wholly understand it, and to-morrow, which lies
unseen in the hands of God ?
Once more, and lastly, the various elements in the
visible presentment of such a city as Florence share
the attribute of permanence in very different degrees.
It seemed to me as if the frescos grew fainter year
1
234 -^ Parable of Florence.
after year, and that the time was within reach at which,
despite all loving care, they would fade wholly out of
sight And the general aspect of the place must be
very different from what it was four hundred years
ago : one can imagine a contemporary of Dante, or
of Savonarola, wandering to-day through its streets,
and recognizing only now and then, with half-dazed
eyes, some familiar arch, some well-known tower. But,
again, there are works of sculptor and architect which
have in them as much of immortality as human handi-
craft can have. There is the Baptistry, Dante's " il
mio bel San Giovanni," with its gates of Paradise ; and
Giotto's tower, leaping upwards into the blue, graceful
and stately as a Virgin's lily; and Arnolfo's cathedral,
flecked with every hue that marble can take, and
the vast dome with which Brunelleschi crowned it.
Will the time ever come at which Michael Angelo's
David will not flourish in perpetual youth and strength?
While, if even these pass away, there will still be the
lucent air, and the grey Tuscan hills, shadowy with
cypress and olive, and the rushing Arno, to recall to
mind the great and beautiful things that men have
thought and said and done on this enchanted spot
So, too, as we consciously near the close of life, and
count up, as by a kind of sad compulsion, the futile
schemes, the disappointed hopes, the mistaken ideals
of bygone years, it is well still to feel that there
remain ideals about which no mistake is possible, and
J
A Parable of Florence. 235
labours which must bear fruit, and hopes that are
rooted in the very constitution of things, and the
unchangeable will of God. For if, as Milton has it,
" old experience doth attain to something of prophetic
strain," it shows its power in the separation of the false
from the true, of the unstable from the permanent, of
the imperfect from the perfect Perhaps as one looks
backover life,it is often with the consciousness of having
spent strength for that which was not worthy of the
sacrifice, of having insisted upon distinctions which we
see now not to have been vital, of having grasped the
temporal while we missed the eternal. And so it is
unhappily possible to grow cold and passionless and
disenchanted, to let the world take its course, to think
nothing greatly worth while, and to find happiness in
watching the battle from some safe and serene emi-
nence, rather than in keeping one's place in the ranks
to the last But it is the privilege of those who are
so fortunate as to carry on the moral enthusiasm of
youth into their declining years, to unite with it a
faculty of clear discernment, a capacity of assured
hope, which youth can never know. To such. Love
and Duty are watchwords which thrill them through
and through to the last pulsation of their hearts. To
such, the kingdom of God still stands for all of good
that is possible to humanity. The method and the
spirit of Christ suffice them, and they are content to
abide in the hands of God. At any failure which is
236 A Parable of Florence.
not the result of their own unfaithfulness they can
afford to smile ; and what men call delay they deem
a patient waiting for the occasion of Infinite Wisdom.
Happy those who, animated by such hopes, filled by
such purposes, are permitted to die sword in hand,
and with their faces to the foe! Nor less happy, it
may be, the larger number who, compelled to retire
from the field, can watch with cheerful augury the
struggle in which they no longer bear a part, and
are content at last " to rest in the Lord, and to wait
patiently for Him."
Mark
" Then Peter began to say unto liim, Lo, we have left all, and
followed thee. And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say
unto you. There is no man that hath left house, or brethren,
or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or
lands, for my sake and the gospel's, but he shall receive an
hundred-fold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and
sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecu-
tions ; and in the world to come, eternal life. But many
that are first shall be last, and the last first."
^H^HIS is at first sight a perplexing passage. For
^TOlfc nothing can be plainer than that the promise
which it conveys was not fulfilled. In what
sense could it be said that the Apostles received " an
hundred-fold now in this time" of the temporal bless-
ings which they had abandoned ? Paul, indeed, was
not of the Twelve ; but we may take his picture of
what the apostolic life was as truer than any imagina-
tive description of mine could be : " Even unto this
J
238 The Irony of Christ.
present hour we both hunger and thirst, and are naked,
and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling-place :
and labour, working with our own hands : being reviled,
wc bless: being persecuted, we suffer it: being de-
famed, we entreat : we are made as the filth of the
world, and are the offscouring of all things, until this
day." Nay, how could such a promise as Christ seems
to make in this passage be seriously made and lite-
rally fulfilled ? These temporal blessings — chouses and
lands, and all the innocent delights of home — are, to
use a mathematical phrase, incommensurable with the
spiritual joys and rewards of the gospel : they belong
to another plane of thought, another region of being :
and no chain of cause and effect unites the two. It is
an old difficulty for those who do not clearly grasp
this fact, that the wicked often flourish like a green
bay-tree ; and that whom God loveth, He chasteneth.
It is a general moral principle that it needs the greatest
watchfulness lest prosperity should harden the soul,
and that the sweetest lives are often those on which
some cloud perpetually rests. One whose mind habi-
tually dwells with houses and lands, and all that makes
up a flourishing and happy civic life, may indeed be
proficient in the exercise of many household virtues,
but can hardly rise to the height of joyful self-sacrifice,
from which it may be truly said, " Lo, we have left all^
and followed thee."
A large part of this tenth chapter of Mark is occu-
The Irony of Christ. 239
pied with the collision of th6 two worlds, the temporal
and the spiritual. I think I see it even in the story
of the little children who were brought to Jesus that
he should touch them : surely the moral of it is, that
the kingdom of God is only for the single-minded,
the single-hearted. Then comes that most pregnant
and affecting episode of the young man who had great
possessions, and who, having come to Christ and hav-
ing made the great refusal, went away sorrowful. A
certain difficult saying of Christ's follows, with its com-
mentary, "How hardly shall they that have riches
enter into the kingdom of God !" and then the claim
of Peter, and the answer to it which we are consider-,
ing just now. Last of all, the same contrast reappears
in a somewhat different form when James and John,
the sons of Zebedee, ask that when the kingdom comes
they may sit, the one on his right hand, the other
on his left, in his glory. It was inevitable that this
collision of thought and feeling should occur. The
temporal only gradually gave place to the spiritual
Messiah in the minds of the disciples. They were
slow to comprehend that the kingdom, the most
blessed of all realities on one side, was on the other
no more than a figure of speech. The Apostles could
not realize the fact that, when they had left their nets
and followed Christ, they had broken for ever with the
comfortableness of the world ; and some of the more
ambitious among them may well have dreamed of
240 The Irony of Christ.
"thrones, dominations, princedoms, powers." Only
when Christ was lifted up on his cross did they begin
to discern that the servants were no better than the
Master, and that as was his fate, so must theirs be.
They struggled slowly towards a new ideal of life ;
learning only at last, and under the irresistible teach-
ing of circumstance, that their Master's secret of living
was to die daily to himself, to the flesh, to the world.
What, then, of Christ's promise in the text?
Many years ago, the late Bishop Thirlwall wrote an
essay on the Irony of Sophocles, which excited a good
deal of attention at the tEme, and has ever since been
regarded as a model of acute and weighty criticism.
He defined "verbal irony" as " a figure which enables
the speaker to convey his meaning with greater force,
by means of a contrast between his thought and his
expression, or, to speak more accurately, between the
thought which he evidently designs to express and
that which his words properly signify." It Is thus a
case of saying one thing and meaning another; and
yet of so saying it as to make it clear that your real
meaning does not lie in the obvious signification of
your words. I may, for instance, agree to a propo-
sition, political, moral, religious, that is laid before
me, yet in such a way as to indicate below the surface
of my words a disagreement more profound than any
mere words of dissent could express. Or, again, when
I utter an opinion exactly contrary to what might
J
The Irony of Christ 241
justly expected of me, out of accord with what I said
yesterday, out of accord with all the previous tenor of
my thought and speech, it is quite plain either that I
have turned suddenly round upon myself, or that I
really mean the opposite of what I am saying. Do
not for a moment imagine that irony is intended to
deceive. On the contrary, it is an oblique form of
speech, which is stronger, more vivid, more pointed,
than the direct It has its own forms of phrase, its
own turns of expression, by which it makes its true
character manifest. It may be, and is, one of those
more refined devices of human speech which the slow
mind, the dull imagination, find it hard to follow and
to interpret ; but we should lose much if we brought
down all our subtler intercourses of mind to the level
of the fool. And a grave and measured irony is often
a distinguishing mark of a high and judicial intellect.
We are apt to think of irony as chiefly a polemical
weapon, and as a vehicle of expression for scorn and
contempt. But we shall see that it is not so, when
we reflect upon what we are wont to call the irony of
circumstanca There is the feeling traceable in all
literature, belonging to every civilized age, to which
no man who broods over his own fate can be a
stranger, that we are, as it were, the sport of life. Pro-
vidence, some higher Power — call it what you will — in
the unexpectedness of misfortune, in the contrast be-
tween the apparent and the real in our existence.
242 The Irony of Christ.
" Look to the end," is a proverb which expresses this
feeling ; and a phrase of similar meaning is Solon's
celebrated word to Crcesiis, " that he counted no man
happy till he was dead." Half our sharpest woes are
what we call bolts out of the blue : if prepared for,
yet prepared for in a region out of our ken, and flash-
ing upon us unawares. And then when the trouble is
come, and our misery is greater than we can bear, we
begin to think of the security in which we sat, of the
carelessness with which we assumed that our pros-
perity was unassailable, of the serenity with which we
ignored, so far as we ourselves were concerned, the
sure vicissitudes of life. Nor is it merely that our
existence resembles at once " the torrent's smoothness
ere it dash below," and the rage of broken waters
which are long ere they find a quiet channel — but that
our affairs, private and public alike, are apt to take
the strangest turns, and to lead us into the most
unexpected situations. If sometimes we pause for a
moment to estimate our position, it is at the same
time to wonder what forces have brought us thither,
and to acknowledge how little our own deliberate will
has had to do with it I do not say that to talk of
the irony of fate is to take a religious view of life :
that would rather express itself in a confession of
personal ignorance and weakness, and a desire to clasp
the guiding hand of God, following whithersoever He
would have us go. But it is only natural that life's
The Irony of Christ.
sharp and sudden contrasts should be deeply felt ; that
men should be acutely conscious of how easily they
may deceive themselves as to the real meaning of their
existence. Rich, strong, prosperous, we wake one
morning with an unusual pain, an undefinable lan-
guor ; and the physician, whom we half- carelessly
consult, warns us that this May will be our last. The
treasure of our heart is embarked in a whole argosy
of love, when suddenly our dear ship goes down, and
we are beggars indeed. And it is the contrast between
the sunshine and the storm, between the confidence
and the despair, which we call the irony of circum-
stance.
And from this it is only a natural transition to the
thought, that when a very lofty nature, morally and
intellectually, is brought into contact with others on a
much lower level, the element of irony must, con-
sciously or unconsciously, enter into their intercourse.
It is, so to speak, a principle of accommodation, a
means by which the higher descends for a little while
to the level of the lower. But I need hardly say, it is
the irony, not of scorn and sarcasm, but of love and
pity, that would as far as possible open blind eyes,
and warm cold hearts, and touch dull consciences.
And this kind of irony I can conceive to have been
often upon Christ's lips when he came into intellectual
collision with a people who were too far below him
to comprehend him : who could not hear his words
R2
i
244 "^^^ Irony of Ckrisl.
without misunderstanding them : who obstinately at-
tached a material meaning to phrases which he uttered
in a deep spiritual sense. Some accommodation was
necessary to bring his mind in any degree into contact
with those of his hearers ; and, in a sense, his only
way of marking his disagreement from their crude
conceptions was to seem to agree with them. And so
too, in regard to the whole conception of their future
life which at one time the Apostles undoubtedly enter-
tained. They dreamed of they hardly knew what ;
but certainly of good things desirable after the fashion
of the world — a visible victory over the enemies of
Israel achieved by their means, a palm of triumph in
their hands, and a throne at their Master's side. I do
not pretend to determine the limits of his prescience i
but he discerned only too clearly that his enterprize
was a failure ; that persecutions, poverty, prisons,
wounds, death, awaited those who still clung to it ;
and that if conquest was to come at last, it could only
be when more than one generation of martyrs and
confessors had borne their witness and given their
blood. And can you not fancy how, with these cer-
tainties established in his soul, he might look round
upon their faces, eager and bright with insubstantial
day-dreams, and a sad, kind smile would rise to his
lips as he meditated the contrast between expectation
and reality?
Bishop Thirlivall begins his essay with the words—
TJie Irony of Christ,
" Some readers may be a little surprised to see irony-
ascribed to a tragic poet ;" if so, it may seem stranger
still to you that I should speak of the irony of Christ.
But the explanation of the wonder in cither case i^
that irony, in the sense which I have given to it,
cannot be separated from human life and therefore
from human speech ; while, if all that I have said be
true, it is not the lowest men, nor they In their lowest
moods, who are most conscious of it. Without this
aid, I am quite unable to explain the words of the
text ; with it, all is easy, straightforward, natural. For
a moment, Jesus, who sees the crude material concep-
tions which are floating through the minds of Peter
and the rest, seems to fall in with them and to accord
with them. Yes, he says, you have left nothing for
my sake and the gospel's which shall not be repaid ta
you in kind, and that an hundred-fold — houses, and
lands, and mothers, and sisters, and children. Your
wandering life with me shall come to an end : you
shall no longer be dependent upon chance hospitality,
but settled in sure possessions : you came to me poor,
you shall leave me rich. Is it not easy to imagine
that Peter and the other Apostles, who, after all,
were not wholly unspiritual, in whose minds the new
thought and the old still mingled and strove for pre-
eminence, wondered at this strange teaching, which
was so contrary to all that had gone before, and seemed
to echOt not the strongerr but the weaker part of thera-
246 The Irony of Christ.
selves? Was there no flash in the Master's eye, no
moral scorn in his voice, no curving smile upon his
lip, as he spake ? Then what was the meaning of that
unexpected qualification, "with persecutions" — sud-
denly turning into view the other side of the shield,
and leaving them as best they could to reconcile the
incompatibilities of the contrast? Persecutions and
houses and lands ! Persecutions and the dear delights
of home ! Persecutions and the absence of self-sacri-
fice ! — how do these things go together ? And again
the note deepens : "and in the world to come, eternal
life. But many that are first shall be last, and the last
first." We have moved into a quite different moral
region now : the irony has vanished from eye and lip
and word, and remains, if at all, only in the swift and
decisive contrast between the later and the earlier
phrase. To live with that deep, poignant, unchange-
able Divine Life which we call Eternal, is the main
thing : what can houses and lands have to do with
that ? But in that life all earthly distinctions are
confounded and reversed, as if to show how radically
different it is from the worldly order, to which for a
little while Peter's thoughts had pointed : its grades
of honour depend upon other conditions, its degrees
of happiness are attainable by other methods : the
first shall be last, and the last first.
So that, after all, this is not, as you might suppose
at first sight, a receipt for " making the best of both
i
The Irony of Christ. 247
worlds," but a declaration, not the less impressive for
its paradoxical form, that their principles, their order,
their rewards, are fundamentally different. I have
pointed the moral for you a hundred times, and it is
not necessary to enlarge greatly upon it now, I think
that we have finally emerged from the old Hebrew
notion that the appropriate rewards of goodness are
length' of days, unbroken prosperity, and children to
carry on our name ; and that a pious man who misses
this recognition of his piety, has just ground of com-
plaint against the goodness of God. But notions not
distantly akin to this obstinately hold their place in
our minds : we are still too apt to invest in religion,
and to grumble if the interest is not paid in precisely
the coin that we like. Yet no man, I suppose, ever
truly loved God, and worked for Him with a pure
heart, and gave himself wholly up to His will, without
feeling that, whatever of what the world called misfor-
tune might befal him, he was more than content with
his toil and his wages. To be at peace with one's
own conscience : to know that one is spending one's
strength, with least waste and largest result, in the line
of Divine purpose : to have a sure refuge in tempta-
tion, a constant defence in trouble : to be emancipated
from fear of change and pain and death, and, no matter
what disappointment may come, in the faith of the
kingdom to
Bate not a jot of heart or hope,
But steer right onward, —
248
The Irony of Christ,
what better thing can there be than this? It is the
rounded symmetry of human powers, the reached goal
of human Hfe.
I have spoken, in a well-known phrase, of making
the best of both worlds. In truth, there is but one
world, a single kosmos. What is not kosmos is chaos,
what is not order is disorder. When our eyes close
for ever on the beauty of earth, and the wretchedness
which human passions have made in the midst of it,
we cannot conceive of ourselves as passing into a
different state of things, where other moral laws prevail,
and God works after a different fashion. Or if for a
moment I were to adopt the phrase two worlds, I
should say that they were coincident, not consecutive :
that here and now there was a world in which God's
laws were recognized and obeyed, and another all
round about it, perhaps more visible, in which men
tried to live their life according to laws of their own.
So there are not two kingdoms, to which we may
justifiably feel a divided allegiance, and whose con-
flicting claims we must endeavour to reconcile, but
one only, now and always, here and beyond the veil ;
and all outside of it, a condition of things without law,
without order, without divine issue, unless it be gra-
dual absorption in the other and nobler state. To
which, O friends, do we belong, by allegiance, by
aspiration, by obedience? Our allegiance to the king-
dom of God may be imperfect, our obedience inter-
The Irony of Christ 249
mittent, our aspirations uncertain : but we must make
a choice in our hearts between it and the kingdom
of the world ; between principles and methods and
rewards of the divine order, and what stand for these
in what is truly no order at all. The whole secret
of life lies in this alternative. Unrest, indecision,
self-dissatisfaction, slowly-fading happiness, declining
strength, a cheerless and faithless death, on this side ;
on that, settled peace, a fixed will, a conscious com-
munion with God, an ever-enlarging life, a clear out-
look to better things to come. Who that could see
the end from the beginning, who that could hold
passion in check and trample base affection under
foot, could for a moment falter in his choice?
mm
"''L|i|[i.ii|Li''
^
" But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness ;
and all these things shall be added unto you."
^S^HIS is a hard saying : one which we may easily
^aK read a thousand times, passing it by with little
notice, yet which, if our attention be once
arrested, we recognize as having a deep and difficult
meaning. For when we have to some extent attenu-
ated the significance of the whole passage by the
recollection that the words, "take no thought for,"
would be more accurately translated, "be not anxious
about," there still remains the fact that we can see
no connection between "the kingdom of God and His
righteousness," and the food, the drink, the raiment,
which are to be added to those who are intent upon
the nobler quest. The two orders of things, the spiri-
tual and the temporal, seem incomparable, incommen-
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God. 251
surate ; and we are conscious of a moral incongruity
when they are brought together. And, indeed, this
incongruity is the key-note of the whole passage, which
rises to its highest pitch in the words, "Ye cannot
serve God and mammon." Choose we may — indeed,
but for the notorious fact that we are always seeking
to avoid the election, I should say, choose we must —
between the world and the kingdom ; but surely the
choice of one involves the rejection of the other, and
we are content to balance temporal loss by spiritual
gain. But does this enigmatical saying seem to mean
that it is after all possible to make the best of both
worlds, and somehow to serve God without altogether
breaking with mammon ? Perhaps some such inde-
finite conviction as this lies at the bottom of our
practice. We do take thought, and anxious thought
too, for food and drink and raiment, and all the things
of the flesh which these symbolize ; and we have some
genuine, if intermittent, desire for "the kingdom of
God and His righteousness." But we usually invert
the order of the text : the world first, and then for God
what we can spare from the world. And I think we
should certainly call fanatic a man who deliberately
took the text in its plain and literal meaning as the
rule of his life.
We may of course say, if we choose, that the Sermon
on the Mount was addressed to the immediate disciples
of Christ, who were a race set apart, a peculiar people.
252 Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.
devoting their lives to the task of aiding him to esta-
blish the kingdom of God. Or, again, we may regard
this, and other difficult sayings of a similar kind, as
counsels of perfection, embodying an ideal, not for
immediate practical purposes, but to which humanity
may be expected gradually to approach. But neither
of these opiates will long delude a living conscience :
on the one hand, general principles of living are
equally applicable to all men under all circumstances;
on the other, an ideal ceases to be an ideal when we
no longer strain to reach It Something, indeed, of
the local, the temporary, there may be in this word
of Christ's ; but if so, it can only be In the expression,
not in the thought ; and a free translation of it into
the language of to-day will elucidate, If not remove,
the difficulty. Let me at least make the attempt
The objects of life may be divided into two classes,
not difficult to distinguish, though perhaps not easy
to label with appropriate names. But one of them
we cannot do wrong in calling the ideal; the other
we will describe and discuss by-and-by. Let me first
observe that I am not now upon distinctively reli-
gious ground ; I am dealing with general facts of
human life, true of every man, whether he have any
theological belief or not The question which we
have to ask ourselves is, What is our first Interest?
What do we care most for ? What is it that we refuse
to postpone to anything else ? Is it, for instance, in
Seek yB first the Kingdom of God, 253
the abstract world, truth? In the personal world,
duty ? In the social world, the common weal ? These
are ideal ends, devotion to which, we notice, takes a
man out of himself, sets his soul in a large place, fires
him with quite unwonted enthusiasm, enables him to
make large sacrifices, strengthens him for long-con-
tinued toil, sometimes bids him throw away life itself.
Some of these ideal ends of life are more moving,
more inspiring, than others : as, for instance, devotion
to mathematical truth may still leave a man's spirit
imprisoned within narrow intellectual and moral limits,
while the power which a pure patriotism has in up-
lifting and enlarging the soul can hardly be over-
estimated ; and a genuine allegiance to the kingdom
of God cleanses, strengthens, fires a man, as nothing
else can do. But they all move, they all inspire, in
their degree. To every soul that strains after them,
they are a principle of growth, a method of education.
Eyes which are set on them cannot regard with satis-
faction whatever is mean and base. Hearts that beat
for them have their true Ufe in a world unseen, purer,
brighter, less subject to change, less open to loss, than
this.
Now to the ideal I cannot oppose the real, for that
would be to abandon my central contention, that the
unseen things alone have a true and eternal being.
Visible is a word that is not distinctive enough : selfish,
may carry too sharp a sting of blame with it : personal,
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.
may be claimed by either side of the controversy.
But if words fail me, you are at all events by this time
beginning to see what I mean. There are certain ends
of life other than the ideal, and even more inextricably
interwoven with the stuff of existence, but which all
have a certain inward and self-regard ing reference —
a livelihood, personal comfort and consideration, rising
perhaps into luxury, and a conspicuous place in so-
ciety—what have been called, with little regard to the
feelings of the rich, "the lust of the flesh and the
pride of life." But whatever differences there may be
among these things, and however they range through
the whole of the moral gamut, as I shall show you in
a moment, they all belong to the visible and temporal
order : they are to be apprehended by the senses :
there is in them an inherent principle of decay and
change. I admit at once that they are a part of life
which cannot be dispensed with : they belong to its
physical basis : sought for in moderation and under
rigorous self-restraint, they supply a large part of its
innocent, its habitual, its lasting pleasures. But the
moment you compare a good dinner, which there is
no harm in eating — a beautiful house, in which it is a
desirable thing to dwell — costly and tasteful clothing,
which is at all events better than slovenly ugliness, —
with a new truth, a kind action, a genuine sacrifice of
self, — you feel instinctively that the former belong to
a lower plane of being, and that in the very act of
Seek ye first tke Kingdom of God. 255
comparison you are committing treason to the nobler
capabilities of human nature. And there is this great
and instructive difference between these two kinds of
human ends — that if you give yourself up unreservedly
to the first, the result is larger power and deeper
insight; if to the second, a decline into base selfish-
ness, a perpetually narrowing soul, a heart growing
colder from day to day. Yes, I must eat ; but the
moment I begin to take constant or frequent thought
of eating, I run the risk of becoming that most con-
temptible of all small sinners, an epicure. And why
take ye thought for raiment ? Is there any creature
of God's more fallen from her high estate than a
woman who is perpetually anxious about her clothes,
and quite careless of her children ? Whereas, of alle-
giance to truth, of devotion to duty, of anxiety for the
common weal, no man, no woman, can have too much :
under this inspiration the heart is enlarged, the con-
science is quickened, and life hourly becomes wider
and more intense.
Now as Christ, in spite of counsels of perfection and
principles of absolute sweep, was the sanest of moral-
ists, we nowhere find him enjoining exclusive devotion
to the higher order of things, and complete neglect of
the lower. That is just the asceticism which is so
ready to grow out of any spiritual religion, and is, in
fact, the monkish corruption of Christianity. What
he does say — and. it is a principle of infinite impor-
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God,
tance — is, that we must choose which of the two shall
be uppermost in our lives ; which of the two shall fur-
nish their regulative principle ; which, should they
come into collision, as may be the case at any moment
of existence, shall yield to the other. " Seek ye first
the kingdom of God and His righteousness." I do not
doubt that the double order of motive exists in every
soul now before God in His house : no one wholly lives
in the ideal, no one wholly in the physical ; the first
the necessities of life perpetually recall to the tangible
earth, the second must be poor and base indeed if he
do not sometimes feel upon his forehead airs from
heaven. Nor are we always the same men at different
times : moods vary, changing circumstances sway us,
the breath of the Spirit comes and goes, blowing, like
the wind, as it listeth. But at the same time there
are men of the flesh and men of the spirit : lives that
belong to the seen, and lives that belong to the unseen
world : tempers through which a strife after the ideal
always runs, and again tempers which, if the world
goes prosperously with them, sit still and are content.
And this is a fundamental difference among men,
that which marks them out as on the side of God, of
Christ, of duty, or, on the other hand, of the world, of
the flesh, of self.
Still, what are we to make of "all these things shall
be added unto you" ? Because we believe, if we be-
lieve anything — and that not on any authority, but by
J
L
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, 257
sure warrant of fact — that in the moral world also
effects follow causes, and that the character of the
effect lies hidden in the character of the cause. Would
you be rich, and with riches acquire the power of pur-
chasing whatever of comfort and luxury the world can
give ? You must have and use the qualities, the natu-
ral result of which is the accumulation of money :
energy, industry, a keen eye for opportunities, a power
of patient waiting till the right moment comes, an
insight into other men's strength and weaknesses, and
the like, which you may always observe in those who
have raised themselves to affluence. But the men
who possess these gifts are not necessarily, by any
means, the poor in spirit, the meek, the hungering
and thirsting after righteousness, the merciful, the
pure in heart, the peacemakers, who have the promise
of the kingdom of God. Why should the successful
exercise of one order of gifts bring after it the rewards
appropriate to the other ? I am most certainly per-
suaded that it does not ; and that the good things of
the spirit, and the good things of the flesh, are each
attainable only in their own way. But there is another
way of looking at the matter, on which I have insisted
over and over again, and of which, as I find it hard
practically to convince myself, I may also easily fail
to persuade you. And that is, that when the two
orders of reward are brought face to face with each
other, one appears, in comparison with the other, so
unspeakably poor, worthless, contemptible, as to vanish
away, and to be of no account any more. You know
the reply with which Michael Faraday astonished
the man of business who pressed him to undertake
researches which might probably result in signal ad-
vantage to himself: " I have no time to make money."
With his laboratory at the Royal Institution, with the
three or four hundred a-year which supplied his modest
wants, with the boundless region of the unknown
stretching out before him, and time subtly stealing
from him day after day, year after year, what to him
were a few paltry thousands, and all that they could
buy? So, put love in one scale and luxury in another —
here duty, and there self-indulgence — and if man or
woman deliberately prefer the latter, as they so often
do, to what can we ascribe it, except to some fatal
blindness that conceals from them the true nature of
the objects brought before them? For deliberately,
and with full knowledge of what they are, to prefer
evil to good, is the characteristic attribute of that
theological figment, the devil.
So it may be that we have here one more instance
of that which I have pointed out to you before — the
irony of Christ. " Seek ye first," he says, " the king-
dom of God and His righteousness," the true end of
all noble human quest. Seek it with toil, seek it with
patience, seek it with obedience, seek it with self-
surrender ; and at last, not easily, but as a strong
Seeh ye first the Kingdom of God. 259
runner touches the goal, breathless, weary, half-de-
spairing of success in the very moment of victory, ye
shall find it And ye shall know that ye have found
it by the new strength that is poured into you, by the
happy peace which is the portion of your hearts, by
your perfect reconciliation with yourselves, with your
fellow-men, with God. And to one who thus lives
the life of God, what are meat and drink and raiment,
and all that they stand for? Necessary things, no
doubt, in their place and degree ; but to be made a
chief object of existence, to be a large constituent
of happy or unhappy living, to ask the best of our
thoughts, to tax the hardest of our efforts ! Yea, chil-
dren, I seem to hear Christ say, when ye have won
your crown, undoubtedly such good things as ye need
shall be added unto you. But ye will know, too, of
how small account they are in the life of the children
of God. He who loves God, he whom God loves, hath
^11 things.
There is not, then, so great a gulf as might at first
sight be supposed between the words of ray text and
that terrible declaration, " Ye cannot serve God and
mammon." It all comes to a comparative estimate
of the two ends of living. No sophistry can make
them one, or confound the distinction between them.
Here, too, that wliich is born of the flesh is flesh, and
that which is bom of the spirit is spirit, But can we
not, I hear some voice reply, live both lives, and cun-
26o Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.
ningly mingle luxury, selfishness, indifference to human
welfare, with self-denial, beneficence, pity? Can we
not unite a devotion to the ideal objects of life, with
a refined indulgence in every pleasure that solicits the
senses? Undoubtedly, in your own se! f- estimate ;
but one day the Judge will come, who knows his own,
and will summarily set Eiside the sheep from the goats.
But what if there be no Judge, no great assize of all
souls, no signal retribution — but death the end of life,
one long dreamless sleep that knows no waking? Ah!
now we are at the bottom of things, and faith and
unfaith fairly face to face. I declare that there is a
Judge, because judgment is of the very stuff of life
itself: because our actions carry with them their own
retribution : because it is not necessary to await that
last day that may never dawn, to show our exist-
ence in its true colours. I know no life so utterly
futile and mistaken as one of perpetual self-pleasing.
Luxury soon ends by wearing itself out. The excite-
ment of pleasure finds, all too late, that it cannot
hasten the leaden feet of time. Pain spares no roof-
tree : death knocks at every door : loss is common to
the race. What will dainty meats and clothes of the
costliest fashion do for the pangs of cancer ? When
your child is taken from you, will the pictures on your
walls be much comfort ? Life itself, in its heyday and
in its slow decline, is not the same thing ; and you
will find your resources of physical luxury fail you
i
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God. 261
most, precisely when you stand most in need of them.
Whereas all the spiritual gifts, motives, ends, which
are the opposite of these things, have this in them,
that they belong to the very life of the soul, and last
in fullest vigour as long ais it lasts : that they are not
palled by custom, or weakened by lapse of timfe or
accomplish less for oM age than for youth. For who
that ever did well can be weary of well-doing ? What
end to the endlessness of love, what limit to the infi-
nity of duty ? And for thq sorrows that must come,
the pains that must be borne, the valley of death
through which we must needs pass, there is no other
resource than that unwearied love of God which the
most miserable of human beings never yet implored
in vain, and in communion with which no agony is
intolerable, no grief without a solace. Had we the
Cross full in vie;w, it were best for us to live, best to
die, with Christ If only we have found the kingdom
of God and His righteousness, not even the Divine
Omnipotence can add to us anything worthy to he
taken into account.
XXII.
^t ®ifts of ®oI> toit^oai ^cpftvtanxc.
Romans xi. 29:
" For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance."
^IB^HE two last words of the text are not without
^Sfg obscurity, though the translators have done no
more than reproduce a similar ambiguity in
the Greek. And the meaning is indeed sufficiently
plain from the context Paul is full of his argument —
which is of such paramount importance to him, though
it sounds old-fashioned and unreal to us — -of the sub-
stitution of the Gentiles for the people of God in the
realization of the Divine promises, and yet of the final
restoration of the Hebrews to their original place in
the favour of Jehovah. Weneed not now enter into its
tortuous windings, nor inquire how far it answers his
polemical purpose : the one thing for us to notice is
the interpretation it gives to the words which we
are considering. It is God who does not repent of
His gifts, and who never revokes His calling. The
J
The Gifts of God without Repentance: 263
bounties which Hq showers upon men are absolute,
ungrudging, unrepented of, no matter how they may
be neglected, scorned, misused ; and though those
whom He has once called are deaf to the voice of His ^
invitation, it remains valid so long as the lamp of life
burns down to its last feeble flicker. Ages come and
go ; the waves of political change sweep over the
nations ; human hearts alternately open themselves
to God, or turn away from the light of His love : but
the goodness of God stands fast for ever.
Perhaps certain common and universal blessings,
which we hardly recognize as blessings until we lose
our part in them for a while, are the most obvious
illustration of this truth. The air we breathe, the
stream that flows with babbling ripple at our feet, the
tide that rises and falls and moans for ever on our
shores, the multitudinous leaves which the fresh wind
stirs into perpetual rustle, the orderly succession of
the flowers, the clouds that chase one another across
the sky, the pomp of the day as it alternately dies
and is re-bom — all these may serve as types of a large
class of God's gifts, which are indeed precious beyond
measure to every one of us, but which are so universal,
so uninterrupted, that no man would dream of taking
them to himself. They form the steadfast background
and scenery of our lives, which would be other than
they are without them : nor are those our least happy,
our least living moments, at which we feel that nature's
264 The Gifts of God without Repentance.
sap flows in our veins also, and that we too are a
part of all we see. I am afraid that we rarely refer
these things to God's bounty at all ; they are condi-
tions of life, and we do not pause to consider that they
might have been other than they are: they are the
result of universal law, so wide in its sweep as to
exclude all consideration of individuals, rather than
magnificent examples of what I will venture to call
God's grand prodigality. His large and unrepentant
goodness, " which maketh His sun to shine upon just
and unjust, and sendeth down His rain even upon the
evil and unthankful." See how the sun flames upon
the sea, lonely of every ship, and overspreads with
evening gold the inaccessible recesses of the ice-bound
hills ! See how the orchid unfolds its strange beauties
in the pathless forest, though for years no traveller
pass that wayl There are secrets of beauty which
Nature keeps locked up in her own heart for centuries,
till at last she reveals them to the predestined eye :
as again there are others displayed from day to day,
as by a kind of divine obstinacy, to eyes that will not
see, and hearts that will not feel. But all these things
unite in making one impression. The gifts of God
are without repentance. He scatters His boundless
wealth over the earth, and who will may take it up.
He grudges nothing, He withdraws nothing; and to
each the measure of the gift is in proportion to his
capacity of receiving.
i
The Gifts of God without Repentance. 265
In these last words we catch sight of a practical
limitation of the principle which I am illustrating.
The vessels of the human spirit are not of equal
capacity : each can take only what it can hold of
what God is willing to give. To the tired day-labourer,
the signs of the sky are only an indication of the flight
of time, giving promise of the hour when the plough
shall be stayed in the furrow, and the long day's work
be done : while to Wordsworth they are the voice of
majestic Nature, the tokens of the living God, notes in
the endless anthem of revelation. We all know what
it is to have the window by which our soul opens upon
the world closed or darkened : some sickness makes
us count the beatings of our own heart, and we can
no longer hear the music of the spheres ; some over-
powering anxiety turns all our thoughts inward, and
the goodliest landscape displays itself before our dull
eyes in vain. We complain then that Nature is im-
passive, that she looks with the same unsympathetic —
I was almost going to say the same ghastly — smile
upon our most joyful hilarity and our most abject
woe; and we bitterly reflect that what we took for
community of feeling between ourselves and her, was
no more than the delusion of our own fancy. And
whatever it may be, it is all bounded by our three-
score years and ten. Grass grew, and flowers broke
into beauty, and tides rose and fell, and the sun blazed
upon the brow of day, infinite years before our eyc3
266 The Gifts of God without Repentance.
looked upon them ; nor will the closing of our eyes
affect for a moment that magnificent procession of
natural laws and forces of which beauty is the outward
expression. We are on a higher plane, we arc wont
to say, than that of Nature, inanimate and animate.
But she remains ; while the seeing eye, the hearing car,
the interpreting brain, pass away. It is the strangest
thing that the very places with which living we are
most closely identified, will not miss us when we are
dead. From the natural point of view, it seems as
if the lower the organism, the greater its faculty of
permanence ; as the rock, which feels neither wind,
nor sun, nor rain, nor frost, in the dull impassibility of
its eternal existence, remains to bear witness to the
days when the elements were seething in primeval
strife, and the foundations of the earth were firmly
laid.
And this suggests to us another thought, that in
some of God's gifts may be a quality of boundedness
which nevertheless does not interfere with the large
and unrepentant character of His liberality. And this
natural limitation may spring either from the fixed
and irrevocable conditions of human life, or be justified
by considerations in connection with His providence
on which we are able to lay only a conjectural grasp.
For perhaps it is the diflliculty of my position, that
while I am asserting that God's gifts are without
repentance, all experience seems to show that He
i
L
The Gifts of God withoitt Repentance. 267
constantly repents of them, and withdraws as freely
as He gives. Is not all our life an alternation of gain
and loss ? Is there anything that we can call our own ?
May we not at any moment be, not invited, but com-
pelled, to resign into God's hands whatever we hold
most precious? !t seems as if nothing that man can
do or be were worth God's keeping : " the world fulfils
itself in many ways," and He breaks remorselessly the
human instrument of His will. No tongue is so elo-
quent that He will not reduce it to silence : no life of
such account for love or service that He will not still
its pulses ; no gift so indispensable to man or woman
that He will not take it away, and command that
the experiment of existence shall be tried without it.
Amid the awe-struck silence which follows these signal
strokes of His hand, I seem to hear in the quiet voice
which drops from heaven, the words, "Be still, and
know that I am God" — a warning, which will not be
slighted, that His thoughts are not as our thoughts,
nor His ways as our ways ; and with the warning, too,
an indication that perhaps, after all, His method of
blessing may not be the same as ours, and that there
may be deeper mysteries in His gifts than we know.
What shall we say, for instance, of two of God's
greatest gifts — youth and beauty ? Are we to cry out
against His goodness because it lies in the nature of
things that either must fade ? Talk we never so wisely,
they are the choicest fruit out of the orchard of heaven:
268 The Gifts of God ■witkout Repentance,
for these we would pay any possible price : to have the
world once more before them, with a tide of resistless
energy flowing through their veins, and a face and
bearing that at once conciliate all love, is what the
old desire beyond all else, though they acknowledge it
all the while to be the impossible dream of fancy. But
are we to deny that God's gifts are without repentance
because this cannot be ? Is it a stigma upon His libe-
rality that no man can live his life twice over? Or
can we not go a little deeper in search of moral con-
siderations that may redress the balance ? A dissolute
youth — a youth that spends itself for nought — a youth
that passes into manhood with physical energies
already beginning to fail, and no manly qualities as
yet ripening — a youth whose freshness is smirched
with foul self-indulgence — a youth which has wandered
away from the true path of life so far that return to
it must be the bitter labour of years, — who would
exchange for this the remnant, small though it may
be, of days well spent, and the slackening tide of ener-
gies that have always been nobly employed ? And
it may be that our ideal of beauty, too, changes as we
grow old. A bright young face, with its eager gaze
upon life, is always a pleasant thing to look upon, and,
in spite of all mock-wise adages that beauty is only
skin-deep, the loveliest thing of God's handiwork.
Eyes must be dull, hearts must be cold indeed, that
are too old to feel its charm. But though the eyes
The Gifts of God without Repentance. 269
may lose the brightness that was never dimmed with
tears, though wrinkles of anxiety and sorrow may
plough their way across the waxen smoothness of the
cheek, I can conceive of a higher and more ethereal
beauty that shall be the result : a beauty that tells of
unexhausted and triumphant love that has tried itself
almost to the death and is unspeakably content: a
serenity that betokens the full solution of life's problem :
a hope that cannot admit the possibility that it should
ever be shamed. So there is a youth which mounts
towards, and is lost in, the life of God which is ever
young, and a beauty which reveals itself more and
more as it puts on the lineaments of the Eternal
Loveliness.
I am minded to say something in this connection
of God's intellectual gifts to men. I suppose there
are those who very closely associate these with them-
selves : they think of their own labour, study, self-
training, and the result seems to them as much their
own as the money which they earn or the fame which
they win. I own that I cannot help taking an oppo-
site view. When I think how different each man is
from every other : how his intellectual capacities and
peculiarities belong to him from his birth : how these
are brought into one coherent energy by circumstances
over which to a large extent he has no control — I am
compelled to look upon the intellectual as being as
much God's handiwork as the physical man, and the
270 The Gifts of God without Repentance.
two as bound together by one thread of divine purpose.
It is no personal presumption on my part, but a legi-
timate deduction from my theory of life, that I have
long heard the voice of God in my ears exhorting me
to make the best of what strength there is in me,
to preach with what force and persuasiveness I can
the things that seem to me to make for truth and
righteousness, to stand in a careless and often ungodly
world for God and His kingdom. With what ineiifi-
cient industry, often with what shameful cowardice, I
have fulfilled my mission, none knows so well as I : in
spite of many failures, God has been gracious to me
far beyond my deserts. But when there has come a
time at which silence has been my portion instead of
speech, and I have not known whether I should ever
be able to speak again : when the plan of my life
has been, as it were, prematurely broken, and all that
seemed left to me was to shape the fragments as best
I could into something new — shall I complain of the
unrepentant goodness of God, or deem His liberality
less large than once I thought, because this element of
limitation was in my powers from the first, and it was
only my presumption that bade me think that I could
put forth unimpaired strength for ever? The earth
closed only a few days ago over the body of a friend
and brother who was younger than I, and assuredly
inferior to no man in faithfulness to his Master. Why
should one be taken, and another left ? Ah ! there is
i
The Gifts of God without Repentance, 271
no repentance in the gifts of God : to one He says,
" Speak on yet a little ;" to another, " Hold thy peace
for evermore :" and perhaps when one remembers
imperfections of apprehension, and dulness of insight,
and slips of the tongue, silence is the better part Only
with Him there is no wrong.
But there is one thing, it will be said, in which my
theory breaks down decisively — the loss of friends.
The gifts of God without repentance ! Why does He
allow one human being to grow into another's heart,
and from that growth to spring all the sweetest flowers
of intercourse, all the noblest fruits of character, and
then in an instant tear it all up, leaving only a ghastly,
gaping chasm which can never close again ? I need
not recapitulate the cases which the sad experience of
every day makes familiar to us : God's best gift to
man is a faithful friend, and he holds none by so
insecure a tenure. We meet the blow in different
ways, according to the differences of our nature ; for
the most part, I think, looking to time as an anodyne
which will do its slow work if only we be patient, and
letting, as it were, the healing hand of nature pass
over us. But how can we more accurately describe
this giving and taking away, than by saying that God
has repented of His gift ? For once, surely. He has
not given unreservedly. Why dash the cup from our
lips at the moment at which we tasted all its sweetness?
But what if the hour has arrived (I put forward
272 The Gifts of God without Repentanu.
my solution of the problem only conjecturally) at
which the cup would be sweet to us no longer ? Is
not our complaint based upon the assumption that it
would be well for us if all things always continued in
one stay? May not there be here also a limitation
which God sees, though it be hidden from us ? I can
conceive it possible that it might be well for us to
suffer the interruption of the dearest love that ever
stirred our hearts. May it not be that the friend who
passes behind the veil has for the present fulfilled his
functions to us ? If life be, as we believe, one long
education, conducted by many methods, effected by
many instruments, why should we charge against the
goodness of God what may very well be among its
most signal proofs ? Vacant places in earthly service
exist only to earthly eyes : God takes a servant into
the hierarchy of heavenly work, only when He sees
that his toil is here at an end. And if a friend leaves
us, does it not mean that his earthly relation to us
also has suffered completion ? It is a hard doctrine
in its application to certain cases : it declares that
earthly work is virtually over at a moment when it
seems to be most crying in its demands : it says to
hearts that are palpitating with unfulfilled passion,
" Be still : it is enough." But in spite of this, I cannot
resist the conclusion that even these best and most
personal gifts of God are without repentance : that He
knows what, and how much, and for how long, He
The Gifts of God without Repentance. 273
gives : and that when He takes away, the stroke seems
premature, not to His wisdom and bounty, but only
to our Ignorance.
I have spoken only weak and tentative words, and
I know that there are gaps in my argument which
any critical spirit will readily* find. For there are two
thoughts which in our relations to God contend toge-
ther — ^the thought of love and the thought of law ; the
one making us personal recipients of His bounty, the
other bidding us share in a world-wide distribution of
benefit And of the second, which is true as the first,
though often hard to reconcile with it, I have said
nothing. I have left with you but one thought : note
it well, for it is not only true but consoling : God
grudges us nothing that He gives, and all His gifts
are without repentance.
xxrii.
C^e Calling of dob init^oui lltpentance.
Romans xi. 29 :
" For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance."
^p SPOKE last Sunday of the gifts of God that
^1^ are without repentance ; my subject to-day is
the calling which, once made, is never revoked.
As I have already remarked, Paul's historical allu-
sion in this place is perfectly plain. He is thinking
of Abraham, who was called from beyond the great
river to become the progenitor of a peculiar people of
God : of Jacob, in whom, as apart from Esau, the pro-
mise was confirmed : of all the spiritual privileges, all
the mysterious expectations, that were the portion of
Israel. It is only when our thoughts take a distinc-
tively theological hue, and we fall half- unconsciously
into the language of an older day, that we speak of
the Hebrews as a peculiar people : we read their
history otherwise than they themselves read it : we
The Calling of God. 275
recognize the part played in tfie advance of civilization
by all the great ancient nations, and are by no means
disposed to confine to Palestine the watchful favour
of God. But we cannot help seeing that there is a
natural as well as an artificial sense in which Israel
was a peculiar people ; and when we recollect that his
function was to witness to the world of the unity and
of the righteousness of God : to protest alike against
multiplicity of deities, and worship of graven images,
and ascription to gods of the worst vices of men : in a
word, to carry in his bosom the germs of spiritual
religion, and to foster them into life and growth — it
only seems a natural use of speech to say that God
called him, and separated him from the nations, and
gave him a word to utter, a work to do. To trace the
living thread of connection through the Old Testament,
to put the great thoughts which it contains in their
natural order of development, to restore the sequence
which tradition and prejudice have confused, is a task
which critical science finds just now very difficult ; but
the main facts are clear enough. There were periods
of spiritual activity and periods of spiritual sluggish-
ness : sudden outbursts of prophetic zeal, gradual
fadings away into dulness of insight, commonness of
life : but when the tide rose, to what a height did not
its waters leap, and all the air was freshened and grew
keen ! We have no language even yet but that of pro-
phet and psalmist to express our highest aspiration,
T 2
276 The Calling of God
our deepest contrition, our heartiest praise, our most
passionate loyalty to righteousness. And then there
came long ages, in which, when prophecy had gradu-
ally died away into silence, the legal was substituted
for the poetical conception of religion ; and for Isaiah
singing of the immutable laws of righteousness, and
the Evangelical Prophet announcing afar off the work
and sorrows of the Servant of the Lord, there were
Rabbis teaching in their schools a complicated system
of ceremonial traditions, and Scribes overlaying the
law with superfluous comment, and Pharisees putting
upon the people's shoulders burthens greater than
they could bear. But the calling of God is without
repentance. Israel, once His messenger, is His mes-
senger always. The message may drop from faithless
lips, may be obliterated from the unbelieving heart,
but the gift is always there, and the possibility. And
so out of the schools of the Rabbis, from the very
midst of Pharisee and Scribe, suddenly spoke one who,
though only a carpenter's son of Galilee, was also the
last and greatest of the Prophets, and the music of his
voice entranced the world. Nations too easily forget
God's calling : but He never revokes it
Were I to seek to illustrate this idea by modern
instances, I might not only be accused of talking
politics in the pulpit, but I should inevitably occupy
ground where difference of opinion would meet me at
every step. Do you recollect the phrase, "effectual
wiikout Repentance, 277
calling"? It belongs to a very different theological
region from that in which we live and move — a region
which, I believe, is to all modem thinkers, no matter
how deeply religions they may be, growing dim and
distant It brings back to us the idea of God, in the
uncontrolled exercise of His will, predestinating cer-
tain of His human children to eternal life, and in the
same act condemning all the rest to eternal death.
There is the great mass of men, outwardly indistin-
guishable the one from the other in their relations
to the tremendous realities of another world, though
separated by the widest diversities of moral aspiration
and achievement, which have, how^ever, nothing to do
with their future fate. Except to the eye of Eternal
Wisdom, there is no star, the promise of future bless-
edness, upon the foreheads of the chosen ^ there is
no black mark, the sign of unutterable woe to eome,
upon the faces of the rejected. But God calls His
own with an effectual calling. Yet, alas for the irony
of His ways ! it is His will that all should be called ;
and the messengers go far and wide, bearing with them
the promise of the Cross, till, if it may be, every human
ear has heard it. But by the majority it is heard only
to be rejected ; or if they think they understand and
accept it, they are under a fatal delusion : you cannot
enlarge the roll of the elect, though it be only by one :
and God's will, registered in the ages before time was,
and without reference to human striving and yearning.
The Calling of God
stands fast immutably. The calling is effectual only
to the chosen. To all the rest it is a hollow mockery
of grace.
I am not going to criticise this doctrine : I will only
point out, as I have pointed out before, that in those
who believe that God has called them, it helps to pro-
duce a very strenuous character. For a man to believe
that God has given him a message to deliver, a work
to do, and that till the task is accomplished he will
be strengthened, upborne, guided, saved, will surely,
if anything can, bear him victorious through the ills,
and lead him through the labyrinths of life. Such
men will certainly have their hours of doubt, hesitation,
even abandonment : faith cannot always be maintained
at its highest pitch ; the spirit comes and goes at its
good pleasure ; there are moments at which they ask
themselves whether their whole life be not a delusion,
and the calling which has been its inspiration, a snara
And there have been cases, too, in which this strong
conviction has nourished a strenuous, but not a scru-
pulous type of goodness ; as if the nobleness of the
main object of life, and the clearness with which it
was held in view, sanctified all means of attaining
it How should the servant of God commit a wrong
in doing God's work ? What better thing than the
conscious fulfilment of the Divine purpose ? But with
these drawbacks taken into account, much of the
world's hardest and best work will be found to have
withoui Repentance. 279
been done by men whose strength lay in the conviction
that God had chosen them, and called them, and fitted
them for His service, and would not forsake them till
the end came. And here is the explanation of the
seeming paradox that Calvinism at once crushes the
human will into nothingness under the majesty and
force of the Divine Will, and yet produces men of whom
an unconquerable resolution, a patience that cannot
be wearied, are the distinguishing characteristics.
But this is the election which carries with it repro-
bation as its accompanying negative. This is the
calling which necessarily involves rejection with it
Is there, then, no other calling? Must we suppose
that there are human ears utterly deaf to the invitation
of God ? Must we adopt what I cannot but call the
revolting hypothesis, that the Divine Voice comes ,to
all, and with it, to some, an inability to hear, imposed
by the irresistible Will ? We no sooner begin to con-
sider these things, than we are caught in a kind of
particularism, which is interwoven with the stuff of
Christianity as it actually manifests itself along the
ages. We think of Israel as enjoying the special
favour of God, while the greater nations lie in spi-
ritual darkness. We think of prophets as of men
set apart to bring a divine message, and of the great
mass of their countrymen as having no higher privilege
than to listen and obey. We think of the Bible as of
a closed book, essentially different in kind from all
Tke Calling of God
other literature ; the one, the word of God — the other,
the word of man : that, final, authoritative, eternal —
this, tentative, fallible, open to criticism, liable to
reversal. And so, in spite of theories of the universal
influence of the Spirit which all churches hold, and
which, logically interpreted, ought to place every soul
in direct communication with God, we shrink from the
idea that every man is called with a calling of which
God never repents, that the highest and completest
consecration of self to a divine service is possible to
every one of us, and that if our life falls away into the
flatness and commonness of self-regard in which no
mysterious voices echo, on which play no unearthly
gleams, it is not that no word of God has ever come
to us, but that we will not listen to it and obey.
That all this is contrary, almost painfully contrary,
to our usual speech on such subjects, I well know.
When a young man devotes his untried powers, and
all the unspoiled enthusiasm of his age, to the work
of the Christian ministry, we think of the act as one
of self-consecration, in obedience to a secret mandate
of the Spirit ; though even here our language is often
less reverent than our thought, and we lightly talk of
professional considerations, and greet with a smile of
goodnatured scorn what looks like any compliance
on his part with common worldly motives. But why
should we not speak of a divine call to the work of a
chemist or a physicist ? The hidden laws and stnic-
L
ture of Nature early affect the imagination of some
bright -brained youth : of every kind of knowledge,
this is the most fascinating to him : he puts all his
soul into the task of learning what men already know,
and grown to manhood himself, he starts on an inde-
pendent Journey of discovery. I will take such a life
at the highest : I will assume that his leading motive
is neither fame nor profit, but the investigation of the
truth : I will suppose that he takes a genuine pleasure
in the enlargement of the kingdom of human know-
ledge, and thinks years of toil well spent for such a
reward. We are treading here very near the confines
of the religious life, even though our investigator
hardly names the Holy Name : love of truth, industry,
self-denial, patience, abstinence from coarse and com-
mon pleasures, the love of an ideal life, are qualities
which he must have if he is to answer to my descrip-
tion. But how susceptible is such a life to religious
inspiration and illustration ! How fully, how easily,
does it answer to the idea of a divine calling ! For if
such a man were happy enough to be able to believe
that this, and no other, were the work for which God
had given him his peculiar powers : if he felt that in
deciphering the secrets of Nature's book he were
indeed reading the will and character of God in words
of no ambiguous meaning, — what a severity of ethical
self-restraint might not be given him, what a power of
growth into rounded strength and complete efficiency !
AnO if he were convinced, as I am convinced, that
this too is an age of revelation, in which God is speak-
ing to man in the very success with which He permits
him to explore the secrets of His ways, he might
humbly take his place among the prophets of the
Highest, and feel that it were not profane to regard
his abstract calculations, his most daring hypotheses,
as the words of the living God.
But all this, it may be said, is not incongruous with
any form of what may be called the ideal life. The
painter, the sculptor, the architect, each in his degree,
may keep before bis eyes the Eternal Loveliness, which
is at once the archetype and consummation of all
earthly beauty ; and so far as he is able to look upon
his vocation as a divine calling, and to do his work
under a sense of responsibility to God, will his life be
sweet and strong, and a reflection of sweetness and
strength visible in his works. Still, what of common
avocations, daily duties, in which there is no ideal
element ? Are there indeed such ? Are there any
lives on which the light of heaven does not sometimes
shine, except indeed those which wilfully love the dark-
ness ? A full half of the population in any civilized
country is chiefly concerned with what, I fear, are
beginning to be considered the unimportant interests
and duties of home. I have nothing to do now with
desires and aspirations which take women, especially
young women, so largely into independent spheres of
i
without Repentance. 283
action, nor does the extent of my personal s>'mpathies
with this kind of social movement matter to my pre-
sent ailment By all means let them go where duty
takes them, and with strenuous heart and fixed will
bring to some successful solution the problem of their
life 1 What I care to insist upon now is, that there is
no condition of life in connection with which it is
easier to think of a divine calling than that of a good
wife and mother. It is concerned, I know, with an
infinitude of petty details, often monotonous, some-
times irksome : to perform its duties successfully re-
quires rigorous self-denial, constant self-restraint: it
fills but a small place in the eye of the world. But
its ruling spirit is love : its ample reward is love : and
love is only another name for God. If peace and love
are in themselves the very atmosphere of heaven, then
is a happy home the nearest likeness of heaven which
we can realize on earth. And the denizens of heaven
are the angels.
Hitherto I have spoken of divine calling in connec-
tion with the whole stuff of a man's life, the choice
of his occupation, the daily employment of his powers.
Nor do I believe that there is any way of life at all in
which it is lawful for a conscientious man to engage,
to which this idea is not applicable, and to which it
will not supply strength and nobleness and sweetness.
But there are what I may call the side channels of
life, to which it applies just as much. Is it fanciful.
284 The Calling of God
for instance, for the merchant who employs the full
strength of his powers in being a good merchant, in
ruling his counting-house kindly and justly, and in
spreading the influence of even-handed integrity all
over the world, to believe that God has called him to
some religious or charitable work among the poor of
his own city — or should he not obey the call in the same
spirit of serious self-consecration in which the prophet
perf'orms his lofty function ? Or if the artizan, tired
at the end of his long day's work, still feels an impulse
to try to do some good at the night-school or the
boys' club, shall he not believe that his heart is moved
by the Spirit of God, and that, though by the humblest
gate, he is entering the highest service ? And the
calling of God, like His gifts, is without repentance.
He relaxes no responsibility, He discharges no servant
The heart that He has once touched is bound to His
behests for ever : no night, not even the night of death,
darkens upon His day of toil. It is we who grow weary
of well-doing : it is we who delude ourselves that we
have done enough, and that it is time for younger
labourers to take our place. I cannot associate the
idea of faithfulness with temporary service ; there
seems to me to be no stranger and sadder thing than
that a man should feel the deep delight of having his
hand upon the plough of God, and be willing, though
life and strength still last, to take it off. True service
is eternal service.
without Repentance. 285
Listen, then, I beseech you, brothers and sisters, for
the voice of God speaking to your souls. None can
hear it for another : to each individual spirit it comes
in tones which each alone can recognize as divine.
Perhaps some chance phrase of Scripture, a line of a
hymn familiar from childhood, some word, fraught
with deeper issues than I know, dropped from my
own lips, may have been to-day an arrow that has
found its mark : or, again, to-morrow, a suddenly re-
curring opportunity, or the solicitations of a friend —
what else we know not — may swiftly reveal life in a
fresh light, and put a new vigour into the performance
of duty. Search your memories, and see if there be
not some old aspiration unfulfilled, some scheme of
holier and stronger life put aside for the moment, some
heavenly vision to which you have hitherto been dis-
obedient : the calling of God is without repentance.
He called you then. He calls you now. Of one thing
be sure — that He never meant your life to be a dull
round of monotonous duties dully performed ; still less
a succession of poor pleasures, of frivolous excitements,
upon which weariness always waits, and whereof dust
and ashes are the end. He asks you, every day, every
hour, to make it a divine service, animated by the lof-
tiest hopes, sustained by the noblest motives ; in which
you cannot grow weary, for you will be re-invigorated
by the freshness of the Eternal Strength ; in which
you cannot fail, for you labour on the side of Omni-
286 The Calling of God.
potence. He bids you note that all toil for the triumph
of His will directly makes for human happiness ; for
His will is justice, mercy, peace, and these are the
pillars upon which rests the welfare of mankind. And
whoso serves Him truly is paid amplest wages, but in
the incorruptible coin of the kingdom of heaven, which
is neither mine nor thine, but the common wealth of
all God's children.
XXIV.
h Bod's f OSS of (
Song of Solomon iii. i, a:
" By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul lovelh : I
sought him, but I found him not I will rise now, and go
about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will
seek him whom my soul loveth : I sought him, but 1 found
^^flffi AM going to follow the bad example of almost
^1^ all commentators, at least since St. Bernard,
and to put a mystic meaning on these words
of the old Hebrew love-song. There can be no harm
in doing so with our eyes open, so long as we dis-
tinctly acknowledge that we first put into the words
the meaning which we afterwards draw out from them,
and do not ascribe our spiritual refinements to a poet
who, if foolish critics would only think so, is simple
and straightforward enough.
My subject is the soul's temporary loss of God.
We are very apt to have confused notions of what
it is to know God. I seldom hear the first words of
288 The SouPs Loss of God.
the creed, " I believe in God, the Father Almighty,"
without wondering how many different things they
mean to the multitude which repeats them with one
accord apparently so hearty. To one, they are the
expression of simple, child-like belief, which cannot
conceive of hesitation, which has never known a doubt;
for another, they give words to an intellectual conclu-
sion somewhat hardly arrived at, and not yet free from
remembrance of its methods ; in the mouth of a third,
they are a careless affirmation, springing from no
inner fountain of faith, and without effect on the life ;
while a fourth may utter them with a kind of hesitat-
ing reverence, as indeed too august for human lips,
and containing a truth which no finite mind can fully
grasp. But even when you give to the phrase " belief
in God" its highest and best meaning, there is still a
felt transition from it to knowledge of God. A human
soul cannot know God without believing in Him ; but
it may only too well believe in Him without knowing
Him. Always to feel His presence : always to have
upon the spirit the touch of His awful hand : always
to be able to speak with Him face to face : always to
throw upon Him the burthen of pain, or sorrow, or
anxiety, which is greater than we can bear : always to
believe that all things work together for good to those
who love Him, and, loving Him, always to abide the
end in patience, — this is to know God. But it is
manifest that of the hundreds of thousands who are
The SouPs Loss of God. 289
willing to cry loudly, " I believe in God, the Father
Almighty," only a few here and there rise to this height
of perfect knowledge and absolute trust.
But what I want to point out to you is, that those
who have risen to it for a while are not always able
to maintain themselves on so lofty an eminence. And
when this is so, the words of the text describe their
situation with quaint directness : " By night upon my
bed I sought him whom my soul loveth : I sought him,
but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about
the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will
seek him whom my soul loveth : I sought him, but I
found him not." It is a strange thing, this withdrawal
of God from the soul. There is no lack of affectionate
yearning, of awful aspiration : it may very well be
that the circumstances are such that the presence of
the Great Companion, the conscious recourse to the
love of God, would be an unspeakable boon. It might
almost seem as if God were hardest to find when we
needed Him most. Is, then, the promise withdrawn,
Draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you ?
And yet when this cloud is over a man's life, it is
as if the heavens were as brass over his head, or as
though his most passionate prayers dispersed them-
selves in empty air. " I sought him upon my bed" —
this terrible loneliness envelopes the soul in the night-
watches ; and when it goes out into the city, and
silently tells its tale in the streets and in the broad
U
The Soic-Ps Loss of God.
ways, the company of men brings no relief, and it
seems as if the busy world without, as well as its own
quiet world within, were empty of God. And yet He
is always the soul's Beloved, without whom it knows
not how to live : whose presence is life and strength
and consolation, whose absence is solitude indeed.
And observe that this is not the case so common in
our own generation — the case which we have often
studied and lamented — of one who loses God slowly
and gradually, but for ever. It may be physical science,
it may be material philosophy, it may be a keen sense
of the world's wrongs and woes, it may be a general
self-surrender to the critical spirit of the age, that
drives a man into unbelief ; the process, in one form
or other, is constantly going on. And in many cases
it is accomplished with throes and pangs not to be
numbered : a loosening of the whole foundations of
life : a necessity of finding new props and stays : an
entrance into a colder, less hopeful, more self-sustained
existence. But a man who loses sight of the supreme
object of faith in this way never expects to see it again,
but sets himself to grow used to the darkness and the
loneliness : to believe that the former radiance was a
delusion, and that all he can reckon on for the future
is "the light of common day." God is not his soul's
Beloved : if ever it was so, the dream has vanished
away : he makes up his mind that lower loves, meaner
affections, are all that are henceforth possible to him.
uk
The SouPs Loss of God. 29 \
and learns to be content with them. Whereas the
peculiarity of the case which we are considering is,
that what the soul has lost, it once had, and hopes to
have again : God was to it the sole reality, though
now it seems as if He had disappeared into the dark-
ness ; and it marvels sadly at its own bereavement
The truth, then, is, that this is a phenomenon, not of
unfaith, but of faith. I do not suppose that any but
devout and ardent spirits know what it is. To miss
God, you must first have lived with Him : to find His
absence a consuming sorrow, you must have felt His
presence a real joy. People who say their prayers
conventionally, go on saying them conventionally to
the end : no tides of Godward emotion rise high or
fall back far in their soul : no period of Divine inter-
course is fuller or emptier of blessing than another.
They have no doubts, because, in the real sense of the
word, they never had any faith : as one who lived in
a land where it was always twilight could imagine
neither the glory of a summer noon nor the black-
ness of a starless night. But it is a very sad and
perplexing fact — and if your own experience tells you
nothing, take it on my word that it is a fact — when
a soul that is accustomed to live in the presence
of God, and to utter confiding prayers, not into the
void, but to a Father's heart, finds all at once that the
certainty which has been the mainstay of its life is
no longer certain ; and that with the utmost desire to
292 The SouVs Loss of God.
be as it once was, the world is suddenly empty of
supernatural realities. Faith still feels after God, if
haply it may find Himi prayer ascends, passionate
as of yore, in hope that the answer will not always be
delayed ; there is an eager going back upon remem-
bered trusts, a clinging recollection of better days.
But for the time it avails nothing. There is no answer
to prayer: there is not even a feeling that prayer
deserves an answer. Reason will not help ; it suggests
more doubts than it answers ; and the soul that has
once known its Beloved, is sorrowfully aware that the
most triumphant argument will bring it no nearer the
goal of its desires. There is nothing for it but to wait
till a season of refreshing descends from the presence
of the Lord.
The records of religious biography are full of the
fact of which I am speaking. I do not suppose that
any one ever had a clearer and closer grasp of reli-
gious realities than Martin Luther. Not only was
faith the central point of his system of theology, but
it was the mainspring of his life. He lived and moved
and had his being in the supernatural world. So
definite were his perceptions, so confident his utter-
ances, that, from the standpoint of a newer time, we
feel almost inclined to criticise his habitual religious
mood as deficient in the sense of awe, the apprehen-
sion of mystery. His whole life-history bears witness
to this intensity of faith : how else, except in an over-
The SomPs Loss of God. 293
whelming conviction of certainty, should he have set
himself against a hostile Church and world, and dared
to break the traditions of ten centuries ? Observe, I
am not holding him up to admiration as the perfect
model of what a saint and a reformer should be : some
of the matters in which he has often been found fault
with were the defects of his qualities : what he saw,
he saw so clearly as to be impatient of others* differing
insight : despotic in action, arrogant in controversy.
But the point is, that this man, to whom the things of
the unseen were habitually nearer than those of the
visible world, was subject all his life to recurrent
seasons of faithlessness and consequent despondency.
His insight suddenly forsook him. If there were a
God, he could not find Him, or found Him only to
encounter His awful condemnation. All the religious
truths of which he had been most certain were covered
with a cloud of doubt The motives that had governed
his past life he no longer recognized as efficient : he
did not know whether he had not been doing the
devil's work instead of God's. If he turned to Scrip-
ture, it no longer seemed to confirm, but to condemn
him : only a phrase here and there penetrated the
crust that covered his soul with a healing balm of
consolation. His own prayers seemed to come back
to him, not only unanswered, but rejected, and he was
fain piteously to implore the prayers of his friends.
It was so to the very end of his life : no period of
294 ^^ Soul's Loss of God.
spiritual sunshine was so long and bright, that it was
not liable to be broken by a period of spiritual night
And Luther's experience might be paralleled by that
of many other great and passionate souls : it is as if,
in some natures, faith and unfaith were obverse and
reverse of one medal : now they rejoice in God with
all their strength, and again they seek their Beloved
and find Him not
We must be careful to note that this is a human,
not a divine phenomenon. We cannot afford to lose
sight of the general principle that God is ever waiting
to be gracious, and that He never fails to respond to
any genuine movement of a human heart towards
Him. The fact of which I am speaking is, in a certain
sense, analogous to the impossibility of finding God
under which unrepentant sin labours. You cannot go
to God in prayer with a conscious sin weighing on
your heart, a sin which you know to be a sin, yet for
which you are not sorry, which you are unwilling to
give up ; the words may form themselves upon your
h'ps, but you know as you utter them that they are
words only, and will not find God. Yet if you are
thus excluded from the Divine Presence, the act of
exclusion is your own : the door of the presence-
chamber is shut against you because you have not
chosen to comply with the indispensable conditions
of admission. And so in the case of which I am
speaking, in which no moral barrier divides the soul
Bki
i
TJie SouPs Loss of God. 295
from God, in which the soul passionately desires God,
yet cannot find Him, the reason must lie in some
hidden coldness and dryness of spirit, some self-cen-
tredness of which we are not conscious, some past
unfaithfulness which corrupts our faith without our
knowing it. It is not that God withdraws Himself
from us, but that we unhappily, though all uncon-
sciously, do not seek Him as He would and where
He would be sought. And when again, after a while,
the happy intercourse is restored — for the essence of
the case is that it is only interrupted, not destroyed —
when prayer is easy and natural, and the Divine Pre-
sence again illumines our life, and a childlike trust
once more takes the burthen of our cares and anxieties
off our own shoulders, — the reason is, that we have
again found the way which we did not know that we
had missed, and are able to offer to God the homage
of a pure and humble heart.
And yet it is a divine phenomenon too. On any
spiritual theory of religion, it is hard to say what, in
the inner motions of the human soul, is divine and
what is human : " as many as are led by the Spirit of
God, they are the children of God," is a principle of
universal application. And in the same way as it is
a most important law of the spiritual universe, which
we must ascribe to God Himself, that the impenitent
soul is self-excluded from the Divine Presence, we are
justified in believing that this recurrent loss of God,
296 The SouPs Loss of God.
however deep in the recesses of human incapacity its
causes may lie, is a part of His general dealing with
His children, and belongs to His method of spiritual
education. Critics differ greatly as to the nature of
PauPs thorn in the flesh ; nor, in the absence of
evidence, is it ever likely that their doubts will be
iresolved. But whatever it may have been, the method
of its ethical and spiritual working is perfectly plain.
It rebuked all growing self-confidence. It drove him
back upon a divine fountain of strength. It forced
upon him the conviction that all human courage and
constancy are founded upon trust It compelled him
to rejoice with trembling, and to dare with fear. So
I can conceive that Luther came out of one of his
"Anfechtungen" with a deep thankfulness for the once
more dawning light of faith, a fresh sense of his own
incapacity and inconstancy, a new belief in the inex-
haustible goodness of God. We hardly know what
God is to our spirits till He seems for a time to have
abandoned them. We are not fit for perpetual sun-
shine : we need the discipline of the night and the
storm.
But when the night is actually upon us, what then ?
Shall we pour out our hearts to God, even though
there be no answer ? or shall we wait patiently, silently,
till the morning dawns? I am supposing that the
special difficulty which we are considering is not, at
least in the first degree, an intellectual one. Whatever
The SouVs Loss of God. 297
reason we ever had for believing in God, we have still.
Our mind has not lost its grasp of the argumentative
facts of the case. We should shrink with as much
horror as at any other time from the affirmation that
we did not believe. Our difficulty — ^which is increased
rather than lessened by the fact of our continual belief
— is, that we cannot find Him whom yet we know
to exist, and whose touch upon our souls has been
aforetime so full of power. And so, saddening as it
may be, it seems to me that it is well to obey the
natural impulse of a devout spirit, and to wrestle with
God for the boon which for the moment He refuses.
There will be intei-vals of relief, gleams of light, snatches
of consolation. There will be recollections of past
struggles and past victories. There will be a looking
back to days that were all sunshine. There will be a
strong underlying faith in God's universal goodness
to His children. And when at last " a light surprises
the Christian as he sings," or prays, or waits quietly
upon God, or labours, though in darkness, for the
kingdom, he recognizes, with joy and thankfulness
unspeakable, that
It is the Lord who rises
With healing on His wings !
So we fare on, brethren, in the spiritual as in the
natural life, through alternate night and day. As I
have already hinted, it is the great and passionate
souls who feel this the most keenly, because they have
X
The Soufs Loss of God.
penetrated most deeply into the heart of the reb'gious
mystery. If, on the ore hand, they sometimes lay
hold of God with a force and insight denied to weaker
spirits— on the other, they feel how His infinite awe
and mystery elude all human grasp, how unsearchable
are His Judgments and His ways past finding out ;
and it seems as if their very faith were an act of pre-
sumption, and He essentially beyond the reach of
human ken. For supernatural realities, if I may so
speak, avenge themselves upon those who hold them
in too close and clear a grasp by retiring into the
mystery which is their native element, and leaving
the soul to its own incapacity. I sometimes think
that we may be too familiar with the Infinite, and
claim too large a knowledge of the Unknown and the
Unknowable. And so we may be driven to seek Him
whom our soul loveth, upon our bed, in the silence and
solitude of night, or in the streets and on the broad
ways where men most do congregate, and be compelled
to return with the sad confession, "I sought Him, but
I found Hira not." Yet patience, patience, O sad
soul ! and He will be found. He hears the prayers
which seem to awake no echo of divine acceptance.
He marks the sorrowful aspirations of a disappointed
heart. He accepts the work for the kingdom which
is done in the twilight of dutifulness. The moment
may be long delayed, but it will come, and the joy of
it will outweigh the sorrow overpast. "As the hart
J
The SouVs Loss of God.
299
panteth after the water- brooks, so panteth my soul
after Thee, O God ! My soul thirsteth for God, for
the living God : when shall I come and appear before
God ? . . . . Why art thou cast down, O my soul ? and
why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in
God : for I shall yet praise Him who is the health of
my countenance and my God !"
Frinted by C. Greeu & Son, 178, Strand.
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