ogee A Bio Kee es ey * PGS EES 7: uy acges ENN as Sees es 3 AS id Phy ny Meas ae yh punky aes Sag Ses pes p-<-n4 oe . : % ¥ ’ $ : as : Oa AS by S Bare PS, Nana nat Sees ES c a te! ES! Sere Pte ae ve. vate ZV Aon, a, ed Ge = Sibi fen pcs dar cea ep ee, Ee pois » = ee oA mS abody, Xibrary. a sREY TATED REGU LAT IONS. ) be taken at atime. - ieee oe the books wanted must a aud the figures made so as to be easi Legian rep out two weeks, anless 2 ‘herwise uf . L silt not } fare until the next. lib- : Aas i reported to the Librarian. snd the time specified by euch day it is so Te- eee ig | toe + ae qageate ©! | WRESTLING AND WAITING SERMONS ei 252 Sy, 050. W2Z2W JOHN| F. W. WARE : : “Hold in, hold on, and hold out!” | J. row. W. BOSTON GEORGE H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET 1882 CoPyRIGHT, 1882, By GEORGE H. ELLIS. - INTRODUCTION. Joun FoTHERGILL WaTERHOUSE Ware, the son of Henry Ware, Jr., and Elizabeth Watson Waterhouse, was born in Boston, Aug. 31, 1818, and died in Milton, Heb: 26, 1851. A eraduate of Harvard College in the class of 1838, and of the Cambridge Divinity School in 1842, he was minister of Unitarian churches in Fall River, _Cambridgeport, Baltimore, and Boston, succes- sively. In the latter city, he was the suc¢essor of Dr. Channing and Dr. Gannett, and had charge of the Arlington Street Church, formerly located in Federal Street. Those who knew him in life remember him. Those who knew him not will find him at his truest in these sermons. The pulpit is the preacher’s confessional. The anointed of his people know how to receive and shrive. him there. The sermons brought together in this 1V INTRODUCTION. book do not give an adequate idea of the scope and richness of his ministry. His work sur- passed his word, strong as that was. Home and camp, church and school, acknowledge his help- ing hand. The rich and the poor thank and bless him. To the home, he has given AHlome Life, a book which is a grateful memorial of his youth, a witness of his manhood, and now a keepsake which will long maintain his ministry by the fireside. His “white tracts,” as the sol- diers called them, flew in and out the camp like the doves of the old Arsenal. He also revised and republished the Szdex¢ Pastor, for use in the — hospitals. He labored for the Church, as a son honoring his father and his mother, filial love blending ever with missionary zeal. The freed- men remember what he did for their education and uplifting. A few friends, believing that the word which had helped them would help others, have chosen these sermons and published them. Nor would they disavow a loyal impulse to offer some trib-. ute to the memory of the faithful pastor, true friend, and honest man. They know that the only honor he would value is the privilege of INTRODUCTION. Vv further ministry. In hours of pain and weak- ness, he never gave up the hope of preaching again. If, with God’s blessing, this book only half fulfils his longing for further service on the earth, it will wholly accomplish the purpose and hope of its compilers. GEORGE LEONARD CHANEY. Boston, March 26, 1882. SERMON i: Ii, III. VII. VIII. CONN NETS, Pace Bremen AMI) WAITING: °. 2 Se. ee I “*T will not let thee go except thou bless me.’?’— GEN. xxxii., 26. IS MIE SS ee ay Ge ee | 1 ‘* Show us the Father, and it sufficeth.”’— Joun xiv., 8. ELVA a cg ‘* Day unto day uttereth speech.’’— PsaLm xix., 2. a id RE Spl Pe a ae a: ‘€ And I know not where they have laid him.””— JouHN xx., 13. Ie OO e e eee se BD ‘This one thing I do.’’— Puiu. iii., 13. REGO OP GOD 6, ke es 8 ee 68 “The kingdom of God.”— LuKE xvi., 16. ’ SemeemE NE CUPNCES Hf.) Sel cpiiie le” dl wh depen e) ee O97 ‘* And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp and played with his hand, so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.””— I. Sam. xvi., 23. BRAN VETER NG is cote joie «wt ere te a > a ems OF “‘The hidden man of the heart.””— I. PETER iii., 4. ERMISE OIC eR ISThy ob ere le eat hae: es ae 1OZ ‘‘ Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” — JouN vi., 68. SOMmMCPLO IMT Ui eee pre st ch ete ee EF ‘* A place which was named Gethsemane.’’— Mark Xiv., 32. SERMON XI. Da XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX. XXI. XXII. CONTENTS. Tuer Fimrvy FURNACE. . % + (0) soa ‘Nor the smell of fire had passed on them.””— Dawn. iii., 27. FAINT, YET PURSUING. . 93. 53). 03 “Faint, yet pursuing.””— JUDGES Viii., 4. TOGETHER WITH GOD.) 2) = ss 2 ee ‘‘ Laborers together with God.’’—TI. Cor, iii., 9. OIL AND WINE «| eos) 6° e 5s “Oil and wine.”’— LUKE x., 34. LIFE AND IMMORTALITY =. <3 0) acne ‘¢ Jesus Christ, who has brought life and immortality to light.”— II. Tr. i., ro. Tur TENTH BEATITUDE = >. oe ‘* Blessed is he that waiteth.”"— Dan. xii., 12. HELPS ° . ° ° e e ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° s e e e e “They used helps.’’— Acts xxvii., 17. THe SILENT COMFORTER <2 Gy oe ‘Sleep on now, and take your rest.”,— MATT. xxvi., 45. FRAGRANT LIVES). «os. =o ce) canines ener enenn “* And the house was filled with the odor.’’— JOHN xii., 3. WHat SHE COULD . 2.) 6} 0 sue ‘¢ She hath done what she could.”’— Mark xiv., 8. TIBNI AND OMRI = . «0s «6 3) ee ¢So Tibni died, and Omri reigned.”” —I. K1nGs xvi., 22. SILENT BUILDING . . «5-06 |e) ene ‘And the house which King Solomon built for the Lord was built of stone, made ready before it was brought thither: so that there was neither hammer, nor axe, nor any tool of iron, heard in the house while it was in building. So was he seven years in building it.”— I. KINGs vi., 2, 7, 38. oe, 173 2ot 213 226 259 CONTENTS. ix SERMON PAGE Pe een) ESUS, AND PAUL. 27.925 6 5 6 we mw 292 “* John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness.””— Mart, iii., 1. “¢ Jesus Christ, the Son of God.””— Mark i, 1. ‘Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ.”,— II. Cor. i., x. Bete oe UROOK-SIDES, 2 8 ew ee tw ew 28K ‘The brook in the way.’’— PSALM cx., 7. Peewee ik 1 INGS WHICH REMAIN... 6. 5 wee + es 298 “‘The things which remain.’’— REV. iii., 2. Poa ete Brust: FRUIT THE LAST PLUCKED... . . . gl4 ‘Two or three berries on the top of the uppermost bough.’’ — ISAIAH xvii., 6. OR EARS em ee we 2 328 “The days of our years.’’— PsaLM xc., 10. [May 4, 1879.] _ si WRESTLING AND WAITING. “T will not let thee go except thou bless me.”— GENESIS xxxii., 26. I WONDER if this experience of Jacob by the brook - Jabbok may not have been somewhat akin to that of Jesus in the wilderness. It is impossible really to know anything about it; but do they not each in some sense represent the personal conflict of two young men coming up to face the first great crisis of life,— a wrestling with the great fate that confronts them, a struggle for that moral, mental supremacy and calm which we allfeel the need of as we first actually meet that life for which we have been preparing? In the wrestling of the night, in the temptation of the wilderness, each man may recognize his own expe- rience. They are very human incidents, and do not require the ordinary bald, literal interpretation to make them solemn and effective. As allegories, epitomizing universal experience, they are of as true value as. if they were statements of fact. Fleeing from his exacting father-in-law, Jacob had approached the place where he knew that his brother Esau had established himself. Naturally uneasy at this fact,— for he had not forgotten how he had cheated him out of his birthright or how he had afterward 2 WRESTLING AND WAITING. defrauded him of his blessing,—he sends messengers to him, who were to address him in terms of respect. Esau, without sending any reply, sets out immediately to meet his brother. More anxious than ever, Jacob divides his herds and his servants into two bands, separated by wide interval, so that, in case of attack, that which was behind and with which his household was might escape, at the same time again sending servants forward with a gift taken from the choicest of his flocks and of his herds. It was while awaiting the result of this embassage that the incident from which the text is taken occurred. The last division of herds had passed over the broek by which he had encamped, and Jacob was left alone. And it was night. Plenty of work for conscience to do, as it is apt to be when night brings us to face a foe- coming morrow. And Jacob had much in his past con- nection with his brother for conscience to busy itself about. It was the great hazard moment of his life, and there were conditions to the problem of which he was not the master. He was a very unhappy man, and sorely perplexed. Then there appeared to him, as the Scripture says, a man who wrestled with him a large part of the night. In some way, Jacob was seriously injured. His thigh was dislocated or strained. Crip- pled, he was not mastered; and, the day beginning to dawn, his antagonist desired to be released. Somehow, he seems to have been in Jacob’s power, could only get away by Jacob’s consent (which ought to shut out the ordinary belief that his antagonist was the Divine Being himself). Jacob has the power of dictating terms,— the condition of the conqueror. His reply is, “I will not i oP =. > a WRESTLING AND WAITING, 3 let thee go except thou bless me.” We simply do not know anything about this incident, the narrative of which starts a flood of unanswerable questions; and it were better to hasten to get our moral from the words, than to linger over possible or impossible interpreta- tions of the event. i The simple elements of the incident are these,—a ~ contest between Jacob and an adversary, in which the adversary gets the worst of it. He is resisted, held, and in place of any proposed mischief is compelled to bless. The incident is striking, the lesson invaluable. For here, in epitome, is human experience. Jacob - may stand for you and for me, for any, for every man ; and the antagonist for our baser selves and the baser things of the world, and the wrestling, the struggle that has to goon between us. We grow up to that point where we are to undertake the handling of our- selves. That certain shield which home has been, that certain support, guide, which parents have been, expires by limitation. We cease being child, we begin to be man. The bars are thrown back through which we have gazed at the field of life, while they have re- strained us from entering. Weenter. As we pass the line, we at once meet opposition; and our first work, duty, experience, is resistance. We are at once put at task, at the task life keeps us at ever after. It would be very pleasant could this first part be only a sort of school-boy’s holiday, in which we could wander here and there over the field, and pick up every joy. We would like to throw an idle hook in this stream, lie under that tree, enjoy the sweet do-nothing, letting our eyes lazily rest themselves on sky and earth, refreshing 4 WRESTLING AND WAITING. and informing the other senses, taking in the keen, but superficial, relish of all the novel wonders about us. It is not at holiday we are put, but at school, and our masters are hard and exacting. We may not doze and dream and get an animal fill of pleasure first. First we © have to go to work, and our first work is hard work. Inexperienced and ignorant, timid and weak, we are called upon to resist the subtlest foes of the soul. If we take the Book of Genesis, the first duty to which the first man is called upon is the duty of resistance. Before he does anything, he must resist somebody. If we take the Gospels, they repeat the story. Before Jesus goes out to do, he retires to resist. Resistance — the negative, the opposite of will —is our primary obli- gation. The young possibilities of virtue seem to be so nurtured. We-have to get strong, assured in our re- sisting powers, before we can essay anything by way of progress. Before we grow, we must be able to stand, and overcome the powers that would not have us stand. » There are many things that will put themselves in the way of a growing soul, many that must be at once met and resisted. At first, we have not-helps. The mission of things seems to be not to help you live, but to force your death; not to establish, but to overthrow. It is not that hindrances strew the way,— obstacles you might expect to meet and to have to surmount,— but more than hindrances, positive, virulent opponents. All the way up, through the various grades of nature, existence seems to be a struggle, a fight for itself. Nothing is cradled, but everything attacked. Nurse, care, afterward; at first, hindrance, opposition, things to be learned which other things seem bound to prevent ee ee es a ne i ee, WRESTLING AND WAITING. 5 your learning. Once establish yourself, and you get help, friends; reach for and receive support. Nothing can be drearier than the first life of the seed in the cold and dark, its way to make against hindrance. If you go into a garden or a field some days after your sowing, you will see how the great vigor of tiny shoots has pushed aside the earth crust, perhaps has lifted a lump of dirt, or a chip, or a stone,—how it has overcome resistance, is born by virtue of that into beauty and light. Once established, once in the light, things begin to consent, become friends. So with our virtues. The law seems to be resistance as the condition of taking root, of becoming established, of growth. We do not begin and just grow easily and pleasantly, but through all sorts of pains and aches and mishaps,— the frictions, jars, antagonisms of other things. Our moral hin- drances naturally divide themselves into two classes,— those from within, self-born, nurtured, grown; those . from without, which have no self about them. If it were worth while to stop long enough to say it, one might perhaps say that the self things are the more ob- stinate, while they perhaps are less recognized, watched, controlled. The things that go wrong with us, the self- hindrances, are largely matters of temperament; and temperament is a thing never entirely original, but largely of inheritance: it is the twist to my nature, the thing I find in me and that starts me the me that I am. If I understand myself at all, my great trouble as a moral being is with a certain something which goes by this name. As I understand it, it is the sub-structure of my whoie being. It underlies my life, my thinking, 6 WRESTLING AND WAITING. and my doing. There is a peculiarity native to me, as sap to the tree or blood to the body, which shapes my thoughts and methods, my hopes and my deeds. It has its felicities, it has its infelicities. No man’s tem- perament is wholly the one or the other. The felicities we set aside. Wedo not want them now. The infelic- ities are our concern. What is to be done with them ? Shall I yield to them, and say: “This is my tempera- ment. I cannot help myself. {£ obey the dictates of nature?” Obedience to nature is very well where the dictates are all right; but, where they are wrong, they are to be disobeyed, just as any wrong thing is. That is what we live for. Temperament is amenable to the laws of discipline. Its imperiousness, its tyranny, is to be resisted. The unlovely is to be grown away from, the lovely grown into,—two distinct processes. Jacob resisted his opponent ; but he did more. He held him. The unruly part of temperament is to be more than resisted: it is to be held hard, and turned at last into an ally, afriend. A blessing, it is to be held until it bless. There is an illustration of what temperament may become when its bad is well ruled and its good is master, in the apostle John. In his early discipleship, he belongs to a club called “Sons of Thunder,” loud- mouthed, noisy, restless, revolutionary men, the Social- ists, the Nihilists of their day,— wants the lightning to destroy the Samaritans. He is as hot and impulsive and rash as Peter. In the maturer days of his intercourse with Jesus, he lays his head upon that sainted bosom, becomes the Christ’s special favorite, and in his mid-life and ald age is as the microcosm of gentleness and love, ee ee WRESTLING AND WAITING. ys It is not that a new nature, a new being, is given him through his changed faith, but that he has through his faith so worked upon that ardent, vindictive tem- perament, has so resisted, chastened, held it, that it has ended not merely in blessing others, but himself. He has done that most radical, difficult thing,— not destroyed his temperament, not got another one, which no man can ever do, for it is that which bases indi- viduality and keeps one man from being like every other man,— but he has held the inimical thing in his temperament until he has wrung from it a blessing. He is the John he is not by inheritance, not through force of temperament, not by an act of nature, but by a resolute self-culture that has whipped the offending Adam out, and has supplanted the natural, inherited, by a broader, braver, better, sweeter self. I do not know anywhere a more striking illustration of what may be done at the very root of things where one really takes hold. It is overturn, it is annihilation, it is rooting out the bad and overgrowing the place of it with the good, and making the other things of the temperament the sweeter and the stronger. In that way, not merely may adversities be made friends, but _ self-antagonisms be changed to blessings. What we need all through is the attitude, the endurance, of that midnight wrestler by the brook Jabbok. We may be wounded, crippled, bear the mark of bruise and scar of wound, feel it our lives long, though we may not show it. But we are the conquerors, and the van- quished thing has made us over; has been compelled not only to yield, but to do that thing so doubly hard for a vanquished foe,— bless, 8 WRESTLING AND WAITING. So it is with the whole catalogue of the self things,— passions, appetites, prejudices, dislikes, habits. . The thing we really ought to do with them is to turn them in to do better work. We do not readily see it that way. They are imperative, and mean to control, and we get an easy habit of letting them. If we get brave enough to make some trial of ourselves against them, we soon give over. We tell children to try and then try again. Thatis at the basis of domestic training, and it is the trying again that makes the child. We who are mature do not do as we tell children. We do not try. We do not resist. We become impatient, despairing, give up. Giving up is the most unhappy thing a man does. To give up is to take one’s life, is to win curse, not blessing. One is never to give up, but to hold on and to hold out, and compel the beatitude which comes of healthy struggle, though he should not reach that which comes of a complete vic- tory. These and all troublesome things within us have great capacity to bless, only we do not yield to them, only we make them feel us. Beside self-hindrances are others from outside, and very various. They are to be treated the same way, made to yield the same reward. In every day, we have disappointments,— common, trifling, troubling things. Life is a good deal made up of them. They are its severest trials. We bear great things with at least a show of equanimity. We break under little ones. If we know there is some- thing serious, we muster our energies and face it. But little, annoying things which spring at us from the wayside, from unexpected corners, at most unwelcome WRESTLING AND WAITING. 9 moments, just at the time of all others when we fancied all going smoothly, just where we can least brook Opposition, postponement, or delay,—these every one feels to be serious annoyances of life, and of no special use. But suppose,— instead of fretting and disappoint- ment over the rain that keeps you indoors, over the dinner that is not ready or is badly cooked, over the man who‘ is not punctual, over the investment that does not pay, over annoyance of domestic or child,— instead of scolding and fuming about the present, immediate form of the trial, you hold it, study it, reason about it, look at it every way, turn it over on all sides, and see if something cannot be made of it, if there be not some fine gold there. Instead of taking these into your temper, suppose you take them into your heart, and hold them there till all shadow of the ugliness of temper is melted away, and the blessing comes,— the blessing that as surely comes, under these conditions, as the blessings of sunlight and spring breezes come after the fret of east winds, and low leaden clouds, and dull rains or hasty showers. Sup- pose one were to make it, not a principle only, but a habit, to hold on to every trying and adverse thing until it blesses, plucking away the disguise beneath which lies the beatitude! It would not be long before all these wearing, worrying irritations would be trans- formed into angels of light, teaching the once captious spirit great and solemn truths, and leading it into gentleness, patience, and forbearance. Every one of us who has had any self-discipline knows what has come to himself out of the most hopeless elements ip him, simply through handling them wisely, compelling Io WRESTLING AND WAITING. them to do good work. Every such one knows how, out of the little irritations and vexations of life, once, like the little foxes of the field, destroying all that was fair and manly, he has made great blessings; and you will generally find the happiness and security ~ of maturer life to lie just where hard wrestling has wrung blessings out of hostile things. Then there are a thousand things in one’s intercourse with others which are unpleasant, vexatious, irritating. Some men and women are merely annoyances, aversions. We don’t see why they were made, or why they should themselves care much to live. They make us feel uncomfortable, if they come near us. They cross our paths every way, and if we cross over to the other side, they cross over too. They contrive to run counter to our wishes, to set themselves against our prejudices, to throw ridicule upon our principles, to set things awry, to be every way repellent, to offend our tastes or somehow to be only disagreeable. And, where things do not run to this extreme, there still is much in every-day intercourse, at home and with friends, which puts us into an uncomfortable humor, and makes us wish ourselves well rid of such society. This is the first, the outside feeling, and too frequently the only and the lasting one. It does only and purely harm more to ourselves than to them. Let a man become conscious of the folly of allowing the petty annoyances of character or conduct to have so much influence over him. Let him resist the annoyance, hold it till he sees how, by that very antagonism, some good thing is drawn out and strengthened in himself, or some bad thing avoided. Let him hold it till out of WRESTLING AND WAITING. II the ashes of aversion shall spring a true, courteous regard, till he find a blessing in that which had been only a plague. For myself, I confess that, among the people of worth whom I have known, not a few were those with whom my first intercourse was unpleasant, and my first impressions repulsive. And I have no small self-rebuke at that want of moral steadfastness which neglects to hold back the crude or unpleasant opinion, that lack of fidelity to conviction which allows me still to refuse to hold the man till I find the bless- ing in him. The truth will bear to be carried higher, among the great troubles and sorrows of life,—the sorrows in which, long time, the stricken spirit can discern no light. Nothing would seem,— did we not know it by experience,— nothing does seem to many still so utterly impossible as that any blessing can come of sorrow. Of none of Christ’s Beatitudes are we so skeptical as of that which promises blessing to them that mourn. And yet, hold sorrow till its more selfish aspect passes, till it turn its religious side to you, till time and experience and faith do their work, till you feel, not its gloom, but its glory; not its storm, but its peace; not its loss, but its gain; not its cross, but its crown. Do not, through any device, lose its sanctify- ing influence, the greatest loss the soul can meet. Do not flee from it, or seek to smother it, or yield to it, but hold it,—hold it till it blesses, till you have con- secrated it by prayer and submission, till all other views grow dim, and only its religious side, its heavenly side, God’s side, is toward you. Keep it till it bless, though it long delay, and you will then see how, out ¢ 12 WRESTLING AND WAITING. of seeming evil, God educes good; how, out of the darkness of earth, he brings the light ineffable of heaven ; how, as night precedes day, so sadness and suffering precede peace; how, as day issues from night, peace from trouble comes. That surely is a mysterious, but not the less real, power of blessing which lies within every well con- tested, rightly borne trouble. He knows but little . who supposes that, if there is to be a blessing in his earthly lot, he shall at once detect it, as he would who, searching for gold, should look to find it scat- tered liberally upon the surface. The things of per- manent value are mostly hidden,— have to be sought. Did not he of old entertain angels unawares,—only know them, get their blessing, as they departed? Did not Jesus walk with his disciples, and only as he left them did they see that the crucified was risen? And does not God still hold men’s eyes, and behind dis- guises conceal the ultimate good? In lesser things, man has learned the divine law. The pure and glit- téring metal lies in the dull ore. The diamond’s coat is rough, uttering no prophecy of the wealth beneath. Forbidding forms enclose choicest souls. Only as one perseveres, gets through the crust, knocks off the covering, or penetrates beneath the surface, is it that the true worth is revealed. The form of trial, harsh and repulsive, and all its earlier manifestations setting strongly against a man’s desire and will, makes him feel that it is only trial, only pain,—takes him on his lower side, his selfish, his earthly side. He may resist it because his nature prompts, or he thinks it duty, or because he feels that, if he do not, it wil destroy him. WRESTLING AND WAITING. 13 He does not see beyond the necessity, the impulse of resistance ; and the resistance is that dogged, soul- less resistance wherewith so many confront their lot. It must be borne; and he will set himself to bear it. It must be met; and he will set himself to meet it. But, as to any good in it, any blessing to be got out of that harsh and repulsive fact, any yield from it beyond a dogged bearing, he does not see it. If it be a serious thing, he may grow rebellious and ques- tion God’s right or God’s love. Let him, however, set himself to bear in a real child-spirit. By degrees, slow and uncertain at first, the painful pressure is relaxed a little. The shades are a little less dark. A possible good begins to be suspected. Then it is half-confessed, till finally, if he will but hold it long enough, he will find that this crushing thing, which was only gloom and only harm, has its bright and holy side, and where misery came blessings are left. The very thing which rose in its terrible might, and seemed about to sweep him from the earth, against which he had feared to measure his puny strength, is found to be a priceless good. | “Surely,” said one writing me who knew something of greater as lesser trial, ‘it is only our fault if we do not turn the hard trials into blessings; and I take shame that the things which were sent to sweeten I have so much allowed to embitter me.” That state- ment grasps and holds the great truth and the great confession. We yield or resist, and are only embit- tered ; we hold, and grow sweet ; and where the sweet- ness is established, the beatitude follows. The secret of successful living is to extract blessings out of all I4 WRESTLING AND WAITING. conditions, to compel of them that. God does not lay them upon the surface, and sometimes he buries them deep. You may not know where the blessing lies except by search, weary and baffling many times. Where it seems most useless, there oftentimes is its most blessed reward. Learn the wisdom to hold every- thing till it bless, though ill be heaped on ill. Make every discipline what the brook Jabbok was to Jacob,— the place of conquest and blessing. Let nothing go till you have probed it well, and got the uttermost of blessing, as the bee does not desert the bitterest flower till she gets the last drop of sweetness from it. Never withhold searching because it seems of no avail. Search as the woman did for her money, as the shep-- herd did for his sheep, as the seeker did for his goodly pearl,—till you find. Having found, hold as Jacob did, and there shall be nothing in life, however frowning, hostile, baffling, which shall not have for you a bless- ing,—a blessing you would not surrender, a blessing you in no other way could attain. Ld May 4, 1879. ibe Weel SUPPICR TH ? “ Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth.”—Joun xiv., 8. I HAVE always felt the incident with which the text is connected to be one of deepest pathos. The air of gentle, suffering tenderness which invests this scene, as the whole language of that last interview, seems to deepen just here; and the little dialogue that intro- duces, and in part shapes the after-talk, is as exquisitely true to nature as touching in itself. I think that either you or I would have said just what Thomas did. It was an outspoken piece of honesty. He really did not know whither Jesus was going; and it was confidence in his Master, and not doubt, that made him say so. More confused men probably were never gotten before so great a fact ; and it was just as natural for Philip —and again you and I might have done the same — to say at the next point Jesus made: “Why, now there is really something! Only show us the Fa- ther, and that is enough.” And I think the very grave way in which Jesus met them, with a tenderly pained sur- prise, with a something in tone and look which was not rebuke, while it had a dash of disappointment about it, helped to steady them all, keep their tongues quiet, and their ears alert, and their minds active, receptive, if they failed of being wholly sympathetic. 16 WHAT SUFFICETH ? The showing of the Father was the whole mission of Jesus, his one aim, his life’s work. Never was that other or less; never was it other ormore. The one thing was to manifest not the dezug of God, which was an already . established fact with his nation, but the character of God, which they never had understood, which they of that generation were understanding very much less than such men as Isaiah and Daniel—men of the most spiritual insight under the old dispensation — did. It was with faith when Jesus came a good deal as with art when Raphael came, with the Church when Savon- arola from within and Luther from without attempted its reform,—a time of grotesque deterioration, falseness _ and deadness, when the name of a great thing covered only ghastly and foul decay. Even the Jehovistic idea of God was very much degenerated, and may be said to- have had little real following. The idea one man has of another is betrayed by the manner of his inter- course with him; and, more than by any language, we reveal through the methods of our intercourse our in- terior conception of God. The Jew of Christ’s time was a ritualist, the most servile believer in and follower of form, a formalist so rank and so mean as to always have had only the Saviour’s contempt. Growing out. of his formalism, its inevitable concomitant, was self- righteousness ; and to be self-righteous is inevitably to be hypocrite. The brave old prophet had said that God could not bear the sacrifice of bulls and of rams, and another as brave had added just what God did desire. All that had been. displaced, and the tradition of the elders, abrogating the sure word of God, taught the cleanliness of the outside of cups and platters, in the WHAT SUFFICETH? 17 place of the service of the pure spirit and its pure worship. The Being who was to be served, to be sat- isfied, to be reached. through such methods, could of course be in popular conception only a sort of Baal, an idol of a graver kind. You might use the most accred- ited phrase in speaking of God,— it signified nothing so long as in men’s hearts and in men’s approach there was no savor of him. So Jesus had to begin with showing what God was. Not who, so much as what his task. He was to show God in his real character. He was to place before men the attitude in which he stood toward his creatures, to teach his real relation, and in what true intercourse with him consisted; not to teach the rudiments of a divine law,— that had been Moses’ work ; not to pursue mental subtleties and dis- criminations,— that had been the rabbis’ work; not to read the stars,—that had been the work of Chaldeans and astrologers; not to make investigation into the great occult realm of nature’s many-chambered labora- tories,— that was in reserve for Tycho Brahe and Kepler and Da Vinci, Newton, Cuvier, Agassiz, and all the host of them. All these for other men, some of them for other times. In these he had no part, with these no interference. Simple and unlearned in the world’s way, as the world’s lore, his one limited work was to show the Father, to shred away the feeble as the false which obscured the glory of the divine countenance, and make men see in himself the reflected attributes of the infinite unseen. Working the works of Him that sént him, stating and unfolding his truths, shaping conduct always into glad and facile subservience to~ the divine will, he who had really seen him had seen 18 WHAT SUFFICETH ? the Father, had seen his power manifest in the works done, his love in the tender forbearance, sympathy, and forgiveness shown, his truth in the wonderful and gracious words that had fallen from lips anointed only with truth; and by these three, work, word, and life, had made such manifestation of the Great One as no vision of mere person could ever have given. It is not seeing the person that makes us realize his character, his relation to us, 4zm#. The world had never been wiser or better, had the form of Jesus been the veritable showing of the person of God. The world is better for its assurance that in these things Jesus showed, manifested, reflected that of God which the soul most craves to know, what he is, and how he feels toward us. The bewildered Philip still asked for the showing of the person. But that would not have sufficed, though he thought so. He who could not see the Father in the Son would have got only the lowest, the most transient impression, had the Great Being vouchsafed to stand before him in all the incon- ceivable majesty of his glory. What I want to say to-day is that, while the teaching, the sufficiency of the gospel, is the grand doctrine of. the divine Fatherhood,—and blessed forevermore be our God and Father because it is so! —we must school ourselves to recognize that it is also its limitation. As we grow into other knowledges, we must not consent to outlaw God from them, and feel that only in the Bible does he speak, only by revelation is he revealed. The Bible does but a partial work; and, when you have exhausted it, a great deal is left unknown.” Whole invaluable provinces of thought-knowledge are left un- WHAT SUFFICETH ? 19 touched. God is the great Economist, and he teaches but one thing atatime. The nail he drives is driven home and clinched before he strikes another. That is one reason why his work stands. To Jesus was dele- gated the grandest duty ever intrusted to man. Other men had been, have been sent for other things,— each for his work. This was his. And no man can say but he has done it utterly. We have nothing more to ask in that direction, however inquisitive or impatient in others. It suffices. The showing of the Father is complete,— perfect after its kind. But it does not exhaust God. It does not suffice us as seekers after God. The gospel showing of God as the Father is not sufficient to meet the wants of the man of civiliza- tion, culture, faith, who cannot be satisfied with words or facts shut up in a book, but burns to know the all possible about him. The gospel does not put him before us as the ALL that he is. It does not give all of him we may know, and shall be happier and better for knowing. God is something beside Father,— may we not say better than Father? And we must learn to see that, and be brave to speak it, and accept and wel- come every investigation of human thought, not fear- ful lest it weaken the hold and lead away from reve- lation, but rejoicing in anything that, by broadening our conceptions of an infinite knowledge and power, shall lead us up to a thought we can by no possibility reach when God stands before us only in the parental attitude. | God is something other than a Father. Grand and elevating as that conception is, it meets and satisfies the religious sentiment; but there is something —a 20 WHAT SUFFICETH ? vast, vast deal —that it does not cover, does not meet and satisfy; and ministers in their preaching, as men in their lives, miss it that they do not confess it. When the man of clear brain and devout heart stands by you and shows you the evidence of the divine reason and handiwork in every minutest tracery of the human frame, in what the microscope reveals, as in what the telescope unveils, and goes step by step before you, leading your groping way among the winds and leads of the divine thought and purpose, while with every advance you feel yourself consciously ap- proaching the centre and source, it comes with great force to you that there is really something of most moment to our best conception of the Infinite which our gospel leaves out, and that man must have.the co-ordinate testimony and revealing of many-handed, many-voiced nature, before he can really hold an any — way adequate idea of God. When I am thinking of and trying to comprehend the Eternal and Infinite One, I cannot, with Philip, say, “Shew me the Father, and it sufficeth.” What I want to be shown is God,—God not in any limited relation, though it be the highest, but God in his whole- ness, whatever and all of him, not too high for me to attain to,— God in mind, in matter, in space, in time; God under all aspects as under one aspect. Why should Christian teaching seek to rule him out of these? What ave mind, matter, what have they done that they may not interpret him, that they must be alien? They know and tell what Gospels do not, cannot. It does not suffice me to know God is my Father, though you bring me, to help out and empha- ° “WHAT SUFFICETH ? dt. size the gospel word, the everything of every human tongue or pen or brain which has sought to express the wonder and the happiness and the condescension of that connection. There is something that, more and more as I grow into experience and knowledge, I feel is to be said of him, known of him, and must be said and known, which it is not in the power of gospel word to disclose or the strictly parental idea to embrace, which can only be disclosed as the humble, teachable, rev- erent soul draws toward and finds the God everywhere immanent. If God be only Father, if that be all there is to such a Being, the showing of Jesus is sufficient: I would be content. But when I find that my teacher himself did not confine his thought or teaching exclusively to that ; when I find him, through the lily and the grass and the Sparrow and the mustard-seed, leading me to see a great working Providence, teaching me to look for and find tokens of him in spheres outside his parental rela- tion, and in those an added grace and power and dearness; when I find that Jesus evidently fed and refreshed his faith by converse with the Great Spirit of Nature, that he himself held relations and received instruction in other than the sharply restricted filial way; when I find him going back to the old-time his- tory and recognizing the Jehovah power of rule and law and restraint as part and parcel of the great one purpose,—I can but say that God is more, and I want to know the more of God, not only for the knowledge’ sake, not only for the knowing him, but that my idea of him as Father may be fed and broadened and inten- sified, become glowing and transfusing. I know him 22 WHAT SUFFICETH ? more, I love him better, my conception is grander for the things I know of him that cannot be embraced within the narrow compass of the one tie. To me always there has seemed as the type of a satisfied faith the good old New England grandmother living in her small way on some back road of some unknown vil- lage, laying her Bible aside at the setting of the Sun- day’s sun with her spectacles in it for the next week’s mark, in the utter and blissful confidence that every minutest word of the book was written by the very finger of God, and came down out of heaven to man. And yet there is a sublime faith and a more restful assurance and a more solemn thought of the Great One as one makes him out to be the informing life of all that is. When I follow the keenest analysis down to the ultimate,— to “organisms without organs,” the simplest of all observed, the simplest of all imaginable organism, so simple as a little lump of -an albuminous combination of carbon, the ultimate that human re- search gives us as the origin and cause of life,—and there I find the bars up, and the awful word creeping upon me, “And what next?” and the as awful answer out of infinite distances and infinite silences,— God ; when I take history, and, all the way down among the affairs of men, I trace a something that is not man, or current of time, or drift of event, but a power somehow setting aside and overruling, balancing and compensat- ing, lifting ages and races, and advancing against all retrogrades the harmonies of humanity, making of the confusions of man, as once of the chaos of matter, order and beauty and growth and success and life; when I get the last word of philosophy, the farthest WHAT SUFFICETH? 23 bound of reason, and over the waste and desolate and unfathomable beyond, as next thing possible, comes the assurance, God;— why, I am wholly a grander man. I have got a grander faith, my God is more than my Father, and my Father seems all the more adorable, because, besides his loving care for little me, and the myriads beside me who are little, besides his mercy and his forgiving, he is all this,—all this to other things, and my Father, too. It does not take a bit from the Scripture revealing, but it adds immeasurable things to it; and I may stand beside the ignorant and confiding grandmother, and feel that though she be spared many dark moments and grave questionings, yet that mine is, after all, zze faith, and I in triumph can look around me and above, and in proud yet humble trust exclaim, ‘“‘These are thy glorious works, Parent of good.” ‘My Father made them all.” You have only to bring this home to yourself by asking, “In what way do I really get the completest idea of my earthly father?” “By regarding him solely in that relation or by trying to know all about him in his various relations,— his connection with other men and things.” For myself, I know this: that I take my all of memory of my father in all his love and care for me,— in companionship, in affection, in discipline, in advice, in example,—the everything that in the tie of blood and the relations of intercourse involved the parental connection, and, when I have exhausted all, it comes to me that, dear as he was,— completely my father,— that relation did not exhaust 4z#. There was ever so much more that he was; and when I know what others 24 WHAT SUFFICETH ? have to say among whom he moved in duties, labors, sympathies outside the more narrow, if most sacred, precincts of home, he is in every way an exalted being. It is not the mere fatherly that I know, but the so much that cannot be included in that idea at its high- est. I turn that thought, that experience, Godward. A good being has come to earth, and virtually said: “Men have been mistaken all along. There is but one God, and that God is not the jealous and vindictive king, the hard, unreasonable, selfish Jehovah that my own countrymen have conceived; but he is a Father, —my Father, their Father. And that I am come to teach.” And the followers of the good Teacher, taking him up more narrowly than he had purposed, have made it the aim of their teaching to impress upon men what they conceived the Bible to tell, many of them clinging to the Old Testament idea, while using the New Testament language, letting Old Testament spirit pervade it, and saying “Father”’ when they only saw and feared the “king.” And it has*been a wrong, a danger, and a crime, to think of him elsehow or else- where, to work for any other feature or attribute or revealing, except along the line of Scripture phrase. Men have -scowled upon and forbade any foray into the great realm of Nature so vocal of God to Jesus, and have trembled lest somehow it should be dis- covered that there was some contradiction between what he had said in his creation and what he had said by his Christ. They have compelled the. human soul to look at God only under a single aspect, and in con- sequence, to our Christian faith, to our Christian con- ception of God, everything is wanting but that which WHAT SUFFICETH ? 25 has a special Bible sanction; and we have one whom we call by the very sublimest names, of the greater part of whose sublimity we keep ourselves wilfully ignorant, who, as merely the Father, is almost as much wronged as by being merely Jehovah. It is the very dearest, brightest, happiest thought that the Great Infinite holds this parental relation to me, that Iam his child; but more and more, as I go, I know —as I know it of my earthly father —that it is impossible to shut the whole of God within that relationship; and that, wherever else you find him, and whatever else you) may have to say about him, instead of veiling or confusing that first grand idea, it only sheds a purer lustre about it. It is not the Father minus anything, but it is the Father plus some- thing, when the heavens add their declaration, and the firmament shows his handiwork, and day unto day and night unto night, through every part of his boundless dominion, bear witness, not to his design, his work alone, but to what is infinitely beyond and quite other, —to Himself. And it seems to me that the privilege of this later day is that, in so much deeper and grander way than the poet knew when he wrote it, we may look “through Nature up to Nature’s God,’ —not Nature’s God merely, our God, nay, our “Father” ; may come to see that the things of her domain are not the work- manship of mere power, wisdom, will, but that they all carry with them the subtler element of love, knit themselves back to that same one whom Jesus called Father. And if so be this fair universe of things has_ not its ultimate in our human prosperities, delights, 26 WHAT SUFFICETH ? and elevation, if the great purpose be beyond ana other than for these inhabitants of earth and time, as may well be in such vast concerns as God’s, still are we sharers in it all, helped by it all, elevated through it all, and by all brought into the innermost presence. It is that we want, whatever will so enlarge the vision of our souls as to bring God out of distance into pres- ence; and what can more do it than the reverent teaching of the imprints he has ever left along every way that his spirit has passed, so that the ardent seeker, striking into unknown discoveries, may stray nowhere but he shall see that God has been there before him, and if God, then — power, reason, wisdom, will, love, the Father. It is one thing to grasp the idea that God made and holds all, and another that all that God made and holds repeat and confirm the truth that the Father did all this as he did the works by which he was manifest through Jesus. The inter- _ weaving of that thought with all that is is that which best interprets him. I never touch Nature anywhere. I never hear the word that wise seekers bring out of silences and distances, out of secret microscopic or tel- escopic lurking-places, that I do not feel how many are the unnoticed messengers and ministries awaiting us, and how mistaken we are who go deaf and blind through this vast museum, like the dead soul of Peter Bell. “A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.” Oh that we might see the primrose, as Jesus saw the lily,—the messenger, the interpreter, the child of WHAT SUFFICETH? a7, the one Great Spirit, over all, and through all, and in all! Oh that we might catch the harmonies that pulse through all things, chanting their consenting ascription of glory and honor and dominion and majesty to the one creating and ruling Wisdom, till man should feel that through every star, through every grass-blade, as through every living soul, “the glory of a present God still beams,’ that God, the God and Father of all things as of Jesus Christ, our Lord, of whom, from whom, in whom are we all. III. DAY -UNTO.DAwe “Day unto day uttereth speech.”— PsALMs. Every yesterday is talking to, instructing, to-day. Every to-day has its word for the morrow. So each individual life progresses, so ages ripen. It is not — what is new-born. Born to-day,—that is our hope, our — power, our weakness, or our defeat. We /ve iw and because of yesterdays. Their life enters into ours. They are our nurses, our instructors. They have had us by the hand, led us step by step, little by little — s unfolding to us the work before, and giving little by — little the helps unto its accomplishment. In nothing is the law of sequence more inevitable. In nothing does that which zs more depend upon that which was. In nothing does the next step more directly hinge upon the last. Not only yesterday speaks to to-day, but what yesterday says decides what to-day zs. He lives well and wisely who has the speech of each day ~ as it goes, who hears and heeds the voice it utters; who lifts himself not into a far, indefinite future, but — into the future of to-morrow, not by the vague teach- a ings of a remote past, but by the last word of the last — day in which he lived, by the things said to himself in his own experience and consciousness, wot by things said .to others under other conditions and to other — DAY UNTO DAY, 29 ends. It was a very sublime truth uttered by the Psalmist, but he did not know half its meaning. With some old memory of his shepherd life (if David wrote it) or some fresh glimpsing of the skies whose twinkling hosts we so seldom think of, his thought turned toward the handiwork of God; and his language, simple, brief, grand, has gone to the uttermost parts of the earth,h—a wondrous expression of that which no finite mind can ever fully gather in, or any finite spirit utter. No mere words so completely fill us with the awed sense of the Infinite as these: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.” Once stand- ing under midnight skies and looking through the _ telescope, as the star I was gazing at passed out of the field of vision and left me looking into deep, dark, empty space, I for an instant caught a feeling akin to that which these words suggest. It is only at rare moments — moments like angels’ visits —that we find ourselves lifted to any conception of the immense and infinite,— now and then upon a Mount of Vision, most of the time spent down among the things that hardly go out before prayer and patience and faith and toil. I suppose that it was of God that the Psalmist first thought when he said, “ Day unto day uttereth speech.” In great nearness, he tried to hold himself to that Being from whom we keep so far. Had he really kept himself as near as his word would seem, great peace he must have had; for it is that that the sense of the divine nearness greatly gives in life’s tumults and straits, But it was with him just as it is with us, 30 DAY UNTO DAY. Here is the language of his better mood, his sense of inferiority and dependence, his sense of reverence and trust. His speech was better than his life, his emotion loftier than his conduct, what he knew better than what he did,— not because of anything hypocritical in | him, as not in us, but because of that flagging service with which we follow up in life what really les as corner-stone to our conviction,— yes, to our desire and attempt. Just that same surging, desperate battle which any of us of any moral vitality knows that he keeps up sometimes so-despairingly between his better and his baser self, with ever-alternating victory, he waged, now calm with success, now desperate with defeat. I think we all love God better than we serve him, and it is just so always with our affections. The love outruns, underruns the needs, especially when the object of the love is above us and demands of us ser- vice. Day unto day uttereth speech unto us of God, from the moment that we wake. Like Old Mortality, it busies itself with sharpening the fading impressions of yesterday, or it gives new witness in its new event. Our daily waking, each day’s girding for each day’s combat, the renewal of affections, temptations, and labors,— the whole minutize of life’s intercourse and machinery,— these, as well as Nature, with her sights and sounds, are daily utterances of God. They are wit- nesses to, interpreters of God. ‘No matter what else we | say or think,—last, first, always,—it is of God these speak. If you have any thought at all, you cannot dissociate them from him. In him, by him, because of him, we and they live, move, and have our being. Just now, day unto day utters speech in these rapid DAY UNTO DAY. 31 changes which flash themselves before our eyes,— this fresh verdure, these spring blossoms, this glorious gar- niture Nature has flung so lavishly over hill, field, and _ wood, this rare beauty newly written in upon the face of the earth in grass and grain and flower, in songs of birds and lingering twilights, in deep thunders and gushing showers, in breezes that make breathing a luxury and living a delight. Day unto day is telling the story of the new hour, and God’s infinity of love in it. The Lenten season of winter is over, and the Easter of Nature calls from their graves to the beauty of new lives the grains of seed, the germs of life that had seemed to die; and with each new outburst up from silent lips go hallelujahs that chime with all Nature’s chorus, ‘“ God zs good.” Go out into the coun- try to this magnificent array of varied beauty in which God has lapped our city, out where the earth is telling the resource as the glory of our God,— go, blind sons and daughters of an Infinite Love, and see and hear and read and comprehend the story day uttereth unto day, away from noises and jars, works and ways and strifes and envies of man,—see what God is doing with busy love. from morn till eve, in fields and lanes and woods that stretch themselves everywhere, that woo and coax with sight and sound, and where nothing stands between the soul and the divine creating hand. The great temple of Nature stands daily open, and, with enticings no art can have, waits to welcome and reward, to soothe and elevate, to tempt to the worship no mammon temple wakes. Beautiful for situation was Mount Zion, but round about Jerusalem the guardian mountains did not stand in such calm and varied 32 DAY UNTO DAY. beauty as these hills-about this city with the rich inter- vales between. Throw off the harness of your daily lives, get from beneath the hammer that beats the life | from out your souls. Go to the smiles of our great Mother Earth, and up from them look for the smile of our great Father,— God,—and the dull thud of your sluggish pulse will bound with new life, the encrusting scales will drop from your eyes, and you will see, not flower and sky, not beauty and summer, but the great immanent spirit of them all— Him in whom you, as they, live, move, and have your being. Not in the country only, and at one season, does day unto day speak of God, but there are voices of the city, louder than its hum, that man may always hear, must sometimes heed. God is not only resident out- side of city limits, an omnipotent gardener replenish- ing the earth, but just as much present and just as loudly speaking and just as clearly spoken of where the weary vessel chafes her sides against the dock, or the clatter of machinery or the concussions of trade make what men call life. Only you heed it! Daily life and daily detail proclaim Him by whose law and in whose sight all things revolve, whose infinite issues in blindness these work out. Strangely into the clash and selfishness of business and intercourse the day intrudes with its speech of God, its various lesson ; and man finds himself compelled to learn of high things while grovelling amid the garbage of life. Sickness, misfortune, sin, poverty, gaunt in rags, with hollow voice and eye, waylay his step or besiege his business hour, demand for sympathy and charity breaks in upon | the anxious fret, and calls him back to the humanity he DAY UNTO DAY. 33 is tempted to forget, brightens and strengthens the great brother tie. Only let him heed what the busy press and busier telegraph bring him of the great har- vest of events, adventure, discovery, progress,— only let the great, ever-growing record speak, not of facts alone, but the author of them, as they all do, just as much as lily or star,—and man would find that under- neath the sordid cares of commerce, and overlying the intricacies of traffic, outspeaking from daily jar and jargon, is a divine name, influence, presence, as mighty to effect its purposes as the glowing life of sunset or of autumn. There is no hiding of God in cities, though men may hide from him. He walks the streets as the fields. The day is vocal of him every- where. Day unto day uttereth its speech. Day unto day uttereth speech of ourselves. We live by days. They are the leaves folded back each night in the great volume that we write. They are our auto- biography. Each day takes us not newly, but as a tale continued. It finds us what yesterday left ais. «It works with us by yesterday’s report. It has the draw- backs as the experiences of yesterday,— the good and the bad,— and with these sets itself at the new task of to-day. And, as we go on, every day is telling to every other day truths about us, showing the kind of being that is handed on to it, making of us something better or something worse, as we decide. It tells us if we have kept our temper, our resolves, our faith, if we have been selfish or self-denying: it tells the rule by which we walk, and how really we are growing into the lineaments of Christ. The day’s whisper to the next day, as it dismisses 34 DAY UNTO DAY. us, is that it will find us very remiss in this command, in the following of which only are the harmony and success of life. I remember that I used to think, as I suppose many still do half consciously, when everything had gone wrong with me, and the day’s record was black with dissatisfaction, as it still so generally is, that, only could I get to sleep, that day’s record would be closed and out of the way, and to-morrow I could begin with a clean sheet for a new trial. Sleep I used to think the same sort of sponge that some men conceive forgive- ness to be,—the eradicator of the ineradicable facts of experience, and each day not the continuing of an old life, but the beginning again. So partially it is, new chances with new courage, while it is yet the outgo of the day gone, as the link in the ship’s chain that slips your finger is the outcome of the link before. Many links, one chain. It is a very weary heart as well as head that man lays away at night, and oblivion for the one as much as sleep for the other is his craving. His life-longing is. to begin again, and yet again, to get away from these inexorable yesterdays, which cling to us in our strug- gles, and will not off. We cannot doit. Into the web of life they go, figure and color receding as the busy loom of time works in others,— get rolled on the great roll that with every diurnal revolution grows. Just as the swift runners amid the Highlands handed the same torch to the next, and it was borne on from hand to hand, from stage to stage, till its work was done, so day to day hands us on, each taking up the same life the other laid down, each with rapid stroke shaping DAY UNTO DAY, 35 us a little, and with its added labor passing us on to the next, the new not effacing the old. However it may change color and figure of the future, however these may blend in future harmony or scatter wilder confusion, we do not lay aside life, only continue it. Our one chance is improvement, not oblivion,— not that the past days shall forget or deny their record, but that the coming shall have better things to utter. Not only of what has been does day unto day utter speech, but more sadly sometimes —might I not say always ?— what might have been. It is not the commission that haunts memory so fiercely as the omission,— omission that seems so tri: fling and venial as we yield to the moment’s enticing, which looms so big itself and with such giant shadow to our backward looking. What I have done is bad enough; but what is unwritten that ought to be on life’s record, what I had no business to leave out, what I have left wzdone it is that runs up a long and heavy column in the account. Day unto day uttereth speech of it,—little additions rolling on in ever-swell- ing volume, as the spring-tide comes rising, rising, till it submerges so much that is fair in life. I need no other reminder than my memory; and, as I glance along the days, and sadly see that I “might have been” a man of so much juster proportions, so much fuller in all the faculty that makes manhood, with so much more even pace might have run my race, achieved so much more for man and for God, “might have been”’ so much more honest, persevering, indus- trious, bold, pure, true, unselfish, gentle, and obedient, so much better in every relation, manward, selfward, Godward ! i 36 DAY UNTO DAY. The old days tell the new days this, and the new days find how toughened I am in the old depraved habits and thoughts. I mourn over what might have been: they cannot raise in me the courage yet to be that I wish I had been and shall yet more wish, O friends, do not let us lapse into the drift that takes us away from hope as we near the goal, do not let us have these pitiful tales of day unto day as our only record, but let us rouse and nerve ourselves; and, whatever the sum of yesterdays, let us make the sum of to-morrows brighter, nobler, holier, the time past enough for mistake and folly, shame and sin, while future days shall utter unto future days a better tale and show a clearer course. “ Build to-day, then, strong and sure, With a firm and ample base; Thus ascending and secure Shall to-morrow find its place. For the structure that we raise, Time is with material filled : © Our to-days and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build.” June 15, 1873. alg EASTER. “And I know not where they have laid him.”—JouHN xx., 13. ONE never quite satisfactorily arranges the sequences of the story of that resurrection morning. The sepa- rate gospel accounts are brief and unsatisfactory. When collated, there are gaps not to be closed, and contradictions not to be reconciled. The fragments of narrative, the separate interviews, the independent witnesses, can by no human ingenuity be woven into one complete, continuous account. After the exciting scenes of the crucifixion, a few devoted friends —from among whom the disciples are conspicuously absent — get the body of Jesus, and lay it in the tomb, but are hurried from an incompleted service by the setting sun, which ushered in the Sab- bath, on which no manner of work could be done, especially as that Sabbath, by Mosaic ordinance, was a high day. The little party of men and women retire. We do not hear of the men again. The future story, so far as that first party is concerned, is confined to the women of it. And, of these women, she who most interests us, to whom Jesus seems to have shown special attention, who most tenaciously clung to him, is Mary Magdalene; and, if seven devils once went out of her, surely seven saints must have then pos- sessed her. 38 EASTER. She was at the burial, she saw the place where her master was laid; and that so sacred body had, no doubt, been composed to its-last rest by her tender and loving touch. She drew back and went away, one bright thought only in her heart to support her slowly reced- ing step, that she should once again see that so loved face, when early on the morning of the first day of the week she should come to finish her incompleted task. In the lone company of her heavy heart, wearily she waited at home till the Sabbath day was gone; and then as the prophetic dawn hinted of coming day, before the sun was up, “while it was yet dark,’ bearing sweet spices, she started on her sacred errand. As she went, she thought of the great stone that had been rolled against the mouth of the cave. Who should roll it away? But it was rolled away already. The tomb was empty. Startled, she fled toward the city, and met the more tardily coming disciples. Her words are the first annunciation of that morning, ‘‘ They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” She turns back with them, and stands by the tomb, alone, silent, weep- ing, when a voice addresses her, ‘“ Why weepest thou ?” And again it is, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” And then, as the angel leaves her, a form is before her which her dim eyes suppose to be that of the gardener, and to him she pours out anew the one agonizing thought, exquisite with the pathos and eloquence of despair: “Oh, sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.” How dirge-like this repeated refrain, that solemn, sad, wail- EASTER, 39 ing cry, wild and weird, “I know not where they have laid him,” They had not laid him anywhere,— disciple, gar. dener, angel. There had been nothing of that which the Pharisees pretended to fear. Of all men, the dis- ciples the least capable of that act. They were too stupefied for that. There had been nothing of that which Mary may have vaguely suspected,—that his enemies had stolen him away. No enemy had done it. Nor had angels. Nor had man. When, how, no man knows; but : | “The rock-barred door Is opened wide, and the great prisoner gone.” The rites of sepulture never were concluded; and the swift word passed from lip to lip of friend, it reached the ear of foe, it spread the wide world round,— “ He is risen! he is risen! Tell it with a joyful voice. He has burst his three days’ prison, Let the whole wide earth rejoice! ” Jesus was not to pass to dust in the long, unrelieved silence and quiet of that hillside garden. It was death that died there ; and Jesus lived. Of all the days in the Christian’s calendar, this should be the gladdest and the welcomest. is » d EASTER. 43 tian,— but the Christ, where have they laid him? Here is the civilized world, holding as the apple of its eye a venerated institution; and here are customs, laws, habits of people and of individuals, and they all bear a Christian name and purport to come of him, to be because of him. There are many valuable, admirable things about these, mingled with much that is no way desirable; but, even in their best expression, the marvel is that they should be considered Christian, that they should claim Christly origin and sanction, so little of the Christ is in them. Where have they laid the Christ? we) say. A very successful, well- regulated Church, feasts, fasts, rites, ceremonies, occa- sions punctiliously looked after, a right administration of service, a broad allegiance of people, a wide-spread interest and power,— but the Christ, where have they laid the Christ? These might be attributes of, attend- ants upon, a well-regulated heathenism: they might be dicta of a philosophy, the expedients of a police, the morality of a well-ordered society, the sanction of honored custom,—any of a thousand motives might account for, uphold these. There is no Christ flavor to them. They bear his name; but where have they | laid him? Where, in these, his unmistakable spirit? Jesus is not an embalmed body laid away in a Judean grave centuries ago, but Jesus is a living spirit, source and centre of a faith that: lives; but where have these which have stolen his name, which do work as under his sanction and as by his help, laid that spirit which is to be the world’s deliverance, without whose leaven- ing presence all must go for nought? It is his own word that it is useless to cry, Lord, Lord! or to claim 44 EASTER. to do mighty deeds in his name; and an apostle puts fresh emphasis upon it by declaring that no man, and no man’s work, except it have his spirit, can be his. Where that is wanting, it is the madness of the mad- dest folly to claim to be his. He is no patriot, how loud soever his profession, how plausible soever his seeming, in whom the very spirit which makes the patriot is evidently wanting: he is no republican, he is no democrat, he is no hard-money man, whose spirit lacks the very elements that go to make him one or the other. He is no Swedenborgian who ignores the influence, the spirit of Swedenborg ; and why should that man be Christian, or that thing be Christian, which is conspicuous and notable for the absence of that which makes the Christian? The in- forming, inspiring spirit of a thing is that by which it is to be alone known. You may call something a rose to all eternity, but, if it have not that informing, inspiring something which makes a rose, an eternity of calling can’t make it one; and you may call church, sect, man Christian up to the last “syllable of recorded time,’ but if church, sect, man, be not informed, in- spired by that spirit which makes, which is, the Christ, the calling is vain. It comes back as empty as the echo that shouts at you behind the mountain,— noth- ing but a sound, the rebound only of air. We talk of nominal Christians. There can be no such thing. An echo is a nominal voice; but it is nothing, baseless, bodiless, substanceless, the shadow of a sound. To be nominally Christian is to be Christian not at all, is to be empty of Jesus as Mary found the tomb to be, is to mistake the tomb for Jesus, the dead place where EASTER. AS he had lain for the living force which already he was become. When Jesus had been taken away, it would have taken more than an angel to prove that he was there. . Only man attempts such legerdemain, and would have us believe that a cerement is a body, and the ~ napkin and the linen clothes the living man, and the empty place quick with the throb and quiver of a beat- ing heart. It is only man that takes a semblance for a reality, a shadow for a substancé, who undertakes to lay away the spirit of Jesus, and yet pretends to have and hold it. | I have briefly to answer the Mary question by say- ing, We have laid him in the past. He is an embalmed memory rather than a living influence; he is a fact in history,.not a present spirit; a man whom claiming to know is honor to ourselves, not proof of faithful service. We have laid him under catechism and creed, decrees, substitutions, and religious form and formula and custom,— buried him under these, not as one buries a corner-stone, that it may be the solid thing upon which the substantial edifice shall rise, but buried him as we bury things that we want to keep out of sight, and mean shall stay dead. We have been satisfied with the conjuring power of his name, and by its spell have attempted to work. We have let our idea of respecta- bility, the customs of society, the proprieties of inter- course, the distinctions of class, and all the shifting and shallow expediencies overlay him, and established the sanctions of a reputable selfishness, tinctured with just a flavor of his name,—the low average of opinion of the low average of men,—into the place which is 46 EASTER, alone of right his, till his influence is as dead in these as was his body when Pilate’s myrmidons thrust the spear into his side. It is not undue exaggeration to say that, saturated with what is called a nominal Chris- tianity, the things that pertain to life are empty of that spirit which is specifically his, and that to attempt to press the law of that spirit upon Christendom would be to shake it to its foundation. And that is a shak- ing Christendom needs, and must yet have. For a moment look at what we call manhood. The cynic Diogenes lighted his lantern, and said he was searching for a man; Plato, banished to Syracuse, told the tyrant that he had come to the island to find a virt uous man. Christ came not to search for, but to make. He came not in the majesty of a God, but in the beauty of personal holiness,—the model, the ex- ample of what the men of different philosophies were seeking, what the many wanted to find, to be. In all the way of life, he stands before us. Whatever we want to get at regarding it, he supplies us with. We have only to refer back to him, and the principles as the conduct of every-day existence become manifest. We no longer walk in the dark and stumble, but it is light all about us, and we are erect. Principles, pre- cepts, injunctions, not mere matters of record, but in living witness, stand dressed in all their attractiveness and possibility, and how to grow into a Christianly manhood, a Chxistianly womanhood is just as clear in rudiment and in progress as how to grow into any ordinary calling or trade. And yet, in this great art of living,— the art of arts for all of us, the desirable and all-important consummation,—that very example, the a EASTER. 47 living spirit and influence of Jesus, has been laid aside; and we consent to be moulded by ten thousand other antagonistic influences, and to grow everyhow, after our own wills or the dictation of men and things about us. Satisfying ourselves in the virtue of a name, we go on to live much as if Christ had never lived, died, risen. So far as his example is concerned, he might as well be lying in a never opened tomb. With per- sistent ingenuity, we keep him from vision, we thrust him from thought. We go our own way. Clinging to his name, and in his name essaying to do many things, we grow away from that spirit whose stringent imper- ativeness is softened by the sweetness of his life and the grand results of resolute service. We make him really of no account, carefully laid away from sight and thought, and in history and in ourselves we have this unaccountable, this monstrous anomaly, a pattern by which nobody patterns, while everybody assumes to be by it patterned. How are we better than the whited sepulchres Jesus pointed out to his disciples? What the-Christian men and women have done with Christ all along these years of a Christian era is simply this,— they have laid him aside. They have not de- nied him: they have not forgotten him. They have confessed him, and then they have put him by, as one puts by the thing or thought that with a too faithful, troublesome pertinacity will keep itself before one, as the angel of the Lord would keep itself in the path of stubborn Balaam. Assuming to be walking after him, glowing with the desire to be named as his, in his name doing every manner of thing, and on it building every manner of hope, him men have simply waived aside; 48 EASTER. and all his mighty self has been as a buried death in the Church’s enterprise and the individual’s career. Empty, as the disciples found the tomb of Christ they expected to see, has the church life, individual life been of his life. The scattered cerements of the sacred body witnessed where the Christ had lain, wit- nessed to his death, and what more living witness have the Church and the soul? Forms, feasts, fasts, profes- sions, cries of Lord, Lord,— cerements, swathing-bands, not the living soul. That is not in them. Our prov- erb is the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out. The religion of the Church, the religion of the soul, is the religion of Christ with Christ left out. New churches building all the time, new sects rising all the time, new preachers, new views, new methods, great stir and interest and zeal, and every manner of thing laid hold of and brought in in his name, but not the Christ. Things not going right, the gospel not progressing, the world and the flesh and the devil successfully withstanding it,—an ever-growing, compact, and well- cemented kingdom arising to confront and threaten the kingdom of God, and men pressing into it, and the anointed custodians calling meetings and asking what to do, and devising new machinery, and gearing up and oiling old, themselves doubtful and quaking and distraught; but the Christ not called in, still laid aside, that living spirit not invoked, without which all ma- chinery must be dumb and had better be dead. And so this Easter morning finds the world. Nearly | two thousand times have men kept the high festival of this memorial service,— flower and language and hymn and prayer and praise and ceremony joining in acclaim ——— ee ee EASTER. 49 to Him who was dead and is alive, yet not alive to the hearts, to the faith, to the needs, to the lives of the very men who shout and profess and commemorate. This is our to-day picture, our to-day fact,— immortal men not living as if immortal, but as if they were to eat and drink to-day and to-morrow die. We want to put away the corruptible law and life of the flesh, and put on the incorruptible law and life of the Spirit, to be clothed upon with the likeness of that One of all the sons of men whose life was a rising from the grave of trespasses and sins, whose spirit both points and leads to what can never decay. We need to grow into a diviner thing than the time shows, than the time as- pires to, than the time believes in. We need to take the Christ from where he has been laid, and allow him to walk abroad in the atmosphere of daily life, once more appealing pungently and convincingly and _ build- ing himself into the soul, its life. We do not need to keep Easter as a memorial; but we do need that living Easter power which shall raise us above our every infirmity, and make us quick with the elements of the holy life. The point of it all seems to be not so much that Jesus has risen from the grave, and our hopes of a future are through that strengthened, as that because of him is the way out of the grave of trespass and sin. Immortality by itself is little. Merely to live again has nothing about it that one should desire it. The con- tinuance of being has no value. The value, the desire, is in the new reach possible to the soul when it has risen above the things obnoxious to an infinite: purity and love, obnoxious to a man’s own best thought and 50 7 EASTER. purpose. That which Jesus calls the eternal life is of more worth than any immortal life. It is the eternal life that gives the value to, that is the crown of the immortal life, that is more than cycles of ages, more than rest. And that thought should crown and con- secrate the Easter, that the spirit touched to new life breaks the tomb of carnal desires, rends the cerements of selfish pursuit, puts off the dross of the earthly part, and walks out into new duties and higher hopes; and as the spirit of spring touches dead grass and buds, and makes’ new life course along their veins till all semblance of death is sloughed away, and Nature stands resplendent in the new vesture and glory of life, our souls, touched by the spirit of life in Jesus, put on their promise and their beauty, carnal things drop away, and the full flow of a diviner being, cleansing, purifying, elevating, throbs through these dull and lag- gard lives, supplying them with that quick power which shall transmute the man of earth into the man for heaven. Mary did not know where Jesus had been laid. She could not go to him. We do, and nothing stands between us and finding him except the stolidity of our wills. We do not want to have it said of us that we have laid away our Saviour. Rather would we have it said that we are risen with him, that we have sunk our lower selves, repressed what is base, and are growing to be like him. We do not want that men should say of us or we confess it of ourselves that Jesus is but a name. No presence, no power. It is not the dead Christ of a past history that we desire to own, but the living Christ of a present influence. We want to feel | . EASTER. 7 A» b ( ] St possessed by living power of faith in him, and then to feel it more, and after that still more. It was Mary’s sadness that a body was gone: let it not be ours to miss that spirit which alone gives life, lifts man above what perishes, and crowns with honor and immortality. Easter songs, flowers, wishes, ceremonies, are nothing save as the spirit of Easter in our hearts, consecrating all that we are, do, and hope, enables us to leave behind as dead chrysalis all power of the inferior nature, while our ransomed souls wing themselves in new arid broader flight, mounting as eagles mount, singing as larks sing, folding wing and hushing song only as we rest upon the topmost peak of high en- deavor, and know ourselves to have found favor as God’s sons. How shall we better keep this holy day of gladness, this queen of days, than by renewing our fealty to the One too much overlaid, forgot, and under his banner re-enlisting for the great struggle of life? Life! Who knows its meaning, who comprehends its vastness, since Jesus has said there is no death? Who can make too much of this part of it? Who too well fit him for the other? Easter Sunday, 1879. aie ONE THING I DO. “This one thing I do.”— PHILIPPIANS iii., 13. £ ’ PAUL was a man of definite purpose. In all history, probably, no man more thoroughly in earnest, so pos- sessed by one great desire. He had one thing he would do. His whole make seems to have looked that way,— a man of an original, grand intention, of a con- densed individual force, who would do whatever he had to do with a might, with an intensity that should insure its thorough doing. Any cause which had him for a champion was sure to succeed. He would do its work wholly and bravely and singly. No frittering of capacities, no scattering of energy, no wasting of opportunities, no halves about him; but what he is and what he does concentrate the entire man,— evidence of one and the same spirit in every phase of his checkered career. Into every one, he put his whole self. No one could complain. No one can write it against him that he did not thoroughly do the thing he started to do. Whether haling people to prison, or riding to Damascus, or fitting himself in Arabia, or fol- lowing out the after career of industry, courage, and faith, one indomitable purpose impels him, Into his tent-making, his persecutions, his apostleship, he carried ONE THING I DO. 53 one and the same spirit. Each in its own season was that one thing he would do, the one thing he did. We talk a good deal about success, but a good deal the secret of it is consecration to one work, and con- centration upon it. That is very much truer than the seductive mixture of nonsense and falsehood with which so many tickle themselves and deceive others. Success is an achievement and has conditions; and chief of them are these, which not the most fortunate or the most largely endowed may overlook. Condi- tions are never very fascinating, nor will anything short of the bitterest experience convince some men of their necessity. Industry that shall never tire, not want purpose, will alone redeem even genius from mortifying failure. Genius, with all its brilliant, but uncertain, desultory, and, on the whole, valueless efforts, has not made the world much its debtor. Its obliga- tions, rather, are to single-purposed, industrious, fixed mediocrity. Opportunities, surroundings, social posi- tion, and influence, the thousand outside accidents or natural advantages to which men attribute success, have really very little to do with success; while they more generally hinder than help the individual, spoil rather than make him. I don’t like that word “suc- cess,’ when used as the aim of life or the criterion of it. A man is to let all thought of success go, to sweep from his imagination the glamours with which it fasci- nates, to put himself at the work of life in the spirit of fidelity, to do the best that he can do because it is right, and then dismiss every thought of consequence, refuse to gauge himself or allow himself to be gauged by success, I do not suppose Paul ever thought of it. 54 ONE THING I DO. Jesus never did, and no true man should. Let it come, if it will; and, if it won’t, why then pray for heart and pluck to bear it, and try again, always sure that honors and wealth and the thousand things men prize may not come, but consecration to and concentration upon any one honorable work must give a career eternity will never be ashamed of, and enough worldly return to keep from the clutches of poverty. There is every - manner of misfortunes attending our mortal condition, but nothing has yet occurred in human experience to shake man’s bottom-most convictions that fixed and resolute energies insure what is best in any success. When we start in life, we do not think enough about this fixing upon one thing and sticking to it. Young people have not a great deal of that quality. It is something they have got to learn. Our first striking into life is a good deal like our first striking out in the water,—a very large quantity of sur- plus energy very illy directed, spatter and splutter very discouraging, to very little purpose. We are all abroad, flustered, concentrated not at all, because we have not learned the habit as the necessity of fixedness, of pick- ing out from the great mass the one particular thing upon which we will lay out ourselves. And somehow our education, both at home and at school, does not help us a bit. They alike tend to fritter. What do you for a child’s mind, when you compel it to wrestle with a half-dozen different branches of study in a single school session, get it a good start at history and then call for geometry, and, when well in the intricacies of angles and sines and what not, call for French? What do you for the trade-apprentice, when you are . po - A ey =F ne ee ee ee ee — a = . ‘ Sous 4 —— a Te ae eee ONE THING I DO, 55 & always taking him away from the thing he is just at, when he has to drop file and take hammer, or turns from adze to sand-paper, this moment is on some nice and delicate job, and the next at rough work that taxes ali his muscle and unsteadies his mind for what he was just at? We talk about the narrowing tendencies of the divisions and subdivisions of labor ; and when a man can only make the heel of a shoe, but can’t put on the sole, life does seem whittled down to a pretty distress- ing minimum. And yet the mastery of a single thing, however minute, is of very much more importance than the mastery of nothing,— the mastery inevitably his who fixes himself to no definite purpose,—and only by such concentration on one thing can we get perfection. With every drawback, the only way is to do one thing. The men who have accomplished the real things of life are not the brilliant, erratic men who have turned their hands to everything, but the plodding men who have stuck to one thing. With all the ridicule we have played off on them, the men of one idea have been the men to heave the world ahead; and so the men of one work. It is one idea, one work, one thing clung to, as a man clings to the plank that holds him from death, © that has filled the world with accomplishment; and men prove that they begin to understand it by this matter of specialties in every vocation, which is one of the significant things of this generation. I suppose Colum- bus was a man of one idea, a bore, a fanatic whom peo- ple hated to see coming, because he would be sure to talk about the great unknown continent; and yet it was his persistence in the thing which he made the one idea of his life that opened up a new world and made 56 ONE THING I DO. your life and mine possible. We know what a pestifer- ous set of fellows those were, a few years ago, for whom we had hard words and mobs, who, in season and out of season, in every style of language and of garb, by day and by night, and everywhere, preached the gospel of anti-slavery, and yet, on very diffuse, general con- viction that slavery was wrong, never would have forced the issue. It is the purpose to do one thing, and the doing it, that achieves result. The engineer of the passenger train does not tend the fire, and stand at the brake, and collect the tickets, and manage the ex- press, and handle the freight, and chat with the pas- sengers, and play cards in the smoking-car, an ubiqui- tous and generally ornamental or overburdened official ; but he is in the cab, his eye on the track, his hand where it can touch lever or throttle, his whole self alert, a man of an incarnate consciousness, no off-thought or power. He is doing one thing; and because he does it, your safety and the journey’s success.. And think how it has been in science, in invention, in all manner of discovery, in scholarship, state, art, mechanics, phi- lanthropy. It is the one thing at a time, the-one thing well held to till accomplished, each separate stone well placed and thoroughly built in, that builds up causes, truths, men. Put everything that you are into a bewil- dered series of vague and ill-assorted effort, and you do nothing real, valuable, lasting. It is like the old fowl- ing-piece that was a master-hand at scattering small shot all through a flock, ruffling feathers and breaking legs and wings, but really bringing down nothing. Put all you are into one thing: stick to that. It is like the rifle at Creedmoor or at Wimbledon. It takes out the very central eye, and bears away the prize. — 4s" eee he ee ee ee ee ee en ONE THING I DO. Eo: And so, whatever of belittlement may come of the doing one thing, we must run the risk for sake of the good that can in no other way be reached, and learn to counteract it by that counteracting a well-instructed conscience insures. We may write it as a first con- dition to useful, honorable life anywhere, without which is no accomplishment, that the power of the whole man must be laid out on the selected thing. One thing must be resolved on, and that one thing done. The old patriarch, dying away back there in the centuries, said it of his, son, “ Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel’’; and history and biography and experi- ence have been ever since repeating the fact. You and I know many a failure in manhood, solely for lack of concentrated purpose ; while we have seen many a one, pigmy otherwise, grow by it. into a sonof Anak. And when we see what a fixed devotedness to one thing does, consecration and concentration, one won- ders that one ever hesitates at anything. The most obdurate has to succumb, the most hopeless yields. There is no obstacle. To-day’s necessities are the im- possibilities of the last generation, every one of them the result of somebody’s fixed adhesion to one thing, till it was done. So tunnels pierce the roots of moun- tains, and telegraphic wires lie undisturbed in ocean deeps, far spaces in the firmament above are read, and fickle weather induced to make known its secret. One feels it to be the sesame before which all things shall unlock themselves. Somebody says, ‘That man is ter- rible who does one thing.” I remember just after the battle of Winchester that General Sheridan said this to me, ‘“ When I go, I want to go all over.’’ He put 58 , ONE THING I DO, everything that was in him into the thing he was about. It was life or death, hit or miss, neck or nothing, and all that not in the reckless, uncalculating way we have been apt to think,— something definite, no half-way ; and so he was terrible,— terrible because every obstacle that put itself in his way had got to get out of it, cost what it might. It was the soldier spirit we want a little more of in life. I love to think of men who are up to something the like, not the hair-brain, dare-devil men dashing against the mills of the gods, but the hardy and daring and resolute men not to sway or yield, who con- quer in all fields, and not only write their own name in glory letters, but leave the horizon all threaded with gold when they are sunk beneath it. When a man says, “ That thing has to be done, and I am going to do it,’ whether it be a battery to be taken, or a habit to be conquered, or any little home stent, or daily trivial duty; when you read, by word, by deed, by look, that the great resolve possesses him, as a divine spirit might have possessed the Pythoness,— possibly you may feel that the word “terrible” hardly defines it; but just let him strike difficulty, meet resistance, find himself sore pressed, and then you feel not the sublimity of purpose merely, but the terrible power that lies in him, resolved to do the one thing. And there is something in one fixed, definite pur- pose that unfolds a man to himself, and gives him confi- dence, courage, and growth. A man does not begin to grow till he has purpose. He does not understand what is in him nor suspect what he can be. Alas, how many live out all their days without understanding what is in them, and go away with no suspicion of the ONE THING I DO. 59 kind of men they might have grown up to under the inspiration of a single resolute purpose! It is amazing the sluggish, contented embryo that one can contrive to be before he has thoroughly roused himself, and what confidence and courage he comes to, who has set himself his task and measured himself against it. That is a new day, the dawn of a new life to the boy, when he has taken himself out of the routine of the child, and resolved to be something in lesson or play or conduct; and the thrill with which the young man put his hand on his earnest life-work tingles yet along the very nerves-of age. It makes us almost giant to feel the birth-throe of a living purpose. The lioness, re- proached because she gave but one at a birth, replied, “Yes; but that a lion.” And the one lon purpose born to a man, to grow into the one thing of life, is a birth to be proud of and never forgotten. After it, we are never the same. It has lifted out of old conditions, limitations : it has put a spirit in us as the new inspira- tion toward a broader life, the quick play of whose pulses, vibrating through the whole man, impels us to thought and deed. You may have noticed in your boy how be seems to have sprung in a night into a great manhood. He laid himself down a child, he arose a man,— the boy behind, and he a new creature in all the grand, fixed purpose and resolve of life. You may remember the leap you made yourself, shut out of and beyond self, when you had come up to the great crisis and turning of life and were resolved what to be, and had set your first foot out in the new journey, and had turned the new leaf in life. In that act, you stood self- revealed, were more of a man than you knew for, had 60 ONE THING I DO. more of the stuff and substance in you; and life, which turned from you as playmate, you welcomed in his new garb of yoke-fellow. It is a proud, a solemn, a sublime moment that sees the soul register its purpose and write it as with imperishable letters, “This one thing I do, come weal, come woe, come ban of man or shock of time, come sorrow and distress and loss,— though I stand alone, dere I stand, this I do”; and the life of slow, earnest, arduous toil that follows partakes of the grandeur of the birth. A dull and depressing toil, too, sometimes; and often has life to be taken at a dead pull, at every disadvantage, steam shut off, brakes down, and all around yawning despairs. The more the need for just that purpose, which comes to us phrased in the fiery words of Luther, but which was keyed to a loftier note by the Buddhist missionary who said, “Even if the gods were united with men, they should not frighten me away.” That is what we want, —the purpose to do from which nor devil nor gods shall drive, before which the very despairs shall be dumb and impossibilities compliant. It was in the midst of such that Paul cheered and braced himself by saying, “This one thing I do.” It was the device upon his banner, his cheery, always cry, the word ever re-echoing its response from the far and beckoning heights, leading and sustaining till he laid all down. The “Excelsior” of the poet is but)the:Pauimousea. flesh. The tendency and temptation to fritter, and the amount of it discernible in the lives about us, the lack of concentration, is one of the most alarming features of our American civilization. We have been educating ONE THING I DO. 61 ourselves away from the virtues of our ancestry, and it begins to tell. Necessity, perhaps, compelled them to fixedness of habit and purpose quite as much as any principles of faith or conduct zwpelled them ; but, un- deniably, they were a people of truer calibre and greater specific character than we threaten to become, for as yet the disasters to American character are threatenings, foreshadows, rather than any actual, posi- tive, permanent deterioration. The decay of useful habit and occupation among our young women, the immense amount of aimless nothing they manage to infuse into their lives, the absence of exact and thor- ough and resolute and useful occupation; the minutes gone here, the hours there, upon an industry that means little and amounts to less; the superabundance of waste upon the purely ornamental and ephemeral, the lack of sober setting one’s self down to what hon- estly may be called work so as to become proficient in the homely graces,—in short, the absolute fritter of life, to which the average American young woman sub- mits herself, is only equalled in disaster by the folly of her brother, who is everything by turns and nothing long, who is here to-day and there to-morrow, this one week, that the next, so that, unconsciously, our salu- tation has got to be, “Well, what are you doing now?” As such times as these specially betray, the market-place is full of those who have half-learned trades, or of those who are just tide-waiters, ready for the thing that turns up, and not fitted to do that well. You find that most men who come to you for aid are | the men who never had a definite occupation, have never fixed themselves to anything, have nothing of es 62 ONE THING I DO. which they can say, “This one thing I do.” It is amaz- ing, the catalogue of things a man will tell you he has turned his hand to; while it is all but impossible to find - aman who can do any one thing well,— and very much, I. think, because of the idolatry which the average Yankee has so long had for the god Smart. Young men think themselves smart, and trust to that: they have no consecration or concentration; and it is a threatening cloud of doom that rises up before the future,— and he is no croaker who says it,— unless our young people shall be compelled to see that, not in- terest, but necessity as well as principle, demand a quick and radical change. We can’t go so another generation. We must get the old fire of purpose, the old fixedness, into life. We must inspire young lives with the true elements of manhood and womanhood. We, as they, must come to see what life means, what life wants of us, and put ourselves at that with all the power we are masters of, and do that thing as if it were the only thing to be done and we alone could do it,— consecrate ourselves to, concentrate ourselves upon it. That is the only assurance that you can have that the things of life will be done. One of the best lessons I ever learned was from a laborer with the city teams, whom I watched for years. I have seldom seen the spirit of the one thing more fully embodied. He seemed to feel as if the world were made for him to dig a ditch in or make a street through, so incarnate was he of purpose about the thing in hand, so resolute in industry; and every nerve he had, the whole volume of his muscle and sinew, were given to his mission. It was really sublime,— the tireless energy with which ONE THING I DO. 63 he put himself into the thing he did. It is again true, and always true, and everywhere and every time true, what the quaint old worthy said :— “Who sweeps a room as for thy laws Makes that and th’ action fine.” But let us not forget that the one thing Paul said he would do was to press forward to the possession of that spirit that was in his Master, from which he said principalities, powers, things present, things to come, height, depth, life nor death, nor any other creature, had power to separate him. He had one over-all thing he wanted to do, and he had one motive for doing it. What in religion men want is both,—the one thing to do and one great, prominent motive. A thousand little ones never will make one great one. Possibly, it may do to enter upon any other pursuit from a variety of motives ; but as one great power upholds the world and sends it spinning through the spaces, while at the moment of need a myriad little ones might leave us the prey of their insignificance, so, to have a grand Christian life, we must have not only one example, but one motive for accepting and following it, and in the strength of its simplicity and sufficiency move to the great one work. Paul has supplied us with the motive to become Christ-like, as Christ has with the example. That fixed, it is for us to be the one thing. The inter- mittent, fluctuating attention we give it, the divided affections which it has, are not the means to a success- ful issue. There are venerable sins in us will not fall before anything less than a determined and per- sistent siege. Not an hour’s diversion from our pur- 64 ONE THING [\DO. gas pose but is felt, but weakens our capacity and prolongs our strife. We have not the hours to spare. A-work, the issues of which no man can overvalue, waits for our whole energy. Our soul-sparks struck from the divine essence need kindling into a pure, steady, and intense flame. They can only be fitted to inherit the kingdom by that genuine, entire devotion which shall lift them above the wiles of other employments, and leave them at liberty to love and labor for the One. SWAMPSCOTT, July, 1875. VI. Tih wKINGDOM OF .GOD. “The kingdom of God.” — LUKE xvi., 16. Tue phrases “kingdom of God” and “kingdom of heaven’ are old Hebrew phrases, and used inter- changeably. They mean one and the same thing; that is, the rule, dominion, supremacy, of what is true, right, God-like, heavenly, not a place, but a condition. Paul says, “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, joy, and peace, in the Holy Spirit.” Jesus says, “ Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness,” and afterward declares that kingdom to be within. What I have to say of the kingdom of God, just now, lies in a little different direction. And I would like to gather within its realm things not enough seen to be of it, nay, supposed to be contrary and alien to it, Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is within.” I want to say that it embraces all things. It runs back to that time which science includes within unknown thou- ' sands of years, which Scripture comprehends in the one word “chaos,” to that “beginning” of which no man knows; and it runs forward to the end of time and things, of which extreme, as of the first, again no man knows. It embraces and it holds within itself all that was and is and is to be. Men have not yet come 66 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. fully to understand this. They have a good many king- doms besides God’s; and they put him over a very restricted province. Scarcely was Christianity recog- nized before it dwindled into a strange incongruity and complication, betraying no more elevated concep- tion of the Deity than the mythologies do, the whole ~ _ matter being cut up and divided very much as Homer had it, among the Olympian gods. _ Very little was left to the Supreme beyond a vague, far-away, impersonal oversight. That phase was suc- ceeded by a condition of things no better. God was just as much wronged, obscured, his kingdom invaded, taken away from him, when Christianity, following — Persian leading, gave most of it to the devil. If you believe what is a great deal said to-day, you will have to believe that this evil spirit still rules over a large. part of the kingdom of God, that our God is but a very helpless God. Then, theology, jealous of the divine right, believing only in a revealed word, to all intent and purpose excludes him from nature, so that between materialists, who deny him anywhere, and religionists, who would have his kingdom to be the exclusive one of their faith, the great Al/zn-All Spirit is a virtual recluse, the larger part of material and human affairs are within their own separate kingdoms, under other cognizance and control than his. A very fundamental need is the need of some conception of the extent of the divine kingdom. When David wrote it so grandly,— ‘‘ Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there, If I take the wings of the THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 67 morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness will cover me, even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee,’ — he wrote it better than he knew. Such lan- guage seems very wonderful, as do many like outbursts, in which the glories of the heavens and the movements of the winds and the grandeur of the storms and the awe of silence-and of night speak not of themselves, but of Him to whose kingdom they belong, of whose power and majesty they are the witness and expression. It was such an advance upon the best heathen belief, that had put all these things of the outward world under separate and subordinate deities : it is such an ad- vance upon the belief of most of us, of this busy crowd who profess and call ourselves Christians, to whom these things are as ever-present as to the old-time singer, while they do not sing to us the same constant and glad melody. He drew them all within the king- dom, made them subject to the handling of God: we are but too ready to rule God out ; and to-day the strug- gle and wrangle, a good deal, is as between a material kingdom and a divine. Men talk about certain mate- rial changes in the brain, and draw diagrams to show how separate molecules assume different relations to one another. in response to, or rather as creative of, certain sentiments, thoughts, resolves, and point to these things, changes, as within the realm of order of a physical kingdom. I cannot help feeling however wonderful and true that thought, how much truer, 68 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. more wonderful, an older thought, that would keep these within God’s kingdom. This effort to leave God out of the things that are his, whether it be made by man’s indifference or man’s familiarity with phenom- ena, or with what he calls nature’s laws, not only shuts us off from many grand and tender thoughts, from much delicate and helpful sentiment, but really shears of their grandest proportions, as of their most wholesome truth, many things capable of carrying us on to the Eternal, materially and inevitably. It is well enough to know what science has to say about the structure and material of our frames, to take it home to our thoughts that we, so compact in flesh and blood and bone, are really but a “few pounds of solid matter distributed through six pailfuls of water”’ ; but to stop there, to remand us to the physical king- dom, to keep us out of God’s kingdom, were no service to us. We had better be ignorant about the compo- nents and properties of our bodies, so we can keep the thought of them as within God’s dominion and care. It is vastly interesting to follow the astronomer, the microscopist, the evolutionist, through their marvel- lous unravellings; but if you establish them within a realm of their own, if they contain their own causes, if the behind, primal creative impulse is of and in them- selves, you rob God’s kingdom of his grand omnipo- tence, you make puny principality his dominion, shut in, shut out by the surrounding peaks which divide it, in cold abruptness, from the kingdom of a godless evolution. A good man said one day, when I was pleading for morality in business, and that no one had a right to THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 69 allow the expediency of market or the temptations of individual gain to override the grand fundamentals of honesty and truth, “God has nothing to do with the grocer’s business,” slicing off one great province of his kingdom by a word, taking all the active hours of his life, his plans and hopes, straight out of the keep- ing of the Almighty, shutting himself within a little kingdom of his own. We cannot do this arbitrary thing. We cannot, at whatever line we will, bow the Great One out. His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. All places, powers, times, seasons, eternities, are within his do- minion: it cannot be brought to desolation by any such division; and though we rend away, here and there, portions of it, and only leave him, like some Jupiter upon an Olympus, a far-off king amid a host of lesser and rival deities, it is, in the end, we that are rent. His kingdom stands, world without end, indi- visible and one. When Jesus so emphatically told his disciples that the kingdom of God was within, he did not mean to deny that it is without also. With just as much in- tenseness and fervor was he careful to show that the kingdom of God was without, and has tied forever the flowers blushing at his feet, the sparrows circling above his head, the clouds along the western sky, the hairs of one’s head, the cubits of one’s stature, to the thought of a divine providence, revealing it, through them to us, as itself was revealed by them to him. Though I cannot quote it to you by chapter and verse, “The kingdom of God is without you,” yet it is. there, and, in its time and place, as unqualifiedly em- 70 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. phatic as the other. The great nature volume bears witness of his authorship as clearly as the tablets of stone which we are told were written by his fingers. The things writ upon her pages, writ in flower, in star, in minute and marvellous mechanism, in chemical change, in advances and retrogrades, in growths and deaths, in blossoms and decays, in solar systems and infinitesimal existences, have behind them his guid- ing, his law, his will; drop from his fingers, as the type from the hand of the setter; are the transcript of — his thought, the fresh, visible record of what centuries long gone he did, of what to-day he does, and read out, in clear, indubitable phrase, his honor and glory. The kingdom of nature is his kingdom, informed freshly and, as I love to think despite all the chain of intermediate causes which I do not disallow, imme- diately by him. I know men frown upon it, and they array their fact against it; but I love to think that David was literally right, and that the moon and the stars, and, if these, all things, are made by the very finger of God. I love to feel that his voice calls. out the spring, and that the hurrying breezes and the sweeping storms, the movements of tides and harvests of earth, and all things that live and grow, wherever they have their being, bear not only the image and superscription of the One, but are his handiwork. I would put God close against his work, as I would the mechanic close against his tool, his creating thought and will against his created thing, so that I might feel it to be his and take great gladness at the feeling; and I would have the gladness grow to reverence, and rev- erence to love, and love to faith, and this fair universe THE KINGDOM OF GOD. ; ya become in every part, in very deed, the kingdom and glory of God. ; _ There are, besides, other provinces in the divine king- dom than this vast and varied one of nature. God’s kingdom is kingdom within kingdom. The kingdom of thought is his: men use it as if it were theirs. They abuse it in many ways, and feel no account owing him for abuse. But mind is God’s as well as matter; and all that a man makes or gets out of his mind belongs to God, as much as that he makes or gets out of his soul. I think it is the great thing not to let our thought at any time prove traitor, and work toward the setting-up of any other empire, the sapping of that one. In all the freedom and revel of it, in all its allowed liberty and wonderful range, in its lighter, in its graver mo- ments, in its depressions, in its aspirations, have a care that it do not escape, that it do not rebel at the bar- riers beyond which lies an outer kingdom of darkness, where are wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth. I have no right to hand my thought over to the custody of any thing that makes against the interests of God’s kingdom. Not that I need be thinking of them all the time, chained like a galley slave, or doomed in penance like a-nun to one spot, one method, one work. God is served, his ends advanced, his kingdom secured by the indirection of pure and honorable living as by the special acts and services of meditation and of prayer and worship. Only it must be pure and honorable living, the un- studied and unconscious outgo of pure and honorable thought, the living water of an untainted source. Whether it be the thought that is born and dies un- Ve: THE KINGDOM OF GOD. \ voiced, passing as a dream, or brooded over as the heart of life; whether the thought that shapes itself in art, in painting, in sculpture, in building, or that goes out seeking other thought through literature of whatever branch; whether thought backward — memory — or thought forward — hope or fear,—it all belongs to, should all be kept within, all subsidiary to the one king- dom and rule, drawing men out of the silent and secret seclusion of their own less and more trifling things, drawing them on to greater strength, to broader reaches, helping them to soar with upward gaze, as the eagle soars and gazes, till they can rest within the bosom of the Infinite. It fairly oppresses one to remember that all the won- derful things men have said, and have handed through the ages down to us, have been the outgo of feeble and timid aspiration, and the bringing back from the be- yond Source, great riches and treasures out of an infinite wisdom and knowledge, impressing it upon us that the limitless range within which the human intel- lect has liberty is God’s kingdom, as well as is the limitless expanse within which light and gravitation and the blue ether harmonize and dwell. The same faith that feels that the man can take no wings and flee no whither but God is there, that the man cannot get outside of God’s kingdom, attests the inability of thought to escape the bands and limits assigned it, and that all these ample returns that troop about and surprise and gladden, instruct and elevate, are but echoes of the great Spirit dwelling within us all, to whom. all things that are are subject. The same may one say of truth. Truth may not be THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 73 tampered with, because, how broad soever of itself and how valuable, over all it is of God’s kingdom, and you may not annul or tarnish it. In its lesser grades, as truth between man and man; in its broader sphere, as truth of science, literature, religion, it is subordinate to the great, over-all Being, its founder and father, within his realm and jurisdiction. Wherever truth is, there is God; and, wherever truth is, it leads to God. There is no danger in following truth wherever it leads, what- ever it overthrows or destroys. It ever keeps within the lines appointed of God: it will never cross the ap- pointed limit. It needs no warning of revenue law or custom-house or excise man or soldiery. It deals in nothing contraband, it seeks nothing of its own. It is alive with another spirit. It knows itself to be hand- maiden of that which is as much beyond itself as the unborrowed light of the central sun of suns is beyond the light. that glitters from the surface of a broken bit of glass flung on the ocean beach. Truth is grand in itself, whether from a child’s lips or from those clothed with the power of intellect, experience, or character ; but truth has only its own grandeur when we conceive of it and all its wealth of worth as but one of the innumerable provinces which go to make up the king- dom of our God. Take one more material thing, and say the same of mechanism, in whose marvellous resources and abilities man has in these just past years been inclined to see but the reflex of his own might and the extension of his own kingdom. Nothing strikes us as more utterly gross, unethereal, unspiritual, than the machin- ery — oily, noisy, and grimy — which in complicated 74 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. variety makes and controls the comfort and the wealth of our generation, and contains within itself “the promise and the potency”’ of things in the future, the very possibility of which dizzies the soberest brain. We are only at the beginning of the triumphs of the mechanical section of the great kingdom; and many a one, unsettled by what has been achieved, conceives of mechanism as standing with its hand at the throttle of ‘the universe ready to defy Omnipotence, bold to make ~ the attempt to run the great machine itself. We have those who, in thought at least, would dare the old at- tempt of Phaeton with the chariot of the sun; men ~ who do not see God at the centre of the machine, but — man; and the more the machine does, the more they see man,— like Herod before the people,— pleased with the flattery and considering themselves as gods. I more dislike and doubt this materialism, the material- ism of practical men, than the more pronaunegen mate- rialism of the schools. -One day at the Centennial Exhibition, at the hush of noon, I stood, one in the great crowd awaiting the starting again of the great engine. By and by, as the hour struck, it seemed to stretch and yawn and draw a long breath, like a man rousing from slumber, then slowly and with half-force to begin its work, and then. at last, thoroughly roused, the ponderous beam rose and fell, the piston sunk and lifted itself again. Near and away off, I heard the whirl and whirr of wheels and saw the swift gliding of belts, and I knew that all over the many buildings life and labor responded to the dumb throbs of this lately so inert mass before me. Men and women looked at each other. ‘Great is Cor- | THE KINGDOM OF GOD. me liss,’ they exclaimed; but an inaudible voice spoke, “Great is God.” His spirit was within the wheels, his breath informed with life the interlacing bands. At his word, swift shuttles flew, accurate cogs interlocked ; and, to the systole and diastole of the great iron heart, whole miles of machinery responded with a nimble ac- curacy that outran that of human fingers. These great vessels, crowding through storm and night ; these huge locomotives, following the iron rails through zones and continents, over mountains and along valleys, doing the traffic and bearing the) burdens of harvests and com- merce; and these watches with delicate accuracy tell- ing the time beats of the sun and systems; photo- graph, telegraph, telephone,—they, and whatever else the genius of mechanism shall devise, send up their consenting voice to the oneness and the glory of the kingdom of God, of which they with their marvel and their magnitude are but a small part. So one might go on and tell how broad the domain of that kingdom of which we, too, are. I do not know what it is, but to me the satisfaction is immense. I feel the glow and quiver of it, that I can believe that everywhere all things are of God. From everywhere to everywhere, I can go nowhere, can find nothing that is out of his kingdom. The great revivalist talks a ereat deal of men who are “out of Christ.” To me, it is a grand thing to feel that nothing can be out of God, that all are parts of one glory and one kingdom; that there are no divisions and un-harmonies, but all things bound in one, to one end, for one good. It is not that at the uttermost bound of earth I still find him, but that at the uttermost reach of space, of time, eternity, 76 THE KINGDOM OF GOD, of truth, of power, of thought, hope, and love, I find him myself, in all directions, under all guises, a citizen of his kingdom, by no possibility of escaping. If you want to get an idea of God, of the vast and the infinite power he is, do not go to the heated pleadings of men or to the cooler logic of theological statement, but go to your own spirit, with the door shut, and then from its silence step into the world, or follow out some thought, - or trace some truth, or into the busy wheels and mech- anism of life put inspiring God. It will move, it will awe, it will satisfy you; and then when your Bible comes to tell you about your heavenly Father, and you follow all the wise words of good and holy men, and add to the kingdom within the kingdom without, you will have clearer thought of the infinite marvel of your own being, and all the interacting har- monies among which you dwell, and life will grow to one long interpreting of the one Spirit that animates all things, and seeks through all to lift the human soul out of its solitude and littleness into that wondrous sympathy and companionship which binds each to all and all to God. February, 1877. VII. GENTLE INFLUENCES. “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp and played with his hand, so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.”— I. SAMUEL xvVi., 23. . Saut had proved himself unworthy of the trust reposed in him, and had fallen under the divine dis- pleasure. It was told him by the prophet that the sceptre should .pass out of his family. He became jealous, irritable, and occasionally fell into fits of the most profound melancholy, during which it was danger- ous for any one to oppose or offend him. As this ten- dency increased upon him, his friends felt the necessity of taking some steps toward its removal, and, remem- bering that he had always been sensible to the influ- ence of music, they proposed that some able musician should be obtained, whose duty it should be to play to the king, whenever these fits came on. This meets with the king’s approval; and one of the courtiers, recalling the skill and sweetness with which he had heard the young son of Jesse play upon the harp, men- tions his name to the king, at the same time making such allusion to his personal qualities and prowess as ‘induces Saul to send to his father and demand the attendance of the young David. So the future king, a bright-eyed boy of fifteen sum- 78 GENTLE INFLUENCES. mers, found himself first within the precincts of that | royal abode which, in the end, was to be his own home; while Saul, ignorant of the fact that he was so preparing the way for his successor, received him gladly, and, won upon by his beauty, his manners, his bravery, promoted him to the honorable place of armor- bearer. His presence was a comfort to him. “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp and played with his hand, so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.” What power was that thus gained! David but passed his hand over the strings of his harp, and the maniac soul was calm and submissive asachild. He whom all feared, who had hurled -his-ready javelin at his only son even, became a man again under the soothing of music; at first thought, a thing as little likely to produce such result as any that could be named,—a thing of mere airy sounds, which would seem to beat against the nerves of a crazed brain as fruitlessly as the waves against the rock. And yet, though only sound, sound l#w, sweet, harmonious, im- pressing only the wave of air that passed it, dying as soon as born, it calmed the rage of the monarch, lulled his jealousy, and brought him to himself again. Though only this frail, delicate thing, it has done what nothing else could do,—tamed the beast, the savage, and the madman, and wrought mighty changes in character and life. What is mightier than music? It expresses what language and painting and sculpture and architecture fail to express. The simple melody, the solemn chant, the elaborate opera or oratorio, the GENTLE INFLUENCES. 79 human voice, the wonderful combination that utters itself in a well-appointed orchestra or peals from an organ or a chime of bells, each and all attest a power of expression in music, unapproachable by any other which is given man. The songs of a nation are said to be stronger than its laws. At the sound of a national anthem, the patriot’s heart beats, he grows brave, and is ready to do or die. Music lifts the deadened soul up to worship, makes a deeper gladness in the joyful, soothes sorrow when all things beside fail, reawakens hope, gives courage and endurance. The invisible harmonies thrill through the whole being, permeate our animal and our spiritual nature, and touch a depth far beyond what has before been touched. The coward running for his life catches the note of some “God save the King,” he halts, and turns, and is a man again. The glazing eye of faith grows bright again, as the familiar hymn for the last time reaches the ear. All emotions express themselves in song,— the gladness of joy, the humility of contrition, the bitterness of sorrow, the fervor of gratitude, the rapture of love. When the world was completed and God rested from his first great labor, the morning stars sang together. Music was the first acclaim of gratitude and joy that broke the silence of creation. When Christ was born, no word was uttered, no voice spoke, no thunder muttered, no lightning flashed, but music broke the stillness of the Judean night, and an angel chant wafted the benison of heaven to the worn and weary waiting ones of earth. And so, as earth passes, it sometimes seems as if the ear, that grew dull to 80 GENTLE INFLUENCES. earthly sounds, caught other nobler strains, as if that which is the highest reach of expression here were the common language of heaven. It would seem a foolish statement to make, if it were not everywhere a recognized fact that great power is not with men and things which have the name of it. Some obscure man will write a song: it shall pass from lip to lip, from heart to heart, till it becomes the chant of liberty to a million souls, and tyrants and thrones and powers shall melt before it. You marvel at the ponderous machinery which drives the thousand rat- tling looms of the factory or propels the vessel in the teeth of the gale across the ocean, and you use it as an emblem of power; and yet the power is in that almost invisible vapor which in repose sails lazily up from every evening cup of tea, and in its might conquers the power of the seas, and in its passion wrecks the might- iest fabric of man. We still retain the idea that power resides in the rude, rough forces which we see about us, which assume to guide and control. We believe in the loud and confident and brute force: the soldier or the bully is the man for emergencies. To remove obstacles, to obtain ends, we look to great means,— means which approve themselves to us as ade- quate,—slow to learn of experience that the real motive power, the power to go back to, the power to rely upon, the power adequate, is some small and silent thing, hid like the steam in the hold of a vessel, unseen, yet not unfelt. Beneficent, permanent influences come not with observation. An army may overthrow a city, a hurricane waste a country, but behind the army shall follow the genial influence of liberty to build again and : : | | | { | GENTLE INFLUENCES. 8I restore, and do what no force shall undo; and after the hurricane shall come the smile of the sun and the blessing of the dew, under whose gentle and genial in- fluence the waste shall be repaired and the desert blossom and be glad. _ Cezesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, the often quoted types of earthly power, the men of blood and violence, have left nothing behind them. Their empire died with them; while He who would neither strive nor cry aloud, who led no armies, who founded no dynasty, has to-day a mightier empire than tyrants ever dared aspire to. It is a curious fact that Napoleon owned that by gentleness Jesus had attained a power which could not perish, while all that had been done by him through years of blood should waste and perish with him. “Were I,” says a late writer, “seeking for the emblem of an enduring force, I should not select the bronze figure of the emperor, with his glass eying the fortunes of the battle, but another work of art, called ‘The Light of the World,’ in which Christ is repre- sented at dusk, in his hand a lantern whose beams fall upon his features, and light up his soft, ruddy hair and delicate countenance, and make fruit and flower glow on the soil near his feet, as, while the darkness gathers and the night hovers all around out of the sky, with wistful face of infinite tenderness he proceeds with the other hand to knock at a cottage door.” The dwelling and the portal which the painter intended, where are they but within, and what power like that empire over the soul established by the gentleness of Jesus ? Real power, beneficent power, enduring power, comes of gentlest things. It is their influence which is irre- sistible. 82 GENTLE INFLUENCES, A man rouses himself against any show of compul- sion. The antagonist is waked, he is thrown on the defensive. He summons all capacity of resistance, so little is gained. Try gentleness, entreaty, persuasion, love, the milder influences. No man can resist. He may yield sullenly at first, but yield he will and must. This fact runs through nature and through man in the world, in our intercourse with one another and with God. Let us take examples of the power that resides in things apparently without power. I cannot do better than recite a fable I once met. “There was a gather- ing together of creatures, hurtful and terrible to man, to name their king. Blight, mildew, darkness, mighty waves, fierce winds, will-o’-the-wisps, and shadows of grim objects, told fearfully their doings, and preferred their claims, none prevailing. But, when evening came on, a thin mist curled itself up derisively amid the assemblage, and said: ‘I gather around a man going to his own home, over paths made by his daily footsteps, and he becomes at once helpless and tame as a child. The lights meant to assist him then betray. You find him wandering, or need the aid of other terror to subdue him. I am alone confusion to him.’ And all the assemblage bowed before the mist, and made it king, and set it on the brow of gece mountain, where it may be often seen to this day.” Now muster all forces of nature, marshal winds, waves, thunders, earthquakes, and though, in their quick, terrible march, they make a wild and horrid ruin, yet you may better face their power than the silent, subtle force of the mist. Again, this fleeting, very ‘significant, but not much GENTLE INFLUENCES. 83 known “snow power.” And I cannot do better than quote the words of a writer known everywhere for his peculiar ability in such description: “Is there any- thing in the world so devoid of all power as a snow- flake? It has no life. It is not organized. It is not even a positive thing, but is formed negatively, by the withdrawal of heat from moisture. It forms in silence, and in the obscurity of the radiant ether, far above eyesight or hand-reach. It starts earthward, so thin, filmy, and unsubstantial that gravitation itself seems at a loss to know how to get hold upon it. Therefore, it comes down with a wavering motion, half attracted and half let alone. And then it rests upon a leaf, or alights upon the ground with such a dainty step, so softly and quietly that you almost pity its virgin helplessness. If you reach out your hand to help it, your very touch destroys it. It dies in your palm and departs as a tear. If any one should ask what is the most harmless and innocent thing on earth, he might be answered, a snow- flake. And yet, in its own way of exerting itself, it stands among the foremost powers of the earth. When it fills the air, the sun cannot shine, the eye becomes powerless. Neither hunter nor pilot, guide nor watch- man, are any better than blind men. The eagle and the mole are on a level of vision. All the kings of the earth could not send forth an edict to mankind, say- ing, ‘Let labor cease.’ But this white-plumed lght- infantry clears out the fields, drives men home from the highway, and puts half a continent under ban. It is a despiser of old landmarks, and very quietly unites all properties, covering up fences, hiding paths and roads, and doing in one day a work which engineers 4 84 GENTLE INFLUENCES. and laborers of the whole earth could not do in years. “But let the wind arise (itself but the movement of soft, invisible particles of air), and how is this peaceful seeming of snowflakes changed! In an instant, the air roves, There are fury and spite in the atmosphere. It pelts you, and searches you out in every fold and seam of your garments. It comes without a search warrant through crack and crevice of your house. It pours over hills, and lurks down in valleys or roads and cuts, until in a night it has entrenched itself formidably against the most expert human strength. For, now lying in drifts, it bids defiance to engine and engineer. “Tn a few weeks, another silent force will come forth, and a noiseless battle will ensue, in which this new vic- torious army of flakes shall be itself vanquished. A raindrop is stronger than a snowflake. One by one, the armed drops will dissolve the crystals, and let forth the spirit imprisoned in them. Descending quickly into the earth, the drops shall search the roots and give their breasts to their myriad mouths. The bud shall open its eye. The leaf shall lift its head. The grass shall wave its spear, and the forests hang out their ban- ners. How significant is this silent, gradual, but irre- sistible power of rain and snow, of moral truth in this world! ‘For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be, that goeth forth out of my mouth: it. shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.’” | a aT ae GENTLE INFLUENCES. 85 Leaving the realm of nature, let us come to life. What is more quiet, gentle than love,—not love that is debased into a passion,—for that is a whirlwind and a fire,— but that which burns pure in the heart of man, woman, and child? What is its language?. A glance, a tone, a tear. What are its weapons? Tenderness, persuasion, devotion. It may not speak, and only do and suffer; yet it finds its way through the pointed armor in which man’s heart is sometimes cased. You can withstand harshness, ill-treatment, chains, persecu- tion, death, but you cannot withstand love. The last hope is gone for that man who can. He has slid out of the sphere of the human down into that of the demon. The coaxing tenderness of a child, the gentle ministrations of a mother, the mild persuasions of a wife, can they not twist you and turn you and rule you as they will? Passion could not do it, ridicule could not do it, law could not, blows could not; buta kiss, an imploring look, a hand laid quietly upon yours, the mere trembling of the lid which foreruns the tear, can break the proudest mood and subdue the most dogged wilfulness. Strike but the cords of the love- harp, and the wildest frenzy of selfishness or passion is tamed. Tyrants have been turned from their blood- iest purposes, revenge has sheathed its thirsting blade, intemperance dashed the cup from its lip, souls that were almost lost have been won again to Christ, not by any threat or strong beseeching, but by the still, silent power of love, by a word almost inaudible,— less than that,— by a tone, a motion, a glance, whose pecu- liar significance, lost on the bystander, sank into the depths of the heart for which it was intended. 86 GENTLE INFLUENCES. Love is nearer omnipotence than any other human attribute, and it is love that makes the omnipotence of the divine character. : Let us go a little out into society, where man is not bound to man or to be influenced by this delicate sentiment. In social life, who is the strong man, the powerful man? The man of position, or of wealth, or of ability? Not at all. But the man who stoops to the lesser courtesies of life, who despises no little act of kindness, but keeps a warm heart, a quick eye, a ready hand. You see many men about you who rather pride themselves ‘upon their roughness, their manly superiority to the trifling amenities of life; who think it derogatory to them to stoop to the little char- ities of act and speech. They impress you with a sense of the consideration in which they stand with themselves, while upon yourself all the bustle and assumption of their self-importance are lost. They carry no weight with them,-win no regard, obtain no purpose. On the contrary, he who has a regard for what have been called the small, sweet courtesies of life lays aside all selfishness, in honor preferring another; quietly stands aside for another’s comfort; without a word, surrenders his claim or preference; is systematically, unfeignedly polite; has a bow, a civility, a pleasant word,—those little things which cost so little, which yet cost so much,—ready for everybody. At home, in the street, in society, he does the thousand nameless acts which are always wanting to be done, but which so few think it worth while to do. Without any large ability or large act or cost, he is felt to be a kind man and a useful man, a reliable man ; GENTLE INFLUENCES. 87 and he wields an influence and obtains a regard that no proud, self-sufficient man can ever know. His little courtesies take large hold of all; and men delight to come within the sphere of his attraction, and breathe the atmosphere in which he moves. They love him for what he does, they listen when he speaks, and are ready to help him when he suffers. Take another instance still less dependent upon per- sonal interest and acquaintance. Eloquence is a power. And what is eloquence? Not noise and vehemence and effort, not the strained posture and gesture and tone of the theatre, but it is the simple, earnest utterance of some truth which lives in the heart, burns on the lips, glows in the eye, and stamps itself upon the language and in the tone. It is not a thing of teachers and .schools, but a thing of the heart and of the moment. What a mighty sway it has! I have seen men get up, and with loud voice and vehement gesture and strong assertion work themselves into a sort of frenzy; and, while those who sat by looked on impassive and won- dered why all that was done, they toiled as one who beat the air and accomplished nothing. I have heard one of another stamp, with subdued tone and folded hand, but with an earnest look anda kindling glow about the eye, say what the heart told him to say, and the contagion spread, All ears were arrested, all eyes fixed, silence deep and breathless filled the place, and every one was lifted up above him- self into that divine region into which it was felt that he who spoke was leading the way. Eloquence is no trick of the speech or the body, no magic of well-tuned voice and fine person or a polished manner. It is the 88 GENTLE INFLUENCES. simple, native conviction of one soul uttering itself to the want or apprehension of another. Its word as an electric flush thrills through the heart, spreads through the land, revolutionizes faiths, opinions, governments, laws, upheaves the old foundations of principle and habit, and recreates the man, society, and the nation. And, last of all, what a power is silence. What so mighty as that impalpable, mysterious presence which wraps about our own hearts, embraces the night? It is the synonyme of mystery and eternity. The hush of the desert, the stillness of the midnight, the muteness of grief, the solitude of one’s chamber, what power lies in these, what appeals come up from their dumb lips! And, then, what terrible power is there in the pauses of a storm, the fitful hush waking a fear deeper than the tumult. What majestic power in the silence of a multitude subdued by some overmastering spirit, touched by some great truth, awed by some sad calam- ity, or melted and swayed by the sweet music of some gifted lips, bound and controlled at one and the same moment by one and the same sentiment! What noble power in the silence that submits to insult, that reviles not again,— silence that comes of no mean fear, but the love of God in the heart. What withering power in the silence of scorn! Then, the influences upon character which are deep- est and longest and most efficient are not those which are made of set purpose, not those of precept, which have been driven into us by constant repetition, but the silent influences which imperceptibly win our es- teem and mould us to their will. We draw near some gentle spirit, and at once we feel an attraction and an ‘GENTLE INFLUENCES. 89 influence, as if some hidden spirit magnet drew us. The very air is impregnated with power we cannot resist. Word, movement, manner, tone, look, without any effort or purpose, throw a nameless charm over us. Weare better and holier for the contact, and feel that we have seen and been near and touched by something of the beauty and purity of which the human soul is capable. The power of others over us is in the silent, indirect influence of character and life. What manner of men ought we therefore to be! It is just so God influences us. He does not seek to subdue us with awful demonstrations of power; not to compel us, but to convince us through the influences of love, and lead us by his gifts. His constant influ- ences are his silent ones. If he sends thunders from Sinai, to man’s infancy, it is the dewy stillness and beauty of a summer’s morning, when the wondering crowds hear the lessons of the second dispensation. If at times things seem to break away from their divine order and harmony and quiet, the re-established law soon asserts itself, that still his is the gentler way of love. And so Christ coming to our aid, to bring us back to God, took no form of antagonism, as he well might, backed as he was by all the power of eternity, but the simple form of a simple man, the gentle tone and win- ning manner of a gentle and loving soul, proving by his adoption of this way in the greatest of all works that it was the one true way which should be almighty to effect the intended purpose. The lesson for us is the folly of passion and force, the uselessness of that in which the world still trusts. The power for us to have and wield is the power that gO GENTLE INFLUENCES. shall subdue and harmonize all discord within and about us, the silent influence of a considerate and gentle spirit. The gentle spirit of God moving over chaos brought all things into life, beauty, and order; the sweet strains of David’s harp loosened the maniac monarch’s clutch upon his javelin, and he sank back calm and at peace; the word of Jesus hushed sorrow, and soothed the demoniac, and put back Peter’s impet- uous sword into its sheath. If we have ever gained a lasting, genuine victory, done a.real, abiding good, it has been by no great powers, but through the might of gentleness in us. So shall the world be in the end redeemed. Armies, monarchs, revolutions, must have their way. They shall destroy ; but the kingdom of our God, the kingdom of spiritual beauty and everlasting peace, shall come out of the graces of the soul, which attract and win because they are gentle and still. February, 1856. Vili. EP MAN WITHIN, “The hidden man of the heart.”— I. PETER iii., 4. THERE is an outward man and there is an inward man, a man visible and a man invisible, a man of outer activity and life and a hidden man of the heart. One man other men see, take notice of, judge by. That is the daily outward man,/the man of speech, of action, of expression, the man that is apprehended primarily by the senses and is addressed to them, which, in our care- less way, we are apt to consider the whole man. From what we detect upon the outside, our affection, our prejudice, our reason even, draw their inferences; and the man becomes to us what they decide him to be. The other man is the hidden man of the heart, the man that no other sees or can see, the man that no other knows or can know. Just as underneath the ocean which we see — which is fretted by winds, moved by tides, lulled by calms, tossed by storms —there is said to be another ocean, whose life finds no expression at the surface, so in us all there lies another man, the currents and counter-currents of whose life are hidden from all mortal knowledge. This is the real man, the man of affections, sympathies, aspirations, impulses, appetites, motives, the things in which life has its root, from which it gets its strength,— the man it has pleased God to hide, to fence in from all intrud- Q2 THE MAN WITHIN. ing vision, that there might be one secret, sacred place in which the soul, alone with its God, mee work out. the problem of its existence. This is God’s law, and like all God’s laws wise and good. Sometimes, we wish that we could take men down.into the secret places of our hearts, its chambers and its galleries, its corridors and niches, and show them what indeed we are, what we want, why we fail, what we aim at, why we do and why we do not do, how we aspire. We long to be revealed to those who walk by our sides, their eyes holden. At times, we weary of our isolation, and long to fling wide the doors and bid all welcome. Discouraged, misunderstood, suffering, we vainly beat at the bars of our prison-house: “Oh, that men really knew us as we know ourselves! Oh, that they could read, not these acts so imperfect, so strange, so contradictory to ourselves even, but the motive that prompts our inmost life, then should we have honor and rest.” But this is only a passing mood. We know that this which God has decreed is well. Experience and obser- vation unite to prove it tous. In our sober moments, we would not, if we could, admit any other into the mysteries of the heart. We prefer that the inner life should be hid. If God had not veiled it, we should upbraid him for his neglect. We will have our hearts as the holy of holies, into which no foot shall pass. Jealously, we guard them against every approach. With pains, we even labor to conceal what men might easily know, and knowing would bless us for. We love to pass incognito through life; and when men pene- trate ever so little our disguise, read ever so little the THE MAN WITHIN. 93 secret of our being, we baffle and throw them off the scent. Not only those who are worse in their hearts than they pass for in life, but those who are better, seem actuated by the same desire. The good man conceals his best as sedulously as the bad man his worst. Neither is willing that the hidden man of the heart should be revealed. And there are those who perversely put upon the outside that which has no place in the heart, who take a pride not merely in con- cealing the good, but in affecting the bad which they have not. I doubt if this be right. We ought to accept any inability God may ordain, not increase it. The wilful concealment of the bad or the good is alike wrong. I think God meant we should live out our inner lives just so far as, under his limitations and restrictions, it is possible: where we do not do it, we ~are deceivers. There are drawbacks enough of God’s selecting and imposing. Under the most favorable circumstances, the outward man does the inward man great injustice. We all, or nearly all, have some infelicity of manner or, address, some drawback in look or tone, some original or hereditary inability, very trifling in itself perhaps, which is always saying untrue things of the hidden man. Very few-are they who can give expression to that which they want to, just as they want to. How many warm and kindly hearts dwell under dull, prosaic, forbidding exteriors, or express themselves in ways and’ words that repel rather than win? How many hard and dry faces, like clock dials which have no hands, give no hint of the life within? How many brave spirits lie unguessed within the shrinking and diffi- 94 THE MAN WITHIN. dent? How many of earth’s noble ones die and make no sign, because they cannot master the native in- firmity which hides the inward man. There are bar- riers enough to a true self-revealing without our raising others. So much of the inner life as we can express we ought to express, so much of the-hidden man of the heart as we can reveal we ought to reveal. For it is by showing as much of the hidden man as we may that ourselves are made better, it is by seeing the man that we are that others are helped, encouraged, or warned. It will not be denied that that which we see is the lowest and least desirable life. It may at first be doubted, but I think it is safe to say, that the hidden man of the heart is always better than the visible man. There is more faith, more patience, more charity, more loyalty to God, more good-will to man, more craving, and more hope than ever yet expressed, more actual attainment. Beautiful as are many lives we gaze on reverently, and perfect as we call them, they are yet more beautiful within: the hidden man of the heart is nearer to God than his works proclaim. Somebody says that the very effort to shape, to embody, to put in language our thoughts, .akes something of power and purity from them. The willing spirit imperfectly utters itself through the weak flesh; and its sweetest songs, its truest devotions, its most earnest yearnings, float upward from it, unuttered and unutterable, to the Invisible, and not outward by any uttering of the flesh. And so it is with the weak man and the bad man. Within, he is building better than we know; and, though he fail to fitly frame and firmly build and com- pletely finish the temple God would dwell in, who shall THE MAN WITHIN. 95 Say that he has no hope, no inner life which, despite instability and failure, God will respect? The man of annoying and desperate selfishness, un- derneath, has a better life. His hidden man is a man of self-reproach, unrest, resolve. The man, cold, proud, stern, who seems to shut out wilfully every tenderness, has a hidden man, longing, aching, to cast off its mantle, and prove the wealth of real life that glows beneath. Approach him rightly, and that strong under-current will break through all opposition in full, rich overflow. The man of wild extravagance and reckless dissi- pation, the man who has scoffed at all warning, em- bittered the lives dearest to him, the man seemingly callous and dead, owns to a hidden man, outraged by this life of self, rebuking it, and moving it many times mightily toward reform. I doubt if in the dens of infamy and vice, amid all the riot and revel of the Sunday’s debauch, God does not see in each a life superior to, loathing, the outward life, a hidden life of the heart that could be lifted and redeemed, if we had but a voice like that of Jesus, which could penetrate through the overlying mass of trespasses and sins, but a spirit like his ready to encourage and to help. If we could but take the light and the bread from heaven where most they are wanted, and where they ought to go, we should then do something toward establishing firmly that sorely beset man of the heart, something toward revealing to the individual the man that he is, and help other men to know the life that exists in all, though it may fail to work. We should encourage and confirm it, and enable it to finish its course with joy. 96 THE MAN WITHIN. It is well to remember how constantly the Saviour noticed and encouraged the hidden man of the heart. It is not the word, the deed, the expression of the outer man, of which he takes notice, responds to, but the condition of the hidden man of the heart, whether by miracle, gift, or the power of his own insight. He knew what was in man. It was the inner life, state, want, inquiry, to which he addressed himself; and they to whom he spoke felt that he knew them not as men. Their thought had been read, and what they really needed had been said. As you read the record, many times his answers seem irrelevant. What have they to do with the inquiry? Nothing. But, with the interior condition that prompted the inquiry, everything. He tells just what the hidden man of the heart wanted to know, but dared not. ask; needed to know, without knowing what it was he needed. It is not the question of the woman of Samaria, or of Nicodemus, or of Martha that he answers, not the woman, the Nico- demus, the Martha who had spoken, but the hidden desires of their hearts. And, as he made these feel - his knowledge and his love, so he made his enemies feel his power, dragging out before others, to the full light of the day, to be gazed upon and despised, the - hidden man of the heart, sending cunning scribe and hypocritical Pharisee and crafty ruler again and again from him, stripped of every disguise, the whole inner man laid bare. And this action of his may well lead us to two special, practical thoughts. 1. It is the hidden man of the heart decides what we are. The outward man cannot do that, though we too ® THE MAN WITHIN. 97 frequently measure attainments, and make our awards by it. You will hear in the world men rated by the outside. That is the world’s criterion. A man of pre- tence or presence, of studied obtrusion and notoriety, of outward profession, carries the palm. Words and deeds, things that can be seen and handled,— these are the elements of man’s opinion of man, the coin of our daily currency. But these are not things that make the man. The man is not the man outward, but the man inward. It is thought, purpose, desire, the things of the heart, hidden there, that mould the man, make or marhim. Out of the heart, the Saviour says, come all things evil and all things good. His own work was with the heart. For the things without, he cared noth- ing. For man’s advancement in the world, he had nothing directly to give or to suggest. He has left no rules, no examples, for outer man. The one thing with him was the heart, and the man that-lay hidden there. He found it bruised, forsaken, crushed; and he raised it up, healed and clothed it, revealed it to itself, its then degradation and its possible holiness. That which he said and showed to those of his own time, he says and shows to us. All our life, all our hope, depend upon the state of the heart. If it is all well there, if pure and holy thoughts abide there, if high and noble resolves are formed there, if gentle charities and kind affections abound there, if the virtues and graces cluster there, if among these move a filial faith, and a serene trust renewed to the inward man day by day, we have the all that can be needed for the true life, and the outward man must bear witness to it. - The heart cannot have these things in its treasury, and 98 THE MAN WITHIN. the life be wholly low, sordid, and false. The good tree, Jesus says, cannot bring forth evil fruit. Let us remember and act upon the converse of that declara- tion. 7 2. And, again, it is the hidden man that God sees, and by that he judges. Men judge by acts. God makes no account of them. He strikes at once at the motive. Men punish crimes, deeds, expressions. God punishes intentions, thoughts, desires; and, more, he strikes the balance, impossible to man, between the ever-renewed alternation, the struggle between the good and bad.. It is a startling thought, when we give ourselves really to it, that there is an eye can read more surely than we can ourselves every prompting of appetite, every mov- ing of will, every longing of desire, an eye which sees passions petted, habits encouraged, thoughts invited, which we dare not let men know of, which we gaze upon with shame ourselves, which we submit to, even with a nameless horror, while still we hold them. It is a startling thought that God not only sees all that the hidden man of the heart is, but that he makes up his judgment from what he knows that to be. Disguises, with pain ‘and loathing worn before men, subterfuges stooped to while all the better life indignantly rebels, hypocrisies riveted upon the soul, armor of proof before men,— what are these before God, who looks straight down and clean through all, and knows just what lies at the deep springs of life in the heart? What a mad hope that is which men will still cling to, that some- how or other they are going to deceive God, and escape his judgment or palliate his justice. It will be a terri- ble retribution to many, when the cowering man of the = .— THE MAN WITHIN. 99 heart shall be dragged forth and judged; as it will be a joy unspeakable to many, when the voice shall say, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom | prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” And now two questions come up, which need an answer,— an answer clear and full. What is the hidden man of the heart in us? Is it such as pleases us, as sat- isfies our idea of life, such as we are willing to have as our record and our witness? In the past has it been all that we could desire? In the present have we nothing to fear, and is the future only radiant with promise? No one who knows the hidden man of his heart can feel wholly at ease, content. Some shadow rests upon the brightest life, some weakness inheres in the strong- est spirit, something done or undone makes the best to mourn. The past has waste in it, ingratitudes, neglects. It has heeded too much the many voices which call from without, and heard too seldom the one voice which speaks in whisper out of the silent deep within, and down from the silence above. The present stands upon that past, and it is imperfect; but it is the divine now, the moment God gives for the renewal and for toil. Let us seize and use it, and so answer by our _ future living our second question,— What ought the hidden man of the heart to be? Let us give ourselves in the fear of God, and as accountable to him, instantly and reverently, toa much neglected work. Let us go down to the bottom of our hearts, and begin there, among the hidden things, the things we think too little . of, those of which are life’s issues. Let us have noth- ing within but what is pure and noble in thought and purpose. Let every spirit of evil be exorcised, and the 100 THE MAN WITHIN. hidden man of the heart be formed after the image of the Son of God. That is a glorious work to which we are called. Do we think enough of the privilege of being permitted to toil in the same way and for the same end that Jesus did? Do we realize what it is to be worthy to inherit with him glory and honor and im- mortality ? In all this crowd of men and women moving so variously about us, in all this character written and acted, that which appears is but as the small dust of the balance. Underneath the man seen is the man unseen, the hidden man of the heart, very unlike, often better than the other. The man we thrust before others for their observation, the man we put forth to do life’s work, to stand in its counting-rooms, exchanges, in its halls of legislation, in the daily walk of common life, is not the man of the heart, but a man for the place and the occasion,—a man imperfect, a man expressing only in part and feebly, perhaps falsely, — what the true manis. The true man lies hid, silently at work, where no eye sees, working more nobly than fancy has painted or poet dreamed. For it has work- ing with it all that is good, the whole host of holy influences, the whole majesty of God and all that Jesus - conquered. You may go wherever man has gone, and you shall see about you everywhere, among barbarous as among civilized, on the islands as the continents, the marvels of human skill set up as trophies for the future to look on and admire, and the generations, as they come and go, gaze and marvel. But there is no such achievement of man,—and by and by men will see and own it,— no such trophy, nothing so worthy of admira- | THE MAN WITHIN. IOI tion, as the heart in man that has withstood the wiles of sense and self, has borne the burden through life’s dust and heat, has conquered, as he who was more than conqueror did. It is the perfect work of the per- fect man, a life that is hid with Christ in God. Dec. 18, 1858. IX. NONE “BUT CHRiIis “ Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”— JOHN vi., 68. Jesus had said and done many things conflicting so strangely with the hopes of the Jews that many who had hitherto been ardent followers and friends now turned away. Desirous of drawing from his disciples some confession of their feelings, he asks, ‘Will ye also go away?” Peter, always first, answers impul- sively yet sincerely: ‘‘Lord, to whom shall we- go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” This assertion of the disciple is our assurance. The words of Jesus lead to eternal life. They are the words of truth which shall not pass, though heaven and earth perish. They are the foundation of our faith and hope. They give the will of God as concerns man. They show us our duty, they point us our way. They are the sufficient and only foundation on which we may raise the superstructure of a clear belief and a holy character. If, however, we examine the predominating faith of Christendom, the tenets which men make the separating points between their various theologies, the doctrines which they claim as the distinctive doctrines of the gospel, we shall find them neither stated in nor defended by the language of Jesus. We shall not find SS ee NONE BUT CHRIST, 103 him occupied in establishing the things the establish- ing of which his followers have held of the first impor- tance. We shall discover nowhere the foundations of church establishment, no nicely drawn distinctions, no elaboration of creed or decree. It is a most singular fact that, though we have a faith called “ Christian,” yet the foundations of the religion professed by nine- tenths of Christendom are laid in the language of the Old Testament or of Paul. The faith of Christendom is not Christian, but Pauline. Not Christ himself is the corner-stone, but Paul. It is not the simple “truth as it is in Jesus,’ but the perplexed truth as it is in Paul. Creeds, catechisms, churches, are started from, defended by, the Epistles, not the Gospels. Proof texts, the sharp and ingenious weapons of theology, are not the clear, brief, broad assertions of Jesus, but the more hurried, confused, and doubtful though glowing sentences of the apostle. You will find the texts from most pulpits on Sunday, certainly if the discourse be in any way a theological one, taken from the Epistles, and the doctrine illustrated and enforced by reference to the prophecies of the Old Testament rather than the gospel of the New.* You will be surprised to find how little reliance in past theological controversies has been placed on the words of Jesus; how men have kept from them, as if conscious that they would not counte- nance such strange and bitter perversions, For one text from him, arrayed in proof of the Trinity or the more commonly received doctrine of the atonement, * Westminster Catechism supported by 1,200 texts, 624 Old Testament, 811 apostles, 235 Gospels. Justification by faith, 1 from Gospels, 42 from other parts. Original sin, 2 from Gospels, 85 from other parts, 104 NONE BUT CHRIST. you will find a dozen from Paul; and you will feel that the stress is thrown rather upon these last, that the testimony of Christ is thrust aside in order that the apostle may speak. The argument depends, the proof hangs, upon his word. He is the great head of the Church. His words, imperfectly understood, have given faith to the world. His Epistles, which even Peter found it hard to comprehend, have been made the lamp to men’s feet. His thoughts, wrested from their sequence and place, have been used in fragments, and out of such incongruous material has been reared a fabric as unlike the religion of Jesus as the matchless and mighty dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral is unlike the wigwam of the Oregon savage. Had not Paul written letters, had not the early collectors of sacred writings put them side by side with the writings of the evangel- ists, had we only the Gospels, we should have to-day a very different faith and a much higher attainment of holiness, a broader charity, and a clearer hope. This is certainly very curious. One would have said that over and above all other witness would have been the witness who came direct from God, and was himself expressly the commissioned teacher. One would have said that all doubts and difficulties would have been at once and solely referred to him for solution; that, when he left anything, there it was to be left; that humble faith would neither go beyond nor stop this side of him. Those are memorable words of: Peter, ‘Thou hast the words of eternal life,” and their appli- cation is as broad as eternity itself. But men, in the hot contest of opinion, have forgotten them. They have not found the gospel to be an armory of such NONE BUT CHRIST. TOS 7 Noy Se weapons as they needed. The graceful and simplaise / truth, as it fell from the lips of the Saviour, has not suited the wisdom of the world, has not answered the purpose of prejudice and passion, the strife for triumph more than truth. A faith to live by has not been so much their desire as a faith to establish and make tri- umphant,— not Christ’s faith, but their faith,— the faith of their sect or church. The apostles needed no other gospel than that which fell from the lips of the Master. It sufficed their purpose. It was the great antagonist of heathenism. It was that which spoke from Mars Hill, which startled the profligate Corinthians, which made its converts even within the gates of the imperial city. It was that which turned the world upside down. The word they preached was just that simple word which now meets us on the printed page of the evan- gelists. They took all men back to Him from whom they had themselves received the words of eternal life. Even Paul, who now stands so strangely above Christ, who is now so strangely quoted against Christ, never taught any other gospel. Little did he dream, when he poured out his full heart in rapid letters to the various feeble churches he had founded,— letters written in the intervals of travel or of pressing business, to meet their immediate wants, adapted to their then condition, —little did he think that these, written as all letters are written, would one day be found in a holy book side by side with the life of his Master, and by many, under the pernicious theory of a plenary verbal inspiration, held to contain other and greater truth than that delivered by that Master himself. Could he have foreseen this, I think he would have put that hand which wrote them in : ! 106 NONE BUT CHRIST. the fire, and held it there, and watched it consume with a more than Roman courage, rather than it should have been the means of depriving his Saviour of one iota of that honor which is only his. Those letters were never meant as bodies of divinity, never were written as care- - fully digested treatises, never were intended to be read outside the little knot of believers at Corinth or Ephe- sus, never were expected to survive the people and the ~ occasion for which they were prepared. How strange that he who so earnestly and eloquently pleaded with the Corinthians, because some were of Paul and some of Apollos, to the forgetting of Christ, should, in these latter days, not only divide the sceptre with him, but virtually be regarded as above him! I sometimes wish Paul had never written an Epistle. We should have been great losers thereby. We should not have known how large a heart was in him, and how meekly that - great intellect was bowed before that faith in Christ, and how completely that noble spirit became under it as a little child. We should have wanted some deep and glowing utterances of love and faith, some stirring exhortations, some pungent rebukes, some liftings into a purer atmosphere than this; and all this would have made a void indeed. Yet so perverted have been some words of his, so unduly exalted some of his opinions, so have men mangled his language and mistaken his pur- pose, that sometimes, for the simple truth’s sake, I could wish we had only the four Gospels for our New Testament. As exponents of the character and faith of the men, as showing the condition and position of believers of that day, as containing much for believers of all times, I prize these letters of Paul as I do those of © NONE BUT CHRIST. 107 Peter and John and James. And so long as we regard them as only letters of men to men upon topics then immediately pressing, so long as we consider them as separated by an immense and deep and broad gulf, never to be bridged over from the words of Jesus, so long honor be to them. Valuable are they as the words of earnest, living men,— men who had seen the Lord,— but their place is subordinate, and they must always be kept to it. The words of eternal life are alone with Christ. Ele is alone the true and living way. To me, the centre and support of faith is the language of the Saviour. Amid all the confusion of sects and jargon of theology, I find repose and assurance there. Bewil- dered and confused by the assertions and arguments of men, almost doubting my own belief when I see it so confidently assailed and put down by others, it is unspeakably refreshing to be able to go back to Christ, and say, as Peter said, ‘Thou hast the words of eternal life.” More and more, I tire of controversy and divi- sions among men, the skilful fence of human prejudice and wit. Waste time, waste words, waste ingenuity, waste temper are they, obscuring, not clearing, the truth, the heaping up of sound rather than the advanc- ing of the cause of Christ. Myone thought is, “ What does Jesus say?” He was of God commissioned. On him was the spirit poured. I find in his life and doc- trine no basis for the stupendous theological and eccle- siastical systems which have overawed the world, and I unhesitatingly reject them. To me, they are human ‘only. Icannot conceive of Jesus as a Catholic or a Calvinist, as a Churchman or even as a Unitarian. I find in his gospel no elaborate ritual, no specified 108 NONE BUT CHRIST, church government, no theology, no accurately ex- pressed creed, squared clipped, and cold. All these things have been after-thoughts, and they are human. It is no arrogance in me to deny them. I base my faith on Christ. Some men may think it a narrow and insuffitient basis, that so I cut myself off from vital truth, that so I wilfully blind myself to™great and solemn necessities of faith. Some will say that I must go for substance of doctrine to those who came after Christ. I have but one answer and but one hope. It is the answer of Peter, and the hope that grows out of it: “ THou hast the words of eternal life.” ‘When Paul follows Christ, I will follow Paul. When he goes be- yond or contradicts him, or rather when men say that he does, I will leave him and follow only Jesus, to whom God alone gave the clear truth, in whom alone of all may we put implicit confidence. What faith I have shall rest on Christ and on none other. To me, the Gospels are the way of life, high over all revelations, the anchor’ to my soul, sure and steadfast. Take a subject like that of the atonement: a matter which seems so simple and plain, so long as you keep to the words of Jesus, becomes unintelligible so soon as it is mixed up with human theories, supported by frag- ments of sentences from the words of Paul. I think time, talent, and temper have already been wasted upon it, and much more probably will be. Jealous- ies have been excited, hard thoughts have arisen, and friendships grown cold; and an injury has been done to the spirit of Christ’s religion, far outweighing any good which can arise from discussion of any topic of belief. To me, it seems a useless war of words, which would NONE BUT CHRIST. IOQ never have arisen, had men only gone to Christ as the fountain-head of religious truth, which might be settled at once now, if they would make his words the umpire, and not attempt to go beyond them. We never should have had this theory and conflict but for a mistransla- tion of a word of Paul. The same word everywhere else translated reconciliation is once translated atonement. If anything is clear and simple, it seems to me it is this, that Christ came into the world to save sinners. Nowhere does he say anything of substitution or the necessity of doing anything that it may be right or safe for God to forgive. Nowhere does he say that his death is necessary to constitute a just ground for the forgive- ness of those who repent. Acting as God’s representa- tive and in his spirit, he freely forgives those who come to him upon the sole condition of repentance; and when ‘he comes to speak of divine forgiveness, of what sort it is, of its nature and action, he simply relates the par- able of the Prodigal Son. All my interest in the sub- ject begins, centres, and ends there. Of the thousand questions that may be asked, I am content to remain in ignorance. They are conceits and delusions of in- tellect and curiosity, not the legitimate demands of faith. I may easily make them matters of intense in- terest, and stake my happiness and faith upon some solution of them; but, as a sinner, the only thing really of interest, the only thing I can know, is that, as Christ is true, my sin will be forgiven of God, as the conse- quence of my repentance and return to him. That is all I care to know, it is all I ought to know. To that repentance and return, I ought to lend all my energies rather than allow my thoughts to be frittered away IIo NONE BUT CHRIST. upon things started by human ingenuity, or growing misunderstood, out of some phrase or word of Paul speaking or writing to some Roman or Jew, who was to be approached through the medium of his old preju- dices and education, to whom language and arguments were to be addressed wholly inappropriate and unintel- ligible to us. I do not think the simple words of Jesus could for a moment bear any other construction than that God forgives when man repents, Forgiveness is an act of divine mercy, and not an act of barter, in which a something else has been accepted as an offset to the act of pardon. The parable asserts that much, and closes with the welcome given at thereturn. That ought to be the faith, and the sufficient faith, of all. Where Christ leaves the matter, we ought to be con- tent to leave it.. As I read it, I rejoice that theresr such a parable upon which we may fall back after wad- ing through the subtleties of thought and language, more nice than wise, in which the plain word of Christ and the loving purpose of God have been shrouded. As I read it, I wonder that men who have that word should ask for anything more, and in their discussions so sel- dom allude to it. I know there is a great deal that Christ does not say. His silence is perhaps as impor- tant a part of his gospel as his speech. He says just enough to make us wish to know more, and yet just what he says is the essential thing; and what he con- ceals, however pleasant or interesting or seemingly serviceable, is not essential. There is a deep purpose in all this, and we ought to respect it. Had it been re- spected, instead of libraries groaning under theological text books, and religion rent by conflicting words and NONE BUT CHRIST. III opinions, we should have had a large and broad and free and united Church, embracing all, and a world very much farther advanced in the fundamental necessities of faith and charity. It is not essential to know how God can forgive the sinner, without some penalty or some equivalent for a violated law: that is not our concern. The only essential, the only thing that con- cerns us, is that God does forgive, when we forsake the evil and do the good. So much Christ says; and, if he is faithful and true, that is all that is to be said. All ‘other questions should be left, while the soul bends itself to the securing of the divine pardon. We do not get any nearer the truth, do not withdraw the veil, by going to the Epistles, taking some disjointed word or phrase, and building it up into an argument for this or that view of the atonement. At best, that is only Paul's view. If Paul says it was necessary that Christ should die before God could consistently forgive, then Paul says what Christ did not say. If true, that is an essen- tial. Consistently, Christ could not have been silent. The parable would have represented the father as say- ing: ‘You have offended against my law. Your re- pentanceis not enough. I must have some satisfaction before it can be safe or right to forgive you. Wait here till I find your elder brother, and see if he is will- ing to bear the penalty. If so, I receive you again to my home, and my arms and my love. If not, depart from me back to your husks.” Could the Saviour have been justified in omitting some such conclusion to his parable, if the belief built on Paul is the truth? Not that I believe Paul ever had any such faith, but that men have based such a faith upon what he has said. I12 NONE BUT CHRIST. Silence here would have been culpable in Jesus. He would have bequeathed us a delusion rather than the words of life: he would have led us into darkness rather than showed us the light. His silence is very remarkable; but it is always the sharp limit between the complete essential truth and the unessential accom- paniments of the truth, between what the soul would like to know and what it is of moment that it should know, between what God chooses to keep to himself — and what he considers as the broad essentials of salva- tion. There are never any waste words with him. The truth, so much as man needs to know, the truth, so much as man needs to attain, the truth, so much as man requires for his work,—that is all. It is simply, clearly stated, and there it is left. Over all the rest, the silence which is from eternity, which, despite all men’s searching and striving, shall be to eternity, is kept. The assigned limits of Infinite Wisdom it were wise in man to accept and respect. What can be more grand than a faith biti upon the simple words of Christ? Is it not Christ’s faith,—the faith that made him what he was? How far above all decisions of councils and churches and synods and sects it is! They have built up stupendous hierarchies. They have spread out faith over a iarge surface, made it embrace many and minute things, and imposed it upon multitudes. Yet with all its seeming, when you come to compare it with that faith built in the heart and life of Christ, you feel how shallow and unworthy itis. You see what and how much has been done by going away from the words of Christ, and how unlike is prevalent Christianity in its tone and deed to the NONE BUT CHRIST. 113 spirit of him, the Master. What Christianity needs is to retrace its way to the simple elements of faith as laid down by him, to abandon all human adjuncts and inventions, and sit at his feet in the humble attitude of Mary. What each one of us wants is to abase the pride of his intellect, stifle the rebellions of prejudice, abandon theories and speculations and decrees, and take the simple page of the gospel, the words of Christ, and without any other alloy of any other mind, prophet or apostle, saint or sect, construct for himself a faith. No backward glance after a type, no forward-looking for a fulfilment, no help sought anywhere of any. The corner-stone of faith is Christ, not Paul or Isaiah. The building can only be fitly framed together, can only grow into a compact and goodly temple, when he is the foundation and not another, when he and not another supplies the joints. There cannot be a thorough Chris- tian church or a simple Christian character until we have winnowed our theology and our faith, and sepa- rated the chaff which is of man from the wheat out-of which ig to be made the bread of life. Do not suppose that, in exalting the words of Christ, I deny the value of the words of Paul. Christ was God’s Son, and had the words of eternal life. Paul was an apostle, a man of clear intellect, warm heart, resolute purpose, and ardent faith, yet only and always a man, mistaken and weak as other men. Never did he expect his word would be exalted to the side of that of Christ, or that his letters would be bound in the same precious volume with the life of the Redeemer, and be held equally sacred and important. To Christ I go, and him I believe. He has the words of eternal II4 NONE BUT CHRIST. life. To Paul I go just as I would to any other man of talent and culture and opportunity. I do not go behind Christ; but I go behind Paul, and weigh his word by the word of Christ, and accept it only so far as it agrees with what the Master has said before. This is the true way, not the way of the majority who accept the whole Scriptures as on one uniform level, each writer of just so much weight, of just such inspira- tion as every other; but this is the way of scholars, of the candid, and, when the effects of education and prej- udice have passed, it will be seen to be the way of com- mon-sense. There are many great truths in the Epis- tles, many which one at once recognizes as kin with the truths of the Gospels. There are many things hard to be understood, many blind things; and it is these, and not the simple and plain, which have done the mis- chief and turned men away from the plain way,— these, and not the simple and plain, which men bring forward and contend about, and make fundamental and con- struct doctrines and sects out of,—these which have filled dungeons, fed the stake, deluged the world with blood, and maddened men with hate, and to-day divide and cripple the Church, and perpetuate prejudice and ill-will among the sects. This is neither treating Christ with respect nor the apostles with respect. It is playing tricks with our own wit. It is making the dark places obscure the light. It is setting aside the sure word for an uncertainty. It is interpreting Christ by Paul rather than Paul by Christ, making the scholar above the Master, the disciple above his Lord. In the course of one’s own thought or reading, he will find very much to perplex him. That is inevitable. So many things NONE BUT CHRIST. 115 are asserted that one soon gets puzzled. It never need be long however, only long enough to turn to the words of Jesus. What the compass is to the helmsman when the mist shuts him in upon the sea are the words of Jesus to the soul befogged and befooled by the philoso- phies of sects and schools. They are the words of life; and he who steers by them must avoid shoals and rocks, and enter the appointed haven. Well shall it be for us individually and for the great cause of the truth, if we shall throw aside whatever is more or less than the word of Christ, and have the sure faith of Peter that there is none other to whom we can go; for none other has the words of eternal life. As [I understand it, friends, it is the proud distinction of Unitarianism that it alone of all the sects builds upon Jesus Christ, his words, his spirit, his life. We alone have the single stone Christ Jesus at the head of our corner. Not the Old Testament, not Paul or Cephas, not tradition of the Father, not council, synod, creed, pope, bishop, or presbyter, not anything of any man’s devising, not any-opinion or dogma about this, that, or the other, but on Christ alone, and his words of eternal life, we take our stand. What other sect does the same? What one creed can you find expressed in gospel language, indeed sanctioned by gospel spirit ? You cannot twist the Gospels into the word “ Trinity”: they utterly refuse to doit. With the Gospels in your hands, you would never dream of the popular doctrine of the atonement. From the Gospels, you could never deduce the theory of the fall and of man’s reprobate nature, and out of them you cannot draw the popular idea of regeneration ; and only by the baldest servility 116 ‘NONE BUT CHRIST. to the letter, and contradicting the word that “flesh and blood cannot enter” the future kingdom of God, can you find the theory of physical hell torments in brimstone and flame. The living words of the eternal gospel give no sanction or refuge to the faith preached in Christendom, so hostile to that once delivered to the saints, . é The religion of to-day is not the Christian religion; and, whatever else may be builded upon it, the kingdom of the Redeemer so will never come. The Gospels alone are the sufficient guide and way into that. They — are corner and buttress, they are foundation and turret cap, they are spirit and life. What they say is simple and plain. What they tell of God and man, of sin | and salvation, of duty and of destiny, who runs may read. To forward the simple truths of Christ, and not the confused dogmas of men, Unitarianism exists and toils, watches, prays, and waits. What Luther said of the Church is pre-eminently true of us. ‘The Church heareth none but Christ.” June 29, 1873. Ds Sn oONS OF QUIET. “A place which was named Gethsemane.” — MARK xiv., 32. THERE is a little spot just across the Brook Kedron, under the Mount of Olives, which has a history. It is known as the Garden of Gethsemane, a name peculiarly sacred to us, which we never mention except with a something of tenderness. The name originally, liter- ally, means simply the place of oil-presses. It was there that the gathered olives were brought and there pressed. How circumstances change and ennoble names! This is all we know about it. Three of the evangelists allude to it, only two of them giving it a name, and none of them stopping to enlighten the cu- riosity or faith of an inquiring world. For some cause, probably its seclusion, near the city and yet apart from its bustle, it became a favorite re- sort with the Saviour. It was there, many times, he withdrew with his disciples, in hours of more intimate communion, when he turned aside from contention with scribe and Pharisee, and endeavored to explain himself and his word to his chosen companions. In this, he was hardly doing more than following the custom of - the times. The rabbi, the Jewish teacher, had his chosen place of instruction and intercourse; and here, uninterrupted, he could impress himself upon the minds 118 SEASONS OF QUIET. of those who were not only his pupils, but a sort of intermediate class, between himself and the people, through whom he made himself known to and felt by the common mind. The philosopher of Greece gath- ered around him the young men who joined themselves to him. They had a chosen place for meeting; and the shaded avenues near Athens, where Plato taught, are as much connected with his philosophy as Geth- semane with our faith. So there was nothing peculiar in the selection by Jesus of a special band of pupils or disciples, or of a quiet place of resort where he might have them all to himself for uninterrupted communion and instruction, where questions might be asked and answered, parables, purposely left dark to the unbeliev- ing, explained, and the innermost life and purpose of the Master laid bare before the pupils. There is not a pleasanter picture in the range of gospel history than that suggested by an evangelist, who speaks of Jesus as withdrawing from the angry discussions and troubles of the day, and quietly, at its close, explaining to the disciples the things which had confused them, which he refused to make plain to his captious questioners. Gethsemane became endeared to both Master and dis- ciple by such meetings and unfoldings. They so drew nearer to each other and to him, and were made to feel that he was not the great, mysterious Being to them that he was to others, but their loving friend as well as Master and Teacher. The effect produced upon them is evident. They never feared to ask him any questions, expected to have light thrown upon dark things in their moments of privacy. But Gethsemane was not merely a place to which Jesus resorted with his eee eee, — SEASONS OF QUIET. II9 disciples. No place so likely to have witnessed those vigils of which we have vague hints, which seem to have held so important a part in the inner life of the Master. When at Jerusalem, more than ever must he have craved and sought these seasons of solitude, which seem always to be forerunners of some new; more arduous duty, some brave exposition of truth, some rarer exhibition of power, some completer act of self-surrender. For it was at Jerusalem that his chief trials came, that his most earnest testimony was borne, that the rare heights and depths of his submission and endeavor were touched. In the country, he had com- parative quiet, found warm friends, willing ears, honest hearts, ready followers. Jews of Jerusalem followed him there to poison the minds of the people, to counter- act an influence they felt to be hostile to theirs; but the real people of the country believed and loved him, and his enemies gained little. In the city was his hard work; and when weary, depressed, longing for rest, for self-communion, and that nearness of God which.seems to have come to him peculiarly, as it does to us, when alone, it was the near quiet of that place, already consecrated by sweet intercourse with his chosen friends, that ministered to and refreshed him. You who have toiled and suffered, who in perils and sorrows have felt how the noise and presence of life grate on your spirit, who have found some hallowed spot,— spot hallowed by some dear memory, sacred as the resting- place of some cherished love, to which you turn with yearning, in which you find the heaven not only drop- ping low to your trial, but opening to your faith,— you who know the refreshing and hope that spring from the 120 SEASONS OF QUIET. quiet and seclusion of such spot, who go back to your burdens, your duties, your fears, as if touched afresh with consecrating fire from heaven, who find your tears wiped, your sorrow soothed, your trust renewed, and your way, however steep, more tolerable,— may know somewhat of the spirit in which Jesus sought that spot, somewhat of the power and peace which went out from it: you will realize how large a part it played in his un- recorded history, and how dear it was. There was a change in the life of Jesus. Its days of action, of charitable deed, of friendly intercourse, were over. His work was done. Life’s busy scenes were closing behind him. No more in the temple should men hear his words of wisdom. Not again should the crouching sinner meet his eye of pity, and depart for- given. Never more should terrified parent cry to him to save his child, or weeping widow or sister embrace again the restored lost. Never more should the dwell- ers in Galilee watch for and rejoice at his coming. — Not again, in the hush of day, should the friends meet at the old trysting-place, and talk over the things that they heard and ask of what they failed to comprehend. The short earthly career of the Son of God was fin- ished. Clouds and darkness and terror shut down heavily about him. One of his own was gone out to betray him for a paltry pittance. The bold, confident man, who just now had promised to die with him, was already sleeping at his watch, and would soon deny that he knew him. Gethsemane, the place of quiet, is now the place of struggle; and he who had found there be- fore only peace, in a more than mortal agony, seeks peace again. A terrible strife it is. We cannot 4 SEASONS OF QUIET. I2i fathom it. We stand dumb before that simple record of great drops of sweat, as it were of blood. We bow subdued and silent in presence of that last conflict. Theology tries to explain, grows quarrelsome over it. Faith is humbled and silent. The disciples sleep. As if craving sympathy, Jesus turns to them; and then, as if rebuked, he turns to God. Anon, he seeks them, and then again turns back to God. We shall never — know the mystery of that conflict until all mysteries are unveiled. You who have suffered, who have had terrible crises in life, do you not understand something of this grasping at help from man, and then, because of baffling rather than of faith, turning to God,—turn- ing again from God, because he was not quick to give what you desired, or gave only what you were not ready to receive, to turn again, craving, yearning, back to God? That is a very human struggle which Gethsem- ane that night witnessed. There is a change again in Gethsemane. The full moon looks down clearly into the garden, and all is peace. The struggle is over. Jesus is victor. The great end is gained. The cup that might not pass is accepted. It shall be as God wills. The sharp cry of agony is hushed before that prayer of prayers, “ Not as I will, but as thou wilt.” The step of the traitor is heard. Calmly, Jesus awaits him and receives the fatal kiss, while the astonished guards shrink from their duty. He wears no laurel, he is captive, he is led to death; but even they read his victory. Poets and painters have tried through their separate arts to give us an idea of this struggle and its results, but they fail. Faith itself is not sufficient. The garden, so dear to 122 SEASONS OF QUIET. all because of its pleasant intercourse, so sacred to Jesus from its hours of self-communing, so memorable because of that great strife, is made by its conquest the central point in the reverence. Not the cross itself has had more to do with making and intensifying love and gratitude to the Saviour than that garden scene, into which, when the victory was gained, angels with their soothing and strengthening ministries came. You who have suffered and have known the struggle of Gethsemane have gained little, unless you have known — also its victory. The teaching of Gethsemane is threefold,— quiet, struggle, victory. Is not this just the course all human souls must run before finding themselves in that per- fect peace with God which has but a single utterance, “Not as I will, but as thou wilt” ? It is a great mistake in these lives of ours that we do not have more quiet,—nota mere dull, lethargic rest, but a quiet that comes from God, and the soul’s rest in him. How busy, absorbed, harassed our lives are, as if there were never to be a break in this vigorous, act- ive existence, as if there were no higher, no superior demand made of us. We are educating ourselves with zeal and thoroughness for every duty and contingency of the market and the exchange. I do not suppose the world ever saw men more magnificently equipped for every sort of material enterprise. I do not suppose the world ever saw powers of mind and body more thor- oughly trained for temporal conquest and success than shall be found among us to-day. And for these the bustle and excitement and association, the interchange of thought, the combination of various ability,—the SEASONS OF QUIET. 123 marked features of our day,—are essential. But there is a life which cannot live in this atmosphere, a life not to be made of this material. As the other waxes, it wanes ; and, in all the press.and overplus of activities, it fades and dies. Jesus himself could not keep the di- vine life in him up to its healthy tone save by getting out of the whirl in which daily life held him, and get- ting by himself, finding, making quiet,— quiet that had not merely rest in it, but God. And, if such as he needed such seasons, how much more we! How much we miss, of how much we fail, through want of them! There is for every one of us the Gethsemane of trial, of mental struggle, the hour and power of darkness. Laugh now and be happy as we will, the time comes to all; and there is not a more hopeless, helpless mortal than the man who has been both brave and wise in every complication of life, when he finds himself intro- duced to the society of a new class of experiences, and when, instead of compelling men and things to submit to his will, he must himself submit to the will to which he has been stranger. It is sad to see how utterly such a one wilts before the presence of sorrow and trouble, how little he knows what they mean or how to use them, to whom to go or how to go to Him. It is sad_to see the giant prostrate and grovelling, or fumbling blindly for support. What all need is to prepare for trial. There is no sure result in life for which a wise man does not prepare himself. No man expects to accomplish an end for which he is unprepared. That is the decision, the wisdom of the market-place. -What so grave, so heavy, so sure, as trial, sorrow, loss, the grand disci- 124 SEASONS OF QUIET. plines of God? And how can they be met, except they be prepared for, except by seasons, it may not be long, but frequent, in which the soul shall insist upon the world’s taking its proper subordinate place, while it invites the visits of a better spirit, and seeks to sanctify itself by self-purging and divine communion, that it may know itself and God,—seasons not annual, pro- longed, but at every moment of need? Trials coming to us, then, as the dealings of a Being whom we know, whose love we cannot doubt, to whose will we bend, will work their cleansing and healing. We may struggle as Jesus. We may cry to have the cup pass. We may say before we can feel the prayer © of perfect resignation, for Gethsemane is ours. Victory must follow, the undisturbed serenity of a soul at one with God, by quiet, through trial to peace, that peace which Jesus said he gave, but not as the world. There is no more enviable condition than that of him who has been led by the trials of his condition into the great peace, who has made the pressure of adverse things the means of a deep faith. Talk of worldly successes, if you will; point to honors and dignities and powers, and call them life’s great good. There is no good so great as that which the soul has itself wrought and secured, through its overcoming faith. There is no man so great, so honored, so suc- cessful, and so happy as he who through much tribu- Jation has entered into the spirit of acquiescence in a divine ordering he cannot understand, who has so con- quered his own will that it has become merged in that of God. Oh, what high things we talk of ! How much above 4 7 i at $ eee deal Ts a Le Re OT oe ere ae ae SEASONS OF QUIET. 125 are they! We strain and reach up toward that excel- lence. We know it is all true, we wish we were push- ing toward that victory; but, alas! it is not so. When shall it be? When the Master’s life has for us more charm than the charms of the world, when we can spare seasons for withdrawal and refreshing, when we shall feel that we cannot afford to slight means of which he felt the necessity, when life’s grave trials find us prepared by a knowledge and service of God to accept his discipline, acquiesce tm his will; when, hav- ing kept the conditions, we shall achieve the inevitable victory. | | Let us not lose, forget, slight the teachings of Geth- semane,— the place of quiet, the place of struggle, the place of victory. Let its history awaken not merely sentiment or gratitude, but desire to possess the like spirit ; and, when our days of trial darken about us, may we have so trained our souls in quiet that our struggles shall have the great and perfect triumph. March 1, 1863. XI. THE FIERY FURNACE “Nor the smell of fire had passed on them.”— DANIEL iii., 27. Ir is a very wondrous story. No miracle recorded in the life of Jesus violates more the laws of nature as we understand them. The statement is very explicit. These officers of the king who were Jews refused to bow before the golden image which Nebuchadnezzar, © the king, had set up. They are brought before him, and remain obdurate. Their answer is very noble: “We are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning, fiery furnace; and he will deliver us out of thy hand, O king. But, if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.” There was of course but one reply. As in the later day of Chris- tian persecutions, when the recusant was remanded to the lions, were these ordered to the fiery furnace, in the king’s wrath heated seven times hotter than was wont. And the mightiest men of the army, lifted them to throw them in, but fell dead before the fearful heat; but the men were not touched, and, lo! as the king looked in, four unburned men. And the king called them out, and the three came out. And the - princes, governors, and captains, and the king’s coun- THE FIERY FURNACE, 127 sellors, being gathered together, saw these men, upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was a hair of their heads singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them. Life is to man that fiery furnace, and there are two fates for him which there were here. Some fail before its heat, fall early, and, blasted, are licked up by the flame, as the stubble of the field. They scarcely enter life when they fall before the blighting breath. The training of home, example, warning, entreaty, avails nothing. They have had all that can be given them, are as well fortified as others; and yet pleasures and temptations, vanities and self-esteem, leap upon them. They have no apparent power of resistance, and they wilt at the first hot breath. Again and again have we seen it, that life has opened with every promise. The young girl, the young man, has stepped into it, to waver and fail,—the tempting things too strong, the seducing things too fair, the glittering things too real. I donot mean to say they have sunk into any great and positive sin; but they have turned away from the things they have been taught are life’s foundations and hope, and have given themselves over to the spirit of the world, that corroding canker, which eats into and eats out the life of so many hearts, and de- stroys the better self as nothing else can, which is not the fault, mistake, vice of the elder or the wealthy, of the hackneyed in the world’s way, the veteran devotee at the shrine of pleasure, but on young people making its first deep furrow very plain and sometimes indelible, and across a spirit that had seemed of better metal. I think it not to be hardly pressed upon them, when the 128 THE FIERY FURNACE. young waver as life opens itself to them, when they begin to take the handling of themselves and see the thing that life seems to be, now that they are their own masters. It is not a thing to be wondered at that they should bow before the hot simoom which sweeps up its unwholesome blast, where they had hoped only for gales sweet and gentle as those of Araby the blest. It is like the wavering of raw troops under the first fire,— not cowardice, but the awe of a new experience. If it be not quickly met and mastered, it becomes fear and disgrace and rout. So the wavering of the young, if it be only wavering. If there be moral power of self- recovery, if they turn again to principle, if they put the world in its place, assert, and assume mastery, it is all well. It must be done at once, however, or the fatal habit comes that overmasters the habit that we see is setthng down upon and overmastering those young people, whose one law is the decree of society, whose one master is the whim of fashion, and who let the fire taint creep over and fasten itself upon them, till they bear it as a conscious presence, everywhere live and move and have their being init. I say the wavering is not in itself a sin; but the yielding is, the falling before the flame, the moral death that follows. The men we read of stood safe within the jaws of the fiery furnace. So some men and women in this world furnace. But they did not stand alone. Can we? Ido not know what it means that one, as in the form of the Son of God, was with them. That is not an Old Testament phrase. It occurs nowhere else. The miracle would seem to be because of his presence. I do not believe any satisfactory solution of the diffi- THE FIERY FURNACE. 129 culty can be arrived at, unless it be supposed that the book was written later than its purport, or that the passage has been interpolated. Even then, men will differ. But there can be no doubt about this: that it is the spirit of the Son-of God with man that keeps him un- scathed amid the heats and flames of the fiery furnace his soul finds itself in,—not the person, not the confes- sion of a faith in, a definition of him, not the placing him in the Trinity, but the spirit. However much we may differ, when we come to definitions, all Christians agree in this: that there is something resident, perma- nent, in the world, something of influence that Jesus, departing, left behind. We can trace other lesser influ- ences to other lesser men. No one lives to himself, no one dies to himself. The influence we all of us exert is not much at the moment, as in what is left behind out- living the deed. Whether you regard it as a special something unlike as superior to all else, whether it is only in degree and quantity that Christ’s influence dif- fers from others, still this is true: that there radiates from that point of the world’s history as centre, from him as centre of it, power, influence, special and pecul- iar, producing results which have changed the whole character of man, the individual, made everything anew. As the sun, coming up out of the darkness of the night, touches, tinges, glorifies nature, draws out all secret colors and odors, nothing that it rests upon but feels and shows that coming, and is changed into its utmost by it, so with Christ’s coming. If you undertake to change it, you do what you do when you undertake to change the aroma of a flower: first, you cannot do it; 130 THE FIERY FURNACE. and, secondly, you destroy the thing in the process. The weary world has been at this analyzing of the spirit of Jesus till, in analysis, we are in danger of losing the thing itself. See how, if I were to take away truth from this furnace scene, it would be this,— and -I think it would -_make a good point against some current theology,— the men are seen with one who is in form like the Son of God. He is not burned to save them; he does not take all their peril and suffering upon himself; they do not go free because everything is laid upon him. The men are safe because he is with them in their trial, a presence soothing and sustaining. And I take that to be just the secret mystery of the whole thing. We are saved by having the. Christ spirit with us, by keeping by it,— not made safe by his destruction, not by any- thing he does for us, but by the power of resistance we have while he is with us, by a something we get of him that we could not have alone; and, were it in the New Testament, I should take this scene as an allegorical statement, of just what the Son of God is to the human soul,—that presence, aid, influence, be- cause of which all fiery assault is powerless, because of which even the smell of fire will cleanse. How have men lost the real point and grandeur and power in their faith through that many-sided idea of substi- tution, through that latent cowardice which grasps the idea of one suffering for them rather than of standing with them. The thing he left them was not his blood as some external cleansing mystery, but his spirit, the influence of that which in him had been the triumphing power. THE FIERY FURNACE. I3I He breathed that upon them, fragrant with the fra- grance of two worlds. He left his peace,—the peace of his spirit the peace which grows in us through his spirit,— not as the world giveth, not as the world understandeth, not as the world taketh again, to re- main and bless and sanctify. He did not go from, he remained with. His body was withdrawn, but that which was really his life remained, touched to new light and power, transfigured as every life is by his going away. I do not see in life what element of strength there is for me in this something supposed to be done for me by the death of Christ, a manipula- tion by some dead and carnal thing of years long gone. But when you speak of a spirit, an influence with me, if I will, coming out of that life, akin to that I feel coming out of other lives, like that which has come from my father’s life, my mother’s life, from good lives I have met or read about, differing in quantity rather more than quality, the same thing, only multiplied by the power of his superior excellence, then I under- stand it. It enters into me, becomes a power with my powers. It helps me. I can lean upon it, be guided by it, be strengthened init. But I cannot understand how a physical thing, like blood, is to have any effect upon my moral condition. It subverts old foundation law of nature, broad as the universe and with no ex- ception, that like produces like. The moral cannot invade the physical realm: the physical cannot over- ride the moral. It is the influence of that spirit which keeps us, not from the burning of the furnace only, but from even the smell of the fire upon our garments. Jesus prays, not 132 THE FIERY FURNACE, that his disciples should be taken out of the world, but that they be kept from the evil. There is such a thing as “being kept from the evil”: there is such a thing as going through life without the smell of the smoke upon us. In our business, necessity has continual means by which our valuables may be securely locked against the harm of fire. A safe fire-proof is part of every merchant’s furnishing. - These have been tested again and again by the most fiery tests, yet have deliv- ered their valuable deposit untouched, not the smell of the fire passed upon them. In this world, just that our hearts may be safes against which the heats and flames of passions and temptations may exhaust them- selves in vain, where we may keep uncharred the soul’s most precious possessions, while, as with a charmed life the man or woman pursues his way unspotted from the world, not the taint even of its smoke passing on them, the spirit of Christ within—our own spirits made consonant with his, kept in unison, a spiritual asbestos — is the fire-repelling power. One of the hottest, most uncomfortable days of the summer, we rode wearily and wretchedly in the saloon of a New York car. Heat and dust, the stifling air and sparks and cinders, combined to make the hours one lingering torture. We fanned and washed and drank, and tried to sleep, to read to forget, to no avail. We were grimed as the smith or the miner,—a spec- tacle to men, surely, a misery to ourselves. Yet all day long sat quietly in a corner a young girl, alone, her eye upon her book, sweet to look at, cool, without fan or water. And not a speck of cinder or of dust seemed to touch garment or face, not a fly teased, not a fiit- THE FIERY FURNACE. 133 ting of unrest or impatience crossed her face,—she blessedly oblivious to all companions’ sufferings, and coming to her journey’s end just as placid and calm as she had begun it hours before, hundreds of miles away. Her very face showed that she was possessed of a meek and quiet spirit; and the uncertain things, the annoying things, would no more come near her than the vile things would come near the virgin, who with naked feet in the night-time, according to old legend, perambulated fields and meadows to keep off mice and vermin which endangered the planted seed. Ido not think I shall ever forget it; for I felt then, as I feel now, that it is just that way we want to carry our souls through these trying and polluting things of time, and to come in at the end of the travel, through the might of a calm and triumphing spirit, out from the midst of all worry and temptation, wzthout taznt. Cannot this be? Have we got to smell of the cor- rupting things? May not our lives have the rich, pure fragrance of pure things? Every life savors of that it consorts with. According to what we are, the inner society we have had, what lives we lead, is the fra- grance we cast out into the world. That decides whether we taint the atmosphere or perfume it. The smell of the world’s smoke invests many as with an atmosphere pungent as that which boys carry ‘about them when they have made spring fires of gar- den rubbish. Ambitions, conceits, selfishness, love of praise, lust,—these exude insensibly to the man as odors do. You do not need to know detail. The smell of the fire betrays, and that is enough. To virtues there is the same subtile power. You 134 THE FIERY FURNACE, speak of the atmosphere of such a one, of the influ- ence of his mere presence, that it tones, represses, cheers as the want may be. It is not inevitable, be- cause in the world, that we imbibe its grosser flavors. We can be as pure in it as the violet, which, if it takes up any thing out of the surrounding filth, so makes it over that it breathes from it again only as the gentlest and sweetest breath. That is to be our way. Inevi- tably, much about our daily lives is impure and degrad- ing, low, and tending to lower us. We come in contact with and are affected by it. But we can so take it, so through the subtle alchemy of a filial spirit transmute it, so shed away impurity and dross, so in the soul’s alembic refine away all grossness, that it shall become a new life, and issue again from us, its earthly parts touched to nobler issue, its residue acceptable to the kingdom of heaven. Men and women say they must have the earth taint. That is because they grovel. They say, in the world, the smell of its fire must cling to them. That is be- cause they are willing to be soaked in it, and will not exert the wisdom of the violet or of God’s law, and make all that touches them sweet by the power of the sweet life within. The purest lives I have known have not been those carefully screened from the world, but which, coming up in it, have kept themselves unspotted. The sweetest and truest have grown and ripened under conditions you would say most hostile, but which have been wrought into the means of a grandly elevated faith and ‘life, attesting, against our laziness and cow- ardice, the truth of the example as the words of Jesus. No man more exposed than he, yet the smell of the fire passed not on him. a » ‘ - _ ee Ss ee Sa oo THE FIERY FURNACE. 135 Out of the hard conditions about him, he wrought the excellence we admire and adore; by fighting and repressing them, grew to his matchless stature. The crown of his immortality, though twisted of thorns, has borne the undying aroma of its fragrance to the ages. In the world, because of the world, was it done. The same conditions ours: the same fidelity will make of us those upon whose garments no smell of the fire will pass. Is it not worth prayer, watching, and toil? XII. FAINT, YET PURSUING: “Faint, yet pursuing.”—JUDGES Vill., 4. » yet p : It was a great victory which Gideon’s band of three hundred had gained over the Midian kings, not by their swords so much as by the fright of their midnight attack. The kings, however, had escaped; and the pursuit had been long and keen. Weary and hungry, the brave three hundred paused, faint as they were, only long enough to ask bread at Succoth and again at Penuel, in both places churlishly refused. Post- poning vengeance until their end was accomplished, they pushed steadily on over the Jordan, overtook the vanquished, the kings, returned by the way of the inhospitable cities, terribly punished them, and then went rejoicing to their homes to make Gideon judge, and to give the land a peace of fifty years. No more striking picture of a restless, consecrated energy is presented us in the Scripture than this pur- suit of the three hundred, who, taking nothing with them but their swords, held to their one task until it was accomplished. We can follow them in our thought, hungry, weary, refused aid of those of whom they had a right to demand it, faint, yet pursuing, a great pur- pose shielding them against danger and hunger and fatigue, holding them up where most would fail, and FAINT, YET PURSUING. 137 bringing them out conquerors over every disadvantage as over every foe. We could hardly take a better example for our help at just this point we to-day touch. For this is the last day of the year; and the last day of a year is apt to find us, who have any habit of intro- spection at all, like those men at the fords of the Jordan, ‘ faint,” not so much depressed as faint,—faint in heart, faint in faith, faint in hope, in effort, down among the despairs, very near the giving-out point, the giving-up point. Something in the season seems to add to a something in ourselves to take the heart out of us. Self-dissatisfaction has become self-discontent ; and self-discontent has run well down to that hopeless state, which says: “ Well, it is no use to try. I do not make | head. Prayers, efforts, tears, all seem vain. I drift toward the bad. I had better give up, and done with it.” Somehow, when a man is at this point, he coaxes himself with the idea that going thoroughly wrong, abandoning himself to the seethe of the vortex, will be a relief. Those who do not go so far are yet a good deal faint before the review of a year. It has been a pretty serious struggle with ourselves, with circumstances, with men, with Providence. We have not had just what we wanted to have, either from man or from God; and we have not been just what we wanted to be. It is a varied disappointment, many- shaped, many-hued; and clouds and vapors obscure our sun, and settle close about us, chill, damp, all tone gone. Not our own shortcomings merely, but all manner of thwarting has stepped in to interfere with the better man we hoped to be; while, added to the depression of 138 FAINT, YET PURSUING. a very generous amount of self-blame, is the opposition from a certain set in things for which we are in no way to blame. And it all combines to set us in the same tone of spirit that one is in who in his business affairs is faced by a year of mishap and disaster, partly his own.mistake, largely the general attitude of things. It is not a very satisfactory back look when one comes to measure himself at any stage of life with his ideal, with the thing he promised himself he was going to be. It is a very poorly realized actual that stands by the side of the promised ideal; and, when one sets his accumulating difficulties side by side with his waning years, it is apt to bring an almost unconquerable weari- ness and deadly faintness, an unwillingness to. work more, a hopelessness of effort, apt to make him the victim of depression rather than the creature of new energy and resolve. The shortcomings urged upon us by a very persistent conscience are perhaps the most uncomfortable experiences of the year; and, as the sun sinks, our horizon is one of clouds and glooms. It is not quite a happy season with us, that which first precedes the bright wishes of others for our happy New Year. We go down pretty low, reach our deepest point of self-dissatisfaction and discouragement. It does not do us a bit of harm. It is pretty unpleas- ant to have to hide your face before yourself; to stand. in the presence of conscience, the most unrelenting of " judges, and feel that you deserve what it is telling you ; to know that there is no cunningly hidden corner into which it will not follow you; to feel that the only plea or palliation you can make must shape itself into the anguish cry, “Miserable man that I am,” It is un- FAINT, YET PURSUING. . 139 pleasant, but it is good, it is encouraging. When a man gets a contrition, it is pretty evident that he is not all wrong: he is just in the condition to begin to be right. What he wants is courage and faith,— not to be faint and lie down and die, but to start in stern resolve again,— to call upon everything within him, and to ask for everything God can give to him. Annoying as it may be, terrible as it may be, one of the most healthy as most hopeful things is a healthy self-dissatisfaction,— not the morbid, useless picking to pieces of one’s self, which results in that worst despair, the abandonment of all hope and all control of one’s self, but that which wakes into the spur and impulse of the future any shortcomings of the past. First. I conceive this thing to be only true; and though it sound paradoxical to the ear, to experience it is a fact, and a valuable one, that, when one is faint, that is the time of all others to pursue, not to give