lili^ 
 
BV 4211 .G8 1911 
 Gunsaulus, Frank Wakeley, 
 
 1856-1921. 
 The minister and tne 
 
 spiritual life 
 
THE MINISTER AND THE 
 SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
Frank W. Gunsaulus, D. D. 
 
 THE MINISTER AND THE 
 SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 Yale Lectures on Preaching for 1911 
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Tale Lectures on Preaching 
 
 The Minister 
 
 and 
 
 The Spiritual Life 
 
 !/ By 
 FRANK W. GUNSAULUS, D. D., LL. D., 
 
 Minister of Central Churcht Chicago 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 191*, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: loo Princes Street 
 
{From the Records of the Corporation of 
 Tale College^ Jpril 12, iSyi.) 
 
 " Voted, To accept the offer of Mr. Henry 
 N. Sage, of Brooklyn, of the sum often thousand 
 dollars, for the founding of a lectureship in the 
 Theological Department, in a branch of Pastoral 
 Theology, to be designated • The Lyman Beecher 
 Lectureship on Preaching,' to be filled from time 
 to time, upon the appointment of the Corporation, 
 by a minister of the Gospel, of any evangelical 
 denomination, who has been markedly successful 
 in the special work of the Christian ministry." 
 
Note 
 
 It will be understood that none of these 
 lectures was delivered in its entirety on the 
 occasion for which it was prepared. All of 
 the statements here, however, were made in 
 answering the questions of students and in 
 addresses made in the course of the author's 
 visit to Yale Divinity School, in the spring 
 of 1911. 
 
 Certain statements already used in his 
 volumes "Paths to Power" and "Paths to 
 the City of God " have been repeated. 
 
 F. W. G. 
 
Contents 
 
 I. The Spiritual Life and Its Ex- 
 
 pression IN AND Through Min- 
 istry II 
 
 II. The Spiritual Life and New 
 
 View-Points .... 47 
 
 III. The Spiritual Life and Its Rela- 
 
 tion TO Truth and Ortho- 
 doxy ..... 89 
 
 IV. The Spiritual Life and the Pres- 
 
 ent Social Problem . . 135 
 
 V. The Spiritual Life and Its De- 
 
 terminations and Deliver- 
 ances 177 
 
 VI. The Spiritual Life and the 
 
 Minister's Message . . 225 
 
 VII. The Spiritual Life and Its Com- 
 
 munication TO Men . . 279 
 
 VIII. The Spiritual Life and the Min- 
 
 ister's Power .... 333 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 AND ITS EXPRESSION IN 
 AND THROUGH MINISTRY 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND ITS EX- 
 
 PRESSION IN AND THROUGH 
 
 MINISTRY 
 
 I AM not come to recommend spirituality 
 to you, my young brethren. When a 
 thing so imperative and self-sufficing as 
 spirituality permits recommendation and rec- 
 ommendation only, it is doubtful if it may get 
 a hearing at all, or ought to expect it. When 
 honesty must be urged upon the community 
 because it is the best policy, a hard time for 
 honesty has come ; and it will be more diffi- 
 cult to keep people honest in any essential 
 way, partly because of the increasing evi- 
 dence that at last becomes overwhelming — 
 that it is the best policy. It is at least not 
 policy at all to allow ennobling reasons or just 
 motives for honesty to shrivel and to become 
 atrophied, while we entertain the less noble, 
 or ignoble reasons in the intellect, or motives 
 for the will, in the direction of what is of 
 13 
 
14 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 itself sufficing and, like beauty, its own ex- 
 cuse for being. 
 
 No! I shall not recommend spirituality, 
 but I will begin with the understanding be- 
 tween us that, without it, the breath of life is 
 not in the nostrils of the minister of Christ 
 God is His own satisfaction, and the spiritual 
 life alone has in it the hope and process of 
 man's Becoming and Being. It is, therefore, 
 the experience of Godlikeness. As Being is 
 deeper than Doing, it is to the perennial 
 fountain of all worthy doing that I come at 
 once. Just to be and maintain one's self as 
 a man made in God's image means spiritu- 
 ality of living. The highest revelation of 
 man is in Christ Jesus and through Christ 
 Jesus. His presence in the world, both be- 
 fore and after His advent, furnishes a new 
 and unique spiritualization of human facts 
 and forces — a filling them full, even to the 
 uttermost, until the Christian ministry comes 
 to be both the expression and finer form of 
 its operation. 
 
 The mystery of our existence is solved 
 only in the mystery of being and becoming 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 1 5 
 
 something of worth. The smaller deepens 
 into the larger mystery. The mystery of 
 being can be contemplated and endured only 
 in the mystery of life — life as a means to an 
 end, life as furnishing the opportunity and 
 processes by which worth is attained. If in 
 any religious program for man this appears 
 a bit foggy and cloudy, let us know that we 
 are in the vicinity of the great sea, and at a 
 certain temperature. It is strange and ex- 
 hilarating to experience the clearing-up of 
 fog and cloud, in the ever-deepening mystery 
 of being through living. 
 
 Superb and joyous vitality lifts the sky to 
 unwonted heights where the soul is at home 
 and more self-respectful and more unafraid, 
 than beneath an apparently lower sky clouded 
 o'er. Vitality is everything in its strength- 
 ening the organism against mere environ- 
 ment — a thing of which the preacher gets 
 unhealthfully conscious oftentimes, especially 
 
 "When the light is low, 
 When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick 
 And tingle ; and the heart is sick, 
 And all the wheels of Being slow." 
 
l6 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 In any account of the spiritual life, we must 
 agree that life has a greater secret and a 
 wider play of intelligence, emotion, and pur- 
 pose than are implied in the statement that 
 it is " harmonization with one's environment." 
 To set one's self against one's environment 
 often is to save one's self and beneficently to 
 transform the environment. Heredity and 
 environment are not such tyrannous words 
 as they once were, partly because we who are 
 to minister, even if we know nothing of the 
 results of modern scientific and philosophical 
 thinking, begin in the conviction first appear- 
 ing in our own minds that the central per- 
 sonality of the human being we minister unto 
 is not in the hands of his ancestors or in 
 the fatality of circumstances. The wider in- 
 duction, with our sense of obligation and 
 ill-desert, has made havoc of the assumed 
 omnipotence lately and conveniently called 
 heredity and environment. The preacher 
 must be vital himself to communicate any 
 cogent statement of this truth to others. He 
 must have felt the spring to sing its vernal 
 songs ; and to affect the expansive life of 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 1 7 
 
 man influenced by him, he must have ex- 
 perienced a definite spiritualization of his 
 faculties. This secures and gives character 
 to his inlook and outlook. Ours is the re- 
 ligion arising from God's manifestation of 
 Himself in humanity. Its ministry, there- 
 fore, is both divine and human. The history 
 of Christianity is the history of a ministry 
 which is the personal outgoing through serv- 
 ice, by lips and hand, of an inner experience 
 consequent upon a spiritualizing inflow of 
 the divine upon the human in us. 
 
 To recommend spirituality, therefore, even 
 to champion its claim as an indispensable 
 fact and factor in ministering, is to put out of 
 sight the divine order, and to lose the vision 
 of the cause in our anxiety as to the effect 
 and its good fortune. " There is a spirit in 
 man, and the inspiration of the Almighty 
 giveth them understanding," "Without vi- 
 sion the people perish," " Be ye spiritual," 
 " The spirit beareth witness with our spirit 
 that we are born of God," — these are but a 
 few of the words immortal which help to con- 
 stitute a delineation of what man is essen- 
 
l8 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 tially, and, especially, what he is in the attain- 
 ing of himself through his life in God, the 
 Father of all Spirits. Perhaps one of the very 
 weaknesses most to be lamented, as we falter 
 and fail in handling the Christian realities that 
 are ever to be spoken of in the pulpit or car- 
 ried to men through our shepherding of 
 souls, comes from our inadequate perception 
 of the primacy of spiritual realities and their 
 inherent right to be supreme. 
 
 If the poet must insist that beauty is its 
 own excuse for being, and a philosopher of 
 aesthetics proves that if one does not respond 
 to the beautiful for the sake of the beautiful 
 itself, he has — to use a New Testament word, 
 — " been condemned already." He is lost to 
 beauty as beauty, whatever estimates he may 
 have of its subsidiary values. How much more, 
 then, do we need at once to perceive and stand 
 in our proper attitude towards spirituality of 
 life. The right attitude for us is not one in 
 which we are "condemned already" by the fact 
 that we have no passion for spirituality in itself. 
 It is one in which we are placed because we 
 are already saved by the power of an endless 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 1 9 
 
 life — life whose endlessness comes of the per- 
 ennial quality of spirituality. We are saved 
 in the fact that spirituality guarantees a per- 
 sonal perpetuity consequent upon living in 
 and through things eternal. 
 
 Let us begin, then, with the only event of 
 our biography which has rightly brought us 
 here. Let us get things in proper order, for 
 we have entered the ministry, not to obtain 
 spirituality or to take it on the recommenda- 
 tion of any one, because spirituality of life 
 may have, and does have valuable conse- 
 quences assuring us of effectiveness in our 
 work. No ; we have entered the ministry in 
 response to a causative influence within us, a 
 realization of our spiritual essence, its pre- 
 rogatives and privileges, its hopes and sover- 
 eignties of influence. We are here because 
 the inner vitalities of faith and experience 
 must blossom forth. Expression is the next 
 thing for their life. They have involved plans 
 for our further self-attainment and for the 
 self-attainment of all humanity. All of these 
 have been discovered in our relationship to 
 Jesus Christ. All of these are to be wrought 
 
20 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 out with increasing joy and blessing, as we 
 manifest them, and, especially, their source in 
 Jesus Christ, to others whom now we love 
 with something of Christ's reasons and ardours 
 for loving other men, because of alike potency 
 of spirituality in them. No true ministry is 
 possible for you and me on any other basis. 
 
 These lectures will be less than what I wish 
 they may be, if they are not received as sub- 
 stantially the particular considerations which 
 I have been invited to bring to you, my 
 younger brethren, out of an age and atmos- 
 phere which my own ministry finds enforcing 
 their own special commandment and method 
 with increasing emphasis. I have lived with, 
 and I hope I have helped to educate men who 
 understand power and its uses in the process 
 of man's attaining his own potencies and 
 worths. An Institute of Technology is not en- 
 tirely untheological. These hundreds of en- 
 gineers have left me with certain ideas as to 
 the efificiencies demanded of material and en- 
 ergy by the modern world. I am glad to say 
 some of their equations have transformed or 
 greatly increased the purposefulness and force 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 21 
 
 of my own methods as a minister. This has 
 occurred to me the while I have discovered 
 analogies which have amounted to startHng 
 correspondences, in the methods of Jesus our 
 Master and of those who have reached and 
 are attaining in some approximate degree 
 His attitude and way of ministry. 
 
 At this particular juncture in the develop- 
 ment of Christian enterprise, the minister's 
 spirituality is, for various and often apparendy 
 opposing reasons, the most interesting item 
 of all the facts and forces of human progress. 
 Now, whether our churchly authorities are of 
 the opinion that the spirituality of the Chris- 
 tian minister, in America especially, is the 
 most interesting item among the facts and 
 forces of human progress, as I have declared, 
 I cannot say, but let me give you my convic- 
 tion that, happily as I think for us, what we 
 call " The World," which is to be recreated 
 by the kingdom of the spirit, does certainly 
 think so. The apparently opposing camps 
 —the Church and the world, as we have so 
 often too roughly named them — do not vie 
 with one another, proposing questions as to 
 
22 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 how we shall possibly get along in the devel- 
 opment of our civilization without the minis- 
 ter's spirituality of life, as they once did. 
 The world is in the Church too fully and freely 
 to permit her to be ignorant of the world's 
 way of thinking and worth, even if the Church 
 knows of the world's collateral thoughtless- 
 ness and worthlessness. Christianity is no 
 longer chiefly possessed, inhibited, and man- 
 aged by the Church. It is out in the world 
 and will never again be so exclusively an ec- 
 clesiastical asset and possession as it has 
 been in the past. It is doubtful if the Church 
 may longer consider herself seriously as pos- 
 sessing and exercising even a dominant con- 
 trol over the ideas, inspirations, or the conse- 
 quences of the Christian religion. Humanity 
 has seen the veil of the temple " rent in twain 
 from the top to the bottom," as once before, 
 and, now as then, this veil has been rent be- 
 cause the world has a resistless exemplifica- 
 tion of the sovereignty of self-sacrifice in the 
 passion of Christ on Calvary. It has heard 
 that "the tabernacle of God is with men." 
 Thoughtful people believe it. It has had a 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 23 
 
 vision of a city celestial with " no temple 
 there." The world's interest in the ministry 
 and what the ministry shall do, because of 
 what the ministry is, in the citadel of its spir- 
 ituality, is far more evident and aggressive 
 than its interest in poetry, and even inven- 
 tion, and possibly in philanthropy as such. 
 No other interest has so gripped the human 
 soul. Man having been put into his place, 
 in thinking, as " incurably religious " and set 
 deliberately upon the " living of his life fully," 
 that is set upon human self-realization, no one 
 expects him to be satisfied with anything this 
 side of a religion of humanity. 
 
 August Comte, an age since, with superb 
 ritual and in spite of tiresome mechanisms, 
 challenged the attention of the world in 
 inaugurating a church of humanity. The 
 thoughtful world sees that while he thought 
 it was a religion of humanity established, it 
 was in fact only a church, and then only so 
 much of a church of humanity as one could 
 fabricate without a religion. Man could not, 
 and cannot, become his own God. However, 
 the failure has rather stimulated than discour- 
 
24 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 aged the effort of that Christianity which 
 works outside of a church, as well as inside of 
 the Church, or works outside of the Church 
 chiefly, or even entirely — to hope and toil on 
 expectantly in the same general direction. 
 A religion of humanity we will have. Never 
 did the heart of this old world so truly har- 
 monize with the head, as now, in the convic- 
 tion that we shall not, because we cannot, dis- 
 pense with true priests. Our religion of hu- 
 manity must bind us to the divine, even if we 
 must exalt the human to that moral eminence. 
 The minister will always be the minstrel of 
 the soul, not because the words have a com- 
 mon root, but because certain realities are 
 fundamentally one. The Church, by a super- 
 stition as to orders, and by the separation of 
 a few men from their other fellow beings after 
 some mechanical fashion duly associated with 
 religious terminology, now and again may 
 empty the ministry of its sublime meanings, 
 as it certainly has, but even then the world 
 will ever find pathways to the door of the 
 man, who, better than any other, tells the soul 
 of things spiritual. This is true, especially at 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 25 
 
 moments such as these in which we live. 
 For our world has lived to the bottom of 
 many interesting phenomena and now seeks 
 the realities behind them. It is saying that 
 all things are first and last thinkings ; phys- 
 ical facts are seen to verge away spiritually 
 and towards greater meanings and higher 
 potencies ; material interests end as interests ; 
 but the concerns of the soul widen and deepen 
 and heighten immeasurably in interest. 
 Leaving aside physics and metaphysics, the 
 world is aware that our most alert and joyous 
 faculties are done with the pleasures that are 
 not continuously joyous, and with the smart- 
 nesses that grow feebler with the weight of 
 life upon them. The equation of material- 
 ism, either speculative or practical, is no 
 longer seriously used. 
 
 Is the Christian ministry on its merits? 
 There is at least a good prospect. As long 
 as the Church persists in enshrining the holiest 
 tradition or associating any body of men, 
 whose endowments and experiences do not 
 reveal depths and heights of spiritual being, 
 with the task of maintaining revered formula 
 
26 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 and overawing ceremonial, or even with the 
 police-duty of guarding the fearsome allega- 
 tions of a once dominant theology, it may be 
 difficult to find ground for hope. There will 
 always be a certain proprietary interest in the 
 long and rich investment from other ages 
 which the conservative instinct must look out 
 after. The instinct of maintaining the value 
 of property as against some contemporary 
 incursions of human progress works auto- 
 matically or makes a product, the wheels of 
 the old mill still turning after the power is ex- 
 hausted. The most that can be accomplished 
 by such as labour or hope in this condition is 
 that they may save the form even if they lose 
 the spirit. And while the Church hesitates 
 and insists loudly that all she ever had is in 
 safe keeping, the world will turn sadly away 
 from this over-emphasis, and especially will 
 it question any authority over conscience after 
 it has found its lack of authority over com- 
 mon sense. It is a sad hour for ecclesiastical 
 authority of any sort when the developed 
 common sense of the world repudiates it. 
 But something more happens. The world is 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 27 
 
 not dull. It fails not to behold certain things 
 made startlingly evident by contrast with 
 things in every other realm of life than that 
 of church life. Its tremendous business in- 
 stinct and energy compel human interest to 
 move towards the essential. The only essen- 
 tial and distinctive thing in the minister's life 
 and conduct is spirituality. His apparent 
 success in being this or that, and his facility 
 in doing this or that ever so brilliantly, does 
 not dazzle the world ; it has long ago shut its 
 eye and feels about searchingly, and almost 
 pathetically, for the reality which the ministry 
 in the last issue of the world's confidence 
 must be held to possess — the secret and spring 
 of the life of the world and himself — spirit- 
 uality. The Christian Church exists that hu- 
 manity may attain self-realization in and 
 through the self-manifestation of God in 
 Christ. Having agreed as to the essential 
 thing in the life of the Church, the spirituality 
 of its ministry is not only the elixir of its life ; 
 it is the life itself. The world steps in to say 
 that it will not permit this vital force to hold 
 any secondary place, and that a social force 
 
28 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 SO immeasurably endowed with ideas and 
 ideals, so completely and perennially en- 
 gaging the ethical imagination of mankind, 
 as the Christian ministry, must no longer lack 
 the necessary imperative. 
 
 It does not require extraordinary piety to 
 perceive this. One has only to be able to 
 handle a social and ethical equation whose 
 members represent ascertained forces ; and 
 the intellect of the modern world can do that. 
 The Christian ministry must be more, in the 
 direction which differentiates and must dis- 
 tinguish it from all other life pursuits, or it 
 must be nothing. The world has had to do 
 with efficients and co-efficients. It is using 
 all its exhaust steam and is now finding that 
 the dump of many an abandoned mine is, 
 with its new and better economic processes, 
 more valuable than the original mother-vein 
 was without them. Because of the economy 
 and efficiency of its methods of ore treat- 
 ment, it is seeking for abandoned mines. It 
 is no longer likely to revere, except as remi- 
 niscences and relics of a past more or less fas- 
 cinating, the ecclesiastical machinery and edi- 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 29 
 
 fice. It will not bear any repetitious asser- 
 tion of authority. It knows that in the na- 
 ture and history it studies, the authority of 
 power will take care of itself. It needs no 
 committee of safety in progress. These things 
 only serve to hide permanently valuable fac- 
 tors of human life. Certain conservative 
 methods must abide, but these factors are 
 made glorious without and within by minis- 
 terial spirituality quivering in the fire of cen- 
 tral altars which fling their radiance out 
 through a window otherwise dull and dust- 
 covered, surcharging it instead with this 
 flame's Hght which, pouring through it, makes 
 it a revelation, without from within. The au- 
 thority of that revelation is attested in the 
 response of the eye to the vision. Every 
 mental habit of the modern world goes driv- 
 ing towards the characteristic energy which it 
 has the right to expect with the certain claims 
 and material which are in evidence whenever 
 the minister of Christ to me appears. 
 
 If these facts have already arrested your 
 attention, I ask you to consider them with 
 me, in view of indubitable wealth of oppor- 
 
30 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 tunity for us who are servants of God and 
 man, as we approach with our gospel the 
 world's heart and life. By my use of the 
 term *• the world," I do not mean the world 
 as a thing adequately described as a carnal, 
 adulterous — because fallen — section of crea- 
 tion, but I refer to the thing Jesus came to 
 save, which is called "the world" in the 
 words, "And God so loved the world that 
 He gave His only begotten Son." Now this 
 " world " was in existence before formal Chris- 
 tianity came, and is therefore not the thing 
 which our pious thought has somewhat loftily 
 and patronizingly separated from the Church, 
 seeing to it that it shall appear contrastingly 
 dark with the expectation that the Church 
 may appear contrastingly bright. ** The 
 world" does not mean a lot of this worldly 
 people who are set against other-worldliness^ 
 especially the "world to come," as Chris- 
 tians view it. There is a world of true and 
 eager thinking, of generous and broad phi- 
 lanthropy, of sinning and yet salvable hu- 
 manity, of hoping and aspiring souls who 
 have all the troubles and vexations, the losses 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 3 1 
 
 and crosses, which men distinctly identified 
 with the Church also have. Certain it is 
 that this world has made a mistake in not 
 realizing that the Church of Jesus Christ is 
 meant to be a means to an end, and that this 
 end is righteousness, the rightening up of 
 the world by the making of men righteous. 
 But now it is this world which has a similar 
 confidence with Christianity and a spiritual- 
 ized Church. It is based on the fact that the 
 world is not for the Church, but the Church 
 is for the world ; that nothing but the highest 
 thing which all humanity may reach is a goal 
 worthy of the struggle of either the Church 
 or the world, whether it accepts the leader- 
 ship of the Church in the world, and for the 
 sake of the world, or not. It is fair to say 
 that whether the world is right or not, the 
 world has thought for many days that the 
 Church is not authoritative; she has not 
 been the spiritual leader she ought to have 
 been, and she is not all in this direction that 
 she ought to be. Slowly but surely the world 
 is, at this moment, announcing this truth in 
 its literature and at hours in which brave 
 
32 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 and true human beings gather to make the 
 world better. The world believes that the 
 chief reason of the Church's inability lies in 
 her lack of spiritual vision, and, indeed, of 
 spiritual life, in those who are her constituted 
 and avowed leaders. It is a critical situa- 
 tion. It has its holy indignations, if not 
 the animosities arising from sickening dis- 
 appointments no less acute because the word 
 of our world is reality. The world is never 
 so demonic with us as when we try to do 
 what no grace has fitted us to do, especially 
 with the world's demons. It was so at the 
 first when these awful powers inherent in the 
 Christian program were placed in human 
 hands. Let us read the earlier story and see 
 how modern it all is : 
 
 " Then certain of the vagabond Jews, ex- 
 orcists, took upon them to call over them 
 which had evil spirits the name of the Lord 
 Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom 
 Paul preacheth. And there were seven sons 
 of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests, 
 which did so. And the evil spirit answered 
 and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 33 
 
 but who are ye ? And the man in whom the 
 evil spirit was leaped on them, and overcame 
 them, and prevailed against them, so that 
 they fled out of that house naked and 
 wounded. And this was known to all the 
 Jews and Greeks also dwelling at Ephesus ; 
 and fear fell on them all, and the name of 
 the Lord Jesus was magnified." 
 
 I have spoken much of the world, and I 
 hope much to its credit, but there is nothing 
 more creditable to the world to be said than 
 this, — that it will not praise, obey, or toler- 
 ate, if possible, anything short of the com- 
 plete spiritual vision and passion which are 
 implied in the Christianity of which it has 
 heard, and which has gotten over the ancient 
 boundaries between what we have called the 
 Church and the world, and has, therefore, 
 given the world such inerrant criteria for 
 judging us. 
 
 The willingness of the world to adopt any 
 being who will meet its cry for spiritual lead- 
 ership is pathetic and reassuring to the least 
 of us. But this must not leave any of us 
 content to be less than our gospel for the 
 
34 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 world seeks to make of you and me. Angelic 
 indeed is the temper of the world at its 
 noblest and best ; and its best appears when 
 you and I are at our best. Nobility ennobles 
 the ignoble by contact. Quick becomes the 
 feeling of obligation roused in the conscious- 
 ness of interior energies unused, and the 
 demand for dynamic power that shall start 
 and run the machinery is instant and half 
 sublime. But the world is not ever thus. 
 Yet is its impatience of us not a mark of its 
 latent loyalty to a divine origin ? Admit that 
 the world, at its worst, has such a conception 
 of what the ministry of Jesus ought to be and 
 do and, therefore, have, in the form of ex- 
 haustless influence for redemption and recre- 
 ation, that it is half-demonic in its wrath and 
 indignation at the appearance of anything 
 short of that which is real. Devilish it may 
 be, but the devils show themselves never so 
 much fallen angels as when they cry out, 
 " Paul I know, and Jesus I know, but who 
 are you?" "The name of the Lord Jesus 
 was magnified " then ; it is being magnified 
 now, but the evil spirit has done much to 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 35 
 
 master and prevail and to leave assumption 
 and pretense naked and wounded as afore- 
 time. 
 
 The situation abroad in the mission coun- 
 tries is thus complicated by the presence of 
 the Lord's Prayer. Along with much prac- 
 tical unbrotherliness on our part as a people, 
 that prayer has changed the atmosphere, laid 
 humanity under the spell of a hope that a 
 civilization founded on the fatherhood of God 
 and brotherhood of man is possible. It has 
 won the brain and heart of heathendom to a 
 lively expectation that the things that ought 
 to be shall be. And the course of Eastern 
 events is therefore awkward and problematic. 
 The question coming to them and to us is 
 what shall be done with the incongruity aris- 
 ing from the effect of the Lord's Prayer as 
 Christianity's charter and the presence of the 
 unbrotherly and scheming representatives of 
 so-called Christian governments. So also 
 and more, here at home, the situation is 
 made acute by the education and trained 
 habit of the modern mind. There is nothing 
 more disastrous in a community where the 
 
36 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 world has been touched by the message of 
 the Church — which message has been sub- 
 limely taught by it, and should be the theme 
 of its ministry — than our apparent inability 
 to meet in sincerity of utterance, wisdom of 
 leadership, and companionship of conduct, 
 the just anticipations which such mightily 
 stated motive powers lead logical minds to 
 entertain. 
 
 I shall have time to consider, and only for 
 a moment, these implications of the truth of 
 the fatherhood of God, as they develop in 
 the form of anticipations in the mind of a 
 world which is growing more logical and 
 which, therefore, will ask that these anticipa- 
 tions, justly founded as such, shall be made 
 good. Recent experience in a service of six 
 months on what is now known as the Vice 
 Commission appointed by the mayor of the 
 city of Chicago, has only served to quicken 
 my appreciation of the working vitality of 
 this truth. Through most revolting and al- 
 most nameless crimes against society and 
 sins against God and humanity, I have 
 traced, without ever once losing sight of it, 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 37 
 
 the presence of a desperate confidence that 
 the soul of the most depraved belongs to 
 God inherently. Something has gone into 
 the heart of hellish malignity and loathsome 
 impurity — something that differentiates itself 
 faintly or cries out in tragic revolt ; and the 
 faith lingers there that whatever else God is 
 as creator, and provider, and judge, He is 
 the Father of us all. 
 
 I have spoken in the den of wild beasts 
 and heard others speak in the lairs of in- 
 iquity, when death was the only other stain- 
 less presence. I have sat for six hours at a 
 stretch to hear only the noxious story of 
 human perversion and iniquity, but I have 
 never failed to find at the bottom of the 
 slimy pit, when the soul had sinned down to 
 its farthest possibility, a certain rebounding 
 sense that this one fact of utmost precious- 
 ness is left — the Fatherhood of God. 
 
 We have only to open the Gospel of John, 
 which has given many of us a good deal of 
 trouble as we have lived with its husk only 
 but whose message will prove most richly 
 refreshing to our age, the likest to its own 
 
38 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 in all deeper aspects of life, to find in its kernel 
 the germinal and harvest-producing concep- 
 tion of the fatherhood of God and the conse- 
 quent truth of the brotherhood of man stated 
 and enforced, not only on the lips and the 
 life of Jesus, but in the behaviour, atmosphere, 
 and even the most undeliberate attitude of 
 those who are influenced by Him. Elsewhere 
 and to-night, I wish to study with you a 
 remote adumbration of this radiance, in 
 Andrew, Simon-Peter's brother. Wherever 
 preaching alone has placed this truth fore- 
 most and in the form of speech, strong asser- 
 tion, or continuous repetition only, the most 
 doleful results have followed. It is the most 
 dangerous of truths to announce, if its an- 
 nouncer is not living it. To merely put it 
 into phrase is to convert the minister into a 
 tantalizer of the most divinely implanted 
 thirsts. The last thing for a preacher even to 
 mention is the fatherhood of God, unless that 
 same minister embodies it, breathes it, literally 
 sheds it forth in his own personality and life. 
 Men are very like children in their straight- 
 forwardness and simplicity, if they have ever 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 39 
 
 once felt the reality of the divine fatherhood. 
 The thing they will not permit is for you and 
 me to make any substitute for this imperial 
 fact and factor in the uplooking human life. 
 
 Once on a doleful day, when the great Pres- 
 ident's soul was sorely burdened, and various 
 members of the Cabinet were looking in vain 
 for him in the White House at Washington, 
 Mr. Lincoln's little boy, called Tad, came into 
 the presence of Secretary Chase and said, " I 
 want my father." The boy was in trouble, 
 for he had been badly used by a belligerent 
 child in a physical contest. Now, suppose 
 Chase, with the Olympian forehead, had said 
 to him with the patronage which we some- 
 times visit cruelly upon those who would be 
 helped, albeit without circumstance and the 
 pomp of learning, " My little fellow, I will tell 
 the Chief Executive of the nation, who will 
 soon prove himself to me, his servant, as the 
 master of unparallelled difficulties in finance, 
 that you wish him." It would have been a 
 true statement, but the boy would have said 
 to the Secretary of the Treasury again, "I 
 want my father." Little Tad encounters 
 
40 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 Seward with a cry straight from his heart, 
 " I want my father." Suppose Seward had 
 said, " I will get for you the most remarkable 
 diplomatic mind who ever warded off from a 
 young nation in sore straits the attack of the 
 British Empire." The Secretary of State 
 would have told the truth. The boy, how- 
 ever, wipes the blood and dirt away, and 
 says, " I want my father." The redoubtable 
 and proud Stanton, Secretary of War, hears 
 this boy's appeal and tells him, " I will get for 
 you the Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of 
 the United States." Stanton knew Abraham 
 Lincoln in this capacity. He was telling the 
 truth about Lincoln, but it was not the boy's 
 truth. Lincoln's child's truth was heard in 
 the sob, " I want n\y father^ 
 
 This is the situation with us all and many of 
 the philosophers. The soul of man has been 
 crying, " I want my Father." The soul is 
 constitutionally religious because of the soul's 
 essential childhood unto God's fatherhood. 
 The soul can have permanently no other 
 religion but a religion in which this filial 
 relationship from the hitherside shall meet an 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 4I 
 
 eternal parental relationship from the thither- 
 side. The idea of fatherhood is in the Old 
 Testament, but dimly described. The idea 
 of fatherhood is manifested in the word 
 '• Jupiter " — " Heaven-Father." But now, the 
 fact and force of divine fatherhood is no 
 longer kinetic ; it is dynamic energy. Jesus 
 Christ in His Sonship to God and through 
 the fullness of His brotherhood unto us lives it, 
 breathes it, and dies for it, and arises from the 
 grave with its might and majesty. He has 
 and is the answer to our cry : '* I want my 
 Father." 
 
 Mr. Spencer has been saying, " Here is the 
 Force which urges on from homogeneity 
 through heterogeneity." He has told the 
 truth. " But I want my Father," the soul 
 says. Mr. Matthew Arnold had a charming 
 habit of introducing us to the " Eternal not 
 ourselves that makes for righteousness." He 
 was well-intentioned and has spoken a truth 
 concerning our God. And so on we might 
 go with many of the philosophers, as Tad 
 Lincoln might have gone on with his father's 
 cabinet, each of the illustrious men characteriz- 
 
42 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 ing the man Abraham Lincoln from a distinct 
 point of view which not only defined him but 
 confined him to a statement. The deepest 
 and most revealing relationship to Mr. 
 Lincoln was not that which existed and grew 
 strong and was of untold importance be- 
 tween him and Seward or Chase or Stanton. 
 Little Tad held the supreme place. The 
 bedraggled, needy, desperate soul of hu- 
 manity wants its Father. 
 
 Not the philosophers alone have erred with 
 magnificence of phraseology at this juncture 
 in the soul's life. Theological definings and 
 refinings have all been confinings, and the 
 divine fatherhood has been shut out, not 
 so much by our phraseology, for that amounts 
 to but little, as by our unbrotherliness. All 
 brotherliness comes from sonship, which ra- 
 diates and discovers the sonship unto God of 
 the other brothers. So unbrotherliness in 
 sentiment and, therefore, in statement, even 
 the unbrotherliness that exiles our brother 
 most effectively when we are calling him 
 *' dear brother," and pushing our argument 
 or urging our appeal to him in an un- 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 43 
 
 brotherly mood or fashion — comes from lack 
 of our sonship unto God as a practical expe- 
 rience. Once more let me say that if Emer- 
 son's words were ever applicable, they are 
 true here — " What you are speaks so much 
 louder than what you say that I cannot hear 
 what you say." The world has a fine ear for 
 the report of one's character on this supreme 
 matter of its sonship unto God. Whoever 
 makes this report credible has the world's 
 heart. 
 
 The three preachers I have known most in- 
 timately, and who have been most effective 
 in our time, have uttered proportionately the 
 least number of phrases about the fatherhood 
 of God and the brotherhood of man. They 
 have simply lived it. It came as an aura 
 from their pulpits. Neither Phillips Brooks, 
 Henry Ward Beecher, nor Joseph Parker could 
 help the aura of personal brotherliness in ar- 
 gument, appeal, consolation, guidance, or 
 instruction. Its origin was in the Light of 
 Lights — the fatherhood of God. When one 
 of these men was encountered in the street, 
 the urchin or the peddler, or the philosopher 
 
44 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 attested the presence of the incommunicable 
 secret, until it opened and was fragrant and 
 lovely as a flower. 
 
 A similar story to this too little known in- 
 cident might be told of either or both of these 
 other men. Mr. Beecher was passing on one 
 morning in early spring through a thronged 
 street. The snow was melting and the streets 
 were wet and dirty. A vagrant wind had 
 blown a newsboy's papers everywhither. 
 Striving in vain to pick them up, he had lost 
 heart and was crying, wiping his eyes with 
 dirty hands which left his face in sad condition. 
 Mr. Beecher, coming along, took the little fel- 
 low up into his arms. Those great orbs which 
 the day before had commanded thousands 
 with such eloquence of eye as Beecher had 
 to give, looked upon the boy and saw through 
 the dirt and tears and trouble, straight into 
 his heart. " What's the matter, my litde fel- 
 low ? " said the orator ; no, the big-brother. 
 He was only a great big-brother then. The 
 boy's tears of sorrow were chased from his 
 cheeks by tears of happiness and gratitude, 
 and he replied to the man whom he had 
 
ITS EXPRESSION THROUGH MINISTRY 45 
 
 never seen before, but who was then mani- 
 festing the fatherhood of God through the 
 brotherhood of man, " Nothin' ; nothin', now 
 you've come." It is an old story, but I 
 heard Mr. Beecher the next Sunday, and he 
 treated that aggregation of God's hapless 
 children in the same way. As he prayed 
 finally, we all felt that if there had been any- 
 thing the matter, it was all over in this 
 Epiphany. The fatherhood of God lived 
 through the brotherliness of the man, and yet 
 he said not a word about either. He was 
 their incarnation, as any broken and sad old 
 world like ours, having once heard of the In- 
 carnation in Christ, has the right to expect us 
 to be. As I shall try to show all along our 
 way, this is the meaning of the incarnation 
 touching the minister. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND NEW 
 VIEW-POINTS 
 
 THAT positions have changed in the 
 realms of Philosophy and Theology, 
 which give to the Christian ministry 
 a new attitude towards certain hitherto famil- 
 iar facts and factors in the religious life, no 
 one can doubt. Especially in the privilege 
 and task of preaching, these transforma- 
 tions appear to many to be decisive and 
 even revolutionary. It is of the first impor- 
 tance that the man who enters the ministry 
 of Jesus to-day should find, in himself and in 
 his knowledge of history, a way of rightly 
 judging the values of this changeful yet per- 
 manent experience of man in religion. He 
 ought to be able to determine much by the 
 depth and strength of current in his own 
 spiritual life. He must at once reflect that 
 whatever transformations may have occurred 
 49 
 
50 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 along the shore of this stream, which has 
 flowed through him because he is a part, in- 
 deed, and, as it were, a single field of the wide 
 humanity through whose breadth and length 
 this stream of religion has so long been flow- 
 ing, there is evidence in the vegetation, in 
 the grasses and trees upon the banks which 
 are significantly different in hue of colour and 
 luxuriousness of growth, that here is a Mis- 
 sissippi. It has entered a spring-tide and is 
 moving southward where it shall find the sea. 
 I insist that the Spiritual Life alone will en- 
 able a man to ascertain this fact. An un- 
 spiritual man will set himself against this 
 truth. These things along the bank, trees 
 and grasses, are from the life-giving stream ; 
 their changing qualities attest the innumer- 
 able vitalities of the water as it touches the 
 land, quite as much as they attest the capac- 
 ity for being vitalized, on the part of the 
 land, when it is laved by the water. As he 
 knows God and a man in the form and fea- 
 ture of himself — man created in God's image 
 — and studies God and man in his own ex- 
 perience ; and, in addition to this, as he 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 5 1 
 
 knows God and man in Jesus Christ, through 
 his experience of reconciliation and the holy 
 life ; and, still more than this, as he knows 
 God and man working together in the ranges 
 of the life immortal, accomplishing the things 
 hinted in the vision of the God-man and 
 realizing those ideals of Being which have 
 sprung from the presence and passion of the 
 God-man, — indeed, only as a man who has 
 in him the ministry of Jesus shall thus know 
 and relive, in his own spiritual life, the moral 
 achievement and expectancy of God mani- 
 fest in the flesh through Jesus Christ, can he 
 and will he see what changes signify. Only 
 thus will he see how these same phenomena 
 of religion, which are so persistent and yet so 
 various as to colour and size, are not new 
 things at all. Each is watered as a tree on 
 the bank in Louisiana is watered, in the same 
 way and by the same stream, as a tree on 
 the bank of the same river has been watered 
 in Minnesota or Illinois. 
 
 This is without any doubt as true, even 
 if the Minnesota tree feels the stream about 
 its roots much earlier in time than the Loui- 
 
52 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 siana tree feels it when the river nears the 
 sea. If a man accustoms himself to the 
 truth that the Spiritual Life of the race flows 
 through him, because he is one of the race, 
 and yet that it is vastly larger than his nar- 
 row area may describe, he has reached the 
 point where such an outlook is as valuable 
 as that of Schliermacher was to him years 
 ago. He may easily share the serenity amid 
 changes which belonged to Horace Bushnell, 
 and, first of all, led Pascal to say that " hu- 
 man history is as the story of a single indi- 
 vidual, ever growing, and ever learning." 
 It is the experience of this great racial move- 
 ment which gives dignity to the preaching 
 of such men as understand and welcome 
 changes presented to our vision, while we 
 move on and ever on. 
 
 Let us look at certain of these changes, in 
 this light. We must agree that it is because 
 man is made in the image of God, that our 
 rehgion is possible. Its distinctive expe- 
 riences spring out of the fact that man, hav- 
 ing been made in the image of God and be- 
 ing a child of God Himself, must love and be 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 53 
 
 loved with such personalness of loving and 
 lovableness that love itself shall become in- 
 carnate. It is the Incarnate Love which con- 
 cretely reutters fully these truths, and makes 
 both soil and sky a welcome and assurance 
 for the seeds of a permanent religion of hu- 
 manity. Neither of these elements, which 
 our seed must count upon, has been so accen- 
 tuated by the significance of man's life in any 
 time, as they have in our own. 
 
 Religion is more imperial and humanity is 
 more pervasive, as working conceptions, than 
 ever before. All faithful preaching will recog- 
 nize the permanency of these realities, amid 
 all the changes which now happen to be in 
 concert of approval, with regard to the em- 
 phasis which our life places upon religion 
 and humanity. The preacher of the twentieth 
 century comes upon this being called man, 
 first as he is seen in himself, for before all 
 else the minister is a man ; and he is such a 
 man that any ministry to humanity must dis- 
 tinguish the minister himself as one of the 
 manliest of men about him. He also knows 
 man, outside of his own self-consciousness 
 
54 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 and self-study, as a being to be ministered 
 unto, according to a message and by an in- 
 fluence which the minister receives from 
 above, and which are of such a sort as to 
 reveal what man essentially is and what 
 Almighty Love means him to be. At the 
 moment, our minister would not if he could, 
 and could not if he would escape what the 
 world, whom he addresses in his sermons, has 
 come to think of man. Very much of what 
 we think of God and of what God can do for 
 a man in the immortal life, through the 
 Church and in spite of the disaster of sin 
 — very much especially of what we think of 
 man's Christ — depends upon our conception 
 of man. 
 
 Many sermons would indicate that the 
 preacher has begun, in remote regions, to do 
 his thinking about man, the thing nearest to 
 him. He unfortunately habituates his audi- 
 ence to a repetition of his own way of ap- 
 proaching, through a series of unknowables, 
 this one knowable and familiar fact and 
 factor with which the minister has to grapple 
 most intimately — Man. If the man in the 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 55 
 
 pew catches this habit — and it is most con- 
 tagious — he will never know himself as a 
 man, except remotely. It would be a calam- 
 ity whose fatality would speedily remove you 
 from any real ministry, if you were to miss 
 what our age offers as the accumulation of 
 the past and especially the product of its un- 
 surpassed laboratories and equipment in the 
 study of man at the present. Bear witness 
 of the truth that the best laboratory is your- 
 self. 
 
 There are, then, other means of study which 
 will be invaluable. One such poet as Brown- 
 ing, in his answer as to what is man, outdis- 
 tances Shakespeare, for he has modern equip- 
 ment and laboratories and uses them. Above 
 all, in himself, the minstrel knows himself. 
 The vitality and indeed revealing, in his ac- 
 counts of humanity, seem to have come from 
 his having sat at the table in the upper room 
 when our Lord said, " One of you shall be- 
 tray Me," the poet answering with his ques- 
 tion, " Lord, is it I?" The possibility of such 
 crime as that of " The Ring and the Book," 
 the experience of " Mr. Sludge, the Medium," 
 
56 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the episodes in the philosophic struggles of 
 " Paracelsus," the falls in " Pippa Passes " 
 or " Andrea Delsarto," — this possibility is 
 that of his own personality. The mingling 
 of those streams of knowledge proceeding 
 from his acquaintance with physiology and 
 psychology is humanly felt and estimated. 
 Streams which here murmur and sing and 
 swirl through man's ethical history show the 
 greatness, often the failure and recovery 
 of man's spiritual faculty. He must have 
 recognized at least their possibility in him- 
 self. He is thus made humanity's minstrel. 
 If these are the new views of man necessary 
 to be collated and interpreted by the min- 
 strel, how much more reverently and ener- 
 getically must they be mastered by the 
 minister, who knows that the theology in 
 his preaching must conform itself in some 
 manner to this anthropology, whose body of 
 facts creates part of the mental life and 
 atmosphere of his congregation and the 
 community in which he lives. 
 
 Modern science has not abolished, but 
 rather it has deepened the wonders of human 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 57 
 
 life ; and philosophy has not relieved them of 
 complexities. The old wonder came of dark- 
 ness, the new wonder comes of light ; the old 
 puzzle was of concealment, the new puzzle is 
 of revealment. The man to whom the min- 
 strel in "Caliban on Setebos" comes as a 
 singer is not more sympathetically and vitally 
 attached to the animal life which we would 
 like to think is far below him, than is the man 
 to whom the minister comes as a preacher, 
 however daringly and soaringly he is seen by 
 the same science and philosophy to make 
 towards citizenship in realms ethereal. My 
 boyhood remembers John B. Gough crying 
 out, after a description of a star in the dark 
 blue night and a description of an Alp 
 drenched with incommunicable sunshine, 
 " These are sublime ; but / can think 1 " A 
 whole ministry was expressed to me, in that 
 tremendous contrast which gave my life a 
 new elevation through his inspiring thought. 
 John B. Gough was a great orator. I 
 had heard orators. Here was something 
 more. Somehow the declaration of that fact 
 had never before entered the process of my 
 
58 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 becoming my true self, and with such a com- 
 mand as to set me thinking right royally. A 
 youth limited by many untoward forces, 
 having less than most of the delights of life, 
 has no greater wealth suddenly given him 
 than Gough conveyed in that announcement. 
 But I knew even then that the speaker had 
 just newly vanquished a passion of his lower 
 self. Was he less my priest saying to me in 
 my unsullied youth, " / can think," than if 
 he had been a cleric in full canonical orders 
 saying to me, " You can think"? If ever 
 this kind of thinking, with contemporary aids 
 to the study of man, presented rewards in the 
 form of faith, it is now. Only let the best of 
 us in thinking hold to his integrity, as to the 
 gain of Truth for its own sake. 
 
 Now, this was the same man who might 
 have taken to a despairful doctrine of life, if the 
 obsolescent account of him made in modern 
 thought had left him like a dust heap in an 
 earthquake, or a worm in the soft moss. The 
 same pulses beat in the modern preacher's 
 brain and heart. The minister is driven to a 
 new study of the laws of this being, Man^ who 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 59 
 
 contrasts with Alcyone and Matterhorn in this, 
 that he can and does think. The revelation 
 of God's willingness and urgency for com- 
 munion, divine thinker with human thinker, 
 will never be spoken in the souls of your 
 listening congregation, until you know your 
 superiority over, and independence of, this 
 enormous material universe. This independ- 
 ence of it will not come by an underestimate 
 of it. He who utters immortal hopes must 
 be something more than a blind believer, if 
 he shall speak them, not only at men, but in 
 the men who feel one end of this very con- 
 trary existence of ours pressing down, but 
 only by the gravity of matter. 
 
 It is astonishing how little the new revela- 
 tion of man as a growing being, and an 
 almost predestinatedly progressive one, enters 
 the message and pervades the manner of 
 many pulpits. If ever a fresh breeze blew 
 towards the sail of any craft, it is this scientific 
 and philosophic assertion, so richly proven as 
 a truth, that man must progress. A pulpit 
 is decidedly inhuman, though perhaps not 
 cruelly so by choice, when its preacher is not 
 
6o THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 living in and speaking out of, as well as 
 speaking into, a humanity which he sees 
 divinely set in the direction of " the far-ofi 
 divine event, towards which the whole creation 
 moves." Progress is indeed " our Being's 
 end and aim." The willingness of many a 
 man to go back to his youth and childhood, 
 for his delight, comes from his never having 
 been inspired and inwardly self-dedicated to 
 progress illimitable. The ministry which has 
 touched him has never fed him upon eternal 
 fare and provided his pilgrimage with the 
 good fortune of those visions which arise out 
 of his being discovered to himself, as a liv- 
 ing entity whose progress demands infinite 
 time. 
 
 He must progress in his race and with his 
 kind, and after well ascertained laws. Let us 
 see and let us reach the celestial side of them. 
 Many a preacher has failed to see that the 
 emphasis of our attention to the law of evo- 
 lution, having been so long given to our 
 origins, rather than to our prospects, ought 
 now at least to be changed. Man has lately, 
 for the most part, spent his time in finding 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 6 1 
 
 out how he came thus far, whereas he would 
 be no less true to the truth of evolution, if his 
 spiritual leader and guide would manifest 
 first of all in himself, by the upwardness of 
 his spiritual life and consequendy by that of 
 his people, by some means, the prospects and 
 involved expectancies for himself and all hu- 
 manity ever moving on and upward. The 
 minister must, of course, understand the pres- 
 ent day's appreciation of powers and tenden- 
 cies of reversion, but he builds his pulpit upon 
 the breadths of assurance and hope in the 
 upper implications of conversion. 
 
 Our age certainly leads any man, who 
 would deal with conduct and character, into a 
 profounder view of sin than any other age 
 has known. It does this by emphasis upon 
 personality. We may speak as we choose 
 after the manner of those who, forty years 
 ago, had a very respectful hearing, leading 
 many people to affirm that sin, after all, is but 
 a blunder, rather than a transgression and a 
 rebellion against all universal order. But now 
 the minister scarcely needs, even thus, to com- 
 pliment this fading view. Moral distinctions, 
 
62 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 even if the fall of man was a fall upward, 
 have been so clarified and sharpened, that, if 
 we were to anticipate no other consciousness 
 of law which would make us know sin as 
 Paul knew sin, our lower self is less attractive 
 than ever. Our upper self is cleaving to 
 higher ethical visions, and it commands with 
 increasing interest. Of course, as we develop 
 upward, we shall develop away from the 
 downward, and the interest in our ascent will 
 increase. Sin is not likely to look less sinful, 
 in the superior attractiveness of an infinite 
 goodness which evidently is pulling towards 
 the heights. The topmost height is the 
 maintenance of personality. 
 
 The true place of Jesus of Nazareth among 
 men is not to be made by the minister, in the 
 mind of modern man, through his insisting 
 upon grounding the unique incarnation upon 
 the Virgin Birth, whether or not the assertion 
 of the Virgin Birth is to be maintained, so much 
 as (i) through placing the Master of man 
 in His vital and vitalizing relationships to this 
 being, humanity, at once so great and so per- 
 sonal, whom we meet on the street, and espe- 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 63 
 
 cially in the congregation, and (2) through 
 placing Jesus Christ before him in such a way 
 as to reveal the fact that all apparent contrari- 
 eties and distances in his own personality and 
 experience are not eternal and hopeless oppo- 
 sitions in human nature and experience. They 
 are newly revealed in Christ. Christ's per- 
 sonality is the fact which comprehends the 
 very puzzling antagonisms of thinking ; and 
 the minister's life in Christ alone will recon- 
 cile all the truths of experience. 
 
 When humanity is known and discovered 
 to itself by the minister, either in the depths 
 of its iniquity where it has sinned down to 
 the bottom, so to speak, and says with the 
 prodigal, " I will arise," because there is 
 nothing but the " I " left and there is nothing 
 to do but to " arise," or, when immortal an- 
 ticipations have been cherished until they 
 have filled the heavens with their bloom, it 
 is amazing how quickly and loyally this hu- 
 manity will respond to any revelation of the 
 Father-God. Of course, if a man persists in 
 preaching to men as if a human being is 
 only a manufacture and not a creation of 
 
64 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 God in His own image — if a minister will go 
 on negativing and stunting, if not destroying, 
 all sense of a man's being essentially God's 
 child, then he may be sure that any sudden 
 employment of the heavenly music will not 
 make the strings which have rusted in mis- 
 use, and been broken, respond in harmony. 
 What we need to-day in our ministry, as we 
 appreciate modern views of man, which, as we 
 say, change his soul-features, is not more a 
 sympathetic appreciation of what the divine 
 is, as Jesus will reveal it in God, than a sim- 
 ilar appreciation of what the human is, as 
 Jesus reveals it in man. 
 
 Two things are likeliest, just now, to per- 
 plex, where they ought to enlighten — the fact 
 of personality, against which such an unsuc- 
 cessful attack has been made, and the fact of 
 the subco7iscious life of the human person, 
 in which personality seems lost, — both of 
 which have been elucidated by contemporary 
 psychology and philosophy. 
 
 Personality is the most interesting, the most 
 eminent, and the most costly item in the list of 
 this universe's assets. The philosophy of the 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 65 
 
 universe which has most instructed us, while 
 it has more nearly revolutionized our con- 
 ceptions of the universe itself and the human 
 life within it than any other, is precisely the 
 philosophy which emphasizes the prominence 
 of personality and presents the clearest state- 
 ment as to its cost and value. Beginning 
 with the primordial stuff, forth from which 
 things higher, and ultimately things highest 
 have been evolved, v/e have seen the half- 
 blind units of force apparently moving up- 
 ward^in their accomplishment. This upward- 
 ness of the universal movement is not without 
 eddies in the stream. Each of these eddies 
 whirls backward and downward : but the 
 stream itself zV^volves these revolving back- 
 ward movements so completely that the 
 evolving result is progress towards what we 
 admit is a better thing or state of things. 
 All ethical reality with which ministers will 
 have to do, in the last analysis of the minis- 
 ter's supreme function, will root itself in this 
 upwardness of the universal movement. Our 
 power as preachers will come, because we 
 stand largely upon a fact, not of our inven- 
 
66 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 tion or discovery, not even of such revelation 
 as comes from a book or a series of books 
 reverently called the Bible, except as all these 
 honour and illustrate the truth, the fact that 
 there is a goal — an universal goal, an inten- 
 tion from the beginning which is now an 
 attention in man's brain unto an end — an 
 order which is upward-moving, unifying in 
 its sweep all movements, making them sub- 
 sidiary and ultimately harmonious — an order, 
 indeed, whose upwardness of movement is 
 now so much an affair of consciousness in 
 man's mind that he has identified it v^iiki good- 
 ness and its opposite with evil; his behaviour 
 in its favour being called right, and his con- 
 duct in opposition to it being called wroiig. 
 
 But, without anticipating, it is well to fix in 
 your minds the fact that, using now the vo- 
 cabulary of theology rather than that of phi- 
 losophy, God, who Himself is the Personality 
 of personalities, is so interested in the pro- 
 duction of personality, to begin with, that 
 His process of creation, in and through the 
 universe, brings us into connection with a 
 workshop whose every tool, from atom to 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 67 
 
 planet, is devoted to that one end, or a studio 
 whose scaffolding built around the crude ma- 
 terial upon which the artist-sculptor works, 
 falls away finally, only to disclose the most 
 Godlike thing, man, imperial in personality. 
 He is touched into beauty or loveliness, fea- 
 tured by such chisels as are results of causes 
 and causes of results, and so a part of nature, 
 set upon the task of revealing personality. 
 Man is at the summit of things. By a long, 
 long way of storm and fire and earthquake 
 and vanquishings he had been led to per- 
 sonality. 
 
 It is agreed that, because he is now evolved 
 from the physical universe, he was involved 
 in it, at the first. If it was all so organized 
 that it has, at length, produced him with his 
 ability to say " / am /," he is at once revealed 
 as of wondrous worth. The assurance that 
 the slowly advancing realm which we call 
 Nature — " the about-to-be-born " — has driven 
 all her forces towards producing what has 
 been described as " the small speck, then the 
 speck with a thin line," and, at length, she 
 has arrived where we know the " small 
 
68 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 speck " as the brain of man and recognize 
 " the thin line " in his spinal cord — this as- 
 surance places man and personality on a 
 summit of our thought and regard which 
 nothing but the cost of his redemption at 
 Calvary may overtower. With human con- 
 sciousness and its phenomena, this is enough 
 to awaken new admirations, reverences, en- 
 thusiasms, and hopes, with regard to any hu- 
 man personality. The assurance of modern 
 science that every movement of the physical 
 universe upward has been at such great ex- 
 penditure, and that every movement has been 
 towards personality, that the coarse proto- 
 plasm has yielded in the face of a flower, or in 
 the half-descried smile on an ape's face, to 
 some resistless impulse towards the formal 
 revealing of personality — this ought to make 
 a minister of Jesus Christ, who has the good- 
 ness of God to tell, stand in awe, until he 
 speaks with not less than angelic power and 
 persuasion unto men, to be reconciled unto 
 God 
 
 This most costly accomplishment of a 
 whole universe — man's personality — is the 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 69 
 
 indubitable attribute which makes him ca- 
 pable of religion. 
 
 Measure the significance of these facts to 
 the minister of that religion. First, religion 
 is a personal relationship unto a person : the 
 highest religion possible is a personal relation 
 of love, obedience, and trust unto and with 
 the Personality Supreme. Secondly, the 
 maintenance and development of human per- 
 sonality are to be had only through a religion 
 which draws out the human personality 
 through love, obedience, and trust, and draws 
 him out unto ends which are eternal and in- 
 finite. This educing of his personality God- 
 ward — this education of humanity — includes 
 his redemption and sanctification. This is the 
 newly apprehended basis of a religion for hu- 
 manity, a religion which is the Spiritual Life, 
 and which must comprehend all men's inter- 
 ests in the self-realization of human person- 
 ality. 
 
 What has the Christian minister to ofTer 
 to a humanity thus instructed, and thus filled 
 with the new desires and hopes which these 
 views must stimulate ? 
 
yo THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 I. The Personal God. 
 
 II. The Personal Christ. 
 
 III. A program of human progress in 
 which each man's personality shall be at- 
 tained in the brotherhood of man — each per- 
 sonality giving all his own and receiving all 
 from every one. 
 
 I. What other religion or message to 
 men compares with yours, my brother, in 
 its portrait of Personality ? '' I am that I am'' 
 — the Holy Name is almost awful in its self- 
 assertion. None but Infinite Power, Holi- 
 ness, Love, could hold the human mind to 
 such a vision of reality, and then only by 
 self-revelation. God is always saying to 
 weak-hearted and rebellious humanity, "Tell 
 them : / am hath sent Me," The ennobling 
 contagion of this Personality must come into 
 the minister of God, always, as it came to 
 Moses, aforetime. 
 
 II. The personality of Jesus is the most 
 redoubtable fact, in a world slipping and 
 sliding with frightful miscellaneousness of 
 interest in its own ideals. " / am the way, 
 the truth, and the life." What language is 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 7 1 
 
 this of self-respectful, divine personality ! " / 
 am the resurrection!" What an annihilat- 
 ing sentence to Death, which always assumes 
 the manners of personality to our impersonal 
 faithlessness! The manner of Jesus' speech 
 as to the personality of the Father shows 
 that He caught the accent of the divine from 
 God Himself : " My Father worketh hitherto 
 and I work." "I ascend unto My Father 
 and your Father and to My God and to your 
 God." " Before Abraham was, / am'' 
 
 III. The religion which Jesus has left us, 
 with all His life and words, is Jesus Christ 
 Himself. His actions and His words were 
 and are the fragrance and beauty thrown off 
 from the flower : He Himself is the blossom. 
 •' Believe in Me," He says, " He that believeth 
 in Me and My words" — He Himself is first 
 and foremost. Personal religion takes the 
 form of service, then of friendship, then of 
 communion, and finally the form of glorifica- 
 tion with Him. It is all heart to heart and 
 heart for heart experience. No one really 
 preaches Christianity, who misses this. The 
 reward of bringing to men, each man in 
 
72 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 search for his true personality, this personal 
 Christ as the Divine Self-revelation, is some- 
 thing for which angels might long. It is the 
 sight of a discovered self, or a recovered self 
 — all illuminated in the light and love of 
 God, set upon tasks which shall evermore 
 strengthen, refine, and exalt the rescued and 
 sanctified personality, as the man grows like 
 unto God. 
 
 Jesus' program of human progress was 
 and is altogether personal. He was never 
 mdividualistic, but always this most Personal 
 of Persons found the social privilege and 
 duty included in the natural outflow of 
 His rich inner life. God's children were all 
 personal. The woman who touched His gar- 
 ment, pushing her need amidst the crowd 
 which had no personality, until her hand 
 touched His robe's hem, was reasserting her 
 personality in the presence of His own. All 
 men found in Him a vision and realization of 
 personal being and life which is salvation. 
 All true preaching, or pastoral labour, seeks 
 to break up the dreadful impersonalness of 
 life beneath a crust of sin or ignorance, to 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 73 
 
 get the hand of need into the loving grasp of 
 God who alone hath the suppHes in Him- 
 self. But, instantly, this once poor hand, 
 now so tenderly and yet so strongly grasped, 
 comes to be a helping hand to all others. 
 Man becomes Godlike. The Fatherhood of 
 God revealed in the personality of Jesus, 
 His Son, our Brother, has appeared in the 
 Brotherhood of Man. Its plan and hope 
 tingle with blood. Its dream is that of a 
 City of God, in which personal salvation will 
 sing its new song. 
 
 Now, our ability — if it may be spoken of 
 so coldly — this ability, v/hich we must pray 
 and live for, to communicate of God's per- 
 sonality unto human personalities that which 
 Christ Jesus completely manifested through 
 His personality — the Divine Life in Humanity 
 — this power is surely an achievement of 
 personality, yours and mine, discovered, 
 cherished, and made glorious in the Spirit- 
 ual Life. The last of all things which may 
 be communicated to a personality, by means 
 of anything impersonal, is personality, in 
 message or in influence. All goodness, vir- 
 
74 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 tue, love, and any and all other living in- 
 fluences and realities must have personal 
 origins, resources and connections, or none. 
 What I am pleading for here, as you must 
 see, is far from the individuality which sepa- 
 rates, and is centrifugal. It ends in egotism 
 and divides from the brotherhood of man in 
 self-interest. I plead for the awakened image 
 of God, living by love and lifting all and 
 everything to unity of blessing by the sub- 
 lime attractions of excellence. I need not 
 tell you how to live for it. Christ's own 
 secret of personal influence will be yours 
 and mine, only when we accept for God's 
 sake, and the sake of our brethren, the 
 awful gift of personality, to be given into 
 His keeping and disciplined by His guid- 
 ance. 
 
 Having said so much as to Personality, as a 
 subject and object for the mind and mission 
 of the minister, it is well to consider one of 
 the apparent contrarieties arising in the 
 highest experience of the personality, at its 
 best estate — a fact in the soul's life which 
 modern psychology has brought to notice 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 75 
 
 with great emphasis, — the souV s subconscious 
 life. 
 
 I believe it would be well for us to have, 
 in each of our seminaries, a department of 
 study — and with a master at its head — which 
 might be called Philosophical Psychology. 
 We do not need to wait for the establishment 
 of such a foundation, in order to obtain great 
 good from certain results of the profound, 
 and therefore sympathetic, investigations 
 which have been carried on in our time. 
 One of these investigations has resulted, at 
 least, in a new phrase. It may be that this 
 phrase will be a permanent name for a 
 hitherto unmapped region of our inner life. 
 I refer to the phrase ^^subconsciousness''^ or 
 " sublij7iinal cojisciousnessT 
 
 When a young man, in the olden times, 
 studied theology with a master of preaching, 
 he was sure to find out that his master's 
 power with human beings, either for their in- 
 struction in righteousness or for their inspira- 
 tion by personal association, depended largely 
 upon those resources of the personality which 
 lie deeper than one's self-consciousness. 
 
76 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 There seems to be a stream beneath the 
 stream with us all. Professor James has not 
 been able to tell us how " some of the strange 
 powers of our inner life can be tapped and 
 used in an intellectual sense." But no one 
 has known and beheld the action of a mind 
 like that of Charles Haddon Spurgeon at 
 work, with thousands of human beings under 
 his easy leadership, without recognizing in his 
 own mind a certain manifestation from be- 
 neath the level of his conscious intellectual 
 activity — a sort of bubbling up, intermittently 
 perhaps, but certainly ; as graciously and un- 
 expectedly as it was fresh and beautiful, of 
 something personal, which, without the def- 
 initely intellectual operations above, would 
 not have been known. Did it come from 
 the depths, as a vital and perhaps thrilling 
 appeal, and as a kind of reason beneath all 
 other more apparent reasons for believing in 
 nobleness and living a noble life ? At least 
 it seems so. It was so. Forgotten evi- 
 dences lay there, like ships of sunken gold 
 beneath the ordinary and more fluent evi- 
 dence. Truths were seen as they stuck up 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 77 
 
 from beneath, as Renan tells us the fabled 
 spires of the sunken city of Is were said to 
 show themselves, when the storm tossed the 
 same sea which had once overwhelmed them. 
 Indeed, Renan thought this was perhaps a 
 parable of his own soul. 
 
 Now, it is certain that this elder spiritual 
 life, this deposit beneath our more apparent 
 and superficial life to-day, contains many of 
 our best powers, and sustains many of our 
 best hopes. There are two problems, then, for 
 us to solve, or, rather, two privileges for us to 
 use with our latent abilities. Indeed, if we 
 are to grow power, there are two necessities ; 
 and more surely, if we are to attain the 
 maximum of power, (i) We must use this 
 deposit, by and through a spiritual life so 
 down-reaching that our treasure shall be 
 brought forth. (2) We must add to this de- 
 posit, by and through such a spiritual life as 
 will yield us treasures which, to be possessed 
 at all, must be in the deeps and out of sight. 
 
 Before we touch these seriously, let us 
 rightly estimate the point of view from which 
 the minister of the Christian religion must 
 
78 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 survey these facts. Two men so different as 
 Moses and Samson have been studied by two 
 of your lecturers — Dr. WiUiam M. Taylor 
 and Dr. Phillips Brooks — as furnishing illus- 
 trations of the presence of a great element 
 of unconsciousness in character. The texts 
 were : " And Moses wist not that the skin of his 
 face did shine." " And Samson wist not that 
 his strength had departed from him." It 
 would be wise for you to read the sermon of 
 Dr. Taylor and then the sermon of Bishop 
 Phillips Brooks, on Moses. However, it is 
 my duty to tell you that there were two ser- 
 mons by Dr. Brooks, and that the second ser- 
 mon, of the man who became a true bishop, 
 in Phillips Brooks — a sermon which was 
 never published and which was preached 
 without notes — went far more deeply inlo the 
 meaning of our unconscious life. The minis- 
 ter's own subconscious self so contributed 
 to his portraiture of Moses, that the late Prof. 
 William James told me, as we listened to- 
 gether to the preacher: " Here is the sight of 
 the subconscious yielding up its wealth in the 
 light of genius." Neither of these men — 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 79 
 
 rtotably Brooks who is more richly original — 
 could have made either of these sermons, if 
 he had not experienced the truth of his mes- 
 sage. The power of that of which no man 
 may be conscious was eloquence itself. 
 Neither of them could have spoken so wisely 
 or well, if he had pulled his experience up by 
 the roots and shown them to the people. 
 The blossom and fruit were excellent, because 
 the roots were hidden. I shall not stop to 
 point out the differences between unconscious- 
 ness and subconsciousness, but it would be a 
 very grave error for any one of you to neglect 
 enriching this deeper life. 
 
 Character is so much the deposit of expe- 
 rience that we are likely to get the best out 
 of our experiences in a substratum of per- 
 sonal tradition. Permanent and favourable 
 dispositions towards those truths which we 
 never any more seek to question or argue 
 about, than about our experience with life, 
 are most valuable assets. They are the re- 
 serve capital of the soul. Wonderful reserve 
 is this, when many years of accumulated 
 treasures in thought and tendency of mind, 
 
8o THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 now grown habitual, are added as they sink, 
 by gravity of their value and weight of in- 
 fluence, to depths within us, — treasures upon 
 which we may call, or which shall be revealed 
 when the winds lift the seas of consciousness 
 to unwonted heights and bare the bed of 
 rock and sand below. 
 
 I once heard Bishop Simpson touch upon 
 an experience of years, which he afterwards 
 related as a student of psychology — for he 
 was a teacher before he was a preacher, and 
 always studied the phenomena of preaching 
 and its results from the point of view of the 
 teacher which he continued to be, in spite of 
 his eloquence. I had seen, as he had, his 
 whole great audience electrified in an instant, 
 at the appearance of something which he 
 seemed, not at all at the beginning, or even 
 in the midst of his discourse, to be preaching 
 or even thinking about. He had superior 
 powers of wooing from the crypts of his mem- 
 ory personal figures who walked forth as if, 
 on some fresh resurrection morning, they had 
 escaped death. But this was not a memory. 
 I can feel and hear the sentence, though I 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 8 1 
 
 cannot quote it. It was a reason for a reason, 
 urged in behalf of the supremacy of our moral 
 intuitions. It was indeed a stormy moment 
 in the history of the man, for he was grappled 
 by and was grappling with tremendous cur- 
 rents of thought and feeling. He was very 
 far from being eminently the thin and so 
 soft-voiced prelate who once read lectures 
 which I heard here, and which were created 
 in an atmosphere as different from the atmos- 
 phere of this sermon, as the atmosphere of 
 the architect of a life-saving ship is different 
 from that of the master of the crew in a crisis 
 of the tempest off Gay's Head. The lift and 
 altitude of his conscious activities ; the quick, 
 splendid realization of the currents which 
 flowed within sight of every one so grandly, 
 were as nothing, in comparison with the mes- 
 sage from underneath. It seemed a voice 
 from out of the eternity of the man's ageless 
 spiritual life. He was advancing upon his 
 subliminal self — speaking out of his subcon- 
 scious life. 
 
 All who would be ministers must respect, 
 revere, and obey not only the Spirit testifying 
 
82 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 with our spirit from beneath, but also, and 
 perhaps chiefly, the Spirit testifying with our 
 spirit from above. Then deep shall indeed 
 call and answer unto deep. " The wind blow- 
 eth where it listeth." We must submit to 
 being passive and receptive to that which is 
 both below and above our deliberative ac- 
 counting of what comes to us. The doctrine 
 of conversion by the influence of the Holy 
 Spirit has been neglected in our theology : 
 and the fact of conversion has too often been 
 lost sight of, as not only the possibility but a 
 necessary reality in the Spiritual Life by which 
 any man attains his full self and efficiency. 
 So, also, the finer experiences of empower- 
 ment for ministering to men, — the experiences 
 which come from the deeper currents that 
 are subliminal, or the higher currents which 
 are supra-liminal — to use the modern phrases 
 — and are indubitable facts of unconsciousness 
 which have been missed by our logic, have 
 been treated as meaningless for their remote- 
 ness. Our ministry has thus been left with- 
 out its greatest authentic and commanding 
 power. Emerson's word as to the supreme 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 83 
 
 thoughts which are always spoken in us, and 
 Goethe's word to the same effect need to be 
 repeated again and again to us who fail, 
 because we are ever looking outside our own 
 personal experience for everything in the na- 
 ture of revelation of truth. Many are the in- 
 timations from within and beneath and above. 
 A fine and true spiritual life will foster them. 
 Let us stand against everything, to conserve 
 and employ that certain state of mind in 
 which things may happen which we have not 
 calculated upon„ The uncalculable winds of 
 the Spirit are the best to calculate upon, even 
 for a valuable sermon — that is, a sermon out 
 of life, which is not less safe because it is four- 
 square and open to all the winds that blow. 
 Indeed, it would be less safe, if it were open 
 to but one. Certainly, it is a meaningless 
 thing in a meaningless universe, if it be open 
 to none of these winds. Trust your unnamed 
 inspirations. 
 
 I have spoken of the minstrel and the min- 
 ister, and they are allied. This alliance is 
 manifested in the fact that the subconscious 
 self congenitally gives no record of itself and 
 
84 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 furnishes no statistics. The true man is un- 
 consciously isolated, but he is nevertheless 
 the man who is closest to humanity. No one 
 is nearer to humanity, and more sensitive to 
 the things of humanity, than he who has this 
 personal and great reserve, not undignifiedly 
 guarded, but kept as a " Holy of Holies." 
 
 The subconscious man beneath the con- 
 scious man, now and then, bursts forth ; for 
 the real man will always ruin a finite equation 
 of himself, and especially if he says some- 
 thing authentic. This is eloquence of the 
 highest order ; it is never mere oratory. 
 This is poetry of the highest order ; it is 
 never mere verse. Trust the unconscious 
 reality within you. So, and only so, may 
 you have your highest personality as a min- 
 ister. A minister may well desire to become 
 an orator of the soul and God, and a minstrel 
 of both. Take George Wm. Curtis' account 
 of the orator. Note how unconsciousness in 
 the orator produces an effect which is re- 
 ceived unconsciously by the audience. He 
 says: 
 
 " Unconsciously and surely the ear and 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 85 
 
 heart were charmed. How was it done? 
 Ah ! how did Mozart do it, how Raphael ? 
 The secret of the rose's sweetness, of the 
 bird's ecstasy, of the sunset's glory — that is 
 the secret of genius and eloquence. What 
 was heard, what was seen, was the form of 
 noble manhood, the courteous and self-pos- 
 sessed tone, the flow of modulated speech, 
 sparkling with matchless richness of illustra- 
 tion, with apt allusion and happy anecdote 
 and historic parallel, with wit and pitiless in- 
 vective, with melodious pathos, with stinging 
 satire, with crackling epigram and limpid 
 humour, like the bright ripples that play 
 around the sure and steady prow of the re- 
 sisdess ship. Like an illuminated vase of 
 odours, he glowed with concentrated and 
 perfumed fire. The divine energy of his 
 conviction utterly possessed him and his 
 
 " * pure and eloquent blood 
 Spoke in his cheek, and so distinctly wrought 
 That one might almost say his body thought.' 
 
 Was it Pericles swaying the Athenian multi- 
 tude? Was it Apollo breathing the music of 
 the morning from his lips? It was an Ameri- 
 
86 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 can patriot, a modern Son of Liberty, with a 
 soul as firm and true as was ever consecrated 
 to unselfish duty, pleading with the Ameri- 
 can conscience for the chained and speech- 
 less victims of American inhumanity." How 
 much of the unconscious is in it all ! 
 
 Why should the minister's effectiveness, at 
 any time, be less than this — all things being 
 equal ? 
 
 And now William Watson is speaking, 
 with wondrous similarity of phrase, and to 
 the same effect, of the minstrel, Tennyson, 
 who was one of the noblest of the ministers 
 of God to humanity : 
 
 •' Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre? 
 In far retreats of elemental mind 
 Obscurely comes and goes 
 
 The imperative breath of song, that as the wind 
 Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows. 
 Demand of lilies wherefore they are white, 
 Extort her crimson secret from the rose, 
 But ask not of the Muse that she disclose 
 The meaning of the riddle of her might : 
 Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite, 
 Save the enigma of herself, she knows. 
 The master could not tell, with all his lore. 
 Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped." 
 
 Live for such moments, and they will multi> 
 ply. They are full of the breath of immor- 
 
AND NEW VIEW-POINTS 87 
 
 tality for men, when the minstrel is a minis- 
 ter or the minister is a minstrel. The great 
 creations of men are born in unconscious- 
 ness. Personality seems to fade, yet person- 
 ality was never fc Irue and real. We gain 
 our noblest self, as Galahad, by sublime self- 
 loss in the universal. 
 
 I must close with James Martineau's 
 words, and thus you shall have all I would 
 wish I myself could say, of the open secret 
 of your possible power : " In virtue of the 
 close affinity, perhaps ultimate identity, of 
 religion and poetry, preaching is essentially 
 a lyric expression of the soul, an utterance of 
 meditation in sorrow, hope, love, and joy, 
 from a representative of the human heart in 
 its divine relations. In proportion as we 
 quit this view, and prominently introduce 
 the idea of a perceptive and monitory func- 
 tion, we retreat from the true prophetic 
 interpretation of the office back into the old 
 sacerdotal: — or (what is not perhaps so dif- 
 ferent a distinction as it may appear) from 
 the properly religions to the simply moral. 
 A ministry of mere instruction and persua- 
 
88 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 sion, which addresses itself primarily to the 
 understanding and the will, which deals 
 mainly with facts and reasoning, with hopes 
 and fears, may furnish us with the exposi- 
 tions of the lecture-room, the commandments 
 of the altar, the casuistry of the confessional : 
 but it falls short of that true ' testimony of 
 God,' that personal effusion of conscience 
 and affection, which distinguishes the re- 
 iormed preaching- from the homily T 
 
 All I wish to say ? Nay : not all. For I 
 would so speak in the lectures to come in 
 this course, that you shall see that we must 
 not believe in any antagonism of interests as 
 between the seer and the priest. We must 
 see that the teacher in the pulpit and the 
 preacher may and ought to be one. This 
 will come to be so, only by an all-reconciling 
 Spiritual Life. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 AND ITS RELATION TO 
 TRUTH AND ORTHODOXY 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND ITS 
 
 RELATION TO TRUTH AND 
 
 ORTHODOXY 
 
 ORTHODOXY, like happiness, is a 
 by-product. It is not less valuable 
 in itself, even as many a very rich 
 and serviceable result obtained incidentally 
 in and through our more insistent and com- 
 prehensive plans is not less valuable because 
 it is arrived at without planfulness. Our 
 plow is more apt to turn up something else 
 of importance — some unexpected wealth — 
 if we are after the essential thing in plowing, 
 and so set upon a harvest by and by that we 
 shall see that it goes in up to the beam. 
 The main purpose seriously undertaken, and 
 valorously stuck to, is the parent of the 
 finest form of the incidental in all our life. 
 Indeed happiness, without such a fatherhood 
 as a life set upon holiness gives to it, is a 
 poor bastard, always homeless and a little 
 91 
 
92 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 ragged. What a poor, aimless, drudging, 
 and gloomy thing is the happiness which 
 has been conceived and born without Holi- 
 ness and Self-sacrifice as its father and 
 mother. It usually dies teething. If it 
 lives, it is scrawny, gets ill-tempered, re- 
 quires to be petted and has the self-con- 
 sciousness of a poor egotism. Start out in 
 any manner to be happy ; let that be the 
 main thing, and you will soon see how 
 miserable you can be and how the birthmark 
 of selfishness develops into a sore. 
 
 On the other hand, determine, under the 
 compulsion of a vision of God's holiness, to 
 follow after holiness ; hear and obey the 
 command : " Be ye holy, for I am holy," 
 and put out of head and heart any vision 
 of God Himself which could make Him say 
 to you : " Be happy, for I am happy " — fol- 
 low after God's deeper joy until He leads 
 you to His Calvary ; behold Jesus, your 
 Christ and His Christ " for the joy that 
 was set before Him," "enduring the cross, 
 despising the shame" and now "set upon 
 the throne of God," where His eternal joy is 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 93 
 
 that of redeeming us to holiness, and you 
 cannot fail to find the by-product of happi- 
 ness gleaming forth like an upturned stream 
 of gold, in the track of the deeply set plow- 
 share of your purpose to be holy. 
 
 All that I have said of happiness is true of 
 orthodoxy. It is just such a by-product. 
 There is only one main thing for us, as the 
 intellectual result of religious activity within 
 and without ourselves, and that is Truth. 
 It is essential ; all orthodoxy, as we have 
 become accustomed to the term — and in that 
 sense only may I use it here — is incidental. 
 The best orthodoxy — here our use of the 
 word is thus shown to be so unscientific that 
 comparison is possible and even useful — our 
 best orthodoxy is the clearest and most 
 sympathetic statement of what men accept 
 as the truth. It may, or may not, be the 
 truth. Perhaps only the majority, not the 
 best of our fellows intellectually or morally, 
 would accept the statement as such. But it 
 goes as orthodoxy. Perhaps the conserva- 
 tism of an age or community or institution 
 like the Church, which always cares much 
 
94 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 for the inheritance, and ought to, until it is 
 found to be an inheritance, not of spirit but 
 of traditions and property, is the chief 
 proprietor of what is known as the truest 
 statement of any series of realities called 
 Truth. 
 
 These interests voice themselves in the 
 accepted statement, as the constituted au- 
 thorities on the subject. All thoughts which 
 Truth may touch or inspire in the mind 
 are under their special purview. Naturally, 
 great deference, if not reverence, is attached 
 to their very pronunciation of the statement. 
 Orthodoxy is, under such circumstances, al- 
 most at a premium. To be orthodox is 
 much more than to be reasonable, of course. 
 And soon, when the growing vision of truth, 
 — as it ever must do, in order to grow ; and 
 it must grow in man's mind, in order to live 
 at all, — does push up and around with its 
 perennial vitality, and noiselessly creates a 
 change which no reasoning in contentious 
 speech ever can do, then to be orthodox is 
 more than to be true. 
 
 Now, I do not mean to say that this matter 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 95 
 
 of orthodoxy is of slight importance. It is of 
 great importance that the world of men 
 should accept and regard certain truths as 
 fixed. It is our duty, as leaders of public 
 opinion, to treat with reverence the bases 
 upon which all right opinion must rest and 
 build its edifices of conviction. But we need 
 to know that these bases are very simple and 
 not multitudinous. The mind of a large 
 number of human beings is both limp and 
 lazy. It looks to orthodoxy in science, soci- 
 ology, medicine, and politics, as it looks to 
 orthodoxy in religious thought, regarding it 
 as something to rest upon, just because it 
 lacks vitality and strength to think. A kind 
 of indolence of the intellect makes many 
 otherwise amiable persons very favourable 
 towards any fixed statement of things con- 
 nected with the mysteries of life and the 
 universe. We will always have with us 
 persons to whom it will be impossible to 
 make explanation that royal thinking is a 
 duty of every one of the Royal Priesthood of 
 God. It is true also that persons of this sort 
 need only the simplicities, which are indeed 
 
96 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the sublimities of truth, and these are not 
 numerous enough to confuse the mind. All 
 great preaching accepts them ; all fine char- 
 acter is built upon them. It is our duty and 
 privilege to make these foundations — if I am 
 still to use this figure of speech — visible, and 
 as glorious as they are eternal. 
 
 But one of the main matters to be made 
 clear is that this figure of speech is in- 
 sufficient. The hardest orthodoxy, having 
 enough truth in it to effectually serve man's 
 life, is not stone for foundations, so much as 
 soil for growth. We are concerned with the 
 Spiritual Life. The moment you mention 
 life, you have agreed to growth. No ortho- 
 doxy will remain even interesting, or main- 
 tain its name long, which cannot be sown 
 with seeds. It must yield not only a crop 
 in return, but also it must give back to the 
 soil an increment, which, like leaf-mold, shall 
 make it perennially productive. It is one of 
 the most besetting of our mental sins — the 
 condoning of intellectual indolence, by our 
 treating truths as a tired statistician might. 
 He is always relieved to find no change in 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 97 
 
 the arid blocks of stone. Numerical identity 
 is sepulchral, when truths arranged in a 
 statement for popular acceptance are called 
 orthodox. They never are so untrue, as when 
 they furnish no nutriment of growth to man's 
 life. Nothing is more valuable than to break 
 them up, or to treat them as the waters from 
 the heavens by slow erosion create deep, rich 
 valleys out of forbiddingly barren mountains 
 which they wear away. 
 
 We were speaking yesterday of the supreme 
 place of personality. Here it will be seen 
 again that the element of personality is 
 decisive, in the interests of what is valuable, 
 in both orthodoxy and truth. It is when 
 you touch a series of doctrines or statements 
 called orthodoxy, with a personal purpose to 
 make your own life what it ought to be by 
 their help, or to recreate the life of some one 
 else, either in the love of the man himself or 
 in the love of the truth itself, that these state- 
 ments and doctrines become true. That is, 
 assuming that our orthodoxy is what the 
 word implies, right doctrine. If it is not 
 right doctrine, the Spiritual Life of a human 
 
98 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 being will be fatal to it. Once let the fire of 
 a fine spirituality searchingly play upon 
 ancient and dry falsities which have been 
 accepted as true, and have been named 
 orthodox for so long a time that they are like 
 inflammable tinder, and the flame will grow 
 while the revered formula will feed it. It is, 
 indeed, the only safety in the presence of our 
 human willingness to label statements and 
 doctrines with such laborious propriety, that 
 they may be quoted in order to relieve us of 
 thinking on imperial things. This affair of 
 personality coming into contact with what we 
 call orthodoxy delivers us at once from any 
 confusion of mind. Orthodoxy must pass 
 into truth and be our truth, the very food for 
 our life, or the usable every-day instrumental- 
 ity and tool, for accomplishing our personal 
 holiness, else it must vanish. 
 
 I have preferred to speak of the value of 
 orthodoxy, when it is a soil for the production 
 of fresh shoots of truth, which, having brought 
 forth their fruit, in turn enrich the soil. Such 
 orthodoxy as this, thoroughly worked, as we 
 say of the field, by spiritual interests which 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 99 
 
 look towards the future, never burned a her- 
 etic. It needs no poHce defense. It scarcely 
 permits the irreverence of a recommendation. 
 One would as soon insist, through a council 
 of prelates, on the right of a growing field of 
 corn to be respected. Nothing but the 
 Spiritual Life, constantly working with what 
 we call the fundamentals — that is, the very 
 soil which is beneath — nourishes the growing 
 future and can protect orthodoxy. 
 
 One of the most unfortunate heresies con- 
 cerning truth and orthodoxy is the implica- 
 tion, so very often made, that religious truth, 
 or truths concerning religion, need a mechan- 
 ically devised protectorate. This is the other 
 side of the falsehood which never dares 
 to speak itself, but is constantly vitiating the 
 atmosphere of many a minister's study, that 
 these truths within the purview of the minis- 
 ter's thought and life are of such a sort that 
 they must be approached in manner reflect- 
 ing their peculiarities. An age like our own 
 revolts at the idea that any truth requires 
 anything but a true and revealing use of it, to 
 keep it safe ; and any whimsicalness of treat- 
 
lOO THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 ing religious truths, as if they belong only to 
 certain classes of human beings who approach 
 them with certain attitudes, is distressing to 
 the intellectual integrity of the modern mind. 
 An ancient fact shows up with a striking 
 modernity, whenever its eternity, like flint, 
 yields fire as it comes in contact with a real- 
 ity hard as steel. The crisis thus made works 
 in the interest of manifested truthfulness. 
 The ancient fact is, that truth is for the mind 
 of man and the mind of man is for truth. For 
 other reasons than that it is old, this is a con- 
 sideration which is not likely to have much 
 weight with persons who do not gladly con- 
 fess that the ministry of Christ, man to man, 
 is at length on its merits. It is an unnatural 
 and, therefore, unscientific view of the realities 
 involved which permits any of us to treat the 
 truth, as to any subject, as something either 
 ultimately to fail to reach the human mind, or 
 requiring an extra-natural, especially anti- 
 natural, therefore abnormal, exercise of the 
 human faculty, to attain and entertain it. Of 
 course, the normal exercise of human faculties 
 for truth-finding involves truthful personal 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH lOI 
 
 character — truth-loving by the bent and 
 tendencies of one's inner self. The pulpit's 
 urgency of some adventitious attitude towards 
 truth — this thing of character being true in a 
 man, to begin with — has been most unsettling 
 to mental orderliness. Any mysteriously 
 created manner of mind which makes the 
 thinker a lonely citizen of what is more iso- 
 lating and demoralizing to his open-eyed hu- 
 manity than any charmed or sacred " circle," 
 is vicious in the extreme. To adopt another, 
 than the normal method of seeking Truth, is 
 to undo the things with which you work. It 
 is to destroy man's confidence in Truth's 
 every-day approachableness and its familiar 
 power in his life, and his own ability to attain 
 it as an end consonant with truthful charac- 
 ter. If Truth is such an essential thing, in 
 order to make the highest product in man, it 
 must be that our essentially high faculties 
 shall get at it in such a manner as will give 
 unity and poise to human nature. Our facul- 
 ties for truth-getting everywhere else ought 
 to work most naturally, when we are seeking 
 the highest truth. If, in what we may call the 
 
I02 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 regular and normal way, which any sound 
 mind may adopt in finding truth, searching 
 is ill-directed, and truth-finding for all true 
 souls is hopeless, then the Christian minister 
 may well be dispensed with. He ought never 
 to say, with the mighty preachers to men — 
 least of all, with God Himself — " Come, let 
 us reason together." 
 
 We cannot be too personal about this mat- 
 ter of our truthfulness, especially if we have 
 the interests of Truth upon our hearts. All 
 that I have said to strengthen confidence in 
 the mind's ability to get at the truths of reli- 
 gion will be misleading, unless, first of all, 
 each man's personality is in normal relations 
 to Reason and to Truth. This is a graver 
 charge against what I have been saying, than 
 the charge that it alone is unqualified ration- 
 alism. Is it a fact in your life that Truth has 
 no supreme place ? You can never know it 
 so certainly, as when you are trying to obtain 
 what is new truth for you. The fact of our 
 having done wrong, " missed the mark," 
 sinned, has already wrenched the mental ma- 
 chinery. Our doing wrong, " missing the 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH I03 
 
 mark," sinning, is even now placing gritty 
 sand in the finely organized intellectual mech- 
 anism and process. Not only are we self- 
 wronged, but certain hard prejudices favour- 
 able to a condition of wrongness have gotten 
 into our thinking and feeling and willing. 
 They have been blown in, or dropped in, 
 because of our acting against rightness. The 
 effect upon us is seen to be conterminous and 
 contemporaneous with a sorry effect upon that 
 body of reality called Truth, so far as it may 
 be ours. We may cling in soundness of state- 
 ment to any old and revered orthodoxy, ours 
 or another's, but our loss of Truth and truth- 
 fulness, and, fundamentally, our loss of truth- 
 loving is damaging if not desolating. Some- 
 thing then must be done for us, in us, by 
 something more true than we are. That 
 something, coming to the redemption of the 
 human personality, must be Some One. 
 
 Here is the beginning, then, of a new spirit- 
 ual life. The Holy Spirit has operated upon 
 our heart and mind, driving us by the neces- 
 sities of our place and position with regard to 
 truth to Him who is Truth. Whenever a 
 
I04 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 soul has found this necessity for being true, 
 and, along with it, a necessity that Some One 
 shall personally regenerate his heart, so that 
 his character shall be a true character and 
 thus open to truth, there is no voice of heaven 
 sweeter or more powerful than that of Jesus 
 saying: '*/ am the Truths Do not fear for 
 a moment that truth can be lost to you, 
 whenever He Who is the Truth has made 
 you true. Be sure, however, that the fortune 
 and fate of truth, as well as of orthodoxy, are 
 betrayed hopelessly, when your character and 
 life have no personal relationship to Him 
 Who is the Truth. 
 
 Now this experience goes far deeper into 
 the personality than the realm of the brain. 
 It is measurelessly more than an intellectual 
 event. Jesus Christ is the Truth whose 
 blessing comes to us by and through love. 
 He is the Truth Whom we keep by obeying 
 Him in the will. He loves you in order that 
 you may love Him ; and so the outcome of it 
 is that the will and the emotions, as well as 
 the intellect, are made true. A famous 
 phrase of an illustrious man, " the will to be- 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 105 
 
 lieve," has deeply instructed our time, as he 
 has taught its meaning. There is no such 
 teaching as this experience with Christ will 
 give, as to the will to be true. Then Jesus 
 Christ takes the whole soul captive, His per- 
 sonality bringing a regeneration into your 
 personality and mine. 
 
 So much for the work of the Holy Spirit 
 through a change which may be well called 
 both co7iviction on account of sin and co7iver- 
 sion from sin. Untruthfulness is sin. The 
 Holy Spirit was promised by our Saviour to 
 His disciples as the guarantor and protector 
 of truth, through His influence upon us in 
 spiritualizing our whole life. Said the 
 Master : " I will give you another Comforter, 
 even the Spirit of Truth." Our Master said 
 more — even this He said : " Howbeit, when 
 He, the Spirit of Truth, is come. He shall 
 guide you into all truth, for He shall not 
 speak from Himself, but whatsoever things 
 He shall hear, these things shall He speak. 
 He shall declare unto you the things that are 
 to come. He shall glorify Me, for He shall 
 take of Mine and show it unto you." 
 
Io6 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 We must realize that the Holy Spirit's 
 work in the Church is the only security 
 of orthodoxy. When we think of what has 
 been done in the name of the protection 
 of orthodoxy — the crimes against body and 
 soul ; the flames and thumb-screws, sur- 
 passed in their malign cruelty only by the 
 coerced falsification of so much of man's 
 mental life, age after age, and when we be- 
 hold what the plain teaching of Jesus is with 
 respect to the future safety of His truth, we 
 are astonished, I think, at the twist and in- 
 direction which the ecclesiastical mind has 
 had, whenever it has neglected the spiritual 
 life. Orthodoxy conceived after this sort of 
 unspiritual ancestry, requiring only an accept- 
 ance of dogmas, has been the most serious 
 foe of religion, because of its abandonment of 
 morality. Let each of us be warned. The 
 finest of us is always in danger of going over 
 to this very tyranny, unless he be withheld in 
 the grasp of Jesus Christ's personal presence 
 throughout his thought and life. The pres- 
 ence of Jesus Christ in a man, and this only, 
 will keep him with an eye so fixed upon 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 107 
 
 goodness and love and the Father's plan 
 and hope for humanity as revealed in His 
 Son, that love and goodness will be the only 
 tests demanded for Christian fellowship. At- 
 tention cannot too often be called to the fact 
 that many otherwise saintly souls have over- 
 estimated the function of the detective, or the 
 policeman, in the interest of order ; and that 
 it was the Beloved Disciple himself who asked 
 his Lord to forbid one who was casting out 
 devils, but not in the Master's name. Here 
 was a passion for orthodoxy which forgot 
 the truth. Jesus' answer shows that the 
 ecclesiastical order is not of supreme impor- 
 tance, and that the truth of the Fatherhood 
 of God and the Brotherhood of Man is like 
 goodness and love. It will not permit a con- 
 stabulary to restrain its going forth for bless- 
 ing. His Master said to John : " Forbid 
 him not ; for he that is not against us is for 
 us." 
 
 There are certain doctrines which can never 
 be held as true, in the mind, unless they are 
 lived willingly and lovingly — that is, unless 
 the whole nature, a man's total personality, 
 
I08 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 in and through Hfe, by assimilation and all 
 other life processes, really identifies them with 
 the process of his attaining selfhood. The 
 doctrine of God is perhaps the most difficult 
 to lose of all the truths which men sometimes 
 do lose. It is doubtful if there ever was, or can 
 be, an atheist, pure and simple. It is not 
 doubtful at all that a godless life will extract 
 the celestial attributes from the vision of the 
 divine, one after another, until the mind's 
 once loved object, supreme above all others, 
 has faded out of the attention. Especially is 
 this true of the Fatherhood of God. Just as 
 the only way God could use, to make real His 
 Fatherhood, in the mind of men, is through 
 sonship, and through such a sonship as re- 
 vealed this quality of His nature, so man's 
 only way to realize the Fatherhood of God in 
 himself is by such a sonship, exercising its 
 functions of need and dependence and affec- 
 tion and adoration in such a way as to liter- 
 ally experience God's Fatherhood. Do not 
 expect to remain sound in the faith and really 
 believe, for any length of time, in the Father- 
 hood of God, unless your sonship is such a 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH I09 
 
 vital experience in the direction of the broth- 
 ers and other sons who are around you, that 
 you cannot rest until all men are under the 
 experienced blessing of God's Fatherhood. 
 To believe in God's wisdom and truth, His 
 mercy and providence, His justice and love, 
 is not a feat of intellect, or a matter of cogent 
 persuasion ; it is the result most largely of 
 will and heart and head, the total personality 
 throwing all thought, feehng, volition, the 
 entire self, upon Him. Then one realizes the 
 validity of these truths of Him. 
 
 The doctrijie of the Scriptures of the Old 
 and New Testaments, which is most helpful to 
 your spiritual life and mine, is that doctrine 
 of the Bible, its nature and meaning, which is 
 most true. We will never know that any 
 doctrine is true by the decisions of councils, 
 the arguments of acute intelligence, or the 
 anathemas of priests. It is not a question of 
 maintaining confidence in the infallibility of 
 the Old and New Testaments, when we are 
 living so fallibly that the thought of infalli- 
 bility with regard to anything is foreign to 
 the mind. The doctrine of the inspiration of 
 
no THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the Scriptures, which is of very much more 
 importance than any doctrine of infalHbility, 
 is such a conception that uninspired living 
 will make the very thought of it impossible. 
 Unless the experience of one's battle for 
 purity is vivid and persistent, he will not long 
 be able to hear the heroic note. The mind 
 of the preacher of to-day must go to Rome 
 with Paul and make the history of Paul as in- 
 dubitable as autobiography ; and only as he 
 is under the spell of that holy enthusiasm, the 
 spiritually minded man is not bewildered, still 
 is he less turned aside, when saints, apostles, 
 and his Christ live chapters in the history of 
 spiritual power such as must ever amaze un- 
 spiritual men. Pascal says : ** It is the lot of 
 Jesus' disciple to have those things happen to 
 him which happened to Jesus." It is doubt- 
 ful if it will be possible for the Christian min- 
 istry to credit the account of the things Jesus 
 did, until we are able to make good our 
 Lord's great words : " Greater things than 
 these shall ye do because I go to the Father." 
 The Spiritual Life alone will answer to the in- 
 spiration of the Bible and of those of our own 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH III 
 
 humanity whose souls were made incandescent 
 by the divine fire. 
 
 So also, the doctrine of the Atonement in 
 Christ will always be a confused and tragic 
 appeal to the mere pulpiteer, who has not real- 
 ized, and is not realizing, while he works with 
 and for men, in his life with men, what Paul 
 meant, when he spoke of his own spiritual life 
 and that Gospel " whereof," as he says, " I, 
 Paul, am made a minister ; who now rejoice in 
 my sufferings for you and fill up that which 
 is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my 
 flesh for His body's sake which is the 
 Church." 
 
 Jesus is always seeking to make men feel, 
 if they will, the common ground upon which 
 He stands with His brethren, while He deals 
 with the problems of time and eternity. He 
 says : "I go to My Father and your Father, 
 to My God and your God." He prays, as the 
 divine promise glows, that the glory God has 
 given unto Him shall be given unto them. 
 All human life, at all worthy of the divine in- 
 vestment in us, is an atonement. The vica- 
 rious element in our life is its redemption. 
 
112 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 The Calvary which gave to the world its 
 unique cross and the divine sacrifice made all 
 our crosses sacred, so that our divine Re- 
 deemer Himself said : •* Take up thy cross 
 and follow Me." In the very fact that Jesus 
 has taken some of us into the fellowship of 
 His sufferings and disclosed the possibilities 
 in human nature, of living divinely and in 
 sympathy with His atonement — this makes 
 Him solitary in His grace towards us as He 
 was solitary in His sufferings. Yet it brings 
 us into communion with Him, at the highest 
 places of the divine life. It will be yourself, 
 if your ministry shall be worthy of its name, 
 having found men who have lost their faith in 
 the vicarious atonement, who may lead them 
 back to the spot where they lost it. They will 
 find it just where they lost it Always some 
 unwillingness to bear the burden of others ; 
 always some slinking and revolt from the crisis 
 which demanded blood of self-sacrifice ; al- 
 ways some refusal to say the word or give the 
 blessing which leads to Golgotha, marks the 
 moment of the loss of faith in the redemption 
 of the w^orld by the crucifixion of Jesus of 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH II3 
 
 Nazareth. For a minister to deeply partake 
 of " the joy which was set before Him Who 
 bore the cross, despising the shame," that 
 minister must not dechne his own cross or 
 fear before its ignominy. No man can preach 
 on the atonement in Christ with words alone, 
 however mighty, or tender, or true. The 
 truth or untruth of the minister will reveal 
 itself here. The grace of God within him 
 will alone keep his mind steadily attentive 
 to a truth which is too sublime or simple, ex- 
 cept for the humble follower of Jesus Christ. 
 The doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus Christ 
 is more than ever a sacred treasure of those 
 who know its truth, by having trusted and 
 obeyed it. We must live this doctrine, by 
 drawing upon the God-man. Many of the 
 arguments used in the pulpits in favour of 
 the Divinity of Jesus — that is, His likeness 
 of nature unto that of God — tend to prove 
 nothing with regard to the Christ's moral 
 quality. When Jesus, " knowing that He 
 came from God and was going unto God, 
 and that the Father had placed all things in 
 His hands " — " took a towel and washed His 
 
114 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 disciples' feet," there was a moral proof of 
 His likeness unto God. But the fact that 
 the prophecy was fulfilled, or that He existed 
 before His coming into the world, or that He 
 performed many miracles, or that He was 
 born of a virgin — these all could not prove 
 or do not tend to prove His likeness unto 
 God, in ethical quality. The conscience and 
 spirituality of the Christian pulpit, knowing 
 through experience that Jesus saves men 
 from a life of sin to sonship unto the Father, 
 is more than any other evidence, historical 
 or otherwise, towards a demonstration that 
 Jesus is to be adored as divine. But we will 
 never be on moral or religious grounds with 
 regard to the proof of anything, until we are 
 living on those grounds and know Jesus 
 Christ ethically, in the grandeur and richness 
 of the Spiritual Life. If you have never put 
 upon the shoulders of Jesus Christ a weight 
 for Him to bear for you greater than you and 
 all other men together may bear, you have 
 not known His omnipotence. It is amazing 
 how ministers can interest themselves in the 
 discussion as to the unique place of Jesus of 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH II5 
 
 Nazareth in the universe of God, when once 
 giving Him our load of disappointment and 
 failure, of sorrow and especially of sin, we 
 may surely know the weight has been lifted 
 and we are borne along with the hopes which 
 no human being can inspire. Beautiful life 
 indeed, it was, that sang itself into measure- 
 less remembrance by these words : 
 
 " If Jesus Christ is a man — 
 And only a man — I say 
 That of all mankind I will cleave to Him, 
 And to Him will I cleave alway. 
 
 " If Jesus Christ is a God — 
 And the only God — I swear 
 I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
 The earth, the sea, and the air ! " 
 
 No soul will thus follow Him long, who will 
 fail finally to adore. 
 
 Following Jesus — this alone will save even 
 our orthodoxy from being a heresy against 
 God and man. 
 
 I have never known any so-called hetero- 
 doxy, or orthodoxy, with reference to Jesus 
 Christ, which did not at length have the 
 marks and flavour of the loftiest truth con- 
 cerning Him, if that so-called heterodoxy or 
 
Il6 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 orthodoxy was the result, as it ever must be, 
 of following Him into those ranges of being 
 and blessing which are reached only in the 
 Spiritual Life. 
 
 It is the same with the doctrine of Inintor- 
 tality. If the minister lives within the com- 
 pass of a year, or ten years, or fifty years, 
 his preaching may not be falsely rhetorical, 
 or rhetorically false, but that will be its only 
 distinction, when he ventures to speak of the 
 life eternal. There is no topic that hangs 
 over the pulpit so Hke a day of judgment and 
 visits it with such unrelieved gloom, as that 
 of immortality, when it is even touched by 
 a man who is not living immortally. Dare 
 not, O man of time ! to deal with its sublime 
 implications. If you should succeed in con- 
 cealing your own mere temporalness, that 
 result might mislead a weak one. Better 
 never even speak of it, than to visit upon it 
 the ethical limitations created by a life of 
 mortality. Only a man who walks in the 
 eternity of God, even now, can release the 
 fragrance from that blossom which is called 
 *^foreverr One flash from the eye of a true 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH II7 
 
 minister of God, — a man who has disdained 
 the asserted finahties of earth's judgment- 
 seat and, instead, has fixed his vision upon 
 the Great White Throne, — is more than elo- 
 quence. This requires an accompHshment of 
 character and an achievement of personality 
 which is transcendent and comes through 
 Spiritual Life alone. Ease, distinction, and 
 the comforts of earth, the dull unanimity of 
 men's praise, freedom from the responsibili- 
 ties which would torture, if they did not 
 glorify the heart which bears them — not 
 these; only a life constantly moving in the 
 range of the everlasting is able to give a 
 pulpit the message and comfort of immor- 
 tality. This life is to be lived, only by the 
 love of Him who is the author of immortality. 
 Tremendous will be the pull against certain 
 truths, as to God and man. Robespierre said : 
 "When the existence of God is denied, it will 
 be denied by aristocrats." It is in the inter- 
 est of a certain godless aristocracy, to have 
 no God. Just so and now, you will find men 
 in your churches who are occupying the high 
 positions, possibly, who will not give up a 
 
Il8 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 false political economy, and who therefore 
 question the doctrine of the universal brother- 
 hood of man. We do not need to "go back 
 to the old doctrines " so much as we need to 
 go, for hope, comfort, and safety, to the Spir- 
 itual Life, which once generated them and 
 which alone will ever glorify them. 
 
 We must have the nature of things on our 
 side. And this is ultimately an affair of life. 
 Spiritual Life will authenticate views of the 
 methods of life, such as those of the corn of 
 wheat, mustard seed, and lily. This is our 
 Christ's method, as reflected in His speech. 
 Nothing but life can apprehend life. All 
 methods of life will be mechanical and legal, 
 unless a man knows that love of light is, 
 fundamentally, love of life. Through his own 
 experience of living spiritual realities and 
 only thus, the highest and most blessed as- 
 sertions of Christianity are made believable. 
 They are livable. They grow to seem im- 
 practicable until we practice them. Such a 
 doctrine as that of God revealed in humanity 
 can never be believed long, where it is not 
 Hved. 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 1 19 
 
 We may add that the true doctrine of the 
 incarnation of God in Christ, which includes 
 the atonement, cannot even be known as a 
 practicable proposition, without the preacher 
 of it being, in some sense, one who himself 
 experiences the incarnation of God. An esti- 
 mate of human nature which carries such 
 values as God's incarnation of Himself in 
 Jesus Christ, the atoning life and sacrificial 
 death of the Master on Calvary, is the like- 
 liest of all things to fail before the cold 
 analysis of the intellect, unless, through a 
 warm spiritual life, these diviner sides of hu- 
 man redemption are constantly experienced. 
 All is well, only when the head is warmed by 
 heart's blood. Yet the emotions themselves 
 are so stirred and wrought upon by a Christ- 
 mas or an Easter morning which are likely 
 to be more distinguished for the aesthetic 
 presentations of the truths of incarnation and 
 the resurrection than for any other ; and even 
 Good Friday's minor harmonies so stimulate 
 and exhaust the feelings, that there is need to 
 enlist the guidance and calm of the intellect, 
 especially where we have so much of warmth. 
 
I20 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 It is certainly not a full perfect ministering 
 to men when we so speak that our people 
 fail to recognize the atoning principle carried 
 to its loftiest height in the death of Jesus. 
 The judgment and reason, the conscience 
 and will are so likely to be left out of the 
 whole matter which these majestic realities 
 involve, that even the minister, if he is deal- 
 ing with the problem thus partially and only 
 so, forgets in his preaching to estimate the 
 value of the most apparently hopeless crea- 
 ture in his congregation, by the awful meas- 
 urings of these truths. You will always for- 
 get what is not in and of your true life. 
 You may sit for hours and work yourselves 
 over and over, towards an interest which you 
 hope will keep your mind keyed up to these 
 valuations. It will all fail. Only personal 
 spirituality will so totalize a man, that his 
 intellect, sensibilities and will shall find all 
 truth streaming out and in with respect to 
 the central circle of himself which we call 
 conscie7ice. Here all streams are one. This 
 is the supreme point of his life. There must 
 come into every man's life, in an experience 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 121 
 
 indubitable and unforgetable, the fact that 
 God is seeking to reveal Himself through us 
 and must reveal Himself through us, if He 
 reveals Himself at all, in the same way 
 of humiliation and self-sacrifice, which we 
 preach as the secret of Jesus. We must 
 know, to make men believe, that a human 
 life, which is the manifestation of God through 
 a man, means Calvary, even now, as it also 
 means Easter morning and Olivet, in the 
 final issue of earth. 
 
 Two things let us reflect upon : 
 
 I. A vivid sense of the worth of any other 
 man comes into the soul of the minister, who 
 has really lived the Gospel all the way from 
 God, whose good news it is to the human 
 beings who need all good words so much. 
 
 II. The unity of doctrine, which is the 
 unity of truth, cannot be realized except by 
 the life integral — the life that is an unit — the 
 Spiritual Life. 
 
 Our only way of escape from the material- 
 ism of our time and of avoiding disseminat- 
 ing it, is by the Spiritual Life. The urgency 
 of Spiritual Life is the urgency of health, 
 
122 .THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 which is '' holihy^ or ''holiness'' and ''whole- 
 nessy No materiahsm in practice can stand 
 its winsome victoriousness. And when ma- 
 terialism is rooted out of conduct, and es- 
 pecially out of feeling, by the incoming and 
 displacement wrought by the fresh presence 
 of the spiritual, there is little need to be 
 combative with scientific disproofs of the ma- 
 terialist's intellectual position. Over and be- 
 neath the little realm in one's mind, to which 
 the universe is compressed by materialism, 
 lie the vast realms which the Spiritual Life 
 knows, as it feeds upon its verities ; and the 
 strength with which a minister emerges from 
 these higher and deeper regions is a strength 
 against which no shrewdness or skill of 
 argumentation shall prevail. Indeed, by its 
 side, no wisdom, except the wisdom of a little 
 child, may stand. 
 
 Our time has the right and the disposition 
 to honour each of you ever, not only as a 
 truth-proclaimer but as a truth-seeker. It 
 therefore demands of you a spiritual fineness. 
 You must be able to stand unabashed, in the 
 company of any band of truth-seekers and 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 1 23 
 
 share their experiences. Nay, more ! You 
 ought to be their minister and leader. Be 
 sure that you grasp their hands and toil with 
 them, your eye intent to see the deepest 
 truth of man and God. No ordinary epic is 
 this which you are to create in your own 
 life, if you associate worthily with the world's 
 truth-seekers. 
 
 Having already on hand a physical 
 universe whose latest thin and spirit-like 
 rungs of the ladder upward are the X-Ray 
 and Radium, any new and finer height will 
 be ascended only by your brother truth- 
 seekers in natural science, whose passion is 
 for Truth and whose supreme quality is Truth- 
 fulness. You, as well as they, will heroically 
 put away all pleasant lies. You will not be 
 afraid of being called inconsistent, if you are 
 tacking ship on your unmarked course. Not 
 even popular acclaim for your errors will lead 
 you to defend them. You will of?er any 
 amount of labour and the quality of sincere 
 enthusiasm, as your forerunners have. Their 
 all has often been devoted to a long investi- 
 gation, whose end was a brilliant and popu- 
 
124 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 larly welcomed error. The expense was as 
 sublime as its investment appears pathetic. 
 Personal truthfulness always has its triumph 
 here. There is no finer heroism than that 
 which stands, after long prospecting and tun- 
 nelling, and expending of means and toil and 
 hope, at last in possession of shining frag- 
 ments, which the world is willing to make into 
 current coin, — the tired searcher for Truth, 
 however, hushing the shouts of the crowd by 
 saying : " Friends of mine, this is beautiful ; 
 it has been won at great sacrifice, but it is 
 not gold." I see this kind of heroism every 
 day in the laboratory. I would have it in 
 every minister's study. 
 
 The minister of the future will be master of 
 that process which Matthew Arnold called 
 "character passing into intellectual produc- 
 tions." His results will be true results, only 
 because his character is true. He will be so 
 true as to never fear for truth. Often he will 
 say, with old Hales of Eton : " If with all this 
 cost and pain my poor chase is but error, I 
 may sa)'^ to err hath cost me more than it 
 has many to gain the truth." No honestly 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 1 25 
 
 gained error but proves an approach to truth. 
 The Truth-lover had to tack ship ; that is all. 
 When he is truest, his acquaintance with 
 Truth is so satisfactory that he preaches with 
 Frederic Ozanam, of the Sorbonne, on " The 
 Duty of Being Just to Error." This state of 
 mind does not come of superficialness of feel- 
 ing as to Truth. But it bubbles up from a 
 depth of faith that fears nothing and will do 
 all for Truth. " All things work together for 
 truth to them who love the truth^^ for the 
 same reason, psychological and theological, 
 that "all things work together for good to 
 them who love GodP 
 
 A lying nature in the laboratory of the 
 future will make every test-tube or retort, 
 which he works in, a liar. The acid and 
 alkali which he touches are speedily inca- 
 pable of telling the truth. He simply must 
 put his false personality into the solution. An 
 untrue nature is not less dangerous in any 
 study. The "personal equation" is every- 
 thing. No man who is more interested 
 in finding something which will support his 
 opinion, than he is in finding truth for truth's 
 
126 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 own sake, has any right to handle the fine 
 apparatus of Hfe. This is the curse on the 
 System-Maiier. He is always after some- 
 thing which will fit in and brace up his 
 System. If Truth comes forth and does not 
 lend herself to singing in time and tune with 
 his partially organized choir — then, of course, 
 Truth will not do. No other such blind- 
 ness as to Truth comes to any, except to the 
 coward who is always asking of Truth : " Is it 
 safe ? " or to the dividend-hunter who asks of 
 Truth : *' Will it pay?" To such essentially 
 untrue souls, Truth is neither safe nor profit- 
 able. 
 
 The interests of Truth will always be safe 
 in the hands of true men, and they will al- 
 ways be imperilled in the hands of untrue 
 men. True men may make mistakes, but 
 things will righten themselves up in time, 
 and the mistake will be forgotten, and Truth 
 and spirituality of life will walk together 
 again. This is the comfort of the Church. 
 When a David sings his Psalms, and a Peter 
 preaches his sermon, we know that these 
 men have fallen and are likely to fall again, 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 127 
 
 but the root of the matter is in them and 
 they will rise up with their faces Zionward ; 
 and, after all is said or done, they alone 
 are trustworthy as to the interests of Truth. 
 Their lamentable blunders serve to accentu- 
 ate its message and emphasize its supremacy. 
 Other men may systematize Truth into more 
 crystal-like form, but it is as dead as it is 
 splendid. Orthodoxy of statement may be 
 theirs, but a living wheat kernel is more 
 valuable than the most accurately cut and 
 gloriously polished Koh-i-noor. If a queen, 
 with a newly discovered India on her hands, 
 could choose between the gem and a single 
 wheat kernel — there being but one such gem 
 and a solitary kernel — she would choose 
 the kernel, and grow enough wheat, in time, 
 to buy a thousand such gems. 
 
 These reflections come to mean more, 
 when we note that a certain devitalized, or 
 at least non-vital religiousness tends to 
 things crystallized. Life, however, always 
 exults in living things ; handling them, 
 growing them, and reaping their harvests. 
 
 Perhaps the pulpit of our day has no 
 
128 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 surer title to power than its unwillingness to 
 throw aside irreverently any crystallization 
 of Truth which may have been as partial as 
 it was helpful, preferring rather the displac- 
 ing and expulsive process of growth, finding 
 at length that the crystallization has been 
 but a shell which was meant to be broken, 
 in order that the ever-living germ might be 
 developed. The rebound from a too-slavish 
 adherence to hard forms, especially for the 
 reason that institutions allied with certain 
 formulae must be preserved, has come ; and 
 we have gone as far in the other direction, 
 mentally, as we ought. The ethical aspect 
 of the whole question must, however, claim 
 the attention of every man. 
 
 How far can a minister go, in accepting 
 the salary and social and clerical emolument 
 which come along with a statement of what 
 has been supposed to be true, which, never- 
 theless, at its best, is but a statement of a part 
 of truth, and, at its worst, is a statement of 
 what is false ? It is not so much to the point 
 that the world knows it and has us on trial, — 
 the indictment against us insisting that we 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 1 29 
 
 dare not preach our creedal statements and 
 that we forebear from preaching what is our 
 real beUef. Every minister knows that to be 
 proven guilty by the world is of no such im- 
 portance as to be guilty of duplicity in these 
 things before God and himself. There can 
 be no estimate too large of the desolation 
 wrought with the sanctities of the minister's 
 own conscience, — the self-respect which is 
 central to the life of the man, as well as the 
 reverence and regard which any community 
 loves to pay to manly straightforwardness 
 and moral leadership, — by the procedure of 
 silence or compromise in these matters. 
 
 Perhaps nowhere has there been more un- 
 flinching honesty and transparent veracity 
 with regard to opinions, and especially with 
 regard to tabulated attainments of truth, than 
 in the modern scientific movement. We 
 ought to be at least as frank and true. We 
 have had many brave and true men who 
 have treated their ministerial character in 
 the same lofty manner as that of Tyndall, 
 when, with everything to gain temporarily, 
 and with the yelping pack of scandal-mon- 
 
I30 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 gering clericals at his heels and the applause 
 of the multitude of fellow- thinkers waiting 
 for his word — after many years of effort, he 
 said to his wife, in the joy of possessing 
 truth which would have been welcome to 
 any but a true soul under the circumstances : 
 " My dear, I must say that the assumption of 
 spontaneous generation is unsound." Gold- 
 win Smith tells us that Jowett of Balliol, 
 Stanley of Westminster, and Wilberforce of 
 Oxford, are only a few of the large number 
 of clergymen who, in his own time, "kept 
 their positions of trust and honour while 
 necessarily these acute and progressive 
 thinkers were destroying the creedal state- 
 ments to whose defense they had given their 
 solemn pledge." He says, "I have always 
 looked upon Huxley as a notable instance 
 of the division which is taking place between 
 the dogmas and the ethics of Christianity ; 
 the dogmas remaining with the orthodox, 
 the ethics often going to the infidel. Upon 
 the ethics it is to be hoped Christendom will 
 reunite." 
 
 It is the ethics of which such men speak 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 13I 
 
 that must furnish a basis for any orthodoxy 
 which is worth the name. It is too late for 
 dead men to be heroic, and it always is too 
 late for a man without a decisive sense of 
 righteousness to be heroic ; but it is not too 
 late for heroic men to so relate themselves to 
 the creeds — good, bad, or indifferent, — that 
 each man shall at least possess himself in 
 God, in his own reverence, and communicate 
 the worthiness of his character as a minister, 
 which will always be the greatest part of his 
 message to men. 
 
 Now that we have learned so much as to 
 the frightful cost the Church is having to pay 
 for past silence and compromise, no man 
 ought to take a church which, years agone, 
 has ever so honestly accepted a creed which 
 now is impossible to the mind and conscience 
 of the person, without his declaring, for the 
 sake of a conservatism which is more than a 
 preserysLtlsm and which alone will keep the 
 faith, his exact and unwillingly chosen posi- 
 tion. 
 
 There will always work within us a just 
 desire to maintain the continuity of Christian 
 
132 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 teaching and the development of orthodoxy. 
 Orthodoxy may appear to us as only the 
 truth which has been generally received and 
 accredited. If it is to live, it must live upon 
 the lips and in the conduct and through the 
 influence of the preacher. It must be itself 
 such a living body of truth, that it has the 
 power of assimilation and appropriation in 
 the presence of all freshly apprehended truth. 
 It must have the power of feeding upon and 
 remaking itself out of what we call " new 
 truth." This means the power of sloughing 
 off form after form which may have appeared 
 a thing of permanence. The orthodoxy of 
 the preacher will always be less than the en- 
 tire universe of truth. His chief interest, 
 therefore, will be in the truth itself. 
 
 This is a position essential to an energetic 
 ministry, but it is a position which will not be 
 held for long, except by the warm grasp of 
 the minister's Spiritual Life. Intellectually, 
 he will find the privilege of silence inviting 
 enough to his coldness. There will be a mul- 
 titude of reasons for compromise, in order 
 that this one or that one shall not be wounded, 
 
ITS RELATION TO TRUTH 133 
 
 if the minister is unheroic at the seat and 
 centre of his Hfe. Spiritual vitality alone will 
 keep truth and the true man from being 
 parted in this crisis. 
 
 There are doubtless perils in the other di- 
 rection, against which we must be constantly- 
 warned. The ease, not to say self-satisfac- 
 tion, with which men sometimes give up the 
 truth is scarcely less than fearful. Let it be 
 remembered by us all, that we will give up the 
 spiritual truths which command us to a richer 
 spiritual Hfe and require from us a higher 
 spiritual intensity, not because they are 
 proven false to us, but because we are false 
 to them. A man may well insist that his 
 personal orthodoxy shall be true ; a minister 
 must insist that all the truth he knows shall 
 become his orthodoxy practically. Never 
 give your congregation the right to think that 
 in one part of your mind you hold certain 
 things as orthodox and elsewhere you hold 
 certain other things as true. 
 
 Moving from the authority of councils, as 
 man has, to the authority of personal judg- 
 ment associated with the long history of ideas, 
 
134 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 he is far from being sure of himself. He can 
 be sure, only in his God, through Christ, by 
 the truth he has lived and is living. He must 
 know the truthfulness of his truth, first of all 
 in the truthfulness of his own spiritual life, 
 and then in the lives of others. Finally truth 
 will come back to him, from them, with new 
 voices for him. Thus the spiritual welfare of 
 a neighbourhood will be immeasurably ex- 
 alted, by a common understanding attained 
 at last, that Truth is something to live with, 
 and forever. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND THE 
 PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND THE 
 PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 
 
 WHATEVER else our minister is, he 
 is tlie representative and ought to 
 be the incarnation of Christian 
 scholarship. His very presence in the com- 
 munity places Christianity and culture on a 
 pedestal. As his personality is vigorous, 
 they will be seen of all eyes. Now it hap- 
 pens that it is Christian scholarship which 
 attests how much nearer is the perpetual day, 
 by the deeper problem of the moment. Con- 
 sider our own, and see how deep and insistent 
 it is. Many have been the functions offered 
 for his choice, when the minister of Christ 
 came to town, in former days, but now there 
 are no controversies as to what Christian 
 scholarship shall be and do, which do not 
 silence themselves in the presence of the one 
 tragic question which our day has found at 
 137 
 
138 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 hand. The minister is more distinctly than 
 at any other time the leader of the educa- 
 tional forces of his community, because his it 
 is to make ideas the servants of conscience. 
 
 With pathetic appeal to all that is real 
 within, and with noble faith in all that is 
 prophetic without, the spirit of our time, 
 quickened by Christ's influence and ideas, 
 declines to stop longer with the elder edu- 
 cational controversy as to what proportion 
 our culture shall contain of the language of 
 nature and the languages of man. The 
 query as to whether our Erasmus shall be 
 a Newton, and whether our Queen Elizabeth 
 shall answer the learned ambassadors in both 
 Latin and Greek, or entertain them with the re- 
 ported behaviour of insect or star, if unsettled, 
 is at least postponed. All discussions which 
 have arisen, in hours less conscious of the 
 realities which we confront, out of either the 
 materialism or insincerity of our age, are 
 sternly put aside. These are hours when the 
 problem of rich and poor detains the scholar 
 at the relief office, if he may not solve it else- 
 where. Its solution involves the future of 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 1 39 
 
 Christianity as well as of learning. It over- 
 awes everything. It dominates the school. 
 The Church has been compelled to postpone 
 trials for heresy or discussion as to apostolic 
 postures, until she may either reaffirm the 
 Golden Rule, or be stirred by some simple 
 evangelist who seems unique, because he ut- 
 ters to what have been her falsities and indo- 
 lence the Decalogue and the Gospel of Christ. 
 There is a lull in the threatening approach of 
 acute experiences to some observers. 
 
 Touching therefore these forces at many 
 points, I warn you we are nearer the begin- 
 ning than the end of the process of read- 
 justment which itself may be final. Both 
 our scholarship and our religious hopes, 
 bound together in hope and service as they 
 are in our present society, must not, at least 
 in the Christian minister's thought and life, 
 relapse into sleep ; and now, if they are 
 worthy of the hour, they will studiously con- 
 front the situation and measure their strength 
 against foes which they alone may conquer. 
 
 The more cultured our minister to-day, the 
 less remote shall he be from this task of 
 
140 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 making a lasting peace. Not Isaiah's age, or 
 that of Nehemiah or Jeremiah, could give, as 
 yours and mine may give, the opportunity for 
 a man who is a statesman, because he is first 
 God's prophet as to the social crisis. 
 
 Our culture has heard, especially since the 
 shock and thunder of our civil war have died 
 away, how like the soul of Milton, its spirit 
 should exist. It has listened to the familiar 
 words : — 
 
 " Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart : " 
 
 and the easy obedience of our scholarship to 
 that conception has furnished an example at 
 once of heartiness and of grace. But she that 
 learned not the other lines of Wordsworth's 
 eulogy of him who was Cromwell's Latin 
 secretary is learning much else. She learns 
 now the peril with which any exiled truth 
 comes home, as she is commanded by the 
 voices of the hour, in the mutterings of 
 approaching storms, to come forth from her 
 retreats of scholastic refinement and her 
 homes of meditative ease, and speak, as this 
 same Milton spoke, in order that even yet 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 14I 
 
 delayed duties may be performed and the 
 panic be over-past. 
 
 ' ' Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free : 
 So thou didst travel on life's common way 
 In cheerful godliness : and yet thine heart 
 The lowliest duties on herself did lay." 
 
 The educational question of the hour is the 
 question of our statecraft and of our religion ; 
 and it is not whether our Roger Ascham and 
 Lady Jane Grey shall spend the delightful 
 hours in translating the ideas of Plato into 
 seven languages, or in discovering the secrets 
 of nature by triumphs in seven sciences, but 
 whether the greatest truth to which they may 
 have come shall have the accents of authority 
 unto their powers to be and to do. This 
 involves, for all of us, the working in us of a 
 mighty moral motive power. We cannot 
 merely wrap ourselves up in glorious truths. 
 They are glorious only because they already 
 glow. Whether we will or no, the air is on 
 fire, and it will consume to the very skin, 
 which it covers, all spiritual clothing which 
 any Sartor ResarUis wears, that, in this wil- 
 derness-march, proves to be unlike the gar- 
 
142 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 ments of the Israelitish pilgrims which never 
 grew old. 
 
 It is often as pitiful as reproachful — the way 
 the thought of our time counts upon our 
 scholarship rather than our Christianity to 
 get the truth, and set it bringing to us the 
 city of Humanity which we know is the city 
 of God. There is much to be expected from 
 this. Scholarship herself is not yet so de- 
 bauched by selfish ease or blinded by timidity 
 that she has ceased to announce the peril of 
 holding burning truths, while she is loosely 
 clothed in inflammable material : and already 
 the word has gone forth that realities so fiery- 
 footed as these which have been tempted 
 from the clouds by our modern culture are 
 not to be put away in the dry pockets of our 
 landed tolerance, to wait our indolent employ- 
 ment of them in doing duty. Truth will 
 transform opinion into conviction and impel 
 conviction into heroic endeavour ; or it will 
 burn it to ashes and leave the guilty harbourer 
 thereof blackened and charred with devour- 
 ing flames. In the realm of sociology and 
 political economy, for long, has our learning 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM I43 
 
 " Called the red lightning from the o'er-rushing cloud 
 And dashed the beauteous terror on the ground 
 Smiling majestic." 
 
 Even scholarship knows we must do some- 
 thing more than this, with Hghtning. 
 
 The world of To-morrow has often been 
 lost beneath the feet of a conservative, in- 
 active, self-satisfied scholarship ; and the great 
 ideas which have come down from above, 
 while, like the " beauteous terror," they were 
 dashed upon the ground, were not ex- 
 hausted of their power. They yet live and 
 move ; and the silver shields flash with their 
 authority, as they bid us clear the way of 
 every consumable error and every inflam- 
 mable wrong that they may freely execute 
 the will of God. Scholarship, without a con- 
 science alive to the relations of man to man, 
 has no place with us. It is essentially athe- 
 istic. It has no vision of the Fatherhood 
 universal, for it is blind to the Brotherhood. 
 
 Modern scholarship and Christianity place 
 awful power into our hands. Such, ever, is 
 the fate of power in the universe — that it must 
 be used. Such is the crisis which our scholar 
 
144 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 always brings with him. What is our Chris- 
 tian scholar ? He is the one being to whom 
 life must always appear, both as a vision and 
 as a duty. The order of progress, now and 
 ever, is, first " the new heavens," and then " the 
 new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." 
 No recent schemes of induction can change 
 this divine order. "Progress," says Hegel, 
 " first in the idea, then in the thing." Life as 
 a vision into which have been gathered every 
 noble idea, every true sentiment, and every 
 worthy purpose, with all their victory and 
 their hope — a vision awfully grand with the 
 announcement that it hangs in the heavens 
 to be obeyed, glorified with the assurance 
 that it is to be realized on the earth — this is 
 the truest gift which years of instruction and 
 of study may give to the scholar's soul. 
 
 At once, having confessed in his first act of 
 doing the intelligent thing in the midst of 
 ignorance, that he has yielded to the vision 
 and believes that this ideal can be made real, 
 — that vision and the duty become forever 
 allied. The vision makes the duty ideal : the 
 duty makes the vision real. The poetical is 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 145 
 
 practical ; the new heavens and the new earth 
 have come into at least one soul — "a new 
 earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." Yea 
 — " wherein dwelleth righteousness," — that 
 which is the conclusion of culture lies as a 
 faith at the heart of any, mind's belief in the 
 desirableness of knowledge. It grips the 
 preacher almightily. And so the highest 
 knowledge must concern itself with ethics. 
 It has this seeking man as the central figure 
 in all its achievements, the ultimatum of all 
 its processes. This same being — man — will 
 not stop with knowledge, but, with a distinct- 
 ness which illumines the whole series of facts 
 which lie behind him like mile-stones on his 
 journey, he stands to say as he looks back 
 along the path he came, through nature, 
 through time, through experience : "I oughts 
 Man, as a phenomenon, confuses all but the 
 Christian scholar. What preparations are 
 yours to estimate and regard this thing — man 
 — as an ethical fact and factor ! The scholar 
 has felt a consciousness of eternity growing in 
 him, as he has turned over layers of the 
 world's crystal story, untwisted the sunbeam 
 
146 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 and found the quality of every thread, 
 watched the sea of human thought with the 
 record of its heart in some tiny sand-ripple of 
 language, detected the growing complexities 
 of human purpose and achievement, and 
 sought to disentangle the unaccountable 
 movements of brain and heart — a sense of 
 eternity, in which this being ma7i may gravely 
 speak of right, and truth, and goodness. 
 
 The minister, as a Christian scholar, is 
 the deliverer of men. He is the sworn ac- 
 quaintance of something still more vener- 
 able than their revering age, something 
 more ancient than their prudence ; and into 
 their solemn cautiousness concerning tradi- 
 tion it is his to introduce the permanent, 
 which declines, because it needs not, their 
 police duty to preserve its pedigree, or to 
 enforce silence. The scholar sees the reality 
 beneath all appearance : and it is his prerog- 
 ative and fortune to furnish to the untrained 
 his trained eye, that they, too, may know 
 that there is a sky above and a river-bed 
 beneath the flow of things. Wherever such 
 a soul goes, there goes hope. He has had 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM I47 
 
 the experience of nature in his science, the 
 experience of man with ideas and principles 
 in history, the experience of man with him- 
 self in his fearless study of the soul : ** and 
 experience worketh hope." To the hopeless 
 man who has seen his flag go out of sight as 
 it fell beneath the feet of wrong, he comes to 
 lead him out of the atmosphere of momen- 
 tary defeat to a larger induction, and to bid 
 him up and on. Wherever such a soul goes, 
 there go resoluteness and self-respect. The 
 scholar has believed from the first in the 
 desirableness of Truth, else he could never 
 woo and win her : he has become persuaded 
 of her eternal trustworthiness, else she would 
 leave him alone. The Truth will work — the 
 ideal which commands you is practical. No 
 accommodating toleration of error is wise or 
 right. No compromising economy of Truth 
 is prudent or just. "The right will tunnel 
 its own Alp." These announcements blaze 
 from the banner of every scholar, and, at his 
 heart, lies the faith of the ultimate unity of 
 dream and duty. 
 
 The true minister, who is a modern scholar, 
 
148 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 has also this double task. He is not only 
 the continue! and commentator upon every 
 predecessor, who, by agony and death, has 
 brought Truth to dwell on the earth, but he 
 also confronts the practical questions which 
 leap up when the fresh Truth first encounters 
 the ancient error, embodied as it is in insti- 
 tutions and living its sensitive life as it does 
 in customs. He stands, as a prophet and an 
 apostle, where the new Truth which his soul 
 knows waits unquietly, whispering its haste 
 into the one ear which listens : and, as a 
 champion and worker, he beholds the critical 
 hours go by, in which the elder Truth of his 
 predecessor gains here an inch and there an- 
 other, as it conquers the souls of men. His 
 love of Truth has not robbed him of fraternal 
 sympathy with the stoutest opposer. Nay ; 
 he loves Truth the more for the brother's sake 
 to whom the Truth is yet heresy. He knows 
 that Truth is fated to rule : he knows that the 
 earth will resist. Custom will beg and curse 
 and bleed : tradition will pray and excom- 
 municate: institutions will frown and execute : 
 ease and wealth will attempt to seduce and 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM I49 
 
 silence : ignorance will forbid : but Truth and 
 men are bound to meet on good terms or 
 evil, in persuasion or in revolution ; and the 
 scholar, if he be manly and true to his Truth 
 and mankind, must clear the way of its im- 
 mortal advance to the human soul. Truth 
 carries into the hand which holds it the obli- 
 gation to realize it, to incarnate it. It will 
 not promise safety to the man who detains it 
 for speculation, or keeps it until the sleepy 
 world wakes and asks him for his wares. 
 Inflammable by nature, to warm, to blaze 
 like a beacon, or to burn up the untrue, it 
 will not be packed in the warehouses of the 
 private soul or public sentiment. It is never 
 safe, except when, on lightning feet, it runs 
 from soul to soul. 
 
 Now, for many years, our scholarship has 
 been discovering and harbouring more Truth 
 as to the relations of what Yale has called 
 "the haves and the have nots," than we have 
 trusted. We have been timid about giving 
 it out, for fear of all sorts of consequences. 
 We have been cowardly about giving it free 
 course, for fear of that unholy value which 
 
I50 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 has been set upon customs which it might 
 assault, and institutions which it certainly 
 will destroy. Penniless improvidence and 
 gigantic greed have issued their threats 
 founded upon most illogical inferences, and 
 to these we have apologized for Truth's early 
 appearance. Conservatism and radicalism 
 have exhausted their resources of quotable 
 commonplaces, and our culture has well-nigh 
 lost its courage. Only the Christian scholar 
 may have faith,— y^/V/z in the simple right- 
 eousness which has won every victory whose 
 story our culture tells — the righteousness 
 which massed the republican cantons of 
 Switzerland against the arbitrary dominance 
 of Austrian dukes ; the righteousness which 
 set the marshes of Holland aflame against 
 Philip II ; the righteousness which em- 
 powered England against Louis XIV, and 
 taught France to dethrone her kings ; the 
 righteousness which made Greece repeat 
 Marathon against the Turk ; the righteous- 
 ness of Kossuth and of Deak, yea, even the 
 righteousness of Pilgrim and Puritan, of Otis 
 and Warren, of Garrison and Ellsworth. 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 151 
 
 When we are complex and unspiritual, this 
 has been too simple for our involved and 
 ambitious culture to utter and defend ; and if 
 there is to be a storm whose clouds apparently 
 have already been marshalled everywhere, 
 it will organize its deadliest currents in the 
 interspace between the truth we know and 
 the error we tolerate ; it will swell with direst 
 cruelties in the void between what scholar- 
 ship knows is right and what scholarship 
 sees is wrong. Culture has well-nigh Chris- 
 tianized so-called Christian Theology. May 
 not culture Christianize our political economy? 
 The scientific movement discloses the 
 main current of scholarship. Is this our 
 dependence? Then, of course, the day is 
 lost for the pulpit and its minister, at least 
 as to preeminence. What does culture 
 make us say ? What is the scholar sure of, 
 while often the preacher hesitates? Fresh 
 from the fields and seas, heavy with the 
 trophies of research, comes our modern 
 scholar ; and our culture agrees that man is 
 the key of nature's every mystery, because 
 he is the goal towards which she has tended 
 
152 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 from the beginning. Every waif of matter 
 thrills with prophecies of him ; every force 
 in the ooze and slime runs manward ; every 
 wandering atom has a home for its lost 
 meaning in his brain and heart. Scholar- 
 ship adds to this the story of how brain 
 dominates brawn, and how conscience sits 
 supreme over all. What use have we made 
 of this idea of the value of man, in our treat- 
 ment of him in our social economics ? Much 
 as the beauties and wits of the French court 
 stood on Oriental carpets, or sat at luxurious 
 tables and toyed the while with the unsus- 
 pected forces of the revolution, has our cul- 
 ture sat in its library and meditated in its lab- 
 oratory, concerning this tremendous and far- 
 reaching idea of the true valuation of man as 
 seen in the history of the physical universe. 
 Nature's most insignificant movement has 
 been precious there, only by how much it 
 has hastened the development of man, just 
 as time's most lauded era is that which has 
 aided the enthronement of the soul above 
 the body, and pointed most clearly to the 
 sovereignty of conscience above the intellect. 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 153 
 " What will it do for the enlightenment of 
 man?" has our historian asked, as he has 
 come upon some turn in the current of 
 affairs in the past. "What did it do to 
 make him more independent of physical cir- 
 cumstances, less a slave of his hunger and 
 of the weather, more deliberate in his 
 thought, more self-determinative— more a 
 man in God's image?" This our student 
 has asked as he has read of some Alfred's 
 influence or Wat Tyler's rebellion. So, in 
 our easy chairs, have we been confessing to 
 the enthronement of man. And even behind 
 our stained windows, there has grown up a 
 lofty humanism as an ideal. It has grown 
 up and has gone out into the world to con- 
 quer by the power of God. But it confronts 
 a political economy which still is the deifica- 
 tion of laissez-faire. It hears much of the 
 value of machinery and the exquisite music of 
 mechanism. It is invited to look into burst- 
 ing ledgers and wonder at the fortunes which 
 have come forth in a day. We ask proudly if 
 ever silk like this came from the mills of any 
 other century? Did ever philosophy dream 
 
154 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 that profits like these could accumulate so 
 rapidly ? Can the pages which the scholar 
 turns point to such products ? Can the 
 genius of discovery go beyond the whirling 
 steel or growing value of these? Answer 
 yes or no ; but our scholarship has at last 
 been taken by what are called dangerous 
 classes, and they ask what quality of man 
 does all this bring forth, what tissue of heart 
 cord, what hardness of righteous conviction, 
 what whiteness of sentiment, what strength 
 of purpose, what purity of heart ? 
 
 The reply is, " Just now that is a danger- 
 ous method of questioning ; for Daniel 
 Webster, or somebody else, once said that 
 property is the basis of progress or the main 
 thing to be looked after in statecraft. So 
 soon as the labour problem is setded, we 
 mean to look into that ; but that is im- 
 practical now." Ah, dear victim of soph- 
 istry ! — the truth as to the value of Man is 
 at last out into the fields of our political 
 economy; it has been caught up by the 
 striker, and has been flung into the air by 
 the mob ; it will be again ; and you must 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 155 
 
 leave your ledgers to welcome a truth so 
 long delayed. No modern cannon can 
 shoot this idea down, though the mob be 
 slain at your door. But we know that this 
 idea, tossed into the air by the agitators, 
 does not belong to them ? Yet, brothers, who 
 shall tell them that it means law and not 
 anarchy, since the scholar has too little 
 known them ? The communist will not 
 listen to me, for I have been quiet so long, 
 and the sunlight I have kept back so long 
 only shows him a dagger gleaming at his side. 
 He sees nothing else but that. So much 
 for my " scholarly ministry." My Chris- 
 tianity, slowly gaining consciousness, now 
 acknowledges that the religion which avows 
 that Man is the great factor in the equation 
 of this world, and worth God's valuation of 
 him at the Cross, must insist on the fullest 
 agitation as to the adequacy of the principle 
 of our current political economy. Because 
 vulgar men have stolen a flag which we have 
 not defended, we must not falter in making 
 it safe. 
 
 We are a little late, because any conscien- 
 
156 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 tious accountant with the pulpit ornamented 
 by the Cross of Jesus, must reckon on the fact 
 that Christianity has been here and witnessed 
 the haughty growth and at length the su- 
 premacy of selfish greed. Cabet said frankly, 
 "If Christianity had been interpreted and 
 applied in the spirit of Jesus Christ, if it were 
 rightfully understood, and faithfully obeyed 
 by the numerous sections of Christians who 
 are really filled with sincere piety, and need 
 only to know the truth to follow it, then 
 Christianity would have sufficed and would 
 still suffice to establish a perfect social and 
 political organization, and to deliver man- 
 kind from all its ills." What but our own 
 spiritual life, my brothers, can yet bring the 
 city of God ? 
 
 A scholarly Christianity must be depended 
 upon to insist, with the classes who are likely 
 just now to quote these neglected words 
 against wealth, that Christianity proposes 
 not an abolition of labour, or a blessing on 
 improvidence, but their inspiration and 
 glorification instead. But, to both the 
 wealth which has gone uninformed of its 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 157 
 
 duties, and to the poverty which has to say 
 nothing except of rights, the day of reason 
 Hes in the breast of a fearless active scholar- 
 ship acquired on and at the foot of the Cross, 
 not in conned conclusions adopted legisla- 
 tively by an impersonal thing called a nation, 
 but in inwrought convictions and redemptive 
 inspirations creative in each man of a new 
 heart. Our new and true spiritual life 
 which will renovate and reconstitute a sound 
 society at this point will begin in personal 
 regeneration or conversion, and it will begin 
 in the house of God. 
 
 We hear much of an era of individualism 
 closing, and an era of communism opening, 
 in our day. Scholarship must point out how 
 dark a day it will be for humanity when 
 either of these shall rule supreme. It is a 
 most vicious falsity which often hides under 
 our tongues when we complacently sing — 
 
 The individual withers, and the world is more 
 and more." 
 
 What is the world for, but to serve as a ma- 
 chinery and scaffolding, that the man may 
 
158 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 be fashioned and buiit the more grandly? 
 Society with forces of government and subtle 
 economics, a vast collection of manifold or- 
 ganizations, has no defense, — save as society 
 upbuilds men. In all the great dream of hu- 
 manity, the duty comes to the individual and 
 bears its blessing from him. We shall have 
 a great society, when the individuals compos- 
 ing it are great. The Christ of God, who 
 taught us of humanity, taught us most of the 
 value of the personal man. "Somebody," 
 said this leader of men, ''Somebody hath 
 touched Mcy for I perceive that virtue hath 
 gone out from Me." The individual is 
 in God's eye, and the weakest one, when 
 society has wronged him, has power in his 
 whisper to revolutionize customs and make 
 institutions tremble into dust. Our scholar- 
 ship needs to teach this to our politics, 
 and social life, and our religion must 
 grow more willing to rest its kingdom with 
 one Samaritan woman at the well, by telling 
 her the most radical truth, rather than with 
 the herd whose clamour may drown the 
 voice. 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 1 59 
 
 Still must we see that the true individual 
 will love his race, and that a worthy socialism 
 shall make him strong at every point. Like 
 Paul, our religion and scholarship must be 
 able to write in the same chapter : " Bear 
 ye one another's burdens," and " Every man 
 must bear his own burden." Shall we not 
 be equal to this task ? 
 
 On the one side stands selfish ease and 
 wealth, which has intrenched itself and in- 
 carnated its spirit in laws and institutions, 
 lazily saying : " The height of true socialism 
 means the greatest good to the greatest num- 
 ber," — saying it, until it means that so long as 
 the majority is satisfied to call it good, the 
 unjust law, the unholy custom, is good, 
 though the individual perish — an individual, 
 who, as he goes to the wall, is said to be the 
 exception proving the rule. " The individual 
 withers, and the world is more and more." 
 On the other side stands an unscholarly com- 
 munism, often miscalled or disguised as so- 
 cialism, which forgets that all real freedom 
 or power is intensely personal, that all true 
 achievement comes by way of the mdlvid- 
 
l6o THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 ual ; that all genuine manhood is to be won 
 each man for himself ; and it prates about pa- 
 ternal governments and human laws, which 
 are expected to seize every indolent fragment 
 and aimless atom of the social world and 
 somehow consolidate and inform them all 
 with self-respect, opulence, and power. It 
 says the world must be legislated into great- 
 ness and goodness, or it must be blown up. 
 "The individual withers, and the world is 
 more and more." These are the arch-here- 
 tics which scholarship must confront. 
 
 The individual must be preserved. To 
 substitute any governmental influence which 
 may take a nerve from his power, or a dis- 
 position to make life and success a personal 
 affair, is to do him a great wrong. To take 
 away the possibility of a struggle is to render 
 heroism impossible for him. 
 
 ** Cast the bantling on the rocks, 
 
 Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat : 
 Wintered with the hawk and fox, 
 
 Power and speed be hands and feet." 
 
 Nature and the soul cry into the ears of 
 every man who would be born into a prob- 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM l6l 
 
 lem whose solution lies at hand, " Thy God 
 hath commanded thy strength." Scholarship 
 has, with Stuart Mill, seen that this elimina- 
 tion of personal liberty is the chronic weak- 
 ness of modern socialism. The organizations 
 which compel men to work or not to work, 
 at the command of a distant committee, have 
 struck a blow against the manhood of the 
 country. Every advance of the labouring 
 man has come with an enlargement of per- 
 sonal liberty, and this always must mean 
 an enlargement of personal responsibility 
 and of respect for law. He does the most 
 for the needy who makes him strongest 
 for himself. Power must be inspired, and 
 never ceases to be personal. What shall 
 inspire this personal power, but a personal 
 religious life whose soul is love — the most 
 personal enthusiasm of humanity, because 
 first it is God's life revealed in the man 
 himself ? 
 
 But the very wealth which agrees to all this 
 needs to be taught its responsibilities to this 
 very individual. To some things he has 
 rights — to justice and to brotherhood. And 
 
l62 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the individual capitalist has the right — yea, 
 the duty, of being a brother to him. To get 
 the richest and the poorest to reach the best 
 they may be, means to introduce them per- 
 sonally to one another beneath some true 
 moral ideal. This does not mean the con- 
 version of capital to the uses of the non-capi- 
 talist as such. The Christian minister must 
 discover to poverty and riches that true 
 wealth will have less and less to do with, and 
 depend less and less upon material things, and 
 more and more upon the spiritual. It means 
 that both capitalist and labourer shall be so 
 spiritually attached to God the Father, through 
 Jesus Christ the brother, that each shall pray : 
 " Our Father, Thy kingdom come, and give 
 us this day our daily bread." 
 
 Is it because our knowledge of Jesus Christ 
 has not felt itself called upon to perform any 
 duties, that only a blatant social anarchist to 
 the terror of the capitalist's soul cries, " Jesus 
 Christ is the first Socialist " ? Clergymen are 
 asked to-day by an orthodoxy, which, in the 
 midst of ill-gotten gain, has forgotten its anx- 
 iety about the infallible authority of the Scrip- 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 163 
 
 tures, if really the Golden Rule is not an im- 
 practicable sentiment after all. The most 
 dangerous of the dangerous classes is a man 
 who has nothing but contributions whereupon 
 to spread a Bible with the Golden Rule in it, 
 wrapped up in a theory of Scriptural infalli- 
 bility, save his systematic faithlessness unto 
 its high behest. Our Christian scholarship 
 must insist upon the fact that this same lofty 
 principle, called the Golden Rule, has put 
 more money into the purse of mankind than 
 all the selfishness of ages. The worth of 
 human life never came from the dominance 
 of the iron-rule. The coin which stands for 
 a day's task is richer to-day, means more of 
 opportunity, represents more that makes life 
 desirable, than a coin which stood for the task 
 nineteen hundred years ago, not because of 
 the triumph of the policy of laissez-faire^ but 
 because of the slow gains of that transcen- 
 dental word of the Galilean visionary who, 
 even now, as then, in our regnant political 
 economy, has not where to lay His head. 
 
 Systems which are falling to pieces to-day 
 fall in the sunlight of this mighty command. 
 
1 64 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 Problems must be met, which grow more 
 complex day by day, because we dare not 
 risk this divine truth. Shall our Christian 
 scholarship halt ? A true scholar knows that 
 every delay whets the sword and makes it 
 more fatal to whomsoever it may touch. It 
 is said that Seward, in 1858, walking with a 
 companion from the Capitol, where flags were 
 flying to celebrate the birth of Washington, 
 pointed to these emblems so splendid in the 
 sun and said scornfully : '* Look at those flags 
 — and yet they talk of disunion ! " He saw 
 not the great law of expiation. He had for- 
 gotten that some one must pay for the com- 
 promises in the Constitution. Even Webster 
 called the abolition movement "a rubadub 
 agitation." These represented a scholarship 
 which had not gone deep as great principles, 
 but had been content with the orations of 
 Cicero, rather than the profounder lines of 
 conscience. 
 
 Our social problem will not vanish because 
 vulgar men howl and because illustrious men 
 whisper. " The wisdom from above is first 
 pure, then peaceable." 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 165 
 
 I readily grant it will be a difficult task for 
 even our most pretentiously religious scholar- 
 ship, which has silently let certain men pile 
 up wealth upon false foundations, and 
 avoided the unpleasant lower classes for so 
 long, to get the ear of either of these. A 
 socialist confronts our conservative scholar- 
 ship, which has had faith in man, and he 
 tells us : " You have known that social 
 economy to be true or lasting must be in 
 harmony with the nature of things ; you 
 have known that Man is that one goal 
 towards which everything in nature and 
 life has run ; you have been singing with 
 Dryden : 
 
 " 'From harmony, from heavenly harmony 
 The universal frame began : 
 From harmony to harmony 
 Through all the compass of the notes it ran, 
 The diapason closing full with Man, ' 
 
 You know also that the law which strengthens 
 only the strong, even when the man who 
 holds the fortune puts it as the law of the 
 universe, is not in harmony with Man's best 
 hope. It unmans both the strong and the 
 
1 66 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 weak. It makes one a brute, the other a 
 machine. All this you have known, and yet 
 you have been silent. Why has this truth 
 not been inserted in the midst of tables of 
 statistics and reports on imposts and duties ? 
 Sismondi's question to Ricardo : * Is wealth 
 everything ; is man nothing ? ' has long ago 
 been answered, both by religion and scholar- 
 ship. Why have you not spoken it ? ' The 
 starting-point, as well as the object-point of 
 our science,' said Roscher, 'is Man.' Why, 
 then, has the quality of the goods which he 
 would make, rather than the fibre of his soul 
 and the weal of his body, been made the 
 whole topic of your economy ? Ah 1 you 
 have been cowardly, when you ought to have 
 spoken. Be silent nowT 
 
 " 'Tis the day of the chattel, web to weave and 
 corn to grind, 
 Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." 
 
 A well-fed conservatism also often objects 
 to what is called dangerous agitation on the 
 part of scholars, and is noisy enough about 
 its objections to remind one that even Erasmus 
 was moved to say to those to whom Luther 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 167 
 
 was but a demagogue : "I say to you to 
 scream less, and to think more." 
 
 God knows I would not urge the coming 
 ministry of my Lord to a quick and loyal 
 acknowledgment of these truths and their 
 immediate incarnation in you, just to save the 
 day and win respect for the pulpit in all the 
 future. Not because it is tactful, shrewd or 
 just prudential, ought you to live a life spirit- 
 ual enough to ally you with this inevitable 
 reform. The Spiritual Life cannot be thus 
 buckled on, because it has a battle on likely 
 to triumph soon in other hands, if you do 
 not push to the front. I trust this will come 
 by peaceful evolution : but heaven knows 
 that in our latest and second revolution when 
 chattel slavery was the issue, American Chris- 
 tianity, along with American scholarship, was 
 so nearly supine and unintelligent, as to lift 
 by contrast into unforgetable eminence those 
 pulpits of Christendom which were awake 
 and valiant ; and our failure to educate the 
 nation North and South through a higher, 
 deeper Spiritual Life, as to divine values of 
 things human, accounts for the frightful 
 
l68 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 inadequacy of the so-called solution of the 
 race-problem. First of all, we thought we 
 could free men by material policies made 
 successful. No proclamation of emancipa- 
 tion, backed only by a majority and a sword, 
 can make anybody good enough to deliver 
 his fellow to freedom or the poor fellow him- 
 self good enough to take it. A spiritualiza- 
 tion of the whole problem, by an inflow of 
 Christian motive upon hearts and lives of all 
 concerned in it, must still be ours before we 
 have even begun aright with this matter. 
 
 The Christian pulpit lost its great opportu- 
 nity, and will yet have to take it. Piety and 
 justice must some day be at one on this afEair. 
 In such a case, it is usually the pulpit, unable 
 for lack of spiritual vigour to be entirely 
 independent of the opinion and apparent 
 interest of the majority, which objects longest 
 to the inevitable progress of renewing ideas 
 in and through minds out of the pulpit and 
 often out of the Church, and so the end is 
 that the influence of the pulpit and Church 
 appear pitifully small in the hour of their 
 victory. Let us not fight our cause's better 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 169 
 
 orator, if we must decline to say much at 
 present. 
 
 Even that new South, rising out of the old, 
 now sees that her best friend was not he who 
 cried, " Hang Phillips and Yancey together," 
 but rather the fearless scholar who was of 
 nothing so sure as of the safety of righteous- 
 ness. The agitation upon us is Pentecost 
 against Babel-towers. In it is our only hope 
 of order. The capital of the world which 
 most protests against agitation, either through 
 joy or dread of memories, will see how wealth 
 needed a better motive for its production, a 
 truer method for its growth, and a more 
 genuine security for its existence and in- 
 fluence, than our system of economics fur- 
 nishes. Wealth will repudiate, some day, the 
 religion or scholarship which does not now 
 see that the strong sentiments, the deep in- 
 stincts of the human soul, on which stable so- 
 ciety rests and which have so largely been 
 ruled out of both our theories and practice, 
 must be respected. Our scholarship has not 
 forgotten history. We want a Pentecostal 
 faith in Christ's idea of man. It is simple. 
 
lyo THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 There is a fatality which attends all cul- 
 ture which neglects to reckon largely on 
 those truths which need no acute intellec- 
 tual voyager to find them. Where such a 
 scholarship droops, the homelier scholarship 
 which has been true to the truths nearest 
 home — true enough to trust them — has 
 builded its monument in a reformed church 
 or a new commonwealth. In his great poem, 
 " The Dream of Gerontius," Cardinal New- 
 man has written the words, "It is the very 
 energy of thy thought which keeps thee 
 from thy God." Our orthodox rationalism 
 in theology and political economy is our 
 curse. It is a sign of unreality, when the in- 
 tellect speculates in the presence of a truth 
 confessed, but all involved and unpurposed. 
 It has first made a corpse for the knife of its 
 anatomy. That truth lying dead is a warn- 
 ing ; the next truth shuns that soul, while 
 
 " The intellectual power through words and things 
 Goes sounding on its dim and perilous way." 
 
 There is a simplicity of practical faith in the 
 apprehended truth which does it ; and the do- 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 1 7 J. 
 
 ing of apprehended truth lies at the bottom 
 of all discovery of the unapprehended. That 
 faith in the Monk of Erfurt launches a heroic 
 life upon its unsounded deeps and begins a 
 reformation. It has the wisdom of a child, in 
 the presence of the caution of an Erasmus. 
 That faith in Savonarola made the contem- 
 poraries of the Medici breathe freely, if but for 
 an hour, an atmosphere sure to become per- 
 manent by and by. That faith made Henry 
 Winter Davis refuse to remain in college by 
 the help of the money realized from the sale 
 of a human being — a slave set to his share in 
 the distribution of his father's property — clar- 
 ified his culture, forbade the entrance of un- 
 heroic ideas into his soul, and prepared him 
 for days in which he should come hither from 
 the South to say : " You see the conflagra- 
 tion from a distance ; it blisters me at my 
 side." These men are not the preservatives 
 of dead forms bottled and duly shelved ; they 
 are conservatives of living ideas. We need 
 not strain for the needed truth. We need 
 only to be true and truthful. 
 
 What a far-reaching culture which declines 
 
172 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the responsibility of realizing the ideals which 
 it does reverence, and trusting the truth it 
 does confess, has missed, comes to that 
 deeper, simpler culture which reads the hu- 
 man soul and is faithful to every truth it finds. 
 The commoner angels of God are the best for 
 us when we are wrong, and they are the 
 hardest to entertain. None of God's more 
 illustrious ministers of grace will be familiar 
 with us so long as we simply make love to 
 their fellows. 
 
 A few strong instincts and a few plain rules 
 Among the herdsmen of the Alps have wrought 
 More for mankind at this unhappy day 
 Than all the pride and intellect of thought." 
 
 The instinct of right and the rules of justice 
 come with no cowering forms to the Christian 
 scholar for protection : but they come with au- 
 thority. Why shall he doubt them ? They 
 say, " We have been with you in all the cen- 
 turies of which you have read, in the nature 
 you have explored and in the soul you revere ; 
 a superficial culture has left our side ; the 
 battle and the issue are ours. Shall our vie- 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 1 73 
 
 tory be yours also?" Just now it is said : 
 " Ah, this is not the Christian scholar's task 
 or fortune. We must not expect great en- 
 thusiasms or much eloquence, for there is no 
 crisis for which men's souls are to be trained." 
 Always are those men, to whom life is both 
 dream and duty, informed that there is little 
 at present for them to do, for the great vic- 
 tories are all won. 
 
 We have been assured that when Charles 
 Sumner came into the United States Senate 
 to begin his most practical labours, on the 
 day upon which Henry Clay walked out, he 
 was met by Thomas Benton, who, seeing his 
 genius, lamented that there was no great 
 career for him. Said he : " You have come 
 upon the stage too late, sir. All our great 
 men have passed away. Mr. Calhoun, Mr. 
 Clay, and Mr. Webster are gone. Not only 
 have the great men passed away, but the 
 great issues too, raised from our form of gov- 
 ernment and of deepest interest to its found- 
 ers and their immediate descendants, have 
 been settled, sir. The last of these was the 
 National Bank, and that has been overthrown 
 
174 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 forever. Nothing is left you, sir, but puny 
 sectional questions and petty strifes about 
 slavery and fugitive slave laws, involving no 
 national issues." 
 
 There are Bentons saying this to the young 
 Sumners of the pulpit to-day. I would not 
 have you debaters, but I would have you seek 
 to rejuvenate social conscience by develop- 
 ing the Spiritual Life in the presence of Jesus 
 Christ. That alone will meet the facts — for 
 men are wrong and need not so much new 
 laws as a new law of love — each man for 
 himself. This preaching alone will avail, in 
 view of the fact that all the past is trembling 
 in the balance to the man who truly sees the 
 present, and that the next problem is always 
 greater, as its solution shall be grander, than 
 the last. Our faith is that only an unyield- 
 ing idealism, now fortified by the testimony 
 of culture and the presence of Christ in the 
 souls of His brothers, can bless the most 
 realistic toiler on these shores. The deeper 
 and darker the materialism of the hour, the 
 greater the triumphs of the light which shall 
 conquer it. Shall not the Christian ministry, 
 
AND THE PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEM 1 75 
 
 trained in these halls, lead in the education 
 of the conscience of Humanity ? God grant 
 that it may be so, and let all the people say : 
 Amen! 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND 
 ITS DETERMINATIONS 
 AND DELIVERANCES 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND ITS 
 
 DETERMINATIONS AND 
 
 DELIVERANCES 
 
 ONE of the richest discoveries which a 
 minister makes, let us hope early, 
 but it may be late in his career, is 
 that his emancipation from what he should 
 not be and should not do as a minister, is 
 attained in the emancipation granted to his 
 whole nature, when he is delivered over, soul, 
 body, and spirit, to God Who alone is his 
 Being's satisfaction and glory. 
 
 The question immediately comes, after such 
 a statement as I have made, and I can see it 
 upon some lips at this moment: "Would 
 you, if you were, for example, addicted, for 
 whatever reason in your nature or your train- 
 ing, to merely logical processes, seek to be 
 delivered from this, by seeking first and all 
 the while a deeper and broader spiritual life?" 
 I answer at once, unhesitatingly, " Yes'' and 
 179 
 
l8o THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 I would say to any, who, at the other ex- 
 treme, suffer on the score of partialness, be- 
 cause they have not the logical faculty fairly 
 developed, and are therefore likely to be not 
 logical, and who, of course, wish to escape 
 from all mere patchwork and disorderliness 
 in thinking — I would say to them also : Do 
 only one thing, first and all the while. "Seek 
 first the kingdom of God and His righteous- 
 ness, and all these things shall be added unto 
 you." " His righteousness" or rightness ! — 
 it is all personal. The truest explanation of 
 this urgency that, first and all the time, we 
 should seek the kingdom of God, is made 
 evident in the fact that nothing can be really 
 added "to you " — that is, to your personality 
 — until you are in a condition of mind for re- 
 ceiving additions through your spiritual life. 
 I mean the condition of mind which comes 
 of seeking a kingdom, not of your own, and 
 still less of the world, but primarily and eter- 
 nally " of God." Any addition that will issue 
 in a completion of your powers, as a minister, 
 will be " to you," personally, and not to your 
 powers as such. 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES l8l 
 
 Softly and surely rising beneath our ca- 
 reened faculties, slowly, and even caressingly, 
 beneath both bow and stern that cannot move 
 themselves away from the wet sand upon 
 which many a man has drifted, the tide of a 
 true spiritual life rises. It is amazing how 
 quickly our useless sails unfurl themselves in 
 the fresh possibility of movement. Our rust- 
 ing machinery plies its mechanisms with the 
 ocean tide below, while, away from rock and 
 shoal, our faculties for thinking the right thing 
 and saying the right thing and doing the right 
 thing glide into the open sea, welcoming any 
 storm and daring any solitude of distance, in 
 order that we who are children of the Infinite 
 may have an infinite course and may reach 
 at last our infinite goal. Such is the min- 
 ister's experience, partially and briefly hinted 
 in this one experience of being delivered unto 
 God. 
 
 Our capital mistake in these matters usually 
 is this — that we try to get ourselves afloat, 
 spiritually, — that is, we try to get the whole 
 of our nature moving out to sea, — by intel- 
 lectual activity alone ; and that is, by work- 
 
l82 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 ing certain machinery inside of us, if we are 
 big enough to have much machinery, or, in 
 the case of a sailboat, by hoisting sail or 
 essaying some other kind of lofty activity 
 which is all the more pitiable when one sees 
 that the hull of the boat is still on the wet 
 sand. The truth is, intellectual activity is 
 never so expensive, or foolish, as when we 
 are thus beached, and there is no Spiritual 
 Life about us or in us ; and, therefore, nothing 
 is moving except the remote edges, perhaps, 
 of a retreating tide. 
 
 Now, I am not going to enter into the 
 question as to how much and how constantly 
 we have to depend, in this matter, on the 
 behaviour of the tide itself. You say we can- 
 not make tides and that Spiritual Life is of the 
 grace of God ; that the " wind bloweth where 
 it listeth," and that we cannot create for our- 
 selves a satisfactory Spiritual Life any more 
 certainly or easily than we can lift ourselves 
 by our boot-straps — all of which is an interest- 
 ing exhibit of half the facets of a gem-like 
 truth. 
 
 I shall not ask to fasten your interests to 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 183 
 
 the Other side of this truth, with its equally- 
 engaging facets, and insist upon what may 
 seem an extreme view of a man's power 
 over himself, though we all agree that the 
 start is primarily with God in the increase of 
 any spiritual life. I have only to say that 
 there is no deliverance for the minister from 
 intellectualism, and from the diversity of 
 other and all bondages and Hmitations, which 
 scarcely share the dignity of this word, — 
 none that is not, first of all, and all the way 
 through, a deliverance by means of a rising 
 and dominant tide of Spiritual Life. 
 
 I have touched one exemplary problem. 
 Let us give attention to more of the deliver- 
 ances which we need. An experienced spir- 
 ituality of life will make mere intellectual 
 formulae crack and snap, as did the fire lit by 
 the pioneers in the woods, to clear the soil for 
 the first plowing. It was the only healthy 
 thing to do. Lighting a flame was prog- 
 ress ; and yet it was the way of conservatism 
 to get the land ready for plowing. Such is 
 the true order of Spiritual Life. But these fires 
 are of the Spirit. Forget my figure of speech, 
 
l84 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 and note how often one's total life Godward, 
 that is his Spiritual Life, saves his mental 
 operations from misleading himself and his 
 people. Is it Dr. Bayley, in the city of my 
 first parish, holding in clearest intellectual 
 light, as it seemed to him, doctrines of lim- 
 ited atonement and election which never 
 seemed so cold and cruel as when new-born 
 souls were shouting for joy all around him ? 
 What was the divine power causative of a 
 new event in and for him ? It was the new 
 Spiritual Life of the man, who was one of the 
 most acute thinkers I ever knew. It was 
 lifting him out and away from anything less 
 gracious than the creed of his personal ex- 
 perience with these newly-named children of 
 light. 
 
 Rest assured, the intellect finally comes 
 around and arranges its formulse in accord- 
 ance with the facts of Spiritual Life. Let me 
 speak of something still less apparently re- 
 ligious. In an earlier day, our pulpits were 
 training strong men, especially for the prac- 
 tice of the law, through the influence of cer- 
 tain pulpits in the Middle West, notably two 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 185 
 
 pulpits in Indianapolis, by masterful, logical 
 presentations of truth. The Indianapolis bar 
 was known for twenty-five years over America 
 as a singularly strong body of practicing law- 
 yers. It was easily observed that the biog- 
 raphy of these men had to do with the pulpit 
 methods of at least two powerful preachers ; 
 and I have often heard President Harrison, 
 who was one of the young men thus influ- 
 enced, recite the histories of five great law- 
 yers in the middle states, who had learned 
 to reason in straight lines, through the train- 
 ing received from the pulpits to which their 
 young manhood had come admiringly. Now 
 this is a very desirable result — namely, to have 
 taught men to be logical ; and it is especially 
 desirable that young lawyers should learn to 
 reason in straight lines. 
 
 But there is another side of it. The emi- 
 nent result of these men of the pulpit never 
 came to these young men, even as intellec- 
 tual force and orderliness of mind, until, by 
 their own confession, in the tide of a new 
 Spiritual Life, each of them was lifted forth, 
 and an oceanic breadth and depth of Chris- 
 
l86 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 tian experience was granted unto each which 
 made the preacher's exercitations in the most 
 logical and theological statements seem, 
 indeed, valuable anchors and redoubtable 
 cables, or the staples to which they were at- 
 tached. And this was all ? I know you say 
 that this " all " is very much. Yet the human 
 race does not depend so seriously upon the 
 logic of its faith, as upon the enthusiasm and 
 loyalty begotten thereof. Happily, often- 
 times, and especially may the remark be 
 made when we think of many impossible 
 but apparently logical theological systems, 
 " man is a very illogical animal." He is safe 
 only when he is spiritual in his life. It was 
 not " alir These men were made not only 
 logical, but more — they were made spir- 
 itually-minded. 
 
 Politicians arise upon the stump to prove 
 to us how the country will logically go to 
 ruin, if certain principles are adopted by a 
 vote for the party who has written them in 
 the platform. Lo ! that very party succeeds 
 in the election ! — and Lo ! also, the country 
 does not go to pieces. It is not because 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 187 
 
 the speaker was not logical in his warning 
 speech, and not primarily because the people 
 were anti-logical, but because the principles 
 written in the platform were only abstract. 
 We see what occurred then occurring now. 
 At once, a great deep life — that is, the ex- 
 perienced patriotism of the people comes in, 
 logic or no logic, like a tide. That gracious 
 tide attends to the business of freeing a 
 thousand helpless ships whose going forth 
 is an event filled with benefit. The convoy 
 is orderly, by an instinct or an unnamed im- 
 pulse. The argosy moves on. The country 
 is safe. 
 
 Now, on the other hand, another weakness 
 of the pulpit from which the true Spiritual 
 Life, and that alone, is most likely to save us. 
 is sensationalism. I will say more, and that 
 I believe the only thing that can save us 
 from a very disorganizing, and withal de- 
 lightsome weakness in the direction of senti- 
 mentalism, is powerful Spiritual Life. Intellec- 
 tually alone, you cannot down the emotions. 
 They ought not to be downed. They ought 
 to be blended with streams of thought and 
 
I88 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 currents of will. A single tear will wash 
 away an Alp of the cooler brain. Many a 
 minister, especially in our time, is quite 
 aware that the recoil from our over-intel- 
 lectualism in demonstration of the truth of 
 dogmas, is executing now its worst judg- 
 ment upon the Church, which has too long 
 kept the heart out of pulpit and pew — so 
 long, indeed, that, now returning, the heart 
 is making havoc of things here and there 
 with an overflow of sentiment which is not 
 miscalled sentimentalism. The same thing 
 which has occurred in certain developments 
 of our poetry has occurred in the pulpit. A 
 disposition to take only the little crippled 
 children and make them walk in their most 
 difficult hours before us, and an almost in- 
 satiate desire to exhibit the unfortunatenesses 
 of certain classes of society for a commercial, 
 though often honest literary end ; indeed, the 
 whole painful and overwrought effort to make 
 people cry because there are so many things 
 in the world to cry about, has taken the place 
 of that " deep, sad, still music of humanity," 
 which has ever honoured sorrow wherever 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 189 
 
 it has its ministries, and always hastens to 
 the side of pain wherever it quivers nobly, 
 and may never rest, until this world of tears 
 has been forgotten in the glory of a world 
 where "God shall wipe all tears away from 
 their eyes, and there shall be no sighing, 
 neither any more pain." Whatever dangers 
 there may have been in other times from 
 logic, it was as nothing to our danger to-day 
 from the lacrymose unctuousness that spills, 
 and the apparently profitable sentimentalism 
 which infects the pulpit message. 
 
 Perhaps there is no such peril in evan- 
 gelism as this ; and ours is an age in which 
 we have brought in the evangelist at such a 
 time and for such a reason that our supposed 
 extremity of need cannot well keep him teth- 
 ered to the accumulated wisdom of the Chris- 
 tian pulpit. Having concluded that the evan- 
 gelist, as such, is not a person whom we 
 really desire in our pulpit, and yet being 
 desperately conscious that a certain work must 
 be done by somebody, we, therefore, have 
 been often led to imitate his methods, to obtain 
 his results. 
 
I90 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 I am bound to say that nothing has more 
 hopelessly anchored our ship, which has al- 
 ready been beached because there is too little 
 Spiritual Life under it, and anchored it where 
 the sands which are the sport of every wind 
 are filling it, than the usual pulpiteering — for 
 I cannot call it preaching — which works with 
 these motives and methods. 
 
 There are very few James Whitcomb 
 Rileys in the pulpit, by the grace of God, 
 who can stop with one, or two, or even a 
 dozen " Little Orphan Annies." I have never 
 known a man who took himself for an Eugene 
 Field in the pulpit who, having succeeded 
 with one "Little Boy Blue", did not find 
 other litde boys of other colours who were 
 passing away so rapidly that the people in 
 the congregation begin to feel much as per- 
 sons do who read the special column in most 
 newspapers now devoted to the humours and 
 hysterics of humanity. There grows up in 
 the mind of the people, under such tutelage, 
 a power which at the first is amazed at this 
 recognition of suffering and sorrow, but it 
 has gone to the theatre so often, and it has 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES I9I 
 
 contented itself with doing nothing but to 
 weep in the presence of described grief so 
 frequently, that now, at length, it just content- 
 edly lies on the wet sand, fastened more se- 
 curely by the rope of enervating convention- 
 alities which have made it gritty with the 
 sands themselves. 
 
 A certain series of stories is rife — a series, 
 each of which get a pious twang, associated 
 with their rendering, which is almost as- 
 sured of success in bringing tears to 
 an audience, and for these same reasons. 
 They may be compared to a like series 
 used in the generation earlier even than 
 ours ; and any thoughtful man, who will thus 
 compare them, will be shocked at the desola- 
 tions which he knows must have been 
 wrought, age succeeding age, by the woeful 
 melodramatist in the pulpit. The real diffi- 
 culty to be met is found in the lack of spirit- 
 ual life. A man will be as logical as he 
 ought to be — that is, his logic will be like the 
 articulation of bones, which have been de- 
 scribed as furnishing opportunity for flesh 
 and blood to become beautiful and sublime, 
 
192 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 eloquent and musical — if he is living such a 
 holy life that the wholeness of his nature is 
 strongly permeated with God. A man will 
 be as tender as he ought to be, if his heart 
 and head are so unified in a common expe- 
 rience that his intellectual life is all suffused 
 with emotion, as the brain is irrigated with 
 blood, and his emotional life is all guided by 
 intelligence, though not restrained by any 
 mere processes of reasoning. Why men 
 should look elsewhere, to have this miracle 
 of unification accomplished within them ex- 
 cept in the Spiritual Life, I cannot say. Truly 
 says one master, " The heart has reasons that 
 the reason can never know." And as truly we 
 are told, " If a man does not sometimes lose 
 his reason, he has no reason to lose." So 
 also it may be said, upon the other side, in 
 full recognition of the fact that " the heart is 
 the best theologian," that there is nothing 
 more needed than to love God " with all the 
 mindP Without a life of deep and quicken- 
 ing thought, the emotional will run off with 
 everything and wear one out. We must not 
 fail to do what we are asked to do by an 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 1 93 
 
 American philosopher : "to eHminate unnec- 
 essary emotions." We have enough neces- 
 sary ones, if we are true ministers of God to 
 men. 
 
 One thing we must know. The preacher's 
 sermons will come out of the preacher's life, 
 or they will not be sermons. They may be 
 essays with texts provided as mottoes, exer- 
 cises in public speaking with the material of 
 religion as clay in the hands of the potter. 
 If they become only pious declamation, or 
 excited colloquy, issued forth when and where 
 the minister knows no one dare say a word 
 or is expected to ask a question save those 
 of himself to which he has provided all 
 answers, the cause of the effect is himself. If 
 his life is so small that it can express itself in 
 terms so that he succeeds only logically, his 
 sermons will be theological or sociological 
 addresses. If, on the contrary, his life is such 
 as can express itself fully only in emotion or 
 sensation, his personal lack of wholeness, of 
 integrity, will drown truths, in themselves im- 
 mortal, in his poor but frequent lacrymosities. 
 To save himself, let his life be utterly lost in 
 
194 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the life of God. Then none of these things, 
 which so repulse the manliness of our age, 
 can happen in his pulpit. 
 
 I hope none of you will think that I am 
 mentioning things unworthy of your atten- 
 tion, — God help you ! — only He may help 
 you, if they seem to be small — things from 
 which, I am sure, nothing but the Spiritual 
 Life at its completest and intensest can free 
 any of us. Almost every one perceives the 
 large things he does, or the things which get 
 into his methods and make him a consciously 
 weaker man than he ought to be. We agree 
 that we ought to get clear of them, some- 
 how. Nothing but the Spiritual Life will ac- 
 complish this for us. Let me assure you, 
 also, that it takes a most intense Spiritual Life 
 to burn out of a man the little pests of his 
 ministries. 
 
 We may wisely remember Angelo's word : 
 " Perfection is made up of trifles, but perfec- 
 tion itself is no trifle." We are amazed and 
 awed at these so-called negative trifles, when 
 they lay waste the princely things of the 
 ministry, as they do oftentimes. From these 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES I95 
 
 we must be delivered. " The litde foxes that 
 spoil the vines " are more to be feared, if one 
 is growing grapes, than the lion and bear 
 which are probably not in our neighbourhood, 
 for the very reason that we are too beset with 
 what we call our small enemies. 
 
 The minister's views of himself and others 
 are made proportional, only in the Spiritual 
 Life. This is one of its determinations. The 
 deliverances follow. 
 
 No one can ever doubt that what is known 
 as self-conceit has its antidote only in the 
 Spiritual Life. There is nothing that a minis- 
 ter needs more than self-reverence, with self- 
 knowledge and self-control. One of the 
 wisest of poets has well said : " These three 
 alone lead life to sovereign power." 
 
 Emerson has not over-preached the rever- 
 ence one ought to have for one's own soul, 
 and many have demonstrated its fruitfulness 
 in character and good deeds. But all true 
 reverence of one's soul is opposed to self- 
 conceit. To revere one's self is the conse- 
 quence of obeying the precept: "Revere 
 God I " He makes the soul grand. 
 
196 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 *' Revere thy soul 
 Fetch thine eye 
 Up to the manners of the sky.' 
 
 One is never delivered fro jn himself, until 
 he is delivered iiito the hands of Almightiness. 
 The all-wisdom must swallow up our efforts 
 and experiences at being wise, or we shall be 
 the most foolish of coxcombs. 
 
 Probably egotism never flings so dismal a 
 shadow, as in the case of the minister. The 
 ministerial measurements are so mountain- 
 ous ; our sun, in the case of self-conceit, is 
 such a flame that, when the light falls upon 
 one's back, the shadow which it casts is deep 
 with darkness and stretches afar, haunting 
 the ways of progress with its gloom, and com- 
 pelling one's eyes to see everything through 
 the thickness and dolor of one's projected 
 self. The greater a man is by nature, the 
 longer and thicker the shadow he then casts. 
 Self-conceit is something other than John 
 Adams' magnificent self-respect, or John 
 Milton's confidence in the superiority of his 
 faculties, or the conscious grip upon his own 
 faculties which made Leonardo able to say 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 197 
 
 truthfully: "I will undertake any work in 
 sculpture, in marble, in bronze, or in terra 
 cotta — likewise in painting I can do as well 
 as any man, be he who he may." 
 
 Our self-reverence, of which I have spoken 
 as self-conceit, is too often the reverence for 
 the appearance of one's self, not 2.^ a redeemed 
 son of God, and one honoured by his heavenly 
 Father, by being called upon to minister unto 
 men, with respect to the mightiest of all the 
 precious things in the universe. This pest 
 abides in our own estimate as to what God 
 had to do with, not in our estimate of 
 zvhat God has done ivith poor and recalcitrant 
 material. Self-respect roots itself in God, 
 not in us ; in the artist, not the stone He 
 touches with His power and grace. Because 
 we have it not, we cringe and fawn and 
 compromise. The authoritative note which 
 manhood in its experience with truth, and 
 God Who is the author of all truth, creates, is 
 wanting in us. So, the music falters and 
 lacks a coherency of movement, because there 
 is not conviction of one's right to utter the 
 interior experiences of a humble child of God. 
 
198 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 Only these experiences make this child 
 of God a minister unto the other children of 
 the heavenly Father. Not for the sake of dis- 
 covering this note valuable, and, indeed, in- 
 dispensable, as it certainly is to the preacher, 
 should we start out upon the hopeless task 
 of creating reverence for ourselves. We can 
 pray, and we must pray, that God will so 
 humble " us under His mighty hand," that, 
 consequentially, as the apostle seems to hint, 
 we may " be exalted in due time." When 
 that exaltation comes, it will be the result of 
 an inflow of the divine life upon our heated 
 and blossomless desert, which has stretched 
 itself so far and so long under a glaring sun. 
 Its very baldness and aridity generate the 
 consciousness that it needs defense. This 
 self-consciousness becomes desperate in self- 
 conceit. The interests of such a life must 
 ever be outside itself. Its own process of 
 living will be interesting, only when the seeds 
 are bursting beneath the soil and the roots 
 are springing everywhere, and the tall 
 grasses sway in the wind or the harvest gold 
 is gathered from stalk and stem. Sunlight 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 199 
 
 and rain, dew-fall and the enriching air, 
 fertilizing with viewless winds wherever they 
 touch — this additioji from without, which has 
 been assimilated as it came into the life 
 beneath, once so hopeless, has kindled an 
 upward feeling and yearning. The more 
 one then has from without himself, which has 
 interested him gloriously to this result, the 
 more one grows interested in the things 
 above. Thus his deliverence from himself 
 completes itself in his ever-completing Spirit- 
 ual Life. 
 
 Perhaps the most galling self-conceit is not 
 that which rattles its chain in the personal 
 pronoun used in beginning sentences — sen- 
 tences whose end has to do with the eternity 
 and infinity of God, yet are throughout in- 
 fected with the monosyllable " I." They go 
 on, rehearsing experiences of the soul, which 
 are either too shallow or too deep and too 
 sacred ever to be spoken before men, betimes 
 insinuating among the brethren a complaint 
 that one is not appreciated and honoured as 
 he ought to be, grasping at every moment or 
 platform or vacant-eyed crowd to publish 
 
200 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 one's self forth. Heaven and earth know that 
 this sort of egotism is galling enough, even 
 if the man does not know that he wears a 
 chain. But the egotism which cuts through 
 the skin and muscle and nerve, until the soul 
 is threatened, is that which has an atheism 
 all its own. The frightful thing that happens, 
 when the disease of egotism is upon us, is 
 that the soul finally gets willing to get on and 
 to go on without God. The sanctuary of 
 prayer must be vacated by the minister, for 
 even if his body in canonicals may appear 
 regularly at each service, some will know, 
 even if the minister does not know, that the 
 minister's soul is gone. 
 
 In such a case, the approaches to God, in 
 prayer, will be like roadways across which 
 are constantly falling the trees of the forest, 
 — they will be clogged with patronages of the 
 eternal God. In his life among men, there 
 will be evident so litde of reliance upon the 
 Almightiness of the love which has saved and 
 has sought to sanctify him, that not any self- 
 reliance of the high and noble sort shall seem 
 to be his, but his people will discern sadly a re- 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 20I 
 
 liance upon that shadow of himself, which, as 
 only the strength and form of his self-projec- 
 tion, will lead him into those particular mis- 
 takes and blunders which may scarcely be 
 distinguished from sins. 
 
 A man will not save himself from any too 
 large estimate of his own powers by subtrac- 
 tion. He must be rescued only by addition. 
 The more he makes of himself, by the addi- 
 tion of inflowing estimates from God's grace 
 with him, which are infinite and eternal in 
 their nature and influences, the less the finite 
 and the temporal will call upon him for self- 
 measurement. Among his brethren, he will 
 move with such an air and style of the ageless, 
 that he cannot be posing for the picture gal- 
 lery of time. Let him be fulfilled, or filled 
 full, and there will not be a noise like that of 
 the emptiness betrayed most by the few things 
 which are shaken within it. 
 
 Of course, young men, more than old men, 
 who usually have had the experiences which 
 have, as we say, taken the conceit out of 
 them, are likeliest to betray a certain condi- 
 tion of egotism. However, there are notable 
 
202 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 exceptions in each of these classes. Some 
 young men do not furnish soil for the self- 
 propagation of extravagant notions as to 
 their own powers and the impact of their im- 
 mediate exercise in the future. And, on the 
 other hand, there are those who, the older 
 they grow, seem at least to defy those highly 
 civilizing influences that make egotism im- 
 possible in most men. 
 
 In the case of the first, there is that humility 
 which invites the stream of God's influence, 
 as the low and rich land in some basin be- 
 tween mountain ranges invites the soft flow- 
 ing molten snows which bring down from the 
 heights untold wealth for harvest-time. God 
 is wonderfully real and blessedly known to 
 such a mind which soon rejoices in feeding 
 upon Him and drinking in His presence. 
 There is no nobleness of nature, or rectitude 
 of conduct, or preciousness of gift, which may 
 be denied to the young minister who is so 
 possessed by the God of his Being. 
 
 I cannot stop with the case of the second. 
 
 Let each of us know that all hardness of na- 
 ture and immobility of spirit, with that invol- 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 203 
 
 untary sharpness which refuses to take a thing 
 except on its own edge, come when the man 
 of self-conceit, having overestimated his own 
 powers and having underestimated the resist- 
 ances which every minister ought to measure 
 truly, finds himself out of touch with any 
 true equation of his forces and forcefulness 
 which must come from the irrigating and 
 softening entrance of God Himself in and 
 upon him. Thinking he is using up the 
 maximum power, he is surprised at the mini- 
 mum of eflfect produced. He is discouraged. 
 And, living in the habit of finding his re- 
 sources in himself only, in every such experi- 
 ence as this particular discouragement, he 
 assurantly goes to himself in vain for re- 
 sources ; and he comes out of it all only a 
 cynic. 
 
 Our underestimate of the beauty and joy 
 and wholesomeness of the world and life, 
 and especially that of our fellow men, is the 
 result of an overestimate of one's self. The 
 continuously wearisome experience of find- 
 ing one's overestimated self unable to accom- 
 plish anything against an underestimated 
 
204 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 fact or force of resistance is most deplorable 
 in the minister. This throws the mental ma- 
 chinery out of gear, and makes the moral 
 machinery creak and wear with friction. 
 
 Another feature of this self-conceit, so long 
 as we are trying to cure it with anything else 
 but a nobler and more resistless Spiritual 
 Life, must be mentioned. It is what becomes, 
 finally, personal falsity in measuring truth. 
 The man begins speaking to his congrega- 
 tion, as if he, and not the truth he had to 
 speak or the personal Christ whom he brings, 
 is to do the work in them and for them. He, 
 of course, wishes to be victorious over igno- 
 rance and prejudice, narrowness and wicked- 
 ness, — whatever it may be which must be 
 conquered in his audience. He does not 
 warm up to his subject, but he warms up 
 only to himself. He is very anxious to suc- 
 ceed with his view of the Truth, for his own 
 sake. He could not by any means endure 
 the humiliation of having the truth escape 
 him, and suddenly take some fairer form 
 than he had dreamed, as the truth often will 
 do, leaving his own form of the truth un- 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 205 
 
 adopted and its virtues unsung. Really, it 
 is not the fortune of truth, or the fortune of 
 the soul which is longing for the truth at its 
 very depths, — not these has he in mind ; and, 
 therefore, with whatever facility or force of 
 speech he may go on sermonizing, he is not 
 a minister, save of himself and his views of 
 truth. Never is he so little a minister of 
 the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. 
 
 On the other hand, how marvellously 
 real such a thing as truth appears to be ; 
 how eloquently on inartistic lips the very 
 word " truth " rings ; how, like a trumpet, 
 with its commandment of reality, his mel- 
 odiousness is with us, when a man of 
 spiritual equipment and acquirement who 
 we feel seeks the thing he cares for 
 most, namely, to get truth and the soul 
 and mind together, says anything to us! 
 That mighty reverence for the souls of his 
 people ; that exceeding exaltation which his 
 almost worshipping mind has given Truth for 
 Truth's own sake, have made any petty self- 
 confidence impossible. It is true, then, that 
 the man grows more sublime as he leans 
 
206 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 with confidence upon the Author of all Truth. 
 His hands grow more radiant as he handles 
 the flashing gem called Truth. But he knows 
 it not. He has been saved from egotism, by 
 a salvation which has not left in his mind a 
 single possibility for self-consciousness. It 
 is Moses again, knowing not that " the skin 
 of his face did shine." 
 
 Let a man be entirely devoted to God. 
 Let him literally lose himself, as the stream 
 loses itself in the ocean, and he will be saved, 
 even from many smaller evils. 
 
 He will be delivered from the egotism of 
 persisting in a certain type of sermon, in- 
 stead of so revering the personality of his 
 flock that their natures shall give a reception 
 to all his instructions and appeals to them as 
 they are planned to their form and capacity, 
 much as the inner construction of a vault 
 gives form and place to the mass of coins 
 with which it is filled. 
 
 The determination which a deep spiritu- 
 ality of life will make in us will deliver us 
 from all foolish notions as to the inferiority 
 of certain human beings. 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 207 
 
 Spiritual Life, alone, will refine the mind 
 and quicken the intelligence to a point and 
 condition of discovery quite beyond what we 
 can think, as to persons. One of the powers 
 most efficient towards the completing of the 
 true Church is this power of discovering the 
 goodness, both actual and possible, of very 
 ordinary people. The Church of America, 
 especially, must remember that in its success 
 it shall partake of the success, and, therefore, 
 it must share the methods, of democratic and 
 republican institutions. Lincoln's saying that 
 " God must love common people, because He 
 made so many of them," ought to help the 
 minister to a just estimate of their value in 
 church life. 
 
 It is astonishing how often we have to 
 resist the disposition to welcome certain 
 classes to our communion with ecstasies 
 which are not so pious, as the shouts from 
 new-born souls. We must have the social 
 ecstasies, partly because we cannot have the 
 shouts, for souls are not new-born often in an 
 atmosphere where the emphasis of our de- 
 light is put upon the importance of what we 
 
208 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 call "strong people" for the Church. The 
 Church of Jesus Christ, the carpenter's son, 
 does not necessarily mean the Church of 
 impoverished people or weak people. A 
 great deal of misquotation has come to the 
 world as to the fact that "not many wise or 
 mighty or rich were called " to the member- 
 ship of the early Church of Christ. The ex- 
 istence of the Church of Christ does not 
 necessarily mean that the poor should know 
 the rich, as rich ; or that the rich should know 
 the poor, as poor. Indeed, the institutions 
 of His religion are quite contrary to this, both 
 in their temper and operation. Nevertheless, 
 it is impossible to conceive of the progress of 
 Christianity towards the redemption of hu- 
 man society, without seeing the Church as 
 largely made up and energized, if not guided, 
 from its earthly side, by those who have not 
 an extraordinary amount of cash, or intellect, 
 or even of goodness to contribute. Most of 
 the love which makes this world lovely, as it 
 is, is the love which is silent, at least not 
 demonstrative. Most of the sweetness that 
 makes this world as little sour as it is, is the 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 209 
 
 sweetness of humility. Tlie sacrifice which 
 enriches most, at the bottom of society, our 
 whole humanity, is unstudied, because the 
 one who makes it is most often not a student 
 at all. The erosion from lofty peaks which 
 creates deep valleys comes in very tiny grains. 
 That minister is most fortunate who has an 
 eye for those inconsequential and shy people 
 who hardly dream they are of enough ac- 
 count to be immortal, and who put a new 
 meaning in George Eliot's words, " Oh, may 
 I join the Choir Invisible." It is entirely 
 true of them that they are so self-effacing 
 that they can get into this poem's hospitality 
 only in the lines containing the words, 
 
 " Those immortal dead who live again 
 In minds made better by their presence : live 
 In pulses stirred to generosity." 
 
 There we must stop, although our deepest 
 admiration of them goes much farther, — we 
 stop because they have no " deeds of daring 
 rectitude" ; they do not dare, they only ven- 
 ture. But their venture is that of the timid 
 violet which blooms in the fence corner, not 
 because some one is going to see it at all, 
 
2IO THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 but just because it is faithful to itself and its 
 Maker. These people screen themselves, not 
 because they are ashamed of themselves, but 
 largely because of their reverence for greater 
 things, and their unfaltering altruism that 
 makes them live " in scorn for miserable 
 aims that end with self." Shall any minister, 
 who, perforce, is their minstrel, shut them 
 out of poetry and a religion like Christianity ? 
 
 Christian preaching takes them with the 
 eye-glance of Jesus ; yet they have no 
 *' thoughts sublime that pierce the night 
 like stars." Their world of thought is a 
 small orb and their mental operations are 
 not reported in constellations. But they 
 come into the poetic, which is the true con- 
 ception of life again, when we think of them, 
 who, "with their mild persistence, urge man's 
 search to vaster issues." For, weak and 
 simple and modest as they are, they do 
 give a tone of reality and an impression of 
 the worth of living the human life, creating 
 the most wealth-giving thing we have ; 
 namely, the moral atmosphere of our world. 
 
 I believe I never felt such a sense of the 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 211 
 
 fact that God certainly cannot afford to let 
 any soul come to the end of its life, at what 
 we call death, as I had, when one of these 
 dear little women, who had nothing of good- 
 ness except what her small nature might de- 
 velop or entertain, said, " Oh, I am so like 
 nothing, that I do not think God will trouble 
 Himself about a place for me, even in the 
 many mansions Christ has prepared I " 
 Knowing her goodness, and that the whole 
 of her little self expressed itself in her good- 
 ness, I felt at that moment that if her 
 heavenly Father did not find a place for her, 
 His moral universe would fall to pieces. 
 
 Now, to get this eye which will discover 
 these lowly and retiring folk and give to them 
 their new future, and the Church its new life, 
 which will make her bloom as a fence corner 
 will bloom with violets, though no one passes 
 that way in the course of the spring time, we 
 must be mastered by Jesus. He saw, as no 
 one else has seen, because He saw with the 
 divine vision, the exceeding preciousness of 
 little things. The woman who brought her 
 mite entered into the world's history with an 
 
212 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 introduction by Jesus Himself, Who said, 
 " Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached 
 throughout the whole world, this that she 
 hath done shall be told for a memorial of 
 her." He vindicated the loyalty and com- 
 pleteness of her little gift. 
 
 The benediction of the Saviour of the world 
 came upon a fidelity which an eye for the 
 little bignesses of our existence despises, and 
 which an eye for true greatness (which is ever 
 of quality, not of quantity) always perceives. 
 It is not because our Church would come to 
 ruin without these people ; it is not because 
 our sanctuaries would be deserted, if they 
 were absent ; it is not because of any con- 
 sideration, except this — that the Spiritual Life 
 is sufficing in this one thing — that we may 
 take it, and look closely to find if you and I 
 have the discernment and ability which, as 
 you see, is preeminently Chrisdike, to place 
 such lowly and shrinking humanity, the like 
 of that widow with her mite, where Jesus 
 places her, in the history of human civiliza- 
 tion. 
 
 Of course, Christianity must always be to 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 213 
 
 US a religion of the heart, quite as much as 
 a religion of the head, and, therefore, any 
 experience which has quickened our feehngs 
 towards worth of this sort is worth while, 
 lest we shall miss seeing these people of 
 whom I speak. Especially, at the begin- 
 nings of every soul's career, the evidences 
 that attract us to their goodness are very 
 slight, for the highest goodness itself is 
 very tiny, both in aspect and appeal. Such 
 faith, for example, is indeed as a mustard 
 seed, but somehow, by the processes of 
 growth, it fills the earth, while the birds 
 lodge in its branches. A minister must 
 never get into the habit of doing work by 
 such wholesale methods that he neglects one 
 of these little ones. Neglect is cruelly cold ; 
 and they perish in the cold. " It were better 
 for him that a millstone were hanged about 
 his neck and that he were cast into the midst 
 of the sea, than that he should offend one of 
 these little ones " by the chilliness of his 
 forgetting them, or never having been 
 known unto them as Christ's representative. 
 The smallest man will do the largest man 
 
214 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 more good than the largest man may do the 
 smallest man in this; and the good will be 
 in proportion. 
 
 I assert that the ministry of grace to our 
 ordinary humanity, both as to the preacher 
 or pastor who is likeliest to be interested in ex- 
 traordinary enterprises and showy achieve- 
 ments, is of the highest value. Of course, all 
 these people are known to you and me by 
 one signet. It is more than the hall-mark of 
 genius. It is the touch of God meaning 
 genuineness, which is moral genius manifest. 
 They are of the band of this woman who had 
 " done what she could." A sincere minister 
 will find their sincerity. A minister, who is 
 preeminent in grace and graciousness, flow- 
 ing from an indubitable Spiritual Life, domi- 
 nated and supreme by the presence of Christ 
 within him, will know their eminence. Jesus' 
 moral earnestness felt the moral earnestness 
 of the widow, and weighed her mite by the 
 subtile feelings of an evangelic brotherliness, 
 which ought to be yours and mine. By the 
 determinations such a Spiritual Life will fix 
 in us, we may approach the sermon. 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 215 
 
 In the method I have chosen, or which, 
 rather, has chosen me, I am treating the Spir- 
 itual Life as a reality, more than a theme, but 
 a reality to be estimated in view of the pres- 
 ent conditions and convictions which are 
 somewhat different from those of the passing 
 order of thought and life. These new condi- 
 tions, I believe, are likeliest to remain, be- 
 cause they are the survival of the fittest. 
 Any of our duties as preachers ought to be 
 affected in its performance by the gains to 
 ethical power and theological thought, which 
 have come from the gathered wisdom now 
 acknowledged as orthodoxy, or at least as 
 Truth, probably. 
 
 For example, in the matter of selecting the 
 text ; while it is true that the text must select 
 you, and must seem to have chosen you from 
 the foundation of the world, as the elect per- 
 son to extract illumination and instruction 
 and inspiration from its unsuspected treas- 
 ures of meaning, it is also true that it will be 
 selected from a Bible which is looked upon by 
 yourself, and I hope by your audience, from 
 a higher point of view and with eyes less be- 
 
2l6 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 fogged with superstition, than we could have 
 possessed at any time before. Our light has 
 come from seriously-minded men. For exam- 
 ple, Coleridge has had his way with our gen- 
 eration as thoroughly as any modern thinker ; 
 and he has influenced us as preachers and as 
 hearers of the Word, by the well-known state- 
 ment as to the Bible. He said : " I take up 
 this work with the purpose to read it for the 
 first time, as I should read any other work, — 
 as far, at least, as I can or dare. For I 
 neither can nor dare throw off a strong and 
 awful prepossession in its favour — certain as 
 I am that a large part of the light and life in 
 and by which I see, love, and embrace the 
 truths and the strengths coorganized into a 
 living body of faith and knowledge, has been 
 derived to me from the sacred volume." He 
 added this : " If between this Word — the 
 Word that was in the beginning — the light 
 that lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world — if between this Word and the written 
 letter, I shall anywhere seem to myself to find 
 a discrepancy, I will not conclude that such 
 there actually is ; nor, on the other hand, will 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 217 
 
 I fall under the condemnation of them that 
 would lie for God, but, seek as I may, be 
 thankful for what I have,— and wait."—" In 
 the Bible, there is more that finds me than I 
 have experienced in all other books put to- 
 gether ; the words of the Bible find me at 
 greater depths of my being, and whatever 
 finds me brings with it an irresistible evi- 
 dence of having proceeded from the Holy 
 Spirit." 
 
 We are here, with him, and with this self- 
 evidencing power in the sacred Scriptures, 
 which puts their truthfulness and trustworthi- 
 ness among the securities of the human soul. 
 There and there only, in you and me, they 
 are safe. They become endeared to the life 
 of the human personality. It is not other- 
 wise with any text for your sermon, which is 
 likeliest to be productive of a discourse of 
 power. In all the Bible, which finds you at 
 such a depth, and so unquestionably gives 
 evidence of its light and its authority over 
 darkness by casting out the darkness with the 
 presence of light, there burns forth your text, 
 which ^nds you, in its special and convincing 
 
2l8 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 way. When you meet it, or it meets you, 
 you feel as Rossetti says he felt when he 
 met Swinburne. Here was the certified atti- 
 tude and utterance of genius. This was 
 merely intellectual recognition. How much 
 more must be the ethical commandment in 
 Moses and in Jesus Christ to us ! 
 
 Whether the subject has found the text 
 after it has wandered in your mind, unclothed, 
 mystical, and half angelic, but yet very hu- 
 man, and waiting for the clothing and girding 
 which this text now gives it, or whether the 
 text is the discoverer, or the means of discov- 
 ering this now panoplied theme of yours 
 which, after they have found one another, 
 seems never to have been fitly treated, having 
 hitherto been unclothed, I shall not stop to 
 inquire, because it is probable that no two 
 men have similar experiences in this matter. 
 It is also certain to me that the truly great 
 preachers I have known have had both of 
 these experiences, and they have occurred 
 within the same fortnight. The essential 
 thing is this — we must always get back to 
 the Spiritual Life of the minister as the one 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 219 
 
 fact which operates dominantly and decisively, 
 and altogether healthfully, so that it makes no 
 difference whether the preacher's subject finds 
 the text, or the text finds the subject. Both 
 these things will occur. But the sacred 
 Scriptures, which are the record of a religious 
 experience, nationally or personally, just like 
 his own, wonderfully descriptive of his own 
 as he reads the page of prophet, or psalmist, 
 or evangelist, or apostle, — this scripture 
 must have so found him as a record of human 
 life, therefore, a transcript of living, that his 
 text will take its place at the beginning of his 
 discourse, not at all as a convenient place of 
 departure ; not at all as a terminal station to 
 which he laboriously sets his train of thought 
 going, but as a masterful power-house. 
 
 At least, it must be the opening out of 
 the great resourceful plant whence power is 
 sent forth so strongly that it shall find the 
 shortest distance between two points to be a 
 straight line, yet so wisely and intelligently and 
 even sympathetically sent forth that it may be 
 directed to the accomplishment of human 
 purposes anywhere and everywhere for the 
 
220 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 highest ends. In any other wise used, a text 
 is sure either to be abused or to be in one's 
 way, or even, sometimes, to stand fatefuUy at 
 the head of a sermon as the condemnation of 
 the sermon itself. Unless a text grips you 
 with its realized ability to set your thoughts 
 and emotions going towards the end of win- 
 ning human beings to a willing submission 
 of their souls and their lives to God, as their 
 Father, through Jesus Christ, their Brother, — 
 do not dare to use it. 
 
 Probably you have not seen into the text 
 as the plant, or power-house, capable of 
 furnishing you the forces you need. Do not 
 suppose your audience will not see it, before 
 your unconnected discourse has been pushed 
 to some terminal station. Our time is exceed- 
 ingly well instructed as to the possibilities 
 and uses of power. Men in your audience 
 will discern the flashings of electric energy 
 from that text, which contrasts so terribly with 
 your powerlessness. It will flame and scatter 
 sparks and writhe and twist with a kind of 
 dumb effort to get at your load and push it 
 along. Nothing is so revealing, as to the 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 221 
 
 heaviness of your unaccelerated talk and the 
 peril of fires unused, as such a condition of 
 things. 
 
 Here, again, is one of the preventions of- 
 fered by the Spiritual Life. No man who 
 lives deeply is so likely to misuse, as Scrip- 
 ture, or to proceed with a text in sight of its 
 spiritual energy all unused, as is the one who 
 desperately sermonizes at people without 
 preaching to them, or " reasoning with them, 
 of judgment and the world to come." A liv- 
 ing familiarity with the Bible, or such famihar- 
 ity which comes through life by the constant 
 feeding upon the Truth and its development 
 in the Bible, will save you from all worry as 
 to texts. They will crowd upon you like so 
 many business propositions in a time of great 
 prosperity, when "the spirit is within the 
 wheels " and things are going, as we say. 
 Then, there comes the problem of what text 
 you shall use ? Whenever that problem ap- 
 pears, solve it by letting your dearest theme 
 have its way. Of course, your theme will have 
 chosen you. It will come partly out of your 
 meditation, partly out of your reading, but 
 
222 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the tap root of it will go down into your ex 
 perience as a minister, seeking personally 
 either to rescue or to elevate into God's sanc- 
 tifying influence the souls of human beings. 
 
 The Spiritual Life, then, is behind your 
 abiUty to see these human beings. Any hu- 
 man being is the heaviest and most loved 
 weight upon your soul. His moral situation, 
 as you diagnose his difficulty, leaves you no 
 choice as to what you shall speak upon. See- 
 ing him, you know there are multitudes like 
 him. Do not fail here ; do not think he is 
 only one man. Having found him, you have 
 found the congregation ; he is the key to the 
 human situation. Once let him go, and you 
 have perhaps no other human being in sight. 
 If he goes from you, you ought not to preach 
 at all. Hold fast to him. His condition now 
 stretches out under the sky of God. If your 
 theme does not come welling up, at once, out 
 of his need, and, instead, he is arid as death to 
 your unilluminated soul, press on with your 
 truth. Then your theme will come down out 
 of the sky, as the clouds release their treas- 
 uries of rain. Then the very aridness of this 
 
DETERMINATIONS AND DELIVERANCES 223 
 
 man's condition will make you see rain, and 
 appreciate rain, and love rain, and rejoice as 
 the desert itself rejoices while it rains. Do 
 not be too anxious not to get wet yourself. 
 Perhaps your own field may share in the 
 beneficence of the shower. 
 
 But have we forgotten about what text 
 you used? Any theme, so vitalized — not 
 merely sermonized — as that theme was, by 
 its origin and development in this one man's 
 life, in the case of any preacher who knows 
 enough of our Holy Scriptures to fitly enter 
 the ministry, will infallibly have chosen some 
 word of Holy Writ which sets forth the 
 same experience with Biblical vividness, or 
 which enforces the commandment which once 
 uttered itself to an ancient saint at the same 
 psychological crisis, or, it shall be, that some 
 promise which came in olden days, when a 
 similar rain left a rainbow in the sky, and all 
 human life will so shine through everything. 
 Then, most happily, the vision of God which 
 prevailed at a similar contest of grace with 
 sin, or truth with falsity, must have the vic- 
 tory, and bring blessing with the triumph. 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND 
 THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND THE 
 MINISTER'S MESSAGE 
 
 LET not my statement of the theme for 
 to-day mislead you. Of course, and, 
 as I beheve, of my bounden duty, I 
 have assumed that whatever has been spoken 
 by my predecessors in this lectureship is at 
 your hand, and that you either have availed 
 yourselves of its teaching, or that you will 
 soon find there what no student of the work 
 of the ministry, especially in preaching, 
 would neglect here, any more than the 
 blessed influences from the past which are 
 circulating in the air you breathe at this 
 school of the prophets, or the stately and 
 inspiring traditions which attend you within 
 these halls. I have, therefore, also foreborne 
 to address you upon the matters affecting 
 any systematic mastery of homiletics as a 
 science. I hold your teachers in the honour 
 the world accords them, and so I would not 
 227 
 
228 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 trench upon a domain beyond my skill. Yet 
 I am glad to think I am not far from either 
 of these interests, if I now so approach and 
 consider with you certain ministerial func- 
 tions other than that of preaching, as I hope 
 to do, that these shall at once and forever 
 contribute to and reinforce, as I believe noth- 
 ing else may, your power as Christian 
 preachers. 
 
 In yesterday's study, we had almost un- 
 expectedly, yet, as I hope, inevitably, 
 reached that interesting item in preaching 
 called the Text; and then we found that 
 only a luminous Spiritual Life within us may 
 assure us of a vital and vitalizing statement 
 of Truth, even from the Holy Scriptures, such 
 as may at once help to originate and give 
 worthiness to that form of an address called 
 a sermon. Now, if many years of life as a 
 preacher, amongst many classes of my fel- 
 low beings, have taught me anything, they 
 have taught me this : that the Christian ser- 
 mon, which is an impersonal thing, must be 
 sufiFused with personality, and it must depend 
 for its note of personality, as a means to an 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 229 
 
 end, upon the preacher to the people himself 
 being also the pastor of the people whom 
 God has given him to minister unto, in the 
 things affecting them from the Christian 
 point of view. 
 
 I. The shepherding minister is the 
 pastor. 
 
 II. He will be, in and out of his pulpit, a 
 veritable voice of prayer ; and, in this sense, 
 he will be the priest that he may become 
 a truer prophet — for this is the order — the 
 prophet of his people. 
 
 III. He will also be the man of whom Job 
 had many a pre-Christian vision, as by and 
 through his sufferings he broke through an 
 inadequate theology and obtained a theology 
 which was also a theodicy, adequate to hu- 
 man life's issues and demands. The minis- 
 ter will be one with whom " the consolations 
 of God " are not small, but mighty; one who 
 always may humbly and truthfully say, in the 
 highest sense : " The blessing of him who 
 was ready to perish came upon me." 
 
 Let me speak first, therefore, of the minister 
 as the pastor of his flock who is to be the 
 
23© THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 preacher to them. Perhaps it is because 
 many have come to be preachers, through 
 making a comparison issuing in favour of 
 the choice of the pulpit as the most promis- 
 ing throne of power, for a seriously-minded 
 Christian man who would make the most 
 out of his life, that we find such almost 
 feverish and monotonous emphasis in speech 
 and writing placed upon the work of the 
 minister as a preacher. I do not contest the 
 truth of the assertion that the preaching 
 function is first and foremost, and for that 
 variety and multitude of reasons, I think, 
 sufficiently voiced and voiceful here. I do, 
 however, contend that the most useful, and, 
 therefore, the most effective spokesman of 
 the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is originally born 
 out of, guided and nurtured by the experi- 
 ence of his own soul set aflame with Divine 
 Love, by his seeking to shepherd some lost 
 sheep of God our Father. We must not 
 permit an age artistic and voluble in speech 
 to turn us away from the fact that one such a 
 man as the commonplace Andrew begins for 
 us a mighty era in the history of preaching. 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 23 1 
 
 by his shepherding one man, and in a man- 
 ner very unsermonic and quite without public 
 eloquence, — one man, even Simon Peter. I 
 need not remind you, though it is to my 
 main purpose, that this memorable achieve- 
 ment in the history of souls drew mightily 
 upon the resources of a deep and strong 
 personal spirituality in this early Christian. 
 It will demand as much from the latest Chris- 
 tian, also. 
 
 Of all the ways of entering the Christian 
 ministry, if I were to choose for my best be- 
 loved the way which must most empower 
 him from the start, I would choose this. A 
 ministry to the world, begun when the per- 
 sonal Spiritual Life is brothering a loved 
 person into the spiritual family of the All- 
 Father, has gained its manner at once. It 
 will be gloriously personal, all the way 
 through. 
 
 My brothers, I believe we can more sympa- 
 thetically, and, therefore, successfully, deal 
 with this matter, in the light and by the help 
 of this incident in the early history of the 
 Christian pulpit. Our studyof it may help us 
 
232 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 also to appreciate the value of the Scriptures, 
 in and for the solution of many similar prob- 
 lems. I am frank to say that, in my judg- 
 ment, much of the inefficiency of modern 
 preaching comes of pulpiteering. We grow 
 impersonal enough to permit hundreds of 
 personal beings constituting a congregation 
 to impersonalize themselves into what we call 
 an audience. Addressing an audience, with 
 ever so pious a message, is about the farthest 
 thing, in all public effort, from preaching the 
 Gospel to men and women. An ex-cathedra 
 air dispersonalizes our most indubitably per- 
 sonal associate, who slips from the touch of 
 our personality, as soon as he sits down in 
 yonder seat and becomes part of our audi- 
 ence. We are no longer in personal rela- 
 tions with him. It will be a mighty gain to 
 the Church if you, having somehow lost your 
 personality in these illusions as to what con- 
 stitutes power in the pulpit, may so study what 
 you may call this commonplace and ordinary 
 man, Andrew, that you may recover the note 
 of personality, and once more see human per- 
 sons with whom you are thinking and feeling 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 233 
 
 and willing in your speech aimed towards 
 personal righteousness, as you preach to 
 them. It will be a blessing, such as few other 
 gifts will contain, for the Church of Christ 
 and the world, if those of you, who have not 
 lost personality and the vivid and sympa- 
 thetic sense of the personality of each man 
 whom you would reach with the influence of 
 the personal Christ, shall so study such a 
 man as Andrew, who unquestionably fur- 
 nishes us with the open secret of ministerial 
 power, to the end of making his spiritual 
 attitude and method your own. 
 
 We will every one of us feel at home 
 with Andrew. Most of us are commonplace 
 and ordinary men, at best. If you have ever 
 told yourself this truth, in some fine moment 
 of sincerity, I trust you have not been dis- 
 couraged as to your value and your possible 
 power in the Christian ministry. For any 
 man is as great as the load he pulls; and 
 Andrew certainly brought Simon Peter, with 
 all his greatness, to his Master and Lord. 
 When we think of this, how can we call any 
 one ordinary or commonplace, even though 
 
234 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 he be as inconspicuous and manifest as little 
 of genius as did Andrew ? 
 
 What was the situation of these two men, 
 Andrew and Simon ? I always think of that 
 mighty Atlantic steamer, the pride and glory 
 of the line, one of the earlier greyhounds of 
 the ocean, and this certain episode in the his- 
 tory of that ship, when I try to account for the 
 achievement of Andrew. A great arm like 
 that called Sandy Hook, with viewless shift- 
 ing sands which pile up in submerged hil- 
 locks, because of the stormy currents be- 
 neath, makes out from the mainland. To 
 reach the port, ships coming from Europe 
 still have to pass over these sands. In mid- 
 winter, this monarch of the deep, at the mo- 
 ment when every one on board was jubilant 
 with the home-feeling and thankful to have 
 returned safely, plowed suddenly into the 
 sand, stopped and careened. Hour after 
 hour of pitiless ocean-waves exposed this 
 giant craft, with all her beauty and power, 
 to the dangerous sport of a wrathful sea. 
 Men and women prayed and cried. The 
 masts and cordage became clothed with 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 235 
 
 ice, and, when the Hght pierced the storm- 
 clouds and mist, it glanced upon something 
 more ghosdike and splendid than Coleridge 
 ever dreamed of, or an Ancient Mariner ever 
 beheld. It was glorious, but it was a glory 
 of failure with grandeur and of death over- 
 matching life. 
 
 Away of! there, however, through the fog, 
 now half in sight, now buried in waves, with 
 her smoke-stack belching blackness and her 
 bows lifted, just then riding on the crest of 
 a breaking sea, came what seemed a tug. 
 Nobody thought it was possible for that tug 
 to live in such a sea, but such straightforward- 
 ness of movement and certainty of approach 
 had that grimy and unattractive craft, that 
 those who felt safe enough to relieve the in- 
 tensity of the situation smiled at that bossy 
 embodiment of assurance coming for the 
 release of the great ship. By and by, the 
 ocean-ranger was securely made fast to the 
 tug. Then the homely thing which was so 
 nearly all engine, except her unattractive 
 hull and form, pulled towards harbour and 
 port. The mighty ocean palace, a moment 
 
236 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 before so utterly helpless, and almost more 
 powerless because of the superb enginery 
 motionless and still within her, slipped from 
 the sand-bar, righted herself, and was majes- 
 tic again. She was making grandly for port. 
 But not alone was she. Captain and crew 
 and all on board would not permit the tug to 
 get out of sight, or even out of touch ; and 
 when at last the glittering grandeur that was 
 called the pride of the line came to her dock, 
 and thousands with tears and shouts welcomed 
 her, the mightiest salvo of praise must have 
 penetrated to the very heart of that tug, for 
 it belonged to it. The affection of happy 
 men and women must have warmed the fires, 
 whose intensity of heat had diminished only 
 because the magnificent ship was now safe in 
 port. 
 
 Now, that ocean liner was Simon Peter 
 and that tug was Andrew. I believe sin- 
 cerely that to make the business of preach- 
 ing successful, you and I must be masters 
 of Andrew's method. I am convinced that, 
 from the pulpit, we do not exercise the kind 
 of power he had for releasing that great 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 237 
 
 man and bringing him to the desired haven. 
 Let us acknowledge that, like that fine ship, 
 our Simon Peters are not bad men. They 
 are good men, and, as we say, grand fellows. 
 Let us not think of any kind of men now, but 
 these men about us who interest us so much, 
 because of the magnificence of their abilities 
 and the attractiveness of their mental and 
 moral furnishings. The fact about them is, 
 however, their religion is inadequate. The 
 bar called Sandy Hook is a portion of the 
 America towards which the Alaska was 
 bound. In a sense, when that ship struck 
 the sand which would have been untouched 
 beneath the keel of lesser ships, she had al- 
 ready reached America. In a sense, also, 
 Andrew's brother Simon was already relig- 
 ious. He was not only a good Jew, but he 
 was also a disciple of John the Baptizer. 
 Even as we must justly estimate his reUgion, 
 and especially its body of Truth, so we must 
 justly estimate the less than satisfactory re- 
 ligiousness and the submerged body of Truth 
 which many a noble man has struck upon, 
 and which holds him from going further. 
 
238 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 There is a singular grandeur and yet a sin- 
 gular pathos in the scene, in the midst of 
 which we behold Simon, or any good man of 
 that day, as the disciple of John the Baptizer. 
 It is ennobling to hear with responses of heart 
 and will the solemn command, " Repent 1 
 Repent I " Nothing on earth is more sublime 
 than a man honest with his soul, when the air 
 quivers with such a trumpet tone. It is 
 grander still to take a step — an outward, visi- 
 ble, irreversible step — which puts that obe- 
 dience into the form of an action, and, be- 
 fore men, draws the line between the soul's 
 new hope and its unsatisfactory past. Noth- 
 ing on earth is more impressive than a human 
 being entering into the waters of baptism 
 with a hope of spotless purity. 
 
 Yet there was a deep pathos about Simon's 
 response to the cry, " Repent," and his bap- 
 tism by John. For, compared with what 
 Simon's soul needed in order to reach his 
 broadest, noblest manhood, these all, and 
 alone, could accomplish so litde. He needed 
 a power which would do something positive 
 in him and for him. To repent was only to 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 239 
 
 cut himself loose from his past : it was a nega- 
 tive work. The same Simon-soil remained 
 upon which other weeds could grow, if these 
 had been uprooted. Something more than 
 repentance must we have. He needed a force 
 within him that should consume the annoying 
 and dead moralities of his spirit with the 
 flame of a resistless religiousness, an energy 
 which would rouse every latent strength of 
 his spirit into manifest activity. To be bap- 
 tized by John for the remission of sins was 
 only to outwardly symbolize a negative puri- 
 fication. He must be more than pure, if he 
 is to remain pure ; he must be powerful. 
 Some more interior and energetic baptism 
 than that of John he must have, if he is to 
 reach his best manhood. Let us not under- 
 estimate the significance of the step Simon 
 had already taken by becoming a disciple of 
 John. He had obtained a sense of reality 
 which had made it impossible for him to be 
 satisfied with the unrealities of Pharisees and 
 Scribes, and which had prepared him for con- 
 fessing any divine reality to which he might 
 be led, and he was full of the idea of the near- 
 
240 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 ness of "the Messiah." On one of these 
 days, through which were streaming the lights 
 of hope which John the Baptizer had let into 
 Simon's soul, his brother Andrew came to 
 him and broke the silence with the more im- 
 portant news, " We have found the Messias." 
 Let us see what a personal Spiritual Life was 
 behind all this in Andrew. 
 
 Where had Andrew been to obtain such 
 information? Not far away. We who 
 would be ministers of power need only 
 have our spiritual eyes open to behold the 
 Lamb of God walking on the very pathway 
 of life which we thoughtlessly tread. An- 
 drew says, "We have found the Messias." 
 Who are "w<?"? Why, another John had 
 been with Andrew near the Jordan. How 
 came these commonplace men to make such 
 a matchless discovery? Well, by being in 
 good company. By keeping close to the best 
 truth-teller they knew of, they discovered a 
 better, as men always do, until they find Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 Only the day before, these two friends 
 were standing in the presence of John, when 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 24I 
 
 there came near to them one whom this John 
 might have spoken of as his cousin, Jesus, 
 Mary's son. But he did not thus speak of 
 Him, because the Baptizer saw more deeply 
 than this. Most of us get only the most 
 superficial qualities and gifts from the figures 
 which a little while throng our life-paths. We 
 see superficially, for we have not the spiritual 
 eyesight which comes of obedience of the 
 Truth we know. We only see our cousin in our 
 Christ. John the Baptizer might have spoken 
 of Him as his convert. That would have been 
 like many a modern statistician of the faith. 
 Had he not baptized Him ? It does not require 
 more than the performance of some formal act, 
 or more than the contact of our soul with an- 
 other soul in a brief conversation, to make 
 some of us very unlike John, especially in this. 
 The smaller always claims the larger. John's 
 mind had been dealing in the solitudes, and 
 in the face of vast audiences, with the pro- 
 found and passionate cries of the human soul, 
 and with the infinite and tender response of 
 God, its Father, to its needs. Away below 
 every other fact which had to do with the 
 
242 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 weakness or woe of humanity, his eye saw 
 this one only — siii. He had what any man 
 who approaches a true ministry must have, a 
 quick sense of the fundamental cause of all 
 human woe. No other schemes for the 
 changing of man's sorrows into joys and his 
 weakness into strength employed his mind. 
 Man must be delivered from sin. John had a 
 dim sense of the sin-bearing love of God. 
 He therefore threw into his words the whole 
 significance of these visions and hopes, along 
 with the eloquent meanings of a past which 
 Andrew had partially understood, when the 
 Baptizer pointed to Jesus, and said : " Be- 
 hold the Lamb of God." The day before he 
 had said, when this same Jesus came in sight, 
 " Behold the Lamb of God which taketh 
 away the sin of the worlds 
 
 It is quite impossible for me to think 
 that these simple fishermen entirely grasped 
 the fine significance of these great words. 
 The after-life of these who became disciples 
 of Jesus shows that, not until after their Lord 
 had lived His life on earth, did they have any 
 thing like a clear conception of the truth of 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 243 
 
 the sin-bearing Lamb of God. It would cer- 
 tainly be too much to presume these men to 
 have seen in these words the multitude of 
 mutually exclusive ideas which differing com- 
 mentators have there discovered. It was, at 
 all events, too great a saying for their thought 
 and experience to take in. Great revelations 
 are themselves, at first, great mysteries. 
 Jesus the greatest of revelations is the great- 
 est of mysteries. But what can, what ought 
 a true man to do in the presence of such a re- 
 vealing mystery ? Andrew and his companion 
 show us. They approach it with reverence. 
 They do not speak, until it does — " and the 
 two disciples heard Him speak," — and having 
 heard, they obey — " and they followed Jesus." 
 God must help us to listen. It is not an easy 
 thing for many preachers to do. Then we 
 must follow until He speaks again to us. 
 
 Our Lord should find in us what made 
 Andrew the kind of man to deal with, to the 
 end of producing certain results in the form 
 of religion — a man who is certain of finding 
 the living kernel within every forbidding mys- 
 tery. The passive virtues combine to make 
 
244 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 active soul-winners. He was inwardly at- 
 tracted by Truth. No more than Andrew, 
 should any one of you be a superstitious, fear- 
 ful hunter after Truth, beginning to tremble 
 when you have to keep still and hear Truth 
 speak. The true minister is not made of a 
 man who quakes with fear, when, after he 
 has asked the Truth where it lives, as An- 
 drew did. Truth says, as Jesus said : " Come 
 and see." Let us fear only the superstition 
 or agnosticism which keeps us from the joy- 
 ous task of going home with Truth, as 
 Andrew did, and dwelling with it in the 
 person of Jesus. The account says : " He 
 abode with Him that day." He had a home- 
 view of Jesus ; he saw Truth where it is 
 simplest and most hospitable. He came 
 away, as all of us must do, from any interview 
 with " Truth as it is in Jesus,'' with a master- 
 ful reverence and love for that kind of mys- 
 terious revelation which invites the human 
 soul to its own home, and which always says 
 to all honest and earnest souls : " Come and 
 see." Christianity is a fact whose familiarity 
 is divine. 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 245 
 
 What then occurred? Andrew was so 
 brothered by Jesus ; he so got enough of the 
 truth concerning Him to guarantee his com- 
 ing some time to the rest ; he was so per- 
 vaded by the brotherliness of Him, that he 
 began to feel brotherward, Simon-ward ; and 
 he longed for Simon, to draw him up within 
 the genial radiance. I despair of any man's 
 ministry which does not thus get its attitude, 
 inspiration, and method. 
 
 Now, with many of our methods and habits 
 of getting acquainted with Truth and dealing 
 with all mysterious revelations — with our way 
 of never going up to a mystery and listen- 
 ing, but rather speaking unpreparedly about 
 it, and with our way of never following it 
 home and staying patiently with it all day, 
 but rather avoiding even the effort, we are 
 likely to be surprised that this man Andrew 
 should ask himself just these questions : 
 "Where is Simon, my brother? and how 
 can I get him here ? " How this puts our 
 brotherliness to shame ! How such a vivid, 
 commanding vision of Jesus as this contrasts 
 with our pale, vague views of Jesus, which 
 
246 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 have no power to send us to anybody, not 
 even to our most distant relatives, in a letter 
 written in the third person and without ad- 
 dress or date I We may well go further and 
 study Andrew's method of bringing Simon 
 to Jesus. For here is the beginning of min- 
 istry. 
 
 There are three stages in the process with 
 Andrew, and there will be these three for you 
 and me : 
 
 (/) Finding. " He first findeth his own 
 brother Simon." (Verse 41.) 
 
 {2) Saying. " And saith unto him : ' We 
 have found the Messias.' " (Verse 41.) 
 
 (j) Bringing. " And he brought him to 
 Jesus." (Verse 42.) 
 
 I. Finding : Men have failed to observe 
 this order. We have often been speaking to 
 or at our brother, before we have known 
 where he was. Be sure our words do not 
 find men, when we have not first found them. 
 Men know whether our brotherliness knows 
 where they are, or not. What made Andrew 
 such a successful finder of the soul he sought 
 for? You say it was his generous, intense 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 247 
 
 brotherhood. That, surely, ought to make a 
 man successful in finding a brother's soul, 
 a Simon. The boys who nursed the same 
 breasts, clambered upon the same knees, 
 kissed the same lips, saw the same tears, and 
 perhaps stood together at the same graves, 
 each ought to be easily found when he is 
 sought by the other. But it is not always 
 so. Sometimes a mother's tears roll like 
 unmeasured oceans between two children, 
 Andrew and Simon. When brotherhood has 
 been debased and slain, the very gravitations 
 pull the hearts asunder. It is a dreadful 
 hour when Andrew ca-nnot Jind Simon — when 
 Andrew's haunts and loves and Simon's are 
 as far apart in reality as east from west, 
 although the city directory says they live in 
 the same block. It is a fact before whose 
 presence men ought to shed tears of grateful 
 joy, whenever Andrew and Simon may easily 
 and surely find each other. 
 
 Strange enough it is, that men we meet 
 can find each other so rarely, when they 
 have something to tell of Jesus. It seems 
 hardest for those who are most familiarly 
 
248 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 bound together. A brother superficially in- 
 fluenced by Jesus wants to hunt for some- 
 body else's relatives. He can talk with his 
 brother on every other topic, can warn him 
 to avoid stormy weather, can beg him to 
 keep out of the hot sun, can entreat him to 
 escape the burning house and force him to 
 leap ior his life ; but when eternal destiny is 
 to be decided and the hour is nearly gone, 
 he is tongue-tied. He gropes in his talk. 
 He seems blindfolded with embarrassment. 
 He finds everybody else ; he cannot find his 
 brother. It is all but impossible for him to 
 remember the need of Simon — Andrew is so 
 happy ! Oh, what a lie is all this ! Oh, con- 
 trariwise when an Andrew really and deeply 
 has been found by Jesus, who is Christ, he 
 *'Jirsi,^' of all things after that, " findeth his 
 own brother Simon." It is a superficial 
 Christian experience which forgets the ten- 
 derest ties and the nearest heart-companions, 
 and contents itself for the first month in 
 hiring a sixth-story room and mailing tracts, 
 or singing about the new Jerusalem. If you 
 do not feel that you must teJl somebody, and 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 249 
 
 especially the man nearest you, about Christ, 
 it is because you have not much to tell. 
 
 Here is the making of the minister. All 
 true ministers are made such by Christ's 
 revealing in them a passion of brotherliness 
 for brotherhood, by and through His own. 
 
 Jesus gave to Andrew, first of all, a sense 
 that he himself was a brother of Simon, and, 
 secondly, a consciousness of the fact that 
 Simon was a brother of him. Unless you 
 have received this gift, your call to the mm- 
 istry is of doubtful authenticity. These con- 
 stitute the nerve of missions. Some of us 
 get one of these ideas without the other. A 
 man who cannot, and does not, live in the 
 apprehension of both of them, is not ac- 
 quainted with Andrew's Christ, and cannot 
 preach Him. Here was a brother to look; 
 and there was a brother to look for. Simon 
 was just as real to Andrew as Andrew was 
 to himself. Christ gives the soul so good a 
 gift that it says : " Brother must have it." 
 This is the only reason for a sermon, ex- 
 cept this : Christ intensifies the sense of a 
 brother's value so much that the soul says, 
 
250 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 " Christ must have my brother.''^ These two 
 are Alpha and Omega for us. 
 
 When you see even dimly the glory which 
 streamed out upon every brother-man from 
 this Christ, when the rays of hope sprang 
 from the very brow of Messias as you know 
 Him in your own spiritual experience with 
 Him — when you see how certain is the 
 splendid future of every brother-man in 
 Him, your eyes will be full of light. You 
 will see deeper, further than ever before, and 
 you vf'iW Jind Simon who shall be Peter, " the 
 rock-man." Priceless will be his worth to 
 you. Andrew had eyes that must find him ; 
 so must yours and mine. Have we for- 
 gotten " ministerial functions " ? No. But 
 to be a soul-winner is more to our hope, and 
 it is more than all functioning ministerially. 
 You must have brotherly eyes to find Simon. 
 In those eyes must be the light of God's 
 Son, which will shut every false shadow out. 
 In those eyes must be a sense of what Christ 
 has for your brother ; that will take you to 
 him, unembarrassed and unafraid. It will 
 make you forget your audience^ as you talk 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 25 1 
 
 of Jesus as with one man. In those eyes 
 must glow Christ's valuation of your brother, 
 which will make it impossible for you to see 
 anything else. Into those eyes there must 
 have come the divine love which looked 
 earthward in Christ and found you — a love 
 which will look the universe through and 
 through until Andrew finds Simon. The 
 soul-finder has eyes which are set on finding. 
 I suppose Andrew was simple and old- 
 fashioned enough to go where Simon could 
 be found. We are too fashionable, or too 
 decorous, or too churchly, or too cold-hearted 
 and un-Christian to do that. It is all seen 
 in the location of our church and its unfitness 
 for finding anybody personally. Too often 
 we establish ourselves within a great build- 
 ing of solemn look and dignified architecture, 
 removed from Simon's haunts, especially if 
 he has gone wrong or needs us much, with 
 stilted mannerisms and hard forms which 
 are uninviting to him, with a theological test 
 for every visitor who would have fellowship 
 with us — a test which we do not ourselves 
 understand or profess to enforce in preach- 
 
252 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 ing — and, having established our place of 
 operation, with such completeness and care, 
 we practically say to our brother Simon, who 
 does not know Jesus at all, " Now you come 
 in here, and beheve, or be lost." I know 
 that this is a very bold way of stating it, but 
 I meant you should see the dreadful contrast 
 between the way in which Andrew found 
 Simon and the way in which we can never 
 find Simon, our brother. To find Simon, 
 Andrew goes where he is, and so must we. 
 
 We must go where men are, touch them 
 where they are, seek them for what they are, 
 if we are to be soul-winners like Andrew. 
 Andrew's Christian enthusiasm would have 
 carried him over danger, through deep dark- 
 ness, past vile places, across seas of disgust- 
 ing infamy, up any height of difficulty, down 
 into any depth of disgrace, if by any or all he 
 might have found Simon ! So will yours and 
 mine, when we have Andrew's experience, 
 and only then. After he sees Jesus, a man 
 has new eyes for souls. No den of infamy 
 is too horrible for his pious feet, if away 
 there, at the end of his path of love, sparkles 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 253 
 
 the gem of a soul. No distance leading 
 through by-ways of shame, and up rough 
 rocks of forbidding sharpness, is too long or 
 too severe, if such a soul knows that there is 
 a human being who needs Christ, at the end. 
 The Church must go where men are ; it must 
 find them, if it is to be Christian. 
 
 Go to none of these places, if Christ has 
 not found you and gripped you strongly. 
 Do not dare to take hold of a Simon, so 
 burly in energy of will, impetuous and hard 
 to handle, unless, when you grasp his hand, 
 your own is surely in the grasp of the 
 Almighty Christ. You may brother others, 
 only when you are brothered divinely. 
 
 II. Saying: Andrew findeth and then 
 Andrew sayeth. Many a man and many an 
 institution have somehow found men : and 
 yet they have not been " brought to Jesus." 
 Simon has remained the same Simon, with- 
 out an intimation of ever being transformed 
 into a Peter. Men are so ready to hear, so 
 anxious for a tone of hope, so hungry for a 
 crumb of inspiration, that it is not hard to find 
 them, if one wants to do them ever so litde 
 
254 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 good. Many a man has confessed to you, 
 already, by the earnestness with which some 
 tiny ray of your meagre store of sunlight has 
 been caught up, that he is a plant whose na- 
 ture pleads for the sun. Every soul in your 
 parish is a prophet of the Christ. The ease 
 with which a little brotherly goodness finds 
 men shows how they will always, yea, must 
 always respond to the divine goodness, to 
 God. It is an awful thing for a man known 
 as a minister, stronger and clearer-eyed for 
 goodness and truth, to find men, to disturb 
 them at their depths, to make the old past 
 impossible for them — and then to have no 
 word to say which shall bring them face to 
 face with goodness itself, with God, with Him 
 who is Truth. Before the awakened army of 
 a man's powers let not the leader be dumb. 
 And you would better be dumb than to be 
 unable then to present the Captain of our 
 salvation to that man's powers, which are 
 risen up "clad in complete steel." There 
 ought to be no doubt as to the message. It 
 is like Emerson's " inevitable word " which 
 makes the poem ; this is the sermon. 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 255 
 
 There is very little need of your saying 
 anything, if there is anything save one thing 
 which you can say. There was one thing, 
 and one only, which Andrew might say : 
 " We have found the Messias." How much 
 more grandly one brother man can talk to 
 another than that in heaven, I do not know ; 
 one thing is sure, there never was loftier 
 saying on earth than this to Simon from 
 Andrew : " We have found the Messias." 
 
 Do not underestimate the cogency of the 
 fact that it came from Andrew, was of him, 
 and just like him. A message is never much, 
 unless it has in it the personal biography of 
 the man who utters it. Every really minis- 
 tering man's character communicates his 
 quality through his message. It is aston- 
 ishing to observe the revelation, and also 
 hear of the capital experience of the in- 
 tellect's regeneration, in the succinctness, 
 lucidity, and suggestiveness of his phrase- 
 ology. A sincere man, however small or 
 great his genius, will unveil his personality, 
 and this will delineate itself truly, behind and 
 within whatever message he has to deliver. 
 
256 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 in moments when this unforgetable expe- 
 rience is used as a resource. Even the 
 peculiarities of that experience, which made 
 it impossible for him to be anything else 
 than a preacher, or which, dealing with his 
 own age and its difficulties has given to him 
 his own message, will appear likewise, even 
 in his way of stating it. Here is another 
 evidence of the power and even the determi- 
 nation of the unconscious and deepest in us, 
 and of us. 
 
 Let us leave Andrew for a moment ; for as 
 an ordinarily endowed man, we may consider 
 him, — a man whose nearness to us in this 
 matter of ordinariness comforts us especially 
 when we see what a successful ministry was 
 his, through his bringing Simon Peter into 
 the kingdom. Let us go to Phillips Brooks, 
 a man extraordinarily endowed, who, never- 
 theless, in all the upward regions of his 
 magnificent mind, exercised that fatherhood 
 of the genius for goodness which Washing- 
 ton exercised and which, as I have said, a 
 Napoleonic kind of man never can exercise. 
 The American leader is called the " Father of 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 257 
 
 his Country " — a thing no penetrative mind 
 could dream of the French leader. All fa- 
 therhood of genius is of the same quality. It 
 was in those moments, when Phillips Brooks 
 was most luminous and effective, when the 
 shining retinue of his abilities seemed self- 
 illuminative, that one obtained a certain self- 
 revelation to which I will refer as manifested 
 in two sermons, which I well remember. You 
 may, and ought, to study them for yourselves. 
 They are only two of a large number which 
 I heard as a young man ; and now I re- 
 member that not one that I ever heard from 
 this preacher, when he was at what we 
 called " his best," failed to betray this inter- 
 esting fact — he seemed ever standing at a 
 kind of crossroads, where two truths came 
 into that reconciliation of truths which the 
 noblest human life alone furnishes. The first 
 sermon had as its text, " Peter saith unto 
 him, ' Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now ? ' " 
 He at once said that he would speak of the 
 delayed completions of life. He brought into 
 view, first, Christ's announcement to His dis- 
 ciples that He was going from them, and that 
 
258 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 where He was going they should come also, 
 and Simon Peter's impetuous word of desire 
 and questioning : " Why cannot I follow 
 Thee now ? " It seemed very beautiful, this 
 thought of his immediate going with his 
 Lord homeward and heavenward. The 
 crossroads to which I refer, you may see in 
 the preacher's treatment of the spiritual 
 situation which Jesus left undisturbed, to 
 work out its beneficent results in Simon 
 Peter : *' Patience and struggle. An earnest 
 use of what we have now, and, all the time, 
 an earnest discontent until we come to what 
 we ought to be. Are not these what we 
 need, — what in their rich union we could not 
 get, except in just such a life as this with its 
 delayed completions ? Jesus does not blame 
 Peter when he impetuously begs that he 
 may follow Him now. He bids him wait 
 and he shall follow Him some day. But we 
 can see," said the preacher — and now the 
 crossroads — "that the value of his waiting 
 lies in the certainty that he shall follow^ 
 and the value of his following, zvhen it 
 comes, will lie in the fact that he has waited. 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 259 
 
 So, if we take all of Christ's culture, we are 
 sure that our life on earth may get al- 
 ready the inspiration of the heaven for 
 which we are training, and our life in heaven 
 may keep forever the blessing of the earth 
 in which we were trained." 
 
 The second sermon which I ask you to 
 study reveals the same thing, not more in the 
 spiritual situation than from the mind and 
 personality of the preacher, whose habit of 
 dealing with truths at crossroads, as I have 
 termed it, was an affair of character. He 
 saw his age and understood its cross-cur- 
 rents. The text is, "As Peter looked upon 
 the vision, an angel said unto him : ' Behold, 
 two men seek thee.' " Instantly, upon the 
 reading of the text, the preacher announced 
 his subject, " Man Between his Visions and 
 his Tasks." I need not give any long quota- 
 tion in this case. The crossroads was soon 
 in sight. It was approached and illuminated 
 as the preacher made it clear to that crowd 
 of students, gathered to hear this Commence- 
 ment Sermon from the pulpit of his own 
 University, that our tasks must have their 
 
26o THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 visions in order that they may be lit up with 
 the ideal ; and our visions must have their 
 tasks, in order that they may be made real. 
 It may be interesting, in this connection, to 
 say that this great, strong, overflowing, and 
 often impetuous man appeared to many of 
 us at his greatest when he was preaching on 
 Simon Peter. The ardent man for whom 
 commonplace Andrew had done so much, by 
 his ministry, was having his greatness proven 
 in the speech which welled up from the life of 
 his true brother. We could all see him, as 
 he accepted the keys from the hands of his 
 Master and Lord. 
 
 But to return to Andrew, and to the 
 atmosphere in which our ordinary powers 
 feel at home. We have learned, while we 
 have been away from him, that what the 
 successful Andrew or Bishop Brooks said, re- 
 quired no greater genius to utter than the 
 weakest here possesses ; for it ever is the 
 shortest, yet the clearest possible, statement 
 of the fact which has gripped his personality : 
 " We have found the Messias." The whole 
 of Christianity is fact. Not our profoundest 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 261 
 
 or acutest study of things, but Jesus Himself 
 must make each of us factual rather than 
 speculative. Obey Him, when He says to 
 our inquiries as to where He lives : " Come 
 and see." Follow Him, and you will be suffi- 
 ciently orthodox. You will know His rank 
 and reality. Andrew had the power of a fact 
 behind him and in his voice. A speculation 
 or a theory about this man Jesus would have 
 kept him, as it keeps us, indoors, musing and 
 philosophizing, for the day, at least. 
 
 " We have found the Messias. Simon, my 
 brother, I have a fact for you." When this 
 experience enters our preaching, it is irresist- 
 ible to an age devoted to facts. It makes his 
 literary style, without the man's thinking of 
 such a thing. We are told that men get the 
 best literary style by " having something to 
 say and then saying it." Any style heavy 
 with facts is saved from heaviness. A fact 
 clears a man's sentences of meaningless 
 phrases and cumbersome polysyllables. A 
 fact to tell of gives a speaker " economy of 
 the hearer's attention," and that, Herbert 
 Spencer says, is the secret of style. This 
 
262 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 Style of Andrew is the soul-winner's style. 
 Of course, as we have seen, here also is the 
 truth in Buff on' s fine saying : " The style is 
 the man." Andrew was a plain, strong, fact- 
 loving man, and that gave him plainness 
 and strength in handling this fact in the pres- 
 ence of Simon. The open secret of speaking 
 to men about Jesus, which we most need to 
 obtain, is first, like Andrew, be a plain man ; 
 secondly, like Andrew, also, deal in plaitt 
 statements of facts. 
 
 The way Truth has used to get into us 
 is likely to be the way which Truth uses 
 that it may go out of us to others. Read, 
 by all means, Bishop Lightfoot's essay on 
 the influence of Stephen upon St. Paul. 
 There you see Paul, years after his hearing 
 Stephen's defense, made while the young 
 Pharisee was holding the garments of Ste- 
 phen's murderers, at length speaking for 
 Stephen's Christ and his, from the same 
 view-point, using the same argument, wrest- 
 ling with a mob, or Agrippa, or Festus, or the 
 crowd at Athens, often in the same phrase- 
 ology as that of the moment when he was 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 263 
 
 made a man in Christ Jesus. Not less of this 
 sincerity and responsiveness of personality to 
 a sovereign experience is shown by any An- 
 drew, when he has gone out after his brother- 
 man. All Andrew's ministry grew out of his 
 personal experience with his Lord. The 
 way of his expression of Jesus was inevitably 
 the way of the impression of Jesus upon him 
 —so genuine was the man. Andrew first 
 took hold of that side of divine reality which 
 any of our minds may handle. 
 
 This genuineness always makes for origi- 
 nality. Andrew has the finest originality. 
 He does not imitate even his teacher, the 
 great John, the Baptizer. He says to Simon, 
 not " We have found the Lamb of God'' but 
 "We have found the Messias^ Andrew is 
 what you may be, a soul-winner ; he is not a 
 great penetrative theologian, which you and I, 
 most likely, cannot be. He is narrow, it may 
 be ; and you and I ought to be narrow enough 
 to be intense. Andrew^ is a Jew ; he must see 
 the Jewish " Messias " in his " Lamb of God." 
 Any true gospeller, as by instinct, takes up 
 that fact concerning, and in his Christ, which 
 
264 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 has actually fired his own heart, and which, 
 he knows, without reasoning the matter out, 
 will fire his brother's heart also. It is a mat- 
 ter of his sincere character that he does not 
 attempt to win a soul, with even the Baptizer's 
 conception of Jesus. Things are too serious 
 with him to permit him to steal even better 
 thunder than his own. He can do best with, 
 because he is most interested in, his own 
 thunderbolts of conviction and experience. 
 Suppose he had tried to be unquestionably- 
 orthodox, instead of first being true. He 
 then might have said to Simon: "We have 
 found the Second Person of the Trinity." 
 That would have been no more than the liter- 
 alist among dogmatists would feel he ought 
 to do " in the interest of Truth." It would 
 have been no more impossible for Andrew 
 to do this, than it is impossible for others 
 to see that such conduct is now pedantic 
 and sad. Keep to your own truth, Andrew. 
 You will get the rest in time. Get to your 
 brother, and you will get the larger truth. 
 With what truth you have, not with what 
 truth your greatest teacher has, you must 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 265 
 
 apprehend Jesus, and thus become a soul- 
 bringer. 
 
 Men will give no such response, as we 
 behold in this immediate action of Simon, to 
 anything but such a statement and from such 
 a man. The personality behind and in the 
 statement is next to the supreme thing. Be 
 as impatient as he was of the refinements of 
 theory ; be more impatient of anything less 
 than straightforwardness and reverence for 
 a fact, than even this man was. Here was a 
 fact, larger than the man who brought it, or 
 him to whom it was brought. So that fact is 
 to-day. When it was given to him, I cannot 
 find that Simon stopped to discuss the mat- 
 ter at all. He would probably have worsted 
 Andrew in an argument. But the gospeller, 
 Andrew, always has the advantage, in that 
 alone he has the fact — Jesus the Christ. 
 
 Never surrender that advantage, when you 
 go out to bring Simon. Never drop the 
 weapon of your fact to argue with your bird 
 on the wing, but fire ! Skepticism is like a 
 bright lawyer with a poor case ; it is better 
 on argument than on facts. Evangelism, 
 
266 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 true and thorough, is not a debater, but a 
 witness ; it does not argue, it testifies. Sad 
 is the caricature which appears, when any 
 man who has such a fact as " the Messias " 
 engages to debate Simon to Jesus. It was 
 the factualness of the man once bUnd which 
 counted in widening the Gospel's realm of 
 victory. He said : " This one thing I know, 
 that, whereas I was blind, now I see." 
 
 I fail to find in Andrew's words or actions 
 anything like that trembling, apologizing 
 fear and embarrassment which characterize 
 most men, when they go to speak to their 
 own kin about religious matters. There are 
 two reasons for this freedom and power in 
 him, and in any other man who associates 
 closely with the men he would see coming 
 into the kingdom. First, Andrew does not 
 come to tell Simon about himself, but about 
 Jesus ; and, secondly, Andrew had not our 
 pitifully limited ideas of what Jesus would 
 do for his brother, but very different ones. 
 These interpenetrate one another. Andrew 
 was too full of Jesus to talk about Andrew ; we 
 are often too full of Andrew to talk about Jesus. 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 267 
 
 Here is a person who is speaking to a 
 person, in order to lead him to a person. 
 Andrew, Simon, Jesus — three persons, and no 
 abstractions. It is the Christ in our Chris- 
 tianity with which our own personal Chris- 
 tianity and personal helpfulness to others 
 must begin and end. When we get to 
 dealing with the impersonal and the abstract, 
 it is because we have lost the personal 
 Messias, have no sense of our own personal- 
 ness, and have no interest in the personal 
 Simon. Abstractions are sometimes but 
 ghosts which indicate how many living 
 Simons have been buried without a personal 
 salvation. 
 
 There was, with all these incidental quali- 
 ties, a noble and inevitable eloquence in these 
 words, when they fell upon the ears of Simon. 
 Simon's soul was a harp whose every string 
 seemed created and prepared for that breeze. 
 Music had to come, when those words and 
 that soul touched. The real Gospel is always 
 sure to be eloquent to any Simon. Having 
 first found him, having got at him where he 
 lives, having met him as he is, its message rings 
 
268 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 throughout the needy, vacant soul like sa- 
 cred melodies in an old and deserted sanctu- 
 ary. There are echoes of God in man which 
 the Messianic thought wakens into resdess 
 harmony of expression. The real Gospel of 
 the Christ has never failed to get a hearing 
 where it, like Andrew, went to find Simon. It 
 is when we get in front of Christ that He fails 
 to attract. 
 
 And a man does not always see the whole 
 Christ. He sees the side of Messias next to 
 him. This thought of Messias — how it thrilled 
 that patriot Jew. That was the small end of 
 the true idea of the Christ of God, of course. 
 It was the end Andrew got hold of ; it was 
 the end which he knew Simon could get hold 
 of. Would that our preaching of Christ 
 could touch the sentiment of world-wide 
 patriotism ! With Andrew and Simon, the 
 fortunes of Israel were dear above all else ; 
 and the enemies which they desired to 
 dethrone were Rome and the political meth- 
 ods which made them a race of slaves. With 
 our modern man, the fortunes of civil society 
 and the destiny of humanity on earth are in- 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 269 
 
 volved in any bright hope which stands at 
 the gateway of the future. Andrew and 
 Simon's Messias is a political deliverer; so 
 also is the Messias which the soul of the 
 broadest man craves, a Saviour of humanity 
 — that greater Israel, that larger Jerusalem — 
 from all its dangers. Christ Jesus instandy 
 grips the hope of men, the ancient and the 
 modern Simon alike, at the moment when 
 that hope sees Him as the Supreme Antag- 
 onist of sin. 
 
 The Messias whom Andrew saw was no 
 more great than his conception of Him, than 
 our Christ is greater than our conception of 
 Him. He had come to deliver men from sin^ 
 to bind them to the on-marching righteous- 
 ness of God, and, in that way, to conquer all 
 the Romes which ever might seek to oppress 
 them. Every hope of man to-day runs forth 
 to greet the preacher of this Christ. Besides 
 this great hope at the heart of progress, every 
 genuine feeling of the dreadful presence of sin, 
 and every desire to be rid of it ; every noble 
 movement of the unquenched good beneath 
 the oppressive evil of life and every glim- 
 
270 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 mer of desire to perpetuate it ; every wander- 
 ing dream of sometimes being true, amidst 
 so many evidences of now being untrue and 
 every desire that that dream may be realized 
 — all the man there is left in us rushes out to 
 meet the evangelist of a real Messias, and 
 to cry : " How beautiful upon the mountains 
 are the feet of him that bringeth good things, 
 that publisheth peace ; that bringeth good 
 tidings of good, that publisheth salvation ; 
 that saith unto Zion, ' Thy God reigneth.' " 
 Go to thy brother. " He will not respect me," 
 you say ? No. It may be so ; but he will 
 respect the Christ you have ; and not you, 
 but Jesus the Christ must save him. 
 
 So the issue of all this ; the " finding " and 
 the " saying" of any Andrew is the " bring- 
 ing " — '• He brought him to Jesus." Our 
 calls and preachings are altogether ineffective, 
 however interesting they are as memories, if 
 they have not issued in the result of " bring- 
 ing " our brother to Jesus. It would, I admit, 
 have been altogether unfair to have estimated 
 Andrew' s piety and Christianity simply by 
 its visible and immediate success in finding 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 27 1 
 
 and bringing Simon. A man may be a very 
 good man, and yet not a minister, in the 
 closer sense of the word. Often, also, our 
 brother may be out of our reach ; Simon 
 might have refused stubbornly to follow. 
 These would not have made Andrew's 
 brotherliness or religion less genuine. But 
 any Christian ministry must be most largely 
 estimated by the bringing of men to Jesus. 
 
 Remember the phrase : " He brought him 
 to Jesiisy I cannot think that the use of the 
 word Simon, and the words Simon Peter, and 
 Peter, with respect to the same personage, is 
 one careless of distinctive meanings. For ex- 
 ample, I think Andrew always goes and at- 
 taches his personal self to the Simon-end of 
 this great brother of his, who is some day to 
 be known as the great and good Peter, whose 
 dome in the Rome of his martyrdom reflects 
 the interest of two worlds. Every Andrew 
 " findeth first his own brother, Siftion^ It is 
 a very human and most needy side of our 
 brother-man to which you and I may first 
 come with our message and most helpfully. 
 We must so bring our message to a man that 
 
272 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 all the earthiness and impetuosity and other 
 unsanctified qualities of our brother like 
 Simon shall be gotten hold of. This is the 
 valuable material for transcendent uses, when 
 we may bring it all to Jesus. Many men 
 seem to me to be preaching not to Simon, or 
 even to Shnon-Pcter — which is the name of 
 the half-way house towards the goal ; the 
 name of the ore with the gold showing forth 
 plenteously — but they essay to address the 
 Peter of this interesting individual. Now, he 
 is, for a good while, in the evolution of this 
 process, and, therefore, a long way off, as he 
 is a long way off in the evolution of any 
 process of grace which comes through our 
 message unto him at the first. 
 
 Jesus is always dealing with this alert and 
 ardent man, even in His speech, with a fine 
 regard for his progress from the Simon to the 
 Peter of him. Sometimes, even near to the last 
 day of their association, the man for whom 
 Jesus had done so much relapsed into his old 
 self, as when he went to sleep in the garden. 
 Then Jesus said to him, " Simon, Simon, sleep- 
 est thou ? " — as if He wished to impress upon 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 273 
 
 him the fact that the old Simon-qualities are 
 the last that ought to slumber in such an 
 hour. So, also, I think we may regard with 
 care the evangelist's statement that Andrew 
 brought Simon " to Jestcs^ He did not bring 
 him even to " the Messias, which is, being 
 interpreted, the Christ." Perhaps we fail to 
 bring men to Jesus, just because we try to 
 bring them to some theological conception of 
 Him. Jesus is the very human name, which, 
 upon the lips of the true preacher, makes the 
 minister himself lose all officialism, and brings 
 to the brother-man the picture of our great 
 elder brother who had already so brothered 
 Andrew into the family of God that Andrew, 
 through his brotherliness, had brought Simon 
 to Jesus. We shall reach the divinity through 
 the humanity of Jesus Christ. 
 
 The minister's message and method seem 
 to me very simple and very clear. I am 
 willing to risk the danger of men failing to 
 reach Christ, in all His high-priestly relations 
 unto them, if only they may be brought to 
 the man, Jesus ; and that is to brother them 
 into the family of the Sons of God. This will 
 
274 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 discover to each man his divine sonship. 
 This involves conversion, of course. Simon 
 as Simon is nothing but a human "son of 
 Jonas." Jacob, unfound by the Man- Angel 
 with whom he wrestled until the breaking of 
 the day, was only a son of Isaac, and he 
 was " the supplanter." When his thigh was 
 out of joint and the chrysalis of time had 
 yielded forth, in the breaking, a winged and 
 eternal soul, now in brother-relations with 
 mankind whom he had hitherto treated in 
 such an unbrotherly fashion, he was a son of 
 God, and he was renamed properly — ** Prince 
 of Israel." This is conversion in the Old 
 Testament. The hint of the incarnation of 
 God in man is given in the " Man-Angel," 
 with whom he wrestled for his true self. So, 
 also, in the New Testament and with Simon. 
 When he is brought to Jesus, Jesus calls 
 forth his divine sonship — that is, his sonship 
 unto God. He begins in him a process of 
 regeneration, by which his sonship unto God 
 is made the supreme thing in and of his char- 
 acter and life. Andrew has done all he can, 
 when he brings his brother man into the 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 275 
 
 range and radiance of Jesus' brotherhood. 
 Jesus says to him then, "Thou art Simon. 
 Thou shalt be Cephas, or Peter, * the rock- 
 man.^ " Men are potentially sons of God, as 
 well as sons of their earthly fathers. To 
 bring them to Jesus is to bring them where 
 this sonship divine may be struck out, at the 
 depths of character, and developed to infinite 
 significance. This alone is Christian preach- 
 ing. 
 
 Let us now have done with the words: 
 " commonplace " and " ordinary " in regard 
 to any Andrew. No man who thus be- 
 gins his ministry, or whose ministry is 
 begun for him in such an experience as 
 Andrew's, can be ordinary or common- 
 place. The good news, announcing a treaty 
 of peace consummated between two nations, 
 makes the copper wire beneath the waves of 
 ocean as valuable as it is. Your message 
 will exalt the messenger to his true place. 
 
 In the presence of Simon Peter, whom he 
 brought to Jesus, and in the presence of Jesus 
 Himself, whose light alone discovers the 
 value of souls, how great any Andrew seems. 
 
276 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 He is great, because he did a great thing. 
 Without empire, he annexed more than an em- 
 pire ; even a creator and ruler of empires he 
 brought to the kingdom of the King of kings. 
 Without genius, he has influenced the world 
 of history as no man who was only a genius 
 has done. What a different world this is, 
 what different pages are in its history, what 
 a different future lies before it, because 
 Andrew brought Simon to Jesus. When he 
 delivered him over to Jesus, the rough and re- 
 calcitrant but most rich ore was in the hands 
 of One who should extract all its gold, coin it 
 and make it bear His face forever. Andrew's 
 hand is beneath the structure of our Chris- 
 tian civilization as is that of none of Israel's 
 tyrants. He utters his voice through the 
 trumpet notes of Simon Peter, and sends his 
 influence along the larger movements im- 
 pelled by that impetuous, noble life. 
 
 What a crisis it was in his own religious 
 career, when he waited to take the first step 
 towards his own brother Simon, in the name 
 of Jesus ! His going to him at once settled 
 his own place in history and in glory, and 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S MESSAGE 277 
 
 gave a new turn and stronger impulse to the 
 stream of goodness and truth. The poor 
 Methodist preacher whom Charles H. Spur- 
 geon heard one night was an inferior soul to 
 all but Jesus and history and humanity, for 
 whom he found that mighty man. The poorer 
 monk of the mountain country, whose words 
 roused Savonarola to become a Protestant out 
 of season and a Republican before the time, 
 had the same sort of real greatness. Oh, ye 
 who here start out to be the Andrews of the 
 Church and of the nation, know ye that, by 
 the miracle of a true personality awakening 
 another in the Light of Lights, and by the in- 
 fluence of a message of Truth passing through 
 a true personality, yours is the power to bring 
 a greater soul unto the Truth. This is a reve- 
 lation of the Godlikeness of man. 
 
LECTURE VII 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND 
 ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 
 
LECTURE VII 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND ITS 
 COMMUNICATION TO MEN 
 
 I KNOW that this sounds priestly enough ; 
 but men will have priests — you or those 
 who have less to communicate unto 
 them. God grant that what we have just 
 found of that which you have to communi- 
 cate may reach them in power — even in the 
 power of the Highest. I must now condense 
 and proceed rapidly over the interesting 
 realms of thought and conviction as to all 
 themes stretching out before me, considering 
 that I must soon conclude the observations 
 and suggestions to be offered to you in this 
 course of lectures. 
 
 I will say, first, that, anticipating and re- 
 joicing in the communication of the Spiritual 
 Life to men, through the life and labours of 
 the minister, the Spiritual Life itself must be 
 supreme and determinative in him, in order 
 
 that the pastor's experience shall have right- 
 281 
 
282 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 ful place and influence, especially upon his 
 sermon. I say ''experience'' because his life 
 is a life with men, and all officialism must 
 vanish away in the interaction of his brother- 
 liness with that of his fellow men. 
 
 Yesterday I attempted to study our mes- 
 sage and its origin, by what I hope you will 
 always employ when you are anxious to 
 reach the simplicities and sublimities of any 
 Scripture theme — namely, the method of ex- 
 position, — to enforce the consideration that 
 the man who will most likely be effective 
 as a preacher is born out of a Christlike ex- 
 perience with humanity in the closest rela- 
 tion of personality. Now, suppose you have 
 come to be a preacher by some other proc- 
 ess. Then you need them all the more, and 
 at once, to justly estimate the value of the 
 pastor's experience with men, in its influence 
 upon your preaching. 
 
 A large and deep Spiritual Life will make it 
 certain that the preacher and pastor will not 
 be separated. It has been often said of this 
 or that minister; "He is a great preacher, 
 but he is no pastor ; " and there is a way of 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 283 
 
 Speaking, upon the part of the uninstructed 
 youth, which makes one sorry for the speaker, 
 when he says of this or that preacher : " He 
 is a master in the pulpit, and he speaks to so 
 many people and so powerfully, that no one 
 expects him to do pastoral work." Be sure 
 there is a most vicious illusion here. It is 
 an illusion that comes not upon the least 
 amply endowed of us, perhaps. It certainly 
 envelops some of the most promising who 
 seek the pulpit as a throne of influence and 
 blessing. It would not be so sad, if only 
 dullards fancied the pulpit to be safely en- 
 tered and made effective by one, who, either 
 has no inclination, or thinks he has not time, 
 for shepherding the flock. Some of us who 
 began the ministry with the vocabulary of 
 what is called the "sermon-maker" upon 
 our undisciplined and academic lips, have 
 dropped such words from our vocabularies : 
 and likewise very few of us speak of the 
 shepherding which one finds the satisfaction 
 and reward in doing as " parochial work." 
 It is not work at all, but the joyful expres- 
 sion of a personal Spiritual Life coming out 
 
284 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 of one's acquaintance with Jesus, and hurry- 
 ing to get all humanity acquainted with Him, 
 Who is the life and light of men. 
 
 Some of us have sorrowful recollections 
 and many repentances, deep and true, that 
 we ever so slighted and impoverished our 
 pulpit, by agreeing with our poor selves that 
 it is at all possible to create, in the study and 
 pulpit alone, even so unimportant a being 
 as a pulpiteer. As I have hinted, the only 
 thing that will lift you out of this mistake, if 
 you have made it, and are looking towards 
 preaching as a function and operation supe- 
 rior to your Christian experience and influ- 
 ence as the brother and friend of those to 
 whom you have spoken or to whom you 
 are yet to speak, is a mightier Spiritual 
 Life in your Christ. You must have that 
 spiritual animation and outgoing, through 
 experienced truth and sanctified brotherli- 
 ness, which alone, at the first, constituted 
 you a minister, and which will all along 
 make you something more than a maker of 
 sermons, even the best, or a social emissary, 
 even the noblest. This will make you in- 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 285 
 
 deed a minister of Christ unto His and your 
 brethren. 
 
 I have observed for many years that no 
 man, however masterfully he began as a 
 Christian in the pulpit, who has been either 
 unwilling or unable to take in upon his heart 
 and life those tides of human experience with 
 truth which he himself has elicited from his 
 own people and which naturally run towards 
 him, has kept his fresh and early masterful- 
 ness. Any slightest study of the subject has 
 shown what he might be now, if these tides 
 had come into his own experience in thought 
 and life. There is a distinct moral weakness 
 which evidences itself in a man's willingness 
 to utter a message, herald a divine truth, or 
 pierce with argument and appeal through 
 some long established habit or false opinion, 
 without being ready to take care of the re- 
 sults, especially if he succeeds. If he does 
 not succeed — what is the worth of preach- 
 ing? If he does succeed, the consequences 
 are not in his quiet study, or in his echoing 
 pulpit. He has done even the least towards 
 dealing with them manfully when he slips 
 
286 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the sermon from its lovely case, and it is 
 placed along with the rest of the artillery 
 which has been discharged — begging pardon 
 here for any reference to a warrior's life, in a 
 connection which does not reveal the pres- 
 ence of courage ! 
 
 Admitting that his sermon has been the 
 very best kind of a sermon, the consequences 
 are very human. They are to be found in 
 flesh and blood ; they are neither literary, 
 artistic, or even theological results. They 
 tingle with human life, and somedmes bleed. 
 A man who has not the honour to look 
 up, as well as care for, the children born 
 of his life-expression, is certainly lacking 
 lamentably in common morals ; the reaction 
 will come upon his own character so seri- 
 ously, that, by and by, the children of his 
 brain and heart — the ideas and emodons 
 which he generates and sends forth — will be 
 as untrue and lawless as he is. I have known 
 men to accede to the foolish proposition that 
 true preaching may live and grow as some- 
 thing separate from the human life for which 
 it is made, until, in each case, all the human 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 287 
 
 element which his lofty nature had inherited 
 — that stream of subconscious kindliness that 
 came from his ancestors, and the currents of 
 experience with sin and sorrow, and love and 
 joy upon the part of his comrades, given 
 over to him in earlier life — had vanished 
 from him. All was lost in the sands glit- 
 tering like his rhetorical movements, and 
 all the more arid because they gleamed 
 under a tropical sun. No amount of argu- 
 ment can instruct a man, who has fallen 
 away from his human brethren, so far 
 that he feels, as I have known preachers to 
 feel, that they must not risk on Wednesday 
 winding their way into the heart of some 
 wretched man's problem to which the door 
 of entrance was found by the preacher in his 
 sermon last Sunday, and for fear the preacher 
 may encounter some aspect of truth, or phase 
 of iniquity, or twist of doubt which might 
 throw him off the track of his proposed ad- 
 vance homiletically, and make it awkward for 
 him to dodge a fresh, commanding, human 
 situation next Sunday morning. Better a 
 hundred times be vitalized by some human 
 
288 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 being's clinging and desperate hand, espe- 
 cially if you have inspired him to stretch it 
 out of the dark, even if that hand in its 
 agony of reaching for succour should tear 
 your sermon to pieces. A man is better 
 than a book, to any preacher who sees how 
 wicked is his wickedness in the light of 
 Christ's holiness, or feels how wretched is 
 his spiritual poverty, when men around him 
 are praising his virtues, or knows how puny 
 or shrivelled is his arm to take hold of an 
 athletic angel who is certainly the greatest 
 blessing of his life, if only he would wrestle 
 with him until the breaking of the day. 
 
 The true minister, in whom this preacher 
 and pastor have to live together, has no per- 
 plexities or worries or pains comparable to 
 those he experiences, when they fall out and 
 persist in having two camps. The preacher 
 in the minister is likeliest to be the jealous 
 one. He loves his cloister for meditation 
 and his study for amplifying and refining his 
 mental product. The pastor of the minister 
 is not so much given to pride of mind, for he 
 has the chastening influence of his fellows, 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 289 
 
 with whom and against w^hom he must meas- 
 ure himself, when their need is quickest and 
 his pulses are warmest. He knows how near 
 he is to sinning their worst sin, or falling into 
 their grayest prejudice. He knows also, by 
 the touch of them upon him, how much more 
 they expect of him when he shall suddenly 
 transform himself as the good friend of the 
 men about him, appearing in his other form 
 — the preacher of the next Sunday morning. 
 
 This next Sunday's preacher is a being, 
 whom, by the way, the pastor very much re- 
 veres, whose jealousy of the pastor's appar- 
 ently leisurely use of time during this last 
 week has been poignant but is now forgiven, 
 — a being with large opportunities and lib- 
 erties, such as no other profession or trade 
 permits, and so protected at what used to be 
 called the sacred desk, that no one will deny, 
 or confute, or even ask a question while he 
 delivers to the people, who have been living 
 with this same man as pastor at short range, 
 his latest discourse. 
 
 It is amazing how the pastor in us looks 
 up to the preacher in all of us. His latest 
 
290 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 discourse — did I say it ? So, if it is success- 
 ful at all in stirring noble emotions, in rip- 
 ping up as with the plowshare the tough 
 sod of tradition, in softening the soil thus 
 made bare, it will send that same pastor 
 out to see that the seed is planted and 
 the harvest made more sure. Would that 
 the preacher in us always so loyally revered 
 and loved the pastor ! Does it not seem a 
 condition of inextricable confusion and mon- 
 strous waste of power, when there are two 
 of every minister ; one a pastor and one a 
 preacher — and just then you marvelled why 
 I could put the pastor first. Be advised that, 
 when this duplex arrangement is even at its 
 best, it is the minister who is not very far 
 from duplicity, indeed. 
 
 There has to be a sort of over-mind in him 
 to decide questions as to the use of time, 
 his prominence as a citizen before the public 
 in order to help them sincerely, and such 
 like, until the over-mind of the Lord God 
 fully possesses the minister, and the eye be- 
 comes single and is full of light. Then the 
 matter becomes more simple, for a passion 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 29I 
 
 for Spiritual effectiveness will determine his 
 course, all other things being equal. 
 
 One surprisingly interesting bit of biog- 
 raphy comes to my mind here. One of the 
 chief happinesses of my life was to note the 
 effect of a mighty accession of spiritual 
 power to the soul of the late Dr. George 
 Purvis, the beloved pastor, the eloquent 
 preacher, the mighty minister of God. He 
 passed from being the correct philosophical 
 master of exposition, entreaty, and prophetic 
 power, unto being the rescuer of men, the up- 
 builder of character from ruins into temples 
 of God, one of the most constantly successful 
 winners of our poor humanity in its lost es- 
 tate, to its regeneration and sanctification by 
 God's grace, whom I have ever known, or 
 New York ever saw. Successor of John 
 Hall, and a man of scholarly tastes, he went 
 out after his preaching on Sunday and met 
 the results of his preaching in the mani- 
 fold appearance of them, joy, sorrow, re- 
 morse, repentance. A newly wrought cour- 
 age grasped and was waiting for the next 
 command. All occurrences seemed forms of 
 
292 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the result of true preaching. He met them 
 all, and, profound and exhaustive student as 
 he was — for he was no less a student after he 
 became the Fifth Avenue minister than he 
 was when professor in Princeton Theological 
 Seminary, a few months before, — the minis- 
 ter opened the preacher to the pastor within 
 him, and opened the pastor to the preacher 
 within him. They wrought together in love, 
 and so were held to each other within a com- 
 prehensive personality. They were not lost 
 in one another, as we say, but they were 
 found in one another. Men and women 
 struggled on their knees, while this personal 
 friend appealed to God for them in prayer, 
 as the preacher, only a few hours before, had 
 been appealing to them in behalf of God. 
 
 There is no greater honour to be offered 
 a human being in this world than to be 
 chosen by God to this holy priesthood, and 
 to be chosen by human beings, when God 
 has been brought near to them by the priest' 
 hood which works from above and through 
 the preacher — to be chosen, I say, by hu- 
 man beings, to bear unto God, with sobs 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 293 
 
 of contrition and cry for personal holiness, 
 the souls and destinies of those whom we 
 love most when we try to help them. A 
 man must live for such power as this, and 
 he can afford to lose everything and suf- 
 fer everything for the Spiritual Life which 
 gives and keeps for him this privilege. My 
 friend did not get his new power as a 
 preacher from his having resolved on being 
 a pastor, and his having started out to exer- 
 cise properly the functions of that office. 
 Doubtless even this, in many cases, would 
 be an occasion for the working of God's 
 grace in us towards a better spiritual state. 
 It was not because he had been a professor 
 in Princeton Seminary, and was now going 
 to be a minister in a great metropolitan 
 church, that he underwent this transforma- 
 tion in the minister's life and career. It oc- 
 curred contrariwise. He went from a church 
 in a large city without an appearance of his 
 possible self in the way of ministerial suc- 
 cess ; and he became a professor, and, fortu- 
 nately for the world, his struggle was instant 
 and primary in all its aspects. He struggled 
 
294 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 for a deeper spiritual life, for its own sake. 
 When it came, one of the first evidences of 
 its authentic and comprehensive power was 
 the new minister himself, who knew nothing 
 of the envy on the part of the preacher when 
 the pastor took time to find and attend to 
 the results of the preacher's preaching. The 
 man seemed to have been so reconstituted 
 into a personal missionary, whose search for 
 his brethren and whose passion for helping 
 them to God as their sole strength and ref- 
 uge were new vitalities, that anything he did 
 was knit in vital process to everything that 
 he did, and all that he did was the manifes- 
 tation of this all-compelling love for Christ 
 and the men whom He came to save. 
 
 Now, to pass to an entirely different man : 
 a similar experience was that of my dear 
 successor in Baltimore, Dr. Maltbie Babcock. 
 A predecessor knows something of the 
 human material in the loved church he 
 leaves. He is most interested if his successor 
 shall be blessed with certain desirable con- 
 sequences of his ministerial activity, to find 
 what is distinctive in him, which enables him 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 295 
 
 to grow much fruit. " By their fruits ye shall 
 know them," not by their pastoral calls ; not 
 even by their sermons. When that sapless 
 mechanic called the sermon-maker, makes 
 what is called " a pastoral call," there is prob- 
 ably less reason to expect anything so natural 
 and living as fruit, than at any other time in 
 the history of our planet. But when a real 
 man, who has all musical instruments in 
 him, whose soul is a diversified landscape 
 sunlit or drenched with the abundant rain 
 from heaven, comes to visit you as your 
 shepherd, then you may be sure these new 
 forces will communicate themselves, as they 
 did in the radiancy and harmoniousness of 
 my friend's religion, with amazing unity of 
 powers. This man who preached like a 
 pastor in the pulpit, because he had touched 
 and known men with the intimacy of love, 
 and who shepherded his people with the 
 appealing warmth and light of the truth 
 which he preached, still burning from 
 his brain as Michelangelo's little candle 
 burned from the socket in which it hung 
 upon his brow — this man was indeed re- 
 
296 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 sistless, with his Christ who said through 
 His servant, "Behold, I stand at the door 
 and knock." I think he had a oneness of 
 self, an utter deliverance from the multitudi- 
 nous or even manifold interests which make 
 a Babel often within our soul by their self- 
 assertion — a continuity in impact which 
 came from having one thing, and only one 
 thing, to do, and that was to be Christ's 
 minister. Behind the result of his ministra- 
 tion upon the most dissimilar men, and with 
 consequences in the direction of their new 
 religious effectiveness the most different, was 
 the man, filled with God. He thus became a 
 man who ensphered what he held within him 
 so perfectly, that he was a safe and imitable 
 human being wherever he was and whatever 
 he did. 
 
 We must acknowledge that in persons 
 entering the pulpit, often with highest hopes 
 and best prospects, an erroneous and almost 
 sinful disproportionateness of interest and 
 emphasis is given to speaking in the pulpit, 
 to preaching. It is given even to sermoniz- 
 ing — which is about the cheapest account of 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 297 
 
 what is sometimes cheaper than the term 
 itself — in comparison with parochial work, 
 such as requires pastoral visitation, and 
 personal attention to men as men. Labour- 
 ing with human beings, when one is outside 
 of the pulpit, to bring them into vital relation- 
 ship with the truths which it is the pulpit's 
 duty and privilege to proclaim, ought not to 
 be thus discounted. What, I ask, will reveal 
 this disproportionateness, and save us from 
 the malady which fosters it in our minds ? 
 Nothing, I answer, but a triumphant Spiritual 
 Life within the minister. I bear you witness 
 that, as one's Spiritual Life deepens, it grows 
 appalling for the preacher to realize how 
 much his pulpit has lost, both of the human 
 element and of the divine blessing, by his 
 having forsaken so largely his personal help- 
 fulness to his fellow-mortals. 
 
 Our best doctrines fade. It is a strange 
 but insistent fact that those who work even 
 hopefully with mortal beings most constantly, 
 and in full view of the personality of each 
 one, — these have most of conviction and 
 illumination and confidence, when they 
 
298 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 speak on immortality. It is so with re- 
 gard to almost every doctrine. We take 
 it out of the pulpit, when we have done our 
 best with it in explanation and proof ; and 
 it is not any more vital than our small and 
 strained vitality has made it, or allowed it to 
 be. We take it out, I say now, unto man 
 after man, and humanize it, put its abstract 
 values under a focus of life, with flesh and 
 blood to confront and transform, if possible ; 
 then we bring it back, and — this has been 
 my experience — far from being harmed, or 
 marred, or even scratched, it lives, and is 
 henceforth found in us as preachers, pulsing 
 and throbbing with human interests, redolent 
 with life, and vocal with music granted to it 
 by experience. Never may the pulpit dis- 
 dain human experience. 
 
 I cannot now stop to mention the doctrines 
 that are constantly growing weak, and are 
 at last devitalized, because they are only 
 preached. None has kept the uses among 
 men which they involve. 
 
 I assure you your shepherding of men will 
 determine your effectiveness as preachers and 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 299 
 
 deliver you from all debilitating impersonal- 
 ness as preachers. Your greatest gain will 
 be your sense of personality with an audience 
 — yours and theirs. If you are an eloquent 
 man, your spirituality will have allied itself 
 with your utterance, to make your audience 
 personal. And you can never deal with an 
 audience, unless you deal with them person- 
 ally. I am sure of this — no minister can deal 
 with an audience personally, inside of the 
 walls of an audience-room, if he does not 
 know how, and if he does not love most to 
 deal with the human person, as he maintains 
 intercourse when he is on intimate terms of 
 friendship, or when he is urging his hostility 
 to evil in his friend's mind without any show 
 of friendliness, and yet with the sincerest 
 friendship — man to man. You w^ill obtain 
 the secret of gathering your audience into a 
 personality, with whom you speak naturally 
 and effectively, only by first and often sit- 
 ting down with some loved man and learning 
 the art of persuasion there. Let me talk of 
 this, in full view of the fact that I have said 
 something of this element of personality in 
 
300 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the text, and its power of finding the man in 
 you to preach it, or in your finding the text 
 for your discourse. The text for a preacher 
 has the vividness and potency of his person- 
 ality. An impersonal preacher can take the 
 vitality out of the most glowing text, if he 
 permits his audience to be impersonal. If he 
 does not gather, out of all the human beings 
 before him, some fused and realizable human 
 reality, not at whom he preaches, nor to whom 
 he preaches, but with whom he lives his spirit- 
 ual life in the discourse, he will not minister 
 to them. He must find and rejoice in the 
 personality of his congregation. 
 
 Wendell Phillips said : " A master of 
 eloquence is a gentleman conversing with 
 other gendemen," and his friend, George 
 William Curtis, tells us he embodied this 
 definition. I have heard him often, and 
 when this gentleman was very fiery ; and 
 then, I must say, the people to whom he was 
 speaking might well have doubted if the 
 limits of courteous conversation had not been 
 passed, both by the stormful and sudden 
 thrust like lightning, and the burning of 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 301 
 
 traditional tinder when the lightning touched 
 it. But all must have confessed that, in this 
 drastic and awe-inspiring kind of speech, the 
 old-style oratory was happily transformed by 
 this man, as it was, even more, by Abraham 
 Lincoln. These men knew how to converse 
 with audiences, even at their worst. 
 
 I doubt not of these masters of law and 
 persuasion in the Supreme Court of the 
 United States, conversing with the judges, 
 it must be said that they have the best man- 
 ner of discourse, when each of them is given 
 an opportunity to talk along without inter- 
 ruption by the court, and when he expects a 
 favourable verdict. He is never out of touch 
 with that mood of the court's general mind 
 which might ask a question, and at any time. 
 My father, who was a lawyer, told me often 
 that if I ever reached effectiveness, it must 
 be by first treating my audience as a jury, 
 from whom I ought not to go away without a 
 verdict in favour of my great Client, who, 
 for the moment, had placed His Cause in my 
 hand. He said, also, that I ought to have 
 in mind the counsel on the other side, who, 
 
302 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 often, would be more able, who would have 
 the advantage of following me, and who, 
 whether I saw him or not in the audience, 
 was sure to rise up to the consciousness of 
 that jury and argue the other side. 
 
 We know what a wholesome effect is 
 produced with respect to a man's pulpit tones, 
 when, for example, some brother arises to say 
 that Dr. Smith is wanted by the friends of a 
 lady dying in yonder street. The pulpit airs 
 and sanctimonious tones — the singsonging, 
 and even the fearful explosives — depart from 
 our speech when a man has to meet the 
 natural current of humanity. No greater 
 than these are the beneficent results which 
 come to us when we are taking our best truth, 
 our most beloved view of things, our finest 
 vision of the future, into personal and hand 
 to hand intimacy with others, and especially 
 with one other. We have to make them real. 
 How much better that they are real ! Han- 
 dling your truth in a friendly manner, or with 
 any truth, in courageous brotherliness in the 
 actual fight for a certain man's safety, will 
 ruin all pretentious proprietorship you may 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 303 
 
 have seemed to acquire. Such an experience 
 makes one feel how abominable it is to ar- 
 rogate in order that he may be authoritative. 
 
 From all these weaknesses and unto all 
 strength flowing from the fountain of per- 
 sonality, nothing is so sure to deliver you as 
 a rich Spiritual Life, lived lovingly towards 
 your fellow beings, and lived for each one of 
 them personally. 
 
 Your ability to communicate the Spiritual 
 Life will depend largely upon the relation of 
 your spiritual growth with your people to 
 their spiritual growth with you. The truest 
 expression of your inner being will be found 
 in the duty and privilege of prayer. In per- 
 sonal association, and in public assemblage, 
 it is yours literally, and, of course, spiritually 
 — that is, by your personality, presence, and 
 atmosphere — to lead in prayer — I like the 
 old phrase, especially as describing the min- 
 ister's outpouring of his growing life in the 
 leadership of his people. 
 
 Yet, I confess, I approach the subject of 
 the minister's prayer as related to his Spirit- 
 ual Life, as I trust with only the hesitations, 
 
304 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 as well as the convictions, which are born of 
 reverence. Just as there is no action of the 
 spirit of a man so premised on infinite reali- 
 ties, and so inevitably concluded in infinite 
 sanctities as that of prayer — so, also, there is 
 no action so capable, in its failure, of profani- 
 ties. An insincere man will clog the way to 
 God for a whole multitude of sincere men, 
 with his pietistic, but quite unconscious ex- 
 ploiting of his personal insincerities, in public 
 prayer. A true man's prayer is a manifesta- 
 tion of humanity at its truest ; and it is one of 
 the most appealing revelations of the truth it- 
 self. I have witnessed a skillful rhetorician at 
 prayer, slipping and sliding and falling on icy 
 periods which gleamed and glanced beneath 
 his agile feet. He was successful only when 
 he executed some figures as a skater in tri- 
 umph. He approached no goal worth while. 
 He was a devotee of cold weather ; and we 
 who looked to be led by him, but were only 
 amazed at his most brilliant moment, were 
 nearly frozen. He had chosen the wintry 
 side of the infinite, perforce. On the other 
 hand, I have heard an untutored cobbler 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 305 
 
 use the old phrase, and seek to " enter the 
 presence-chamber of the Most High," and go 
 on melting everything with his summery soul. 
 I remember him, as he would forget his 
 hardly acquired language of pulpit artistry, 
 and press forward through gates of awe and 
 love, until God Himself seemed to hold him 
 up, while he asked and obtained blessings be- 
 yond the measure of his speech or mental 
 girth — and this indeed was prayer. His 
 implied intimacies were adorations. His 
 evident friendship with God was a fact first 
 originated in what God had some time said 
 to him, not in what he had dared to say to 
 God. He had known, in himself, the mo- 
 ment when Jesus said to His disciples : 
 " Henceforth I call you no more servants, but 
 I have called you friends." 
 
 As against this power of communicating the 
 Spiritual Life when the Spiritual Life is low, 
 all declarations of nearness to the heavenly 
 throne are as those of one who doth protest 
 too much. They finally echo something of 
 servility, and, at length, much more of venal- 
 ity. Every assumption of intimacy with the 
 
306 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 eternal betrays the rags of time. Every dis- 
 play of new-found skill, in the presence of the 
 all-True, only unwinds the skein of the false. 
 
 Does it go without needing to be said 
 again and again — that no man will have 
 power in public prayer who has not won 
 power in private devotion ? The pathway to 
 God is precisely the pathway which the Christ 
 of God has taken to us. It is the pathway by 
 which He enters into the life of the minister. 
 If it is not trodden constantly, lovingly, and 
 adoringly back to God, by feet which bear up 
 the body of a valorous soldier for goodness, 
 it will become a tangle and even a snare. 
 
 The greatest truth is exacdy the truth which, 
 if unused, is like the greatest opportunity af- 
 forded the Spiritual Life, and is the most 
 fraught with peril. Is there anything more 
 direful, in its sadness, than the moment in 
 public prayer, in which human beings are 
 most desirous of leadership unto God, when 
 the minister has either not found the way of 
 progress Godward, to begin with ; or having 
 once set out upon it, perhaps with the aid of 
 a luminous Scripture text, he has lost his way 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 307 
 
 and the significance of the text as well ? To 
 keep going on with phrase after phrase, in 
 the presence of the omnipotent love, and 
 with the trembling interests of human hearts 
 and lives clinging to our wandering verbiage, 
 is a far more disastrous thing to whatever of 
 sincerity there may yet be in us, than even the 
 same sort of manipulating for time, in order 
 that we may haply come within sight of ideas 
 and inspirations, when we have unhappily 
 come upon similar moments in preaching. 
 If it is a serious and just charge against 
 some preaching that it defeats its end, in 
 robbing the minister of self-respect and in 
 making the audience faithless as to him and 
 perhaps his message, because he speaks of 
 experiences, deep and tragic, which involve 
 the secret domains of life to which his con- 
 sciousness is a total stranger, how much more 
 overwhelming is the weight of the charge 
 against one who, in prayer, in the very face 
 of Jehovah, prattles unctuously — for it is 
 nothing more or less — of religious experi- 
 ences in repentance, self-reproach, self-sacri- 
 fice, and moral confidence which have never 
 
308 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 happened in the hfe of the man then praying. 
 The whole atmosphere of such a man gives 
 the He to his profanity. But, on the con- 
 trary, when one's total self has been rescued 
 from the invasion and ruin of sin, when the 
 shadow of one's past sin haunts the present 
 morning with its horror and yet dares not to 
 venture in upon one's precious daytime, how 
 certainly and with what buoyancy and charm 
 of personal faithfulness his prayer to God for 
 others institutes within them, by blessed con- 
 tagion, a life of faith. The crises in our own 
 lives, — they alone will give us an eye man- 
 ward for seeing the crises in the lives of 
 others ; and the fact that we have looked 
 Godward when crises have occurred in our 
 lives will give us an eye Godward, discerning 
 the coming from afar of the God who answers 
 prayer. We build our smoke-stack very 
 high, in order that the furnace may have the 
 best draft ; and the Spiritual Life must be very 
 lofty, if the breath of prayer going upward 
 shall serve to intensify the heat which life 
 needs for all its purposes. 
 
 The best prayer, of course, for us to study, 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 309 
 
 in order that we may have the right 
 point of view, and be assured of that prog- 
 ress of ideas and hopes of a spirit which 
 receives power from God, as well as that 
 preparation of the soul for all the expe- 
 riences of divine education, is the prayer of 
 our Lord. Never let your prayer be a run- 
 ning comment on the Lord's Prayer. Let its 
 spirit, and the development of the vision of 
 Jesus within its petitions, be all yours. Once 
 enshrined in your Spiritual Life, its glow and 
 expanding truth will make impossible any 
 temporary accommodations of its appeal to 
 God, in behalf of the petty occasionalism of 
 our life. Place yourself unreservedly in lov- 
 ing discipleship, under the leadership of Him 
 who will lead you constantly to the moun- 
 tain of His own transfiguration. There 
 again Jesus teaches us what must oc- 
 cur in every true prayer. His prayer 
 brings him into communion with great souls. 
 Every church service, through hymn and 
 anthem, praise, and preaching, and prayer, 
 ought to be a transfiguration of the Lord 
 Jesus. His life was the greatest of prayers to 
 
3IO THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 God. His life in our church service will make 
 all its moments moments of prayer, and we 
 will be in the neighbourhood of great souls 
 of all ages — souls like Moses and Elias who 
 appeared in the glory of Christ — He does not 
 appear in the glory of them. Finally, they 
 depart and we see Jesus only. It has been a 
 great Christian service. 
 
 The natural foundation of religion has 
 been in sight of science and philosophy for 
 some time. Rather unwillingly has the 
 Church at last found that the true position of 
 religion in its influence in the world depends 
 upon our acknowledging this natural basis in 
 the nature and potencies of the human soul. 
 Such men as Sir Oliver Lodge, David Ram- 
 sey, and Dr. Hyslop represent the fields of 
 medical science, psychology, and philosophy, 
 which were mapped out roughly by the genius 
 of Clerk Maxwell, and the lips of the most 
 unassailable learning and culture now move 
 with the invitation and exhortation — " Let 
 us pray." So long as it was doubtful if 
 man has a soul, or is a soul living in a body, 
 it was perhaps unscientific to sing, — " Prayer 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 3II 
 
 is the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unex- 
 pressed," and " the motion of the heavenly- 
 fire that trembles in the breast." But now 
 we see that it would be nearly impossible to 
 state the facts and forces of human nature 
 more accurately than in these old and famil- 
 iar words. Christian prayer will always have 
 its own ample sky and its awful deeps within. 
 Deep will continue to call unto deep ; sanc- 
 tity and strength will continue to meet in the 
 issues and experiences of prayer. 
 
 The Christian minister leading a congrega- 
 tion in prayer is certainly an unique object for 
 earth and heaven, because of the grandeur of 
 his aims and the unconscious nobility of his un- 
 dertaking. If one should stop to think of the 
 multitude of capacities that are to be voiced, 
 of the throng of unheard-of possibilities which 
 are to be discovered and uncovered, of the 
 numberless tracts of being within any con- 
 gregation which is to be sensitized and divin- 
 ized, in a prayer that may utter any part of the 
 spiritual yearning found there, one would be 
 stricken with silence. But the minister must 
 think not of these, enchanting and expansive 
 
312 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 as his thinking comes to be on such a theme. 
 He must think of the God he himself has seen 
 upon the Great White Throne, above all this 
 territory, and he must know in his own other- 
 wise poor life that each of these needy sections 
 of immortal being has its undoubtable reason 
 for being, and that its home is in God. The 
 minister must be surcharged with the con- 
 viction, illuminated and quickened in the ex- 
 perience of his own prayerful life, that " only 
 the infinite pity is equal to the infinite pathos 
 of human life," as the author of "John Ingle- 
 sant" has told us, and that any cry to the 
 All-Pitiful cannot fail. 
 
 An absorbing sense of the unity of the uni- 
 verse under God ; a persuasion that man is at 
 his highest in prayer ; that man who is highest 
 cannot fail at his highest, and that, therefore, 
 prayer is the normal exchange of values be- 
 tween the child and the Father, the soul and its 
 God — this fine conclusion must consecrate and 
 enshrine all his prayer. It is a fact to be la- 
 mented that our prayers are so little Chris- 
 tian. That is, that they have so little of the 
 spirit of soul-sacrifice in them. We underes- 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 313 
 
 timate, as we pray, what has been spoken of 
 as the value of the passive virtues. Even the 
 best of us is likely to sing, like the Abt Vog- 
 ler of Robert Browning, only so far as the 
 words go : 
 
 " Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her 
 reign : 
 I will be patient and proud, and soberly ac- 
 quiesce, ' ' 
 
 as if to "acquiesce" with God is something 
 less than a very great and ennobling act. 
 
 I have questioned, if there is, especially in 
 modern literature, a less consciously wrought 
 or a more sincerely achieved presentation of 
 true praying than this. This man is like 
 many a man in your congregation ; and for 
 him you would pray. Why ? He has failed 
 with the sublimities all around him. This is 
 the tragedy of most men's failures. He is one 
 of those men whose purpose in life is beyond 
 their performance. They have had aspira- 
 tions beyond achievements; but the man's 
 struggle is distinctly Christian. The inner 
 minstrelsy of his nature has been turned loose 
 by a vision of God ; and the righteous mind 
 
314 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 feels that his circumstances must not turn 
 in and engulf him. You think of him, in 
 your prayer, also. Your poor fellow, bowed 
 with his failure, has no such eloquence of 
 verse as Abt Vogler with Browning ; but 
 he has an experience, as a Christian, which 
 leads him to believe that which is, at root, 
 this, — that the Cross of Calvary has turned 
 out to be the throne of Christ. Why should 
 he, who has a Browning for poetizing him, 
 seek in vain for you to voice him in prayer ? 
 All these things which are crosses " are 
 music sent up to God by the lover and the 
 bard " ; and we believe that it is " enough 
 that He heard it once," and " we shall hear it 
 by and by." There is no theological lan- 
 guage here, I admit, but we know that this 
 is the true psychology of prayer. 
 
 Every minister knows when a man in 
 circumstances similar to his own, however 
 limited may be his intellectual range, is in 
 search of the keys, as was Abt Vogler. The 
 greatest answer to his greatest prayer is the 
 gift of the keys. Later on, he will find the 
 " C major " of this life ; but all he asks of 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 315 
 
 God is the expression of his powers through 
 adequate instrumentalities ; then he is one of 
 those who say, " We are workers together 
 with God." We must never miss our privi- 
 lege of serving such a man, and his God, in 
 our prayer for him, which must be our prayer 
 with him. 
 
 Jesus Himself had the divine power of ac- 
 quiescing humanly in God's program ; He 
 could do His Father's will so willingly as to 
 expand His personality with the inner pres- 
 ence of God, and say — " I and the Father 
 are One." By the misapprehension of a low 
 Spiritual Life and its feebleness fundamentally, 
 we underestimate the precious gift of suffering 
 and the increase of power which comes by 
 bearing, rather than doing. The prayers of 
 a Christian minister ought never to be frantic 
 or indolent announcements to God of our 
 efforts to escape the heroic in human life. 
 An age, like ours, which is so set upon 
 doing and having, rather than being, will 
 offer no high place for one who is the min- 
 ister to a mind diseased in this way. Let us 
 be superior to our age, and each make his 
 
3l6 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 own place. Pulpit power is of all things the 
 most destructive of manly tissue and womanly 
 patience, when it confesses the unsatisfactori- 
 ness of life's content as to the balance of 
 energies, good and bad, and runs even to 
 heaven and the throne of God as a last re- 
 sort. Power in the pulpit must unfold and 
 set forth, not in the form of a catalogue, but 
 by a flash of the interior flame, kindled 
 from above, the riches of the human soul 
 and its resources in the God to Whom we 
 pray. 
 
 Many a man has been led by the prayers 
 of Thomas Guthrie or George Dawson of 
 Birmingham, for examples, to find that he 
 had no business, because it was not worthy of 
 a man, to ask God for something whose tat- 
 tered phrase was about to be spoken by his 
 own lips. Then and there, he felt he had 
 something more valuable in the new light 
 which made the whole congregation richer 
 by similar self-discovery. The tremendous 
 spiritual resource of Baldwin Brown always 
 seemed to me to disclose itself in his prayer. 
 He was the most willing of all souls to get 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 317 
 
 on with what God had appointed for him. 
 Apparently-j he had no doubt whatever of the 
 vaHdity and wisdom of the divine program ; 
 and this was basic in his prayer for the peo- 
 ple. He seemed to be reverendy, obediendy, 
 yet aspiringly looking that program over 
 and investigating joyfully the beneficences of 
 God's plan for every one of them. One 
 could learn much from Hugh Price Hughes, 
 also, who could lift a congregation so com- 
 pletely into the light of God that men were 
 constantly saying to their own hearts, " Well, 
 we can get along without this and that, if we 
 can only live in this light, where we see things 
 as they really are " ; and his nature enforced its 
 rapid and revealing quality upon his praying, 
 so that, in its brevity, his prayer conveyed a 
 teaching which was more powerful than that 
 of his sermon, fine and uplifting as it was 
 ordinarily. 
 
 Joseph Parker greatly inspired and con- 
 tinually exalted the Spiritual Life of his peo- 
 ple by prayers falsely called extempore, 
 for they were the blossoms of his own ad- 
 vancing Spiritual Life — prayers which were 
 
3l8 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 eminently Christian from another point of 
 view. He had a power unsurpassed, so 
 far as I know, springing from a sympathy 
 which felt so much farther than his intellect 
 could see — a power of discovering the soul of 
 his friend to himself and compelling him to 
 seek, beyond his own meagre method of treat- 
 ment, for the difficulty pressing upon him, 
 for God's idea and method. Two years of 
 acquaintance with his work, as one may see it 
 from all points, and in a manner which could 
 not possibly have brought him to me in a less 
 self-revealing mood than that of the man of 
 spiritual power, above all else, have given the 
 thirty years of my ministry a recollection of 
 what it is and ever must be to pray, as the 
 minister who deeply loves men must ever 
 pray with them and for them. This is per- 
 haps not altogether a gift, though it seemed 
 one of the many and the choicest in this man's 
 treasure-house of powers. The truth is, he 
 was leading his people, just in the way and 
 by the same motives as Christ was leading 
 him, all the while in prayer. The whole life 
 of Jesus was the expression of His prayerful 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 319 
 
 nature. The tendrils of His spirit were run- 
 ning Father-ward ; and even His vocabulary, 
 like the leaves, was seasonal as nature's 
 growth, and always it was heavy with dews 
 and rain from above. As Jesus carries the 
 soul of His servant who is "with Christ, in 
 God," on and on, into the heart of the infinite 
 Fatherhood, so the trustful and Christ-born 
 man in the ministry has Christ's own experi- 
 ence. Beginning to pray that he may be de- 
 livered from drinking the cup ; then, his 
 sincere and open soul, so pliable and recep- 
 tive to God's purpose, appealing in what was 
 Christ's and is his life's one long prayer by 
 saying, " Not mine, but Thy will be done." 
 This is indeed ministerial praying. 
 
 It is the High Priest's most glorious func- 
 tion truly exercised. Let us not be afraid to 
 be priesdy in this way. He who is Christ's 
 follower here has carried into the Holy of 
 Holies something more than the ancient 
 High Priest could know. He has carried 
 into the Holy of Holies what our High Priest, 
 the Christ, takes from his weak hands ; and 
 Jesus presents it to His Father — the dearest 
 
320 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 thing this side of the divine Fatherhood — the 
 human soul. 
 
 Of course, I do not mean that these re- 
 actions upon our abihty to heroically live 
 our lives, which affect us less, because we get 
 what we ask for in prayer, than because we 
 become able to do without what would be 
 mere props to an ability to stand alone in 
 God's name, are all or even the larger por- 
 tion of the effect of praying. We have 
 desires that must be answered by something 
 not less than a loftier quality acquired to do 
 without them, even while we pray. We 
 have wants which are indubitable, demands 
 which do not fade away, because our wishes, 
 which we even mistake for wants, are lost 
 sight of as we pray. We see the shell and 
 husk which are cast aside, but we must not 
 underestimate the same circulation between 
 the lower and the higher — the life-current 
 between the plant and the sun — which goes on 
 in nature. If a minister's own Spiritual Life 
 is the gratification of a series of wishes only, 
 his power will never disclose a vital point ; 
 and it is quite as much the mission of prayer 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 321 
 
 to deepen and describe to one's own con- 
 sciousness a genuine spiritual want, as it is 
 to plead for its satisfaction. Men never 
 know how deep the sky is above them until 
 they have revealed to them the depth of an 
 inverted sky beneath, on which they have 
 set sail. Let no prayer be supposed valid 
 for human nature which echoes the shallows, 
 while indeed the deeps are dumb. To 
 change the figure, let no public prayer be 
 considered less than an influence hostile to 
 man's greatest self-attainment and joy, which 
 does not sink the shaft into the mother-vein 
 of all his hard and hidden ore, and also find 
 the dens of wild beasts which must be ex- 
 terminated, while, in the wilderness, he works 
 that vein. The desirable mind of prayer, 
 here suggested by contrast, will never come, 
 except as the expression God-ward of a per- 
 sonal life which identifies the hopes and 
 aspirations, and loves, and griefs, and re- 
 morses of others with one's own, at the 
 deepest level of his problem of life, and 
 gives them voice. 
 
 If we agree that the minister is the minstrel 
 
322 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 of the soul, through his preaching and per- 
 sonal exercise of brotherliness to all hu- 
 manity, revealing its stringed and vibratory 
 harmonies under his strong and sure touch, 
 much more is he, in prayer, the soul's friend 
 who liberates unheard-of melodies which we 
 know are sweeter than those which are heard. 
 Who am I, at the moment as a true minister 
 of God to any soul which takes me into com- 
 panionship with him to pray, save his in- 
 terpreter to Almighty Love ? 
 
 I have spoken of the influence of the 
 higher Spiritual Life upon the doctrines of 
 our religion which are highest. All of these 
 doctrines will appear and reappear in the 
 prayer of the ministry, and if it is true that 
 the minister is the true minstrel of the 
 soul, we may see why it is also true that 
 minstrelsy in the church and prayer is 
 always evangelic, positive, and resonant 
 with the doctrines of grace. It is almost as 
 hard to pray real heresy as it is to sing it. 
 It is quite as impossible to sing agnosticism, 
 and, most of all, is it impossible to sing 
 atheism, and for the same reasons. There 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 323 
 
 is no alliance between them and prayer ; a 
 godless world has no prayer ; a world with 
 its supreme power unknown and unknow- 
 able, even to the experience of faith, has no 
 altars and no choir and chorus to originate, 
 stimulate and enrich prayer. 
 
 So, beginning with the doctrine of God, 
 which is to be maintained only by a life 
 in and with God, we find our minister 
 always Christlike in his vision of those with 
 whom he prays, for whom he prays ; seeing 
 men and their destiny involved always in 
 the purpose and movement and self-revela- 
 tion of God. 
 
 The reaction of the prayerful life upon all 
 the doctrines to which one is attached, be- 
 cause their truthfulness has made him true, 
 is incalculable. The Being to whom one is 
 willing to pray, with the lives and destinies 
 of others upon his heart, must be no less 
 than the living God, for the preacher's 
 theology. The Being who stands behind 
 and shines through his appeal must be God 
 Himself, as He was and is the Being of beings 
 within the minister's mind. His presence dis- 
 
324 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 covering the godlike in the ruins of human 
 nature with which the minister delights to 
 work. It is a loss irremediable, when there 
 occurs in the minister's mind, as he dis- 
 courses, a theistic dualism — the man preach- 
 ing to the people — as a soul having a God 
 different from the God of the man praying 
 for the people. It is not the old dualism be- 
 tween Ormuzd and Ahriman, which is too 
 crass to harm much, but it is a partially 
 realized di-Theism which is worse than any 
 tri-Theism. Then, fortunately, the heart of 
 the people often shows how much more holy 
 and yet tender, how much more sublime and 
 yet near, is the God of our minister's prayers 
 than the God of his sermons. If there must be 
 a difference in your vagrant deliberations, en- 
 shrine your best vision, as you probably must, 
 in prayer, and speak forth its beauty there. 
 Prayer will compel stricter honesties and 
 deeper reverences than sermon-making, even 
 than the preaching of the Gospel. Prayittg 
 the Gospel depends primarily upon the 
 realization of the life of God in your 
 humanity, according to the law and method, 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 325 
 
 and through incarnation. Let nothing lead 
 you to forget that a Christian prayer is 
 Christ's life, first revealed in you and then 
 revealed by you ; and no man goeth up into 
 heaven but he that came down out of heaven. 
 Prayer is a manifestation of God from above, 
 first, in the soul— the vision of God, one's 
 experience with God, revealing the nature of 
 God in humanity. Therefore, when prayer 
 is true, this revealment of God which it is 
 goes back to heaven, and in obedience to 
 gravitations which pull from above, like the 
 Christ of God. The soul of man realizes, in 
 its life, that true prayer has its beginning 
 and end in God. Let our doctrine of God 
 know the reactions of our praying unto God, 
 and all will be well. 
 
 I might go on to speak at length, in this 
 same way, about the doctrine of atonement 
 and the relation of our view of the Scriptures 
 to prayer. This much must be said concern- 
 ing one's doctrine of the atonement — that its 
 genuineness, livableness, and self-evidencing 
 practicalness, will give such colour to one's 
 prayers, when one has his congregation 
 
326 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 living or dying in one's own heart, that noth- 
 ing but what our Spiritual Life validates in 
 this respect can be seriously entertained in 
 the mind. 
 
 In our current view of the atonement in 
 Christ as the staple of Gospel preaching, and 
 the spiritual encouragement it gives in our 
 praying, it is not so much that the Bible tells 
 us this is true, though that means something, 
 as it is that human nature under divine in- 
 fluence should speak as it does. It is not 
 so much that constituted authorities, assem- 
 blies, and conventions say so ; it is not so 
 much because professors of Christian dogmat- 
 ics have concluded that the completeness 
 of the theological system requires something 
 more than has been insisted upon, as it is 
 that the soul of humanity at its truest mo- 
 ments seizes, for its way of approach to God, 
 upon a path which our theology has not 
 duly emphasized, that makes it true in us 
 and for us. Man's prayer, as the utterance 
 of his broken heart in the midst of the severe 
 crises of his Hfe, has enlarged, while it has 
 conserved, his theology. At least, it has 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 327 
 
 vivified an old truth of the atonement. So 
 much it has done, and will do, with all the 
 doctrines of faith. 
 
 The Spiritual Life born anew out of sorrow, 
 trained by the culture of the Cross of Jesus, 
 is never so evangelical, nor does it ever so 
 richly present the truths which are to con- 
 stitute the rising orthodoxy, than when it ex- 
 periences new Truth, or a Truth that is new 
 to its own consciousness. Indeed, usually 
 that which is often called " new truth " is 
 only a revivification of old truth — old truth, 
 which has been neglected and has partially 
 perished, as yonder tree, planted in time of 
 the stream's fullness and then had its roots 
 touched by the river, now dies in the time 
 when the river-bed is dry. There were re- 
 quired the new impulses of a Spiritual Life 
 developed in new crises to re-present the for- 
 gotten truth. 
 
 The most impressive illustration of this, 
 which I remember, is a double one. It 
 comes from the Christian experience of two 
 of my friends. The one, Dr. George Mathe- 
 son, author of the hymn, " O Love That Will 
 
328 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 Not Let Me Go," the other, Dr. William R. 
 Harper, educator and leader of men here, the 
 spiritual and intellectual founder and guide 
 of the University of Chicago. The story of 
 Matheson's blindness and the origin of this 
 precious hymn are known everywhere. It is 
 not usually known, however, that this, like 
 every such spiritual achievement, came from 
 the necessity of his soul's unfolding for a 
 vision of God and His ways which would 
 answer to the difficulty and pain which 
 had then come to him. Such an experience, 
 as sincerely accepted as it is looked into, 
 must lead any mind beyond the ordinary 
 statement of the truth of atonement by the 
 Cross and at the Cross of Jesus. A life with- 
 out a cross of its own will never sing : 
 
 " O cross that liftest up my head, 
 I dare not ask to fly from thee." 
 
 A life honestly dealing with a personal cross, 
 such as this, must sing this truth in its prayer, 
 above all others. A man who has not found 
 out instantly, on revering his own personal 
 cross, that to fly from it means to fly from his 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 329 
 
 truer life, inasmuch as it has the secret of power 
 of his truer Hfe within it, has never called upon 
 the resources of the Spiritual Life in the way- 
 George Matheson called upon them as he 
 prayed. Only our own crosses will enable 
 us to understand what Jesus meant when He 
 said : " Take up thy cross and follow Me," 
 and what the apostle meant when he said: 
 " Whereof I Paul am made a minister ; who 
 now rejoice in my sufTerings for you, and fill 
 up that which is behind of the afflictions of 
 Christ in my flesh for His body's sake, which 
 is the Church." The Cross of Christ is 
 unique, of course. It is unique as Jesus is, 
 because He is our representative humanity. 
 The Cross of Jesus makes sacred our crosses. 
 It lends to them the secret of its power. We 
 behold what the Cross of Jesus did for Jesus 
 in its enthroning Him, through making the 
 " captain of our salvation perfect through 
 sufferings." So, we come into the right valu- 
 ation of our own Calvary and our sufferings 
 there. 
 
 When Dr. Harper was passing hence, 
 through long and agonizing months, it was 
 
330 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 mine to bring to him often this truth so 
 freshly restated by the Scotch scholar and 
 mystic. Let no one dream, for a moment, 
 that Dr. Harper's most radical views of the 
 nature of the Bible and the true method of its 
 interpretation underwent any change. It was 
 distinctly through his larger faith in God's 
 natural method of working through the 
 Spiritual Life of the humanity of the olden 
 time and of all time, that he grasped this, 
 which we may well call the most sadly neg- 
 lected truth of all-atoning grace. His deeper 
 and larger Spiritual Life simply expelled from 
 itself all dry formularies, and, in this personal 
 experience through his own cross, with all the 
 frustration of his brilliant hopes and all the 
 crushing disappointments of his heart regard- 
 ing his work on earth, God and His word 
 came to the rescue through the completion 
 of a faith such as, in any of us, is never satis- 
 fied, in the face of such calamities, unfulfilled 
 with this vision. I never believed more in 
 the grandeur of those determinations which 
 the Spiritual Life alone must make, as to the 
 largeness and depth of any living orthodoxy 
 
AND ITS COMMUNICATION TO MEN 33 1 
 
 than when, with the towers of the University- 
 unfinished and his glorious prime and ma- 
 turity apparently quenched out from earth's 
 vision and influence, his lips moved with joy, 
 and his heart repeated with my own George 
 Matheson's words : 
 
 " O cross that liftest up my head, 
 I do not ask to fly from thee ; 
 I lay in dust, life's glory dead. 
 And from the ground there blossoms 
 red. 
 Life that shall endless be." 
 
LECTURE VIII 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND 
 THE MINISTERS POWER 
 
LECTURE VIII 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND THE 
 MINISTER'S POWER 
 
 AFTER all, the quality and force of the 
 Spiritual Life which is ours will be 
 rightly judged and known, here and 
 elsewhere, by the kind of humanity we help 
 to upbuild. The one result which is worth 
 while — such is the determination of the 
 Spiritual Life of the Christian minister — is | 
 Christlike manhood. Not the multitude of 
 pastoral calls, not a vast congregation or a 
 long roll of church-members, not even the 
 greatest sermon is of such importance, or 
 worth, as is the tiniest increment of personal 
 sanctity. And as for the great sermon— it is 
 never even a great sermon unless its aim is 
 to produce manhood ; and it hits the mark 
 only in exalted human character. So our 
 preaching and pastoral service for men must, 
 first, have Christ's fine regard for whatever 
 power for self-help there may be yet in any 
 335 
 
336 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 man — a potency from which no man ought 
 to be separated. When the Teutonic was on 
 that memorable voyage whose March storm 
 nearly sent her to the bottom of the Atlantic, 
 her man at the watch descried in the fog a 
 hapless schooner off the Grand Banks. It 
 appeared that nothing was left of her rigging ; 
 and she plunged aimlessly about with the 
 violence of the tempest. Soon a signal of 
 distress was visible, and two sailors were seen 
 hanging to her broken hatchway. The great 
 Teutonic \hQXi reminded one of a magnificently 
 endowed Christian, ardent for that triumph 
 of the ministry which begins in self-forget- 
 fulness, generous love, and ends in rescue. 
 
 How splendid it is, and yet, often and here, 
 how inefificient ! As the Teutonic got near, 
 lifted above the craft tossed by the mighty 
 and swift seas, her very power and greatness 
 were against her enterprise of saving. She 
 could not approach closely enough to save 
 without smiting and engulfing the bark 
 and the wretched men still aboard of her. 
 Her life-boats were lowered, after being 
 superbly manned ; and almost as speedily 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 337 
 
 they were dashed back against the ship from 
 which it was impossible for them to get away. 
 Then it was that the captain saw the httle dory 
 still fast to the ship which was now rapidly 
 breaking up. The dizzied and drenched 
 sailors had forgotten all about that little dory. 
 The Teutonics captain surrendered his first 
 plans and his engaging method of their sal- 
 vation. He shouted through mist and blast 
 to them : " Take to the dory and come to us." 
 It is an affair of personal character, per- 
 haps the finest deposit, but certainly the 
 result of a certain most genuine Spiritual Life 
 intent upon the one thing — the affair of 
 saving — which behaves thus wisely and well. 
 Not a sermonic result, but the human result, — 
 his heart and eye on that — enables a man, in 
 such a moment, to throw every cherished plan 
 or ambition to the winds which howl about 
 him, and adopt freely and joyously the one 
 unanticipated, but now evident, method of 
 saving his brothers. The larger the Teutonic, 
 the more certain it is that the men on the 
 bark must take to the dory and come to 
 the greater boat. Not to press this illustra- 
 
338 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 tion too far, we must recognize in the life of 
 the minister, devoted to the salvation of men, 
 that there is nothing more wise, tender, and 
 distinctly loyal to the higher values of human 
 personality, which we would help in every 
 crisis like this, than the evoking, by admoni- 
 tion or command, of every atom of power 
 and opportunity or self-help which our most 
 loved but apparently helpless brother pos- 
 sesses. "Take to the dory and come to us" 
 — this is the call. 
 
 The greatest preachers of divine grace I 
 have ever known have been the preachers 
 also of what we call " works." We are 
 "saved by faith alone, but the faith is not 
 alone." The power to stimulate the con- 
 fidence which sends the current of newly ac- 
 quired vitality, caught from our own, along 
 the nerveless sinews and through the very 
 bones of a man who needs to be rescued, so 
 that he instantly does all he can for himself 
 and develops, in his being saved, a power 
 which makes him all the more worth saving 
 — this wonderful ability to see when the word 
 is to be spoken, and to speak the word en- 
 
AND THE minister's POWER 339 
 
 couragingly and even commandingly, is the 
 accomplishment of a vigorous, elastic Spir- 
 itual Life, which comprehends and focalizes 
 all the faculties of the soul and sends their 
 total wisdom at once to the solution of the 
 problem. 
 
 There is nothing that needs to be repeated 
 to our present ministry more often than the 
 saying of Novalis, which has been repeated 
 by George Eliot in another form : " Char- 
 acter is educated will." The will is supreme 
 at the instant when action is before the per- 
 sonality ; and it is just there that the true 
 minister of Christ must get his sermon and 
 his shepherding in touch with men, to up- 
 build them. I know of nothing, save the 
 Christ Himself — let me speak it reverently — 
 in the hands of the minister, which may take 
 a will-less solution of the various component 
 elements which we find in every human 
 character, and, by the presence of Christ 
 introduced in this unorganized solution, so 
 human and yet so impotent, create a will, 
 or recreate all this which is so formless into 
 the form of character. 
 
340 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 Enter into the chemical laboratory with 
 me for a moment. Here is a large glass 
 beaker containing a solution so cloudy and 
 troublous and perhaps unpleasant of odour. 
 Now, nothing can be gotten out of this solu- 
 tion worth while until the process of precipi- 
 tation and crystallization takes place. Take 
 a glass rod absolutely free from impurity, and 
 let it down into this solution quietly, and lo ! 
 the process has begun. From every quarter 
 there come in little, apparently wandering 
 but now strongly attracted forms like atoms, 
 which now huddle around the glass rod, 
 until the crystallization is complete. 
 
 But the chemist has been lifting the rod 
 quietly and sympathetically as the process 
 goes on, until, when he lifts the rod out and 
 away, there is a crystal rod which has been 
 formed like the pure, strong rod of crystal 
 around which it was formed. Does not this, 
 in some way, picture for us what is done for 
 our poor will-less humanity by introducing 
 Jesus Christ, God's crystal purity, into the 
 troublous impurity and formlessness of 
 humanity ? A man's soul holds a solution 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 341 
 
 which is trembling and seething throughout 
 with all his little willings, which mean well, 
 but are as nothing for determination. These 
 faint intimations of volition seek aimlessly 
 to associate in a will powerful, true, and pure. 
 They seek after their kind, according to a law 
 of attraction. They would attach themselves 
 to and reorganize themselves around a will. 
 Grace comes from above. Such a will as the 
 Will Supreme, reorganizing life and vanquish- 
 ing death at Calvary, — the will of God in 
 Christ sympathetically let down, as it were, 
 into the personality, — disturbs at once into 
 precipitation, and commands the moving 
 solution into a process of crystallization by 
 which the many willings, which are so pre- 
 cious and yet so inefficient, come to be a will 
 educated into the form of character. As I 
 see this rod lifted out from the solution, and 
 the crystal creation, or re-creation, standing 
 before me, I seem to hear certain words, and 
 I would speak them with reverence. It was 
 as if the original and pure rod of crystal had 
 said, on departing from the new creation : 
 " It is expedient for you that I go away." A 
 
342 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 new will must will for itself, after its own 
 character in Christ. 
 
 Of course, both of these considerations 
 suggest to you that all true ministerial power 
 comes out of the Spiritual Life, which is self- 
 effacing and self-forgetting. We must be 
 strong enough in the Lord, and for men, to 
 drop any plan we have once conceived for 
 their sake ; above all, we must rely upon Jesus 
 Christ to create the new character by giving 
 a new will to weak humanity, which shall 
 enable that humanity to endure temptation, 
 overcome difficulties, and fight to the end the 
 good fight of faith. In your sermon, this 
 self-forgetfulness will probably appear along 
 with the unforgetting insight which discovers 
 only the things that imist be said and that 
 ethical imagination, which is a kind of 
 memory of things to be, and is unfailing in 
 measuring merely intellectual, or emotional, 
 or even volitional forces by their effect upon 
 the conscience. 
 
 I have not time to say more, at this point, 
 on what has been called the ability to leave 
 out everything that is not of supreme impor- 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 343 
 
 tance in a picture or a sermon, in tlie interest 
 of all good productions of man's mind at its 
 best. This brings about what it is never by- 
 deliberation meant to be, namely, such an 
 artistic result as even ministers ought not 
 to disdain. SufTer me first, however, a 
 word with you as to this matter of the 
 conscience which, as I have said, is to be 
 affected by certain forces and in a certain 
 way. 
 
 The minister of to-morrow will recog- 
 nize and value the conscience of man, in his 
 preaching, as no minister of yesterday ever 
 did or could. While the modern pulpit has 
 often neglected the conscience, the bar and 
 the court of law are as deeply interested 
 in addressing and relying upon conscience 
 as ever before. Our jurisprudence appeals, 
 for its vitality, to the conscience of our 
 citizenship. No law, to begin with, is force- 
 ful as a law, unless it is the utterance of the 
 public conscience. No man would think of 
 overturning our courts of equity, and expect 
 a nation to abide, by advising the assumption 
 upon the part of a jury and the court that the 
 
344 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 conscience of man is such a product as the 
 feeble agnosticism of ten or twenty years ago 
 announced it to be. There is a very serious 
 danger that our preached theology and 
 anthropology in regard to the conscience 
 may conspire with the dawdling criminology 
 of our day, and leave right and wrong, and 
 the criminal who assaults the conscience and 
 life of the commonwealth, out of all serious 
 consideration. Such a man as Daniel Web- 
 ster, thank God, still represents our bar and 
 public order, when he says to court and jury : 
 •' A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omni- 
 present like the Deity. If we take to ourselves 
 the wings of the morning, and dwell in the 
 uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed, or 
 duty violated, is still with us, for our happi- 
 ness or our misery. If we say the darkness 
 shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light 
 our obligations are yet with us. We cannot 
 escape their power, nor fly from their pres- 
 ence. They are with us in this life, will be with 
 us at its close ; and^ in that scene of incon- 
 ceivable solemnity, which lies yet farther on- 
 ward, we shall still find ourselves surrounded 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 345 
 
 by the consciousness of duty, to pain us 
 wherever it has been violated, and to console 
 us so far as God may have given us grace to 
 perform it." At the bar, with men like 
 Webster, now, in the practice of law, are 
 those who must hold the ethical positions of 
 the mighty past ; and they, if not we, are 
 teaching wayward society to aver, with 
 Lowell's straightforwardness : 
 
 " In vain we call old notions fudge, 
 
 And bend our conscience to our dealing : 
 The Ten Commandments will not budge. 
 And stealing will continue stealing." 
 
 If the minister is willing that the bar, or all 
 other organizations of human interests save 
 that of the pulpit, shall maintain the validity 
 of the conscience, he will deservedly lose the 
 respect of men. But not for this reason of 
 his unfortunate isolation only. They will 
 disregard him for the stronger reason — that a 
 conscienceless humanity is a hopeless ruin ; 
 and the man who does not address the con- 
 science, reinforce the conscience, and, at 
 length, lay upon the conscience of man such 
 burdens as will drive the guilty soul to Cal- 
 
346 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 vary and to Christ's outpoured blood, has no 
 place as a factor in creating or re-creating 
 human civilization. 
 
 Literature, which, to be immortal, must be 
 true to facts, has a singularly impressive way 
 of rightening up our thought on these mat- 
 ters ; and ultimately, what literature says will 
 be what life has compelled writers of sagacity 
 and insight, as surveyors of life's realm, to 
 say as to what the conscience is and what 
 sin really is. One of our most wise readers 
 of all excellent writers has called attention to 
 the fact that, while Emerson was willing to 
 say somewhat captiously — " The less we have 
 to do with our sins the better," and — " No 
 man can afford to waste his moments on 
 compunctiousness," — the man in the thick of 
 the fight for a higher civilization has spoken 
 differently. John Morley, for example, who 
 certainly cannot be called an ally or defender 
 of orthodoxy, because of any favourable 
 predilections hitherto published, has said : 
 "Emerson has little to say of that horrid 
 burden and impediment on the soul which 
 the churches call ' sin^' and which, by what- 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 347 
 
 ever name we call it, is a very real catastro- 
 phe in the moral nature of man," When 
 men like this man of men, in Britain's House 
 of Lords, are struggling for right as against 
 wrong, surely Christ's minister should not 
 mystify the true situation for all men who 
 ought to be strong in the battle. 
 
 Dante's circles of flame would have paled 
 and cooled long ago, and the blood on Lady 
 Macbeth' s hands would have vanished with- 
 out incarnadining either the multitudinous 
 seas or the human memory, if sin and con- 
 science were not — as they have been presumed 
 to be — actualities to be regarded seriously. 
 They are not receding factors, or facts, in 
 man's universe ; but rather they are advanc- 
 ing in interest and importance, as his life at- 
 tains nearness to his cherished ideals. The 
 very reward which a Hugo finds for his crea- 
 tion of Jean Valjean — namely, numberless 
 readers and the respect of the moral con- 
 sciousness of the world — this awaits the 
 preacher, who, with equal force and genius, 
 will respect the realities which constitute the 
 perennial message of this novel. It is not 
 
348 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 to be expected, however, that any man who 
 has not had personal deliverances from sin 
 and sinning, by having been lifted out of the 
 pit by a Perfect Holiness, will ever address 
 men at their deepest, or speak authoritatively 
 to them at their highest. 
 
 Unique and commanding, above that of 
 all others, is the view-point of the Christian 
 minister with respect to this matter of human 
 sin, guiltiness, self-reproach and pain. The 
 Spiritual Life of the minister, in its depths and 
 clearness, will furnish the means and method 
 of estimating, not only the sinfulness of sin, 
 but the possibility and way of salvation from 
 sin, and sanctification through the divine life. 
 It grows by and through his vision of the 
 sinless Christ, who makes for us an estimate, 
 in His own blood, of the sinfulness of sin. 
 
 Men talk of preparation for the Gospel min- 
 istry I There is no preparation to be men- 
 tioned in the same thought or breath, with that 
 which comes of the struggle and victory, not 
 primarily over one's sins, but over sin and 
 the sinful disposition, in full view of the Sin- 
 Bearer. It cannot be accomplished nega- 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 349 
 
 lively, and especially while one is compelled 
 to make two sermons a week, which will 
 satisfy an audience not yet trained to partici- 
 pate, consciously or unconsciously, in what is 
 a searching experience in the minister's life. 
 It means the garden and bloody sweat of 
 Gethsemane, but with Jesus there to help. 
 
 Every now and then a man as great as 
 Chalmers has to make his best preparation 
 for the ministry, as did Savonarola, after he 
 has been preaching for years. Nothing so 
 tries out and so often quickly shakes to the 
 foundations a young John Wesley ; nothing 
 so "inducts him into his holy office" as this 
 new life of righteousness, thus attained. It 
 often promises to shake to pieces that which 
 we have deemed a fixed series of truths for 
 our preaching, — a series of window-like utter- 
 ances for the light that shall sweep in for the 
 day, and as well for the light that shall sweep 
 out from within, through the night, making 
 what we call our faith luminous as a cathedral. 
 It even threatens to reduce this whole temple 
 of our solemn preparedness to its real worth 
 in our sight, and to show us that what we 
 
350 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 call value is utter valuelessness to any child 
 of humanity who is scarred and stained by 
 sin, broken, and leprous with the invasion of 
 iniquity, unless that child finds the way of 
 light through the Crucified, himself crying 
 out at the altar to which he has crawled, and 
 stretching his poor hand to the priest at the 
 altar, the true minister of that Christ Who 
 hears the otherwise mute appeal. When we 
 have felt all this, and have been glad for the 
 transformation in us, made through the 
 saving of a human being in and by our life 
 with Christ, we know just what our previous 
 preparation for the ministry is worth, and 
 we rejoice in our new estate with God and 
 men. 
 
 What a terrible moment it is, in the life of 
 a minister, when some wretched being, with 
 the form of our humanity, crouches before a 
 temptation which he fears and hates, and 
 then comes pleadingly to him, bringing a 
 more vivid sense of moral values, with his 
 more illumined conscience, than the minister 
 himself has ! Woe to the preacher who, at 
 that moment, is not commanded, consoled, 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 35 1 
 
 and rescued, in this presence, by his vision of 
 the sinlessness and, therefore, moral beautiful- 
 ness of Jesus ! 
 
 The sinner has sinned down beneath his 
 blunders as, long before this moment, he has 
 sinned beneath the pleasures of his prodigal 
 days, also; and, having sinned to the very 
 bottom, he finds a certain revolt within him 
 which is the rebound of the soul upward 
 towards its own. There is nothing which he 
 now beholds which makes the original strings 
 of its being vibrate so surely and with such 
 haunting intimations of harmony, as the 
 figure and face of Jesus, Who was and is the 
 all-harmony, for ''He ivas without sinJ^ Now, 
 the minister cannot be a disinterested party 
 when this vision has come and produced 
 conviction and longing, in the mind of that 
 sinner, especially if, by some fortunate or 
 prudent word spoken in this minister's 
 sermon, he himself may have roused this 
 man to the dream and possibility of a new 
 life. Sometimes it is perillous for him to 
 quote from a soul more fluent with God than 
 his own. If even the minister now finds that, 
 
352 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 as he preached yesterday, there came into his 
 discourse and out of the Spiritual Life of 
 another, from whom he repeated a certain 
 vigorous passage, quoting it, inviting it in 
 from the side of the sluggish stream of his 
 own lower Spiritual Life as it went on, seeking 
 expression for itself in the sermon, and, by 
 the quotation, letting in a fresher, clearer, and 
 more rapidly progressing stream from the 
 heights above, — if even the minister now has 
 learned, for the first time, that some better 
 Spiritual Life than his own is likely to win such 
 a man as this, whom he is now sincerely try- 
 ing to help with a helpfulness not altogether 
 satisfactory to himself, surely he is a most 
 interested party on two sides. He may well 
 ask of his own heart and his work as a min- 
 ister, if a greater Spiritual Life, coming from 
 a more authoritative vision of Jesus within 
 him, might not win for him the responses of 
 many such as this poor creature. He may, 
 and he must, ask how he may get hold of a 
 more pronounced and arresting conception 
 of the reality of sin, as its darkness slidders 
 against the whiteness of Christ's sinlessness, 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 353 
 
 or even as this was visioned by the mind 
 whose words he quoted. 
 
 Wonderful are the blessings of self-forget- 
 fulness, when it comes from an all-absorbing 
 and authoritative ethical ideal — personal and 
 glorious in the sinless Redeemer. It is this 
 self-forgetfulness which never makes the 
 confusion, even in our sermon-writing, or 
 our preaching, or our shepherding — a con- 
 fusion such as Whistler, the painter, rebuked, 
 when a young lady, who had been labouring 
 upon a canvas, was approached by the artist. 
 He said of her work : " This will not do." 
 " Why," she asserted, " you said to me to 
 pamt as I seeT " Yes," he replied, " I know 
 I did ; but you are seeing as you pamt P 
 
 Only the love of Christ, abounding, joyous, 
 and altogether gathering our faculties into its 
 delight, will free us from such illusions. It is 
 an awful thing for a minister to be satisfied in 
 beholding Christ only in accord with his 
 habit of preaching about Him, imposing his 
 impoverishing limitations upon Him, and 
 projecting his tone of cynicism upon Him, or 
 half-hiding the otherwise glorious portrait by 
 
354 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 and in the shadow and gloom of himself — a 
 shadow and gloom produced, as has been 
 said, " because he has the sun at his back." 
 It is one of the most vivid pictures of Simon 
 Peter's soul when, as he flees from Rome 
 only to meet his Master and His " Quo 
 Vadis^' we are told that " he strove to think 
 he did his Master's will." Let your Spiritual 
 Life be such an adoration, and with its central 
 and regnant figure, Jesus Christ, so become 
 the very blood circulating through your whole 
 personality, that you become intent upon 
 Christ's errand, seeking to do the thing, for 
 man and with man, which His presence in 
 you intimates must be done by those who 
 constitute now His " body" — His only chosen 
 means of reaching His brothers — with the 
 presence and help of the Holy Spirit, — then, 
 you will be exempted from every petty task, 
 and you will be delivered over to the larger 
 and sweeter service for men and Him. 
 
 Then, how appealingly the neediest man 
 holds you by one hand, pulling with his 
 pathetic necessities ; while the Christ holds 
 you by the other hand, assuring you of His 
 
AND THE minister's POWER 355 
 
 power and willingness to meet these neces- 
 sities, through you. This it is that gives you 
 dignity — a position made by the presence of 
 Christ, with your one hand in His, and the 
 presence of the needy humanity which holds 
 to your other hand and which appeals through 
 you to Him, desperately confident that it 
 must receive its everything through you, 
 from Him. 
 
 There can be no greater reward in the 
 thing itself, or in the joy flowing from it, than 
 to make a place for Christ in a human 
 life. For example, you are taking, as I 
 have taken, a pardon to a man in jail. You 
 look through the grating of steel, which has 
 separated him so long from freedom and 
 association with his fellow men. If you can 
 withhold your emotions from the flood that 
 rises in you, you may hear him say, as I 
 have heard him say: "Yes, this is my 
 pardon ; but do you know why I am here ? 
 I am here, and I have been here so long, 
 because I have not the power to keep me 
 from doing certain things that are lawless 
 and evil. Thank God and you for this 
 
356 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 pardon, I say: but I tell you that / need a 
 friend. Do you know that I think that if 
 you, who bring me this pardon, would only 
 be my friend, and I could lean up against 
 you and obey the command of your love for 
 me — for I believe you do love me, because 
 you have brought to me this pardon — then, 
 if you would stick to me, I could go out of 
 here safely. Then, you see, this pardon 
 would mean so much more to me and to all 
 whom I love. Jiist be my friend^ — will you ? 
 — so that my pardon may be woj'-th while /" 
 
 Now, if you have had a similar experience in 
 preaching or in shepherding, with any human 
 soul, you know how instantly and command- 
 ingly Jesus Christ, the author of the pardon, 
 the only omnipotent Friend, Who, ail-wisely 
 and unfailingly, will go, side by side, with 
 the pardoned soul, steps into your place, fills 
 it, and fills all this weak man's whole world, 
 beside, with the infinite majesty, not only of 
 His pardoning love to get him out, but His 
 sanctifying grace and help, to keep him from 
 sinning, and so getting into prison again. 
 
 This self-forgetting quality of our Spiritual 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 357 
 
 Life alone makes us able to treat fairly what 
 else would seem the contrarieties of our 
 Scriptures and the apparent contrarieties of 
 life. There are many statements in the Scrip- 
 tures, and of first importance to the help of 
 genuine spirituality, which will never be 
 true to us until their truth has been experi- 
 enced by us. I have witnessed the effort of 
 an immature clergyman to preach on the 
 text, " A?id the Lamb shall be their Shepherd^ 
 He took many precious moments in attempt- 
 ing to clear up the confusion as to metaphor. 
 He said many times, " How may a lamb be 
 a shepherd?" In it all he disclosed how 
 much may be learned only through experi- 
 ence, which no metaphor can teach, or pre- 
 vent from being true. In spite of any rhe- 
 torical offense, any living soul knows that the 
 power which saves a man is the same power 
 that protects and leads and sanctifies him. 
 " The Lamb shall be their Shepherd." Now, 
 this is the experience of all true ministry. 
 
 There is a certain set of forces, powerful 
 motives and ideals, which may be named 
 " the Lamb." Redemption is a fact. The 
 
358 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 glory and burden of the ministry is the once 
 slain and now enthroned Lamb — the Cross 
 of the Christ whom Paul adored. As soon 
 and as long as one is a proclaimer of the 
 Word of Life, so soon and so long will the 
 music of his speech be the music of redemp- 
 tion to him, through the sacrifice of innocence. 
 But there is something for God's grace to do, 
 with and for human nature, more than just to 
 rescue it, even by redemption, possessed, as 
 His redemption is, with these high spiritual 
 values. Human nature must be shepherded ; 
 and here is the realm of the minister, not as 
 preacher so much as pastor. He can be 
 neither of these until this truth is lived by 
 him. But they are not two men in his own 
 experience. One, the man living this Gospel 
 of being redeemed by the Lamb and being 
 also shepherded, comes to have the slain 
 Lamb as the glorious figure in his sermon. 
 The shepherding is as much a matter of con- 
 sequence as ever anything may be, in the 
 development of character in the preacher. 
 It comes through following out the duty 
 implied in his first address to his fellow man, 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 359 
 
 and in the following out of that culture of 
 character, which is the setting permanently of 
 moral foundations within him, and the build- 
 ing up of Christian personality — all again 
 implied and prophesied in his first experience 
 of being saved by the sacrifice of the Lamb. 
 This is only an example, but it is to my pur- 
 pose. 
 
 That the divine life is livable in humanity 
 and by humanity is a conviction that has 
 roots in personal experience alone. If a 
 minister is ever to be delivered from un- 
 vital ideals and devitalizing effort, it must 
 be by a vitality which is very personal and 
 works with the expulsiveness of a good seed 
 occupying the soil to the exclusion of every- 
 thing else. A living Gospel in the minister 
 will produce a Gospel for men in and out of 
 every life, and such a Gospel will no more 
 tolerate apologetics in the name of its safety 
 than life will permit any other waste of time. 
 It is its own reason for being and enduring. 
 
 The process which is going on in the minis- 
 ter is also working its miracles, and, indeed, 
 repeating the whole life of Christ, from His 
 
36o THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 birth to His ascension, in the experiences of 
 the minister's people. The growth of minis- 
 ter and his people is their growth together. 
 They have the same food and share one ex- 
 perience of labour and piety, and are so 
 directed by the same forces and towards the 
 same goal, that minister and congregation 
 are perpetually interested in the same things 
 and abide, ever interesting to each other. The 
 impulse of his preaching, the reason for it, 
 and the source of its power — these are as 
 much realizable and realized forces in the 
 lives of the men and women touched by his 
 life, as they are in his own. Let no man, 
 however, take this for granted, if he has not 
 that sort of spiritual vitality which is con- 
 tagious. An audience knows that he cannot 
 put it into the speech of a community. It 
 requires a pervasive life. The community 
 will feel it quickly enough — when you are, or 
 are becoming sapless and will soon be in the 
 sere and yellow leaf, if there be leaves at all. 
 To keep them from this discovery, leaves may 
 not be hung on the branches of the trees in 
 your orchard. Something must be done for 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 361 
 
 the roots of the trees, so that fresh leaves 
 will grow there, else they will fade in the 
 mind. 
 
 In such a case, your sermons — I venture to 
 use an illustration from my experience — are 
 like some paintings I had to pass by recendy. 
 My poor ardst friend had no living connec- 
 tion with the live thing called nature. In 
 his pictures, the sun always comes too soon ; 
 the grass has not yet its diamonds full and 
 ready for effulgent day ; his sky says six, 
 when it is only five o'clock on the clover. 
 Painters must be true to earth and sky, for 
 these have a common chronology. 
 
 Mr. Beecher never failed in giving his audi- 
 ence refreshment from the nature he touched, 
 for she responded to him as a maiden who 
 has heard a whisper of love. Study the 
 nature which you find in the Bible. It will 
 make your sermons more Biblical than your 
 quoting texts. " Height of the sky ? I touch 
 it with my stick." "Whose stick?" I won- 
 der. Never touch the sea or the sky 
 with your walking-stick, unless you have the 
 oceanic feeling and a sky of faith. Beneath 
 
362 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the brightness of the sea there must be depth, 
 else the brightness is a glory imposed upon 
 the ocean, not a response of the infinite in 
 the sea to the infinite in the sky. Deep must 
 ever call unto deep, in all art. Some of our 
 recent nature-books have been so reproduced 
 in the form of preaching, that any trick of 
 appearing to be on good terms with nature 
 has worn its welcome out to our audiences. 
 A Thoreau, a John Burroughs, or a Richard 
 Jefferies will hardly do, at second-hand. 
 Tricks cannot achieve the results of real in- 
 spiration, any more than the most elaborately 
 wrought of paper roses can yield a drop of 
 pure attar. It is only the reality of feeling, 
 in your speech, that awakes the reality in him 
 who listens ^to it. Honour your own experi- 
 ence by refusing to steal, or even to imbibe 
 too lawlessly from another. Once I saw the 
 Hypatia of Kingsley, done in marble, by 
 Thornycroft. The difference in portraiture 
 was only this ; she had grown up in Kingsley's 
 soul, whereas, in Thornycroft' s, she had been 
 manufactured from Kingsley's experience 
 with her. The moment we appeal to an- 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 363 
 
 Other's experience we cannot create ; we only 
 manufacture. 
 
 And this leads me to say that there is an- 
 other thing almost as vicious as stealing, 
 and that is your so getting into debt, 
 to any and all others, who are themselves as 
 dependent for first-hand treasure from God as 
 yourselves, that you must go along through 
 life as debtors only. Delayed payment of 
 just debts, intellectual and moral, involves 
 paying very high interest : yet the gods never 
 take usury. While this is true, let us, by the 
 strength of our spiritual life, so draw from 
 God that, as His children, we may escape 
 the thralldom of debt unto men. If you must 
 get into debt intellectually, get into debt unto 
 God and to the great souls who can afford to 
 carry you. Let us never break the com- 
 mandment against theft. Small persons 
 practice petty larceny, and abscond with 
 phraseology which pleases them, wherever 
 they may get it. Larger persons practice 
 grand larceny, and take ideas. Nothing will 
 keep you from plagiarism, but the richness of 
 the Spiritual Life, which must ever think and 
 
364 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 feel and express itself honestly. The freshness 
 and power of assimilation, that necessity for 
 true expression involved in the opulence of 
 the Spiritual Life, will make it possible for any 
 of you to read the most masterful of men and 
 leave his neighbourhood with nothing, save 
 and except the inspiration of his mastery 
 upon you. 
 
 The Spiritual Life alone, whose main in- 
 terest is God Himself and His redemption of 
 humanity, will guarantee to the mind both 
 the God ward and man ward aspects, for ex- 
 ample, of Nature, as also of History and 
 Literature and Art. Its flood of interest 
 towards God will exclude from the mind any 
 view of nature which can be put into a ser- 
 mon only as a piece of mosaic, which de- 
 naturalizes everything at once for your con- 
 gregation. Instead of all this, there comes, 
 by way of the Spiritual Life, through 
 the minds and lives of all, a spiritual 
 movement, a recognition of that which the 
 minstrel brings to the minister for a truer 
 interpretation — the Soul in nature which 
 anticipates the instant : 
 
AND THE minister's POWER 365 
 
 When, from this threshold of being, these steps of 
 the Presence, this precinct. 
 Into the matrix of Life darkly divinely resumed, 
 Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error 
 and cancelled, 
 Man and his greatness survive, lost in the great- 
 ness of God." 
 
 Then take the interest of nature manward. 
 Nothing has made our greatest preachers of 
 any time so competent with natural phe- 
 nomena and nature's messages to the relig- 
 ious hfe, as their love of humanity. Remem- 
 ber that their love of nature is more than 
 a love of natural science ; it is a passion 
 more than a study. Every such minister also 
 loves men more than any science dealing with 
 men. Each of them seems to have touched 
 nature with kingly powers of interpretation, 
 and rejoiced ; and then to have looked farther, 
 and said : 
 
 Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, 
 And the sun looked over the mountain's rim : 
 And straight was a path of gold for him, 
 And the need of a world of men for me." 
 
 When a minister has become divinely ac- 
 quainted with the world of men, through the 
 
366 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 love of God in Christ Jesus as manifested in 
 the minister's own life, his whole universe, 
 beside physical nature, becomes not only hu- 
 manized, but divinized. This, first of all, re- 
 inforces him with the methods of nature, so 
 that, if his studies bring to his door the per- 
 sons and events of human history and they 
 throng for recognition or speech in his ser- 
 mon, he has a philosophy of history with 
 which to welcome and entertain them, and to 
 get the best out of each one of them, for the 
 people who are hearing him. The minister's 
 method of studying history, to be either safe 
 for him or helpful to his message and influ- 
 ence among men, must have its source and 
 inspiration in his own Spiritual Life — God's 
 perpetual coming into humanity, which has 
 its supreme illustration in the incarnation of 
 God through Jesus Christ. If a minister is 
 not able to preach this truth, and because he 
 knows its truth in God's life within his own, 
 he can see no unity in history; and there 
 appears again that wretched dualism, which, 
 in the study of history, has made men ac- 
 customed to call some of it sacred and all 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 367 
 
 else in man's life-story profane. On the 
 other hand, the Spiritual Life authenticates 
 the validity of all one's proper undertakings 
 in the pulpit and out of it. It has its own 
 testimony as to what is safe and wise for a 
 minister to try to do, either as a preacher or 
 pastor. Let him submit to Omnipotence, 
 and undertake the inevitable; the irresistible 
 current of the divine life will invite and bear 
 up what argosies may and ought to move 
 upon its flood. He is in the power of God 
 working in history. 
 
 I need not say that, to the strongest of us, 
 this means richer and stronger personal life 
 with men and God. Genius may do without 
 food and fire, but it cannot do without fellow- 
 ship. Dilettanteism will be the result always, 
 when the elemental presses no longer through 
 our gates for utterance. The artist, in living, 
 speaking and doing, never humours the ele- 
 mental, as does the dilettante ; he submits to 
 it. What makes these true makes it true, 
 also, that helpful preaching is far from all 
 rhapsodical productions of any kind. They 
 betray lack of vitality. Each is the shrill 
 
368 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 Utterance of decaying emotion, or the tragic 
 farewell-appearance of a vanishing idea. 
 
 Always revere and seek personalities, so 
 you can live with the greatest of them in joy 
 and peace. Then you will never substitute 
 a bloodless discourse, on some mighty man 
 or woman of God, for a portrait. Even Sir 
 Joshua's lectures, read in the atmosphere 
 created by such a portrait as he made of 
 Mrs. Siddons, seem like a grammarian's or 
 philologist's discourses on the language in 
 which Shakespeare's Lear enchains our souls 
 to his own. Even his account of himself is 
 talent attempting to record genius. 
 
 Live for insight, for form and method are 
 consequent upon insight. The insight which 
 makes Jesus the Master of men may be won- 
 derfully communicated to us — in all these 
 miracles of empowerment. Jesus relies upon 
 the principle of generation and regenera- 
 tion of the most natural kind — a communal 
 life for Him and us — saying: "I am the 
 vine ; ye are the branches." As the same 
 sap fills both vine and branches, so God fills 
 our life, as He filled the life of Jesus. So, 
 
AND THE minister's POWER 369 
 
 also, we may have hope that, just as the ap- 
 parent contradictions of truth are swept 
 within one circle of His comprehension, in 
 the form of some promise of His grace, or 
 some command of His conscience, so it is 
 He within us, Who communicates to our 
 natures the comprehensiveness of character 
 in which all the faculties are given life, 
 strength, and unity. There is one repre- 
 sentative Man, one complete Man ; not only 
 so far as the universe and history go, but 
 more fundamentally. In Him all things of 
 the human personality consist. The else 
 disorderly and errant faculties, that so often 
 are met within us, only to be vagrant and an- 
 archic within us, will compose, when they are 
 composed by the inner influence of Jesus' 
 presence. This alone will give unity and 
 comprehensiveness to our preaching. 
 
 We need to hear our Christ saying to us, 
 as His wounded hand is lifted in benediction 
 over the topics and texts which we have not 
 preached upon, while we turn admiringly to 
 the topics and texts which our partialness of 
 nature and our incompleteness of life have 
 
370 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 preached upon so often, thus giving men 
 only a fragment of Gospel : " These things ye 
 ought to have done, and not left the other 
 undone." The minister needs to know that 
 we are as partial, and to that extent untrue, as 
 we are pious and Scriptural, when our Christ 
 has told us, until it has been spoken within 
 the depths of our very souls, some one truth 
 which, for the reason of our personal incom- 
 pleteness, we accept to the exclusion of 
 another equally important. We need to hear 
 Him tell us the " ^/^t* " truth. "He saith 
 unto them, again'' We do not need to 
 compromise as between these apparently 
 antagonistic ideas, or as between many, or 
 with the many seeming oppositions in Chris- 
 tian teaching. They cannot be compromised ; 
 they must be comprehended in our life, as 
 they are in the life of the Christ, and in 
 His message. 
 
 The end to which all these efficiencies, 
 consequential upon depth and strength and 
 richness of the Spiritual Life, must be obedient 
 is, of course, ministerial effectiveness. Shall 
 your sermon be shorter or longer ? The age 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 37 1 
 
 says it must be shorter; but I notice that 
 the age is determined, nevertheless, and 
 indeed, above all, to get itself and its baggage 
 from the terminus " a quo " to the terminus 
 " ad quetn " — I shall say from Chicago to 
 New York. Nobody has been foolish 
 enough to attempt to shorten the distance ; 
 the number of miles remains the same be- 
 tween the cities ; the space and the scenery 
 will be there when our fifteen or eighteen 
 hour train has made way for the aeroplane. 
 Even then the scenery and the space will lie 
 there, below our speed. What our congre- 
 gation really wishes is what the man who 
 hastens between these two cities wishes — to 
 get to his destination as soon as possible. 
 The destination and the distance he cannot, 
 or will not, change. What does it mean? 
 It means a road-bed like rock ; ties tougher 
 and sounder ; flawless rails of steel for track, 
 heavier and of unquestioned fineness and 
 strength. If this were all, in the preacher's 
 case, he might do without a stronger and 
 finer Spiritual Life, but the railway also must 
 have a better engine. Fiercer flames in the 
 
372 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 fire-box, cylinders and condensers of higher 
 potency and every wheel and screw of in- 
 fallible security — all these the mightier mech- 
 anism demands. The short sermon, if it is 
 to take the hearers of it safely from one point 
 to another, and not merely go part way, or to 
 jump the track, means for each of this sort of 
 " train of thought " and road, — Spiritual Life 
 of a far higher quality. 
 
 Let me speak of another of these, which 
 are called " litde things." If they seem litde 
 things, let me again assure you that they are 
 great enough to defend our vineyard from 
 " the little foxes which destroy the vines." 
 
 The Spiritual Life will do as much for you in 
 granting you the quality of courtesy, with all 
 it involves of knightliness and grace. Chris- 
 tianity is indeed "a compliment to human 
 nature." Be sure that you treat all men, in 
 the light of their possibilides. If a man looks 
 at other men, in all their prose, as poems in 
 the making under the influence of rhythmic 
 influences, he is likely to realize how far gra- 
 ciousness of manner and generosity of treat- 
 ment may go to make these other lives at 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 373 
 
 least worth living. Old Thomas Decker has 
 told us that Jesus was the " first true gentle- 
 man that ever breathed." It is not irreverence 
 that speaks of our Christ as " God Almighty's 
 Gentleman." Let us not be fearful that these 
 make Him less divine. His manliness is the 
 power within us, to quicken our own and 
 foster it. His gentleness is the genial climate 
 He brings with Him — a climate celestially 
 adapted to woo harvests out of seeds, and 
 strew hedges with blossoms, and hang clusters 
 of grapes in the forests, and arbours in our 
 otherwise fruitless life. A gentleman, in and 
 out of the pulpit, is the finest and most elo- 
 quent of sermons — a whole vital exposition of 
 the Gospel in Christ Jesus, when, with eyes that 
 are windows of character, through which the 
 light pours by day, and out of which the 
 kindled radiance pours through in many- 
 coloured glory at night ; with a hand for guid- 
 ance and blessing, and lips musical with truth 
 and love, he speaks his message. No man 
 is ever a man of truest courtesy until he is 
 of the manner born, in the new-birth. His 
 heart is then at the court of the Highest, 
 
374 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 doing homage to Jesus, his Lord, breathing 
 in the chivalry which led Jesus to His cross 
 on Calvary. 
 
 Just as the most slavish literalism with re- 
 gard to the Bible and its authority vanishes 
 before the liberty which comes, along with 
 that higher law of love and liberty which 
 binds every man with a new affection to 
 Truth, through a more spiritual use of the 
 Bible, so the tyranny of ecclesiasticism, or 
 that more perillous tyranny of one's own 
 anarchic disregard of all order, passes away in 
 the more spiritual use we make of our church 
 occasions, even church councils and the like. 
 Then the truths of the Bible run into the new 
 molds offered us by modern scholarship, and 
 the vivification of the ecclesiastical life is so 
 assured that machines go, and processes of 
 growth begin and flourish. The preventive 
 of weakness always is power. Power is the 
 product of life. Only a life's spirituality is 
 successfully set against such pulpit pests, if 
 we may not call them sins, as verbosity, 
 hysteria and disputatiousness. They all 
 come, not from the pulpit itself, but from the 
 
AND THE minister's POWER 375 
 
 person in the pulpit. They arise from 
 either unhealthful, or fragmentary char- 
 acter. The remedy for them all is spiritual 
 health, holiness, wholeness. 
 
 Men are continually mistaking, for ex- 
 ample, what is really and only preserva- 
 tism for what they think is very respectable 
 — I mean conservatism. The passion for 
 taking dry seeds and labelling them, 
 in order that they may be safe, belongs 
 not to orthodoxy of the Church alone. It 
 never does the work of a true conservative. 
 He conserves who plants the seeds. Here 
 as elsewhere, extremes meet ; and he becomes 
 the true radical. Radicalism — Radix mean- 
 ing " root " — is rootedness. There, again, you 
 come upon life itself, and all our valuable 
 certitude or confidence feels its way down to 
 this rootedness which goes on and ever on, 
 inside our dim but real secret-places, through 
 a process of life. It is so in all things. Just 
 as the Spiritual Life fosters such growth in a 
 man that there develops an originality in him, 
 or an impulse for originating, accordant with 
 that Spiritual Life's assimilation and trans- 
 
376 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 formation of what he touches, so the modera- 
 tion and poise, which are to " be known of all 
 men," are obtained, not by mechanically 
 slowing down some machinery for the sake 
 of simply running more slowly to meet an 
 extraneous suggestion. It comes of whole- 
 some life-processes, which show that high 
 pressure is disease, and life with its sensi- 
 tiveness to the load it pulls or bears, is not 
 amenable to whim from without, or any 
 mechanical direction whatsoever. 
 
 This kind of moderation in the minister 
 does not cool the heart of his courage. And 
 we must not forget that a certain very high 
 value inheres in that spirituality which to- 
 day is likely to be too little appreciated, and 
 which alone has the vigour and rigour needed 
 to keep courage alive and to furnish the he- 
 roic note, in all our speech and action. The 
 Church is likely to realize that she is com- 
 paratively poor in these days ; and it is 
 probable that the Church will be poorer in 
 material things, and at length become very 
 poor, before she shall become, in turn, and 
 rightfully, the mistress and ruler of the 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 377 
 
 treasures of the world. It is certain that the 
 hold which the Church has had upon money 
 and property, throughout her large and rich 
 communion, has not been regarded as well 
 taken ; and the easy and comfortable relation- 
 ship of the pulpit to ill-gotten wealth, in our 
 time of speculation and greed, has been so 
 successfully assailed that, in the ruin of cer- 
 tain quite ancient and honourable theories as 
 to the relation of morality and religion to 
 swollen fortunes, associated with hopeless 
 poverty, many an ecclesiastical rush-light has 
 been made ineffective and many a base 
 compromise has been destroyed. Thus the 
 Church, as a financial institution, will prob- 
 ably become poorer, before she finds in her 
 hand the spiritual power which shall enable 
 her to whip the traders from the temple and 
 appreciate the mite of the poor widow. 
 
 This courage to speak, or to be silent both in 
 love and righteousness, must come through a 
 ministry so devoted to spiritual realities that 
 it may follow Him who had not where to lay 
 His head. Rigorous indeed will be the blasts 
 which . blow upon the sycophancy and 
 
378 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 cowardice of a pulpit, or that of a pastor's 
 voice, where either of these is allied with 
 earthly interests alone. A valid life of the 
 spirit alone will maintain courage and faith. 
 
 Even the adjured spirits of the past are on 
 trial. No American thinker to-day would 
 agree with the mightiest figure in the states- 
 manship of seventy years ago, holding, as he 
 did, that property is the basis or corner-stone 
 of government. Humanity is more than 
 property. Do we stand by this faith ? We 
 have been more careful in the Church of our 
 divinity than we have of our humanity ; but 
 now, having a clearer conception of the 
 Fatherhood of God, there has sprung out of it, 
 armed for batde, if it shall not be permitted to 
 strew the earth with benedictions, the idea of 
 the Brotherhood of Man. There is no pos- 
 sibility of resisting the advance of this idea, 
 with its inspiration and with its host. It 
 means the downfall of privilege and the 
 extinction of those views of political economy 
 which have been too long regnant, especially 
 among many of the successful adherents of 
 ecclesiastical Christianity. Let not the con- 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 379 
 
 quering souls of other bands take our crown 
 and sing of any one of Christ's ministers : 
 
 " We shall march prospering, — not through his pres- 
 ence ; 
 Songs may inspirit us, — not from his lyre ; 
 Deeds will be done, — while he boasts his quies- 
 cence. 
 Still bidding crouch whom the rest bid aspire." 
 
 Perhaps there is nothing in which a minis- 
 ter's work among men indicates the highest 
 values contributed by his own profound spir- 
 ituality of life, more than the quality and 
 form of the consolatio7i he brings. He must 
 be a man of prayer, that he rnay be a shep- 
 herd, taking the case of his brothers up to 
 God. He is the man of consolation, bring- 
 ing the comfort of God from the heights, 
 unto his brothers. How shallow and shad- 
 owy is much that we offer to the stricken 
 and broken and sorrowful in the form of 
 consolation ! Is there any vocabulary, or 
 any phraseology, which is more vapid or 
 arid than these of the peripatetic purveyor 
 of what he calls Comfort? To answer 
 truly these questions is to put our finger 
 upon the reason for our loquacious incompe- 
 
38o THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 tence. An unspiritual man whose life has 
 never been comforted by the comfort of God, 
 throughout the far and near realms of his 
 whole nature, will always appear the least 
 helpful of human beings in a time of sorrow. 
 If such an one shall possess the intellect of 
 "the greatest of the Germans," save Luther 
 — I choose, for example, Goethe — and be 
 tangled with the perplexities of a brain which 
 lacked only the pure blood coming from a 
 pure heart, he will never have the comfort men 
 need. Richard Holt Hutton says of Goethe 
 that he was the " man half worshipped as 
 a demigod." The more stupendous the 
 intellect of your minister, the more appall- 
 ing is his discovery, when all he can 
 ofTer is his knowledge of " all symptoms of 
 disease, a few alleviations, no remedies." 
 Men may say of him, as Arnold says of 
 Goethe : 
 
 " He took the suffering human race; 
 
 He read each wound, each weakness clear ; 
 He struck his finger on the place. 
 
 And said : 'Thou ailest here and here.' " 
 
 This will not sufifice. What will ? 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 381 
 
 There are at least two passages in our 
 Scriptures whose truth must always be in 
 our mind, and its implications be wrought 
 over and over again into our very character, 
 if we shall be able to comfort the comfortless 
 sons of men. '' I will send you another com- 
 forter "— " Even the Spirit of Truthr This 
 is the word of our Master. It describes the 
 Almighty Source with Whom the minister 
 must be acquainted and familiar. Remem- 
 ber that our minister, whose problem we are 
 studying, is the very man who, as I have said, 
 has, by the heightening influence of his 
 preaching, made low satisfactions impossible 
 for his people. Remember that this minister 
 has also removed, let us hope, all removable 
 ignorance as to Truth from the souls of his 
 people, and that he has given them Truth in- 
 stead. If this be so, the only kind of comfort 
 which now may fidy pass through his hands 
 unto them, in the cleansing acuteness of their 
 woe, is that which comes from the Spirit of 
 Truth. Truth is the light which must break 
 in upon the dolor of their grief. Our com- 
 fort for them must come from this — that 
 
382 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 Truth's very spirit shall never leave their 
 painful gloom, until it shall have been illu- 
 minated, and all its bewildering hieroglyph- 
 ics interpreted to them. But this Truth is 
 something more than light. "The Life is 
 the light." It has warmth, and is tender 
 and saving. Then we hear Jesus say: "/ 
 am the Truths We no longer try to get 
 life out of mere light. 
 
 Truth and comfort are never two differ- 
 ing things in the hands of a man full of 
 the Spirit of Truth, which is the Comforter 
 Whom our Lord Jesus promised. The 
 truths of many a minister are remote, 
 cold, and unapproachable by the emotions ; 
 his Comfort also is shy and sentimental ; and 
 it will not climb the heights for the discovery 
 of Truth. They must be one, in the gener- 
 ous personal Spiritual Life of the man who 
 would make men truer by the consolations 
 which he brings to them. We all feel de- 
 sirous to make for the comforting of our 
 people, by the truth we tell them. Here the 
 minister must have help from above. His 
 Truth is the verity of things, discovered in his 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 383 
 
 own Spiritual Life. It must suffice, as it has, 
 for the agony of death. This is the comfort 
 he brings, that life ever overcomes death. So, 
 also, of any other sorrow, or loss, or pain, or 
 disappointment ; and, especially, it is thus 
 with the sorrow of the soul for its sin. The 
 personal Christ, the life of the minister's life, 
 must be man's dearest truth and his surest 
 comfort ; and so we have the meaning of the 
 second text : " Blessed be the God of all com- 
 fort ; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, 
 that we may be able to comfort them which 
 are in any trouble by the comfort zvherewith 
 we ourselves are comforted of God T Never 
 undertake to comfort any one except with 
 Truth ; and never try to comfort any other 
 human being with any truth which has not 
 first comforted you. 
 
 The Christian minister's inspiration and in- 
 struction, as well as that illumination which 
 is the first characteristic of all preaching, 
 have never moved more mightily towards in- 
 fluencing and guiding a human personality, 
 than when Savonarola ministered to Michel- 
 angelo in Florence. The most convincing of 
 
384 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the many biographers of the painter of the 
 Sistine Dome, John Addington Symonds, 
 tells us that, at a certain critical period of 
 Angelo's life, when this monarch of art had 
 long been under merely literary and aesthetic 
 influences, directed by a splendid prince and 
 his courtiers, Michelangelo fell under very 
 " different influences ; and these left a far 
 more lasting impression on his character 
 than the gay festivals and witty sword-com- 
 bats of the lords of Florence." '* In 1491," 
 Symonds goes on to say, " the terrible 
 prophet of coming woes, Savonarola, the 
 searcher of men's hearts, and the remorseless 
 denouncer of pleasant vices, began that 
 Florentine career which ended with his 
 martyrdom in 1498. He had preached in 
 Florence eight years earlier, but on that oc- 
 casion he passed unnoticed through the 
 crowd. Now he took the whole city by 
 storm. Obeying the magic of his eloquence 
 and the magnetism of his personality, her 
 citizens accepted this Dominican friar as 
 their political leader and moral reformer, 
 when events brought about the expulsion of 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 385 
 
 the Medici in 1494. Michelangelo was one 
 of his constant listeners at S. Marco and in 
 Duomo. He witnessed those stormy scenes 
 of religious revival and passionate fanaticism 
 which contemporaries have impressively de- 
 scribed. The shorthand writer to whom we 
 owe the text of Savonarola's sermons at times 
 breaks off with words like these : ' Here I was 
 so overcome with weeping that I could not go 
 on.' Pico della Mirandola tells that the mere 
 sound of the monk's voice, startling the still- 
 ness of the Duomo, thronged through all its 
 space with people, was like a clap of doom ; 
 a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his 
 bones, the hairs of his head stood on end 
 while he listened. Another witness reports : 
 ' Those sermons caused such terror, alarm, 
 sobbing, and tears, that every one passed 
 through the streets without speaking, more 
 dead than alive.' 
 
 "One of the earliest extant letters of 
 Michelangelo, written from Rome in 1497 to 
 his brother Buonarotti, reveals a vivid inter- 
 est in Savonarola. He relates the evil 
 rumours spread about the city regarding his 
 
386 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 heretical opinions, and alludes to the hostility 
 of Fra Mariano da Genezzano ; adding this 
 ironical sentence : ' Therefore he ought by 
 all means to come and prophesy a little in 
 Rome, when afterwards he will be canonized ; 
 and so let all his party be of good cheer.' In 
 later years, it is said that the great sculptor 
 read and meditated Savonarola's writings 
 together with the Bible. The apocalyptic 
 thunderings and voices of the Sistine Chapel 
 owe much of their soul-thrilling impressive- 
 ness to those studies. Michelet says, not 
 without justice, that the spirit of Savonarola 
 lives again in the frescoes of that vault." 
 
 What an evidence is afforded by this 
 episode, in the biography of two great men, 
 as to the spirit and manner of the true minis- 
 ter in upbuilding men 1 What a testimony 
 as to our possible influence, on a smaller 
 scale, which it is ours to exercise upon human 
 beings 1 God grant that we may see here 
 something of the consecrated artistry of the 
 minister's calling and opportunities. 
 
 Our fathers oft have told us, not always in 
 the interest of Puritanism, that we must not 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 387 
 
 seek to be artistic, and that a sermon con- 
 ceived in such an atmosphere as this of 
 Angeio is likely to be overly artistic. On the 
 other hand, there are others who will tell us 
 that we are not artistic enough, and that our 
 sermon is ineffective for the purpose of in- 
 fluencing a lover of beauty as well as truth, 
 because it is a hopelessly inartistic thing. 
 Standing in the presence of Michelangelo 
 and his art, — the man himself, most of all, 
 constituting a gloriously artistic result, sur- 
 passing even the artistry of his work on 
 marble or in frescoes, — we cannot fail to see 
 that Savonarola, the preacher, was largely 
 the father of Angelo's art both in life and 
 achievement. More, — for effects must have 
 causes for themselves adequate not only in 
 quantity, but also in quality — he was doubt- 
 less as great an artist as any of his contem- 
 poraries ; as great, if not as illustrious, as 
 Raphael with his pencil, Leonardo with his 
 brush, or Angeio with his chisel. Each of 
 these men expressed a life larger than his 
 own, — a life all-compelling and irresistible. 
 Its expression was the man's career. Savo- 
 
388 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 narola, by both the limitations which made 
 the walls, and the affluence of the stream of 
 power rushing between these enclosing walls, 
 expressed himself not in painting, poetry, or 
 sculpture, but in eloquence. Let us not fear 
 fluency — a word which allies itself, in liquidity 
 of movement, with eloquence, when we per- 
 ceive that any and all of these arts are vital 
 movements of human self-expression which, in 
 itself, is a process of self-attainment. When 
 a spiritual life, in its majesty of content and 
 urgency of expression, is behind and within it 
 all, running onward in order that it may be 
 true to itself, we need not set ourselves for- 
 biddingly against fluency. But there is some- 
 thing more important involved just here. 
 
 We still have in mind those persons who 
 fear what they call the artistic, on the one side ; 
 and the others who fear the inartistic, on the 
 other side. The minister, who stands between 
 them, must come from such a study as that of 
 Savonarola in his relations to Michelangelo, 
 made sure of one thing : It is this — that 
 which alone will deliver us from being open 
 either to the charge that we are too artistic, or 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 389 
 
 to the charge that we are inartistic, is such a 
 manhood through the Spiritual Life as com- 
 pelled Savonarola's life-expression, all uncon- 
 sciously, to be a thing of highest art. Never, 
 in such an instance, was there a deliberate 
 endeavour to produce art, as an end. It is 
 not yours to speak here of the " art which con- 
 ceals art." There was nothing of reasoned- 
 out planfulness, when this painter's instinct 
 chose words, rather than colour, for his life- 
 expression. The achievement rooted itself in 
 the blissful unconsciousness of his absorbing 
 piety and outstanding genius. 
 
 We must never fear that the pulpit will 
 have too much of this personal holiness and 
 consecrated faculty which make its sermons 
 things of beauty and even of sublimity. This 
 means art-products, — and there are none 
 nobler, save and except the characters of the 
 men which they are created to inspire and 
 enrich. Obedient to that Truth whom we 
 shall see in His beauty, then, in reason and 
 aim, our true minister must be. He must be, 
 therefore, a loftily-motived man ; and his 
 power with men will be first of all his power 
 
390 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 with God. I do not mean solely, or even 
 firstly, his power, for example, in prevailing 
 efficacy of prayer as the priest of his fellows ; 
 but I mean his power with God — "-along 
 with God^^ in and through Christ, in the re- 
 demption of the world. This power, which 
 must be yours and mine, is implied in the 
 words : " We are workers together with 
 God." " God was in Christ, reconciling the 
 world unto Himself." "We are ambassadors 
 of God," and in that striking phrase of the 
 Old Testament: "The sword of the Lord 
 God and of Gideon." It is the power of a 
 fellowship and partnership, which the weaker 
 has and the stronger gives him for a purpose 
 and use which they are agreed upon. With 
 such associative power, added to the empow- 
 ering which God, through Christ, so often 
 promises in the multitude of crises, where He 
 says : " I will give you power," or, " Ye shall 
 receive power from on high," our ministry 
 cannot be far from the upper room and its 
 Pentecost. Indeed, Pentecost should be a 
 perpetual experience. We find it so, even 
 now, in the lives of men who do take up 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 39 1 
 
 serpents in their efforts to reform men, and 
 yet these ministers are not harmed ; and we 
 ought not to be amazed that they first speak 
 with " other tongues, as the Spirit gives them 
 utterance." Now, this is the explanation, if 
 one is needed, of the eminent influence of 
 many a man in our ministry, who is not great 
 as this world accounts greatness, in manifest 
 faculty or in the culture of the schools. But 
 we hear of things celestial, as he preaches to 
 men and lives among them. 
 
 Andrea Del Sarto, the faultless painter of 
 Angelo's day, has had his Browning ; and it 
 would be well if the Andrea Del Sarto of 
 many a laborious and painstaking pulpit 
 might tell us of his failure, as well, in the 
 presence of the successes of less refined breth- 
 ren. They nevertheless so achieve, that even 
 this Andrea may be led to say : 
 
 " There burns a truer light of God in them, 
 In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, 
 Heart, or whate'er else, than goes to prompt 
 This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of 
 mine." 
 
 An interesting feature of the whole matter is, 
 that the result of their effort, measured by 
 
392 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 the power manifested and the power which 
 for uncounted years goes forth from such Hfe 
 and preaching, is like the work of an un- 
 known painter, as compared with Andrea's — 
 it is really the more artistic. Oh, you say 
 again that you do not care for art ? — it is of 
 this perishing world and the carnal mind ? 
 How little will you care for heaven ! My 
 brother, the good and the true and the 
 beautiful are one ; and only in Christ are 
 they indivisible, because they are alive in 
 Him. "Strength and beauty are in his sanc- 
 tuary." The minister, in life and speech, 
 "shall have two staves, and one shall be 
 beauty, and the other bands." " He shall 
 see the King in His beauty," — that is, if he 
 has been true and good, and especially suffi- 
 ciently beautiful in life and work to have an 
 eye for beauty when he awakes at morning. 
 
 I have paid scant respect to prettiness, 
 because I have insisted upon the supremacy 
 of the Spiritual Life over all, beneath all, in 
 all, and that is always either beautiful or 
 sublime. 
 
 We must welcome the criteria of beauty 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 393 
 
 and sublimity, with the criteria of truth and 
 righteousness. We may see that beauty is 
 sublimity on a small scale, in the Welsh hills, 
 and sublimity is beauty on a large scale, in 
 the Canadian Rockies. It is not something 
 to be said against the life or sermon, but 
 rather in its favour, that it accords, in beauty 
 or sublimity, with Rossetti's "Annunciation," 
 or George Watts' "Isaiah of Jerusalem." 
 These men were very different at points, but 
 Rossetti nursed his youth with Christina on 
 the Gospels, and George Watts, a grandson of 
 Adam Clarke, the Bible commentator, could 
 not escape a Biblical grandeur and loveliness 
 when he painted. It appears odd enough 
 that we praise our religion because it has 
 built Cologne Cathedral, chiselled the Apos- 
 des, painted the " Transfiguration of Christ " 
 and "The Last Supper," written "Paradise 
 Lost" and "A Death in the Desert," and 
 sung "The Messiah" and "Parsifal": and 
 yet we are fearful of it when it redeems and 
 sancdfies the art of the orator, in our neigh- 
 bourhood, as throughout all the world it has 
 rejuvenated all other arts. Be still and fear 
 
394 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 not — be siill, especially, if you do fear. The 
 day of Christian eloquence is coming soon, 
 and when it comes, Angelo, the orator, will 
 preach as he once wrought Moses or David 
 in marble ; and, more beautiful if less sublime, 
 the angel faces of Fra Angelico will look 
 out from some Savonarola's sermon now 
 preached, as was his, within the very walls 
 upon which they remain. They shall also 
 speak of their Lord Jesus, as they have, 
 since that morning when the angelical monk 
 touched lineament after lineament for the 
 last time, his tears mingling with his colours 
 while he prayed and painted. 
 
 I know what each of you is saying to his 
 own soul while these kingly names and their 
 royal personages come and go, with my 
 concluding utterance. You are saying : 
 " There is nothing of this sort of triumph for 
 me. I shall never come into the lofty region 
 of these men's lives or influence." I straight- 
 way, and here, summon you to a battle which 
 is yours and mine, — a battle for the faith in 
 which alone we may, or ought to continue in 
 the Christian ministry — a battle for that faith 
 
AND THE MINISTER'S POWER 395 
 
 in God, the Holy Spirit, Who alone hath 
 power for motive adequate for us — the only 
 faith which will give thee and me self-respect, 
 my brother I Contest, here and now, O my 
 soul, before thou shaft leave this place of prayer 
 and vision, for every inch of the ground which 
 is thine by right. Settle it, once for all, as 
 thou shalt settie all things in and by the Holy 
 Spirit, if thou art to be weak in thyself or 
 strong in the Lord and the power of His 
 might. " Come, let us reason together," 
 saith our God. Let us reason, then, in the 
 words of the humanity to whom we are sent. 
 What, other than this, can be our reasoning ? 
 As a matter of fact, a certain obscure Augustin 
 friar, in the town of Faenza, said the word 
 which illuminated the soul of Savonarola, at its 
 crisis, and gave him to the Christian pulpit : 
 " Things and men are the results of causes, 
 and the causes of results." It cannot be that 
 the result upon Savonarola which caused the 
 result upon Michelangelo, which, in turn, 
 caused the limitless result of his art and life 
 upon the world, was wholly dependent upon 
 the material which this mountain-preacher 
 
396 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 
 found in that youth from Farara, Savonarola. 
 You can never estimate the energy which 
 makes for such art of character-finding and 
 molding, by the material furnished to the 
 artist, any more than you can estimate the 
 value of his friend Angelo's "Last Judgment" 
 by the cost of the pigments. What then was 
 the sovereign force? A majestic motive, 
 working in and through the hands of a man, 
 totally dedicated to it and meantime educated 
 by it, — this alone contributed the main 
 value. 
 
 Go back then, my soul, but not until thou 
 hast put aside thine own weakness which 
 minifies, and taken hold of God's power in 
 Christ by the Holy Spirit which magnifies 
 human opportunity — back to Angelo's fres- 
 coes which are the breath of Savonarola's 
 utterance caught and held upon the ceiling of 
 the Sistine Chapel ; back further, to Savona- 
 rola's power which is supreme 
 
 "As when some great painter dips 
 His pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse," 
 
 leaving Florence and all succeeding time 
 with his unfading picture of the all-conquering 
 
AND THE minister's POWER 397 
 
 Christ ; — go back, still further, back to the 
 unheralded monk, who touched the young 
 man, Savonarola, and released within his 
 secret soul the only Power in this universe 
 which will decide for us and redeem our 
 human nature from ugliness into beauty, and 
 give it a message which will create herald- 
 lips aglow with divine flame, — go back, far- 
 thest back, to the Omnipotent Grace and 
 Crucified Love ! My soul must go with thine, 
 my brother, even to this Reality of Realities, 
 lest we cheat ourselves by an underestimate 
 of God in the Spiritual Life, for which I have 
 been pleading here. Having come to this, 
 here at the Cross of God's power, which itself 
 became a ministry only by such an humiliation, 
 we faint not, but must know that, here or 
 yonder, in the squalor and solitude of our 
 least attractive parish, you and I, by the 
 preaching of that Cross, shall discover, for 
 time and eternity, the greatness and glory of 
 the Christian Ministry. 
 
THE MINISTER AND HIS WORK 
 
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