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 PRESENTED TO THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 PRINCETON THEOLOGICSL SEMINARY 
 
 BY 
 
 MPS. Alejiandet* Ppoadfit. 
 
 BR 45 .H8A 1878 
 Carpenter, William Boyd, 
 
 1841-1918 
 The witness of the heart t 
 
 Christ 
 
THE 
 
 Witness of the Heart to Christ. 
 
 BEING THE 
 
 HULSEAN LECTURES 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE IN THE 
 YEAR 1878. 
 
 BY T^E 
 
 / 
 
 Rev. W. BOYD CARPENTER, MA., 
 
 Vicar 0/ Christ Church, Lancaster Gate^ and Hon. Chaplain to the Queen. 
 
 New York: 
 anson d. f. randolph & company 
 
 900 BROADWAY, COR. 20th STREET. 
 
To Her 
 
 WHOSE LOVE FOR TWELVE SHORT YEARS 
 
 MADE LABOUR LIGHT 
 
 t DEDICATE THIS LABOUR 
 
 0¥ MY DARKER DAYS. 
 
 a 2, 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 These Lectures are only indirectly apologetic: 
 they necessarily take much for granted : they 
 have one simple aim : they are intended to 
 illustrate the adaptation of the Gospel to the 
 needs of man. Man is the problem : Chris- 
 tianity is the solution. Tested in every age 
 and by every race, the Gospel has proved itself 
 fitted to man, and possessed of power to win 
 the wandering affections, to satisfy the uneasy 
 conscience, to establish the wavering will, to 
 form the character, to kindle new hope, and 
 to inspire with nobler aims the chance-led or 
 passion- driven life. Of all those who have 
 appealed to man, Christ alone has uttered the 
 magic words before which the sin-closed door 
 of the human heart has rolled open. If this 
 be true, the truth supplies an argument. We 
 may not be accomplished scholars, erudite critics, 
 
6 PREFACE. 
 
 or subtle thinkers ; but we are men ; we know 
 what we need ; we know the force of tempestuous 
 passions, the bitter reproaches of a burdened 
 conscience, the painful failings of a vacillating 
 will ; we know sin, and sorrow, love and death ; 
 and we find in Christ a remedy for these, we find 
 that the medicine suits the disease ; the key fits 
 the lock. No other key fits all the wards. 
 Why should we refuse the use of the one which 
 does on the chance that the facts of nineteen 
 centuries may be mistaken? Why should we 
 refuse the aid of Jesus Christy when He can 
 allay life's fever and restore life's hope, and 
 when there is none else who has ever given to 
 men such words of everlasting life ? 
 
 Advent, 1S79. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECT. 
 
 I. THE WITNESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 I'AGK 
 
 9 
 
 2. THE WITNESS OF CONSCIENCE . . 6o 
 
 3. THE WITNESS OF LOVE ... 96 
 
 4. THE WITNESS OF HOPE . . . I42 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 ''The kingdom of God is within you." — Luke xvii. 21. 
 
 There is a striking* contrast between the lan- 
 guage of early Christian hope and the sad utter- 
 ances which we sometimes hear around us to-day. 
 To the earlier believers Christianity was a power 
 and Christ a real King. The Gospel was the 
 power of God, and Christ the destined Prince 
 of the kings of the earth. But now, we hear 
 another tone. Christianity is prostrate ^. The 
 fascination which lingered round the land of 
 promise is dispelled ; Canaan is its name ; it is 
 a Holy Land no more. At Bethlehem^ too, 
 the angel voices no longer sing of peace and 
 good-will; the freshness has vanished from 
 Nazareth ; Olivet has lost its charm ; and even 
 Calvary is disenchanted. As w^e listen to the 
 
 ^ "Not only are Lourdes and Paray le Monial contemptible, 
 but Calvary is disenchanted. There may have been a death 
 there, but there never was a sacrifice. Scales have fallen 
 from our eyes. We see it all clearly. The creed we were 
 brought up in is an earthly myth ; not a heavenly revelation." 
 — Contemporary i?criei(;, vol. xxxi. p. 710, "Future of Faith," 
 by W. H. Mallock. 
 
 B 
 
10 LECTURE I. 
 
 sad voices wHcli proclaim a heart's disappoint- 
 ment^ we catch the echo of yet earlier language, 
 as two discoursed mournfully of a dead Christ : 
 " We trusted that it had been He which should 
 have redeemed Israel." This tone of despondency 
 is in sad contrast with the visions of Christianity. 
 Then they saw Him in vision going forth clad 
 in the apparel of triumph, conquering and that 
 He might conquer : now we are told that the 
 sceptre has fallen from His hand. Then the 
 eyes of hope and faith were fixed upon Him, 
 who was alive for evermore : now we seem to 
 hang tearfully over the body of a dead Christ. 
 
 What is the reason of this change from hope 
 to sadness ? Has age brought upon the world 
 its inevitable hopelessness, when the wearied 
 and over-strained energies can no longer take 
 an interest in the schemes of youth, and when 
 regretful memory is stronger than hope ? Has 
 Christianity lost her power ? But in truth this 
 is not the way the question should be asked. 
 It rather should be — What is the cause of this 
 change from the spirit of hopefulness to that 
 of despair? Is it in the enfeebled power of 
 Christianity or in an enfeeblement of our moral 
 tone? Is it that the Christian religion that 
 once broke like a stream from its fountain, and 
 poured forth its full and refreshing floods upon 
 
LECTURE I. 11 
 
 the parched world, has spent its energy, or that 
 we have neglected to dig fresh channels for its 
 generous waters ? Is it that the fatigue of life 
 has robbed us of the power of hope, or that 
 time has deprived Christianity of her force ? 
 Is the change in our dimmed eyesight which 
 can no longer see the charm of the landseaj)e, 
 or has the land of promise itself lost its loveli- 
 ness? Is it enfeebled faith in us, or en- 
 feebled force in Christianity, which occasions 
 this depression? Has Christ grown old, or 
 have we ? 
 
 Perchance the change is in ourselves ; and 
 that there is a strangely weakened moral tone 
 in many quarters, who will deny? Are there 
 not to be found among us dispositions and 
 tendencies which enervate all religious force ? 
 Are we not confronted with the spirits of moral 
 cowardice,, of theological puerility, of religious 
 dilettanteism, and of wide-spread self-conscious- 
 ness ? 
 
 I venture to believe that the change is in 
 ourselves, and not in Him whose years are for 
 ever and ever. I venture to believe that the 
 earlier hope was the truer, and that the vision 
 of the conquering Christ may yet again rush 
 back with its fulness and splendour upon the 
 opened eyes of human-kind. I venture to be- 
 B 2 
 
12 LECTURE I. 
 
 lieve that if instead of mournfully discussing 
 theories, we would but turn our glance to One 
 who walks among us, but whom we know not, 
 our now holden eyes would find in Him, whose 
 words even now make our hearts burn within 
 us, the Christ whom we have spoken of as dead, 
 but who is still the Resurrection and the Life. 
 
 If, on the one hand, we observe that there 
 is a weakened moral tone abroad, if on the 
 other we can, on a survey of the work and 
 kingdom of Christ, find that there is no reason 
 for supposing that it has lost its adaptation to 
 the great needs of mankind, we shall be led to 
 look for the cause of much of this despondent 
 tone in ourselves rather than in Him who is 
 the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. 
 
 Let us confess that there has been much fault 
 in ourselves, that the very interest which we 
 take in religion has often blinded our eyes to 
 Him who is its life ; that both in the Church 
 and in the world, a lack of moral earnestness 
 has been the strange, but not unnatural out- 
 come of the (shall I say) critical power in which 
 we pride ourselves. There is a robust criticism 
 which can only bring strength because it is 
 earnest for truth — truth above all, and truth 
 tven at the sacrifice of our proudest hopes ; but 
 there is a spirit also which is the very reverse 
 
LECTUEE I. 13 
 
 of this, which is so self-complacently critical 
 tlmt truth is veiled from its eyes. In the 
 Church it is seen in the eagerness for trifles ; 
 the elevation of matters of infinitesimal insig- 
 nificance into the dignity of principles ; we are 
 like men discussing the robe of our Master 
 instead of looking into His face and following 
 His lead. We are earnest enough over things 
 about religion, but in our eao-erness we forg-et 
 the weightier matters of the faith. In our 
 criticism of the mechanism we have forgotten 
 the work of the machine. Nothing is so fatal 
 to moral earnestness and true spiritual life as 
 the spirit of superficial criticism in religion. 
 Every beardless boy may criticise a faith which 
 he has never understood. Every untrained 
 laj^man may descant upon the imperfections of 
 the Biblcj which it is not uncharitable to say 
 he has never read ; it is just now the rage to 
 discuss religious matters ; it is little more, in 
 many cases, than a rage ; as transient as a 
 fasliionable colour, and in many cases as un- 
 intelligent. We are religious talkers, just as we 
 are ardent astronomers for the week that the 
 British Association visits our neighbourhood, or 
 eager antiquarians during the brief season of an 
 archaeological excursion, in which the picnic i>; 
 more than the ancient camp or tlie barrow. 
 
14 LECTURE I. 
 
 There are earnest men, sincere believers, and 
 heart-tried doubters,, to whom this dilettanti 
 religionism is insufferable ; for all true men 
 soon see that vapid and ill-considered criticism 
 destroys all healthy inquiry. It creates a shal- 
 low readiness of talk about a thing, which is 
 the most fatal hindrance to its right under- 
 standing. And just as the truth in Art is 
 entirely above the comprehension of the self- 
 sufficient critic, whose aim is rather to say 
 something smart than to advance art-culture, 
 so is it in religion ; this spirit in religion ^ dis- 
 ables us from fairly understanding its meaning. 
 Our minds are fixed upon its external features ; 
 we forget its aim, we are like those who discuss 
 
 ^ " I refer to the disposition to look at feith instead of living 
 in it ; to own it as a noble fact in human nature, without 
 being personally committed to it, to feel interest in its repre- 
 sentations, but evade contact with its realities." — Martineau, 
 Hows of Thought, p. 46. 
 
 " Waiving the awful and fundamental question — the only 
 one that touches any living soul, — whether the voice of 
 prophets and of piayer be true, men agree that at any rate 
 religion is an indestructible affection of the human mind ; 
 that, whether we regard it as a dceam, a philosophy, or a 
 revelation, it remains ix fact; that it is an influence of such 
 transcendant importance as to reward study and demand 
 regulation and control. . . . Churches are built not as holy 
 shrines to God, but as platforms of sectional opinion. Doc- 
 trines and sentiments are eistimated not by the sincere rule 
 of our private heart, not by their intrinsic worth and sanc- 
 tity, but by their supposed effect on the prejudices of others 
 and the current usages of thought." — Ibid. p. 47. 
 
 The same writer thus tersely sums up the spirit of the 
 age ; — "The critic is everywhere, the lover nowhere." 
 
LECTURE I. 15 
 
 the architecture of a cathedral, but who have no 
 knowledge of its use; we can understand the 
 harmony of its outline, or the spreading dignity 
 of its arches, hut we have no ear for the melody 
 which rolls along its roof, no heart for the 
 worship within its walls. Our attentions are 
 drawn away from the true purpose of the struc- 
 ture to the architectural details, as our minds 
 have been turned from the first and simplest 
 object of Christianity and directed to its form. 
 We have complained of the clamour or the un- 
 gainliness of the machinery; we have not mea- 
 sured its value by its purpose, its aim, or its 
 results. And heaven's gates do not open to 
 such a misdirected spirit, for the true measure 
 of it is not in its capacity to satisfy the critics, 
 but in its power to do its work. When our 
 minds turn to this — the w^ork to be done, and 
 the power that is with us to do it, the evidence 
 which lies so near at hand, which is buried be- 
 neath our feet, which is lodged in our hearts, 
 which speaks from our consciences, will leap into 
 life again, and reveal that the true place of the 
 Kiuo^dom of God is within us. 
 
 There is reason therefore to suspect the exist- 
 ence of a weakened moral tone among us. But 
 when we turn, on the other hand, to Christianity, 
 we do not find reason to suppose that she has 
 
16 LECTURE I. 
 
 lost her power of adaptation to the needs of 
 mankind. When we survey her in her wide- 
 spread rule^ in her progressive power, and her im- 
 partial administrations, we see her to be possessed 
 of the capacity to adjust herself to the varying 
 changes which test the energies of institutions. 
 In her threefold power to satisfy diversities of 
 needs, to suit the moving ages, and to reconcile 
 conflicting interests, we may still see her fitness 
 to her high and holy calling. Let us observe 
 her adaptation in these directions, and we shall 
 see her expansive power in the world ; her pro- 
 gressive power in historj-; and her reconciling 
 power among the rival claims which distract 
 mankind. 
 
 On this I wish to fix your thoughts ; for 1 
 believe that Christianity is still adapted to her 
 w^ork ; that Christ is still King. Led by tliis 
 belief, I wish to put before you some illustra- 
 tions of the fact that tlie religion of Jesus 
 Christ is adapted to meet the wants of man 
 and of men; that it is suited to the changing 
 forms of human history; that Christ is still 
 King, and that He shows the sovereignty by 
 the wondrous adaptation of His kingdom to the 
 varying races of the world, to the exigencies of 
 an ever-expanding civilisation, and above all to 
 the deep spirit-needs of the heart of man, pained 
 
LECTURE I. 17 
 
 with the weig'ht of life's threefold mj^steiy, — 
 an irrevocable past_, an unsolaced present, and 
 an uncertain future. 
 
 My subject, then, is the worth of Christ's 
 King"dom seen in its adaptation to man. I ask 
 you to observe Christianity doing its work, to 
 measure it not by the theories of men, but by 
 its own aim and its capacity to accomplish that 
 aim. This view of the adaptation of Chris- 
 tianity to man is no new thought. It has 
 occupied other minds : it is no crude idea, 
 hastily born in the scant thought-hours of a 
 busy life. Men of calm thought and of patient 
 study have recognised the force of the fact. They 
 have spoken of its proved adaptation " to all the 
 spiritual wants of man^ ;" they have described 
 
 ' " Its overtures to the individual soul, limited to no race, or 
 caste, or class or set of faculties, extend from its entrance into 
 life to the hour of departure ; are adapted to its real wants 
 and failings ; and provide for that immortality wdiich strikes 
 an answering chord in the heart of every man." — Eaton's 
 Permanence of Christianity, p. 376, to which I am indebted 
 for the two following quotations. 
 
 " There never was any religion as that of Christ, so con- 
 genial to our highest instincts; so persuasive, so ennobling, 
 so universally acceptable to rich and poor ; so worthy of the 
 intellect, so consistent and uncompromising in its rules for 
 advancing moral excellence. Men could not, would not turn 
 from it, if it was properly brought home to them ; if it was 
 not tendered to them with some admixture of earth about it, 
 excitin:,' their suspicions and robbing it of its heavenly 
 fragr;inee." — Ffoulkes, Division of Christendom, p. xiv. 
 
 "Many I think are agreed, that after all the most 
 striking evidence for the Divine origin of our faith lies in the 
 
18 LECTUEE I. 
 
 it as '^ congenial to our highest instincts ;'' and 
 this adaptation has carried conviction to those 
 to whom other modes of arg'ument seemed weak. 
 " It meets me in the deepest needs of my 
 natm'e *," acknowledged one whom many will 
 regard as a father in English philosophy. 
 "*' Whoever made this book made me," was the 
 
 exclamation of an Oriental as he rose from the 
 task of translating the Bible ^. And there was 
 another — a member of this University, a man 
 of wide and varied gifts, cut off in the morning 
 of life, and mourned in imperishable verse by 
 the first of living poets^ — 
 
 " Who fought the spectres of the mind 
 And laid them," — 
 
 patent fact of its existence; of its spiritual growth and diffu- 
 sion ; its proved superiority to all other forms of spiritual 
 thought ; its proved adaptation to all the spiritual wants of 
 man." — Merivale, Lectures, p. 6, and Northern Nations, 
 p. 28. 
 
 "The Bible thus not only discovers a previous contemplation 
 of the habits and faculties of man, and an adequate provision 
 for their wholesome direction, but that its substance is the 
 very likeness of man ; meaning its moral substance, as it 
 appears through all its historical details, its exhortations and 
 its prohibitions." — Miller's Banipton Lectures, p. 84. 
 
 " Mei'ely as a school of ideas to the soul's inmost wants, 
 Christianity is so much above all other philosophies in merit 
 as the moon is more radiant than the sunlight." — Cook's 
 Boston Lectures, Series i. p. 6;. 
 
 * Coleridge. 
 
 ^ The incident is related in the BoJilen Lectures (p. 11) by 
 Dr. Huntingdon, Bishop of Central New York. The Oriental 
 was a Chinese student under Bishop Boone. 
 
LECTUEE I. 19 
 
 and what was his witness ? or whence did he 
 draw that noble faith ? "I believe this to be 
 God's Book because it is man's book : it fits 
 itself into every fold of the human heart ^." 
 
 I. The width of her sway denotes expansive 
 force. 
 
 We often measure the glory of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race by the wondrous capacity they seem 
 to possess of adapting themselves to every cli- 
 mate^ and of making a home in every land. 
 They are king-like men, born to rule in every 
 clime. It is but an illustration of the greater 
 ruling power of Christ. Christianity, to borrow 
 a beautiful adaptation of the Psalmist's lan- 
 guage, " rose on the wings of the morning, and 
 found an abode even in the uttermost parts of 
 the sea '^." This was the original aim of Christ. 
 It was no mere accident of development. It 
 was the very character of Christ's kingdom. 
 
 ° " I see that the Bible fits into every fold of the human 
 l;eart. I am a man, and I believe it to be God's book, because 
 it is man's book. It is true that the Bible affords me no 
 additional means of demonstrating the falsity of Atheism ; if 
 mind had nothing to do with the formation of the universe, 
 whatever had was competent also to make the Bible ; but I 
 have gained this advantage, that my feelings and tlioughts 
 can no longer refuse their asstnt to uhat is evidently framed 
 to engaf/e that assent ; and what is it to me that I cannot 
 disprove the bare logical possibility of my whole nature being 
 fallacious?" — Arthur H. Hallam, Theodiccea Norissima. 
 
 ■^ Sermon by Dean Stanley on " Christianity the Universal 
 Religion." 
 
20 LECTURE I. 
 
 He aimed at no empire founded on the as- 
 cendancy of one nation over another. He re- 
 fused a king-ship which would have risen out of 
 a great popular movement ^, because that king- 
 ship, from the very law of its growth, would 
 have resulted in a tyranny supported by a Jewish 
 aristocracy. He proclaimed a kingdom in which 
 all men might have equal privileges and equal 
 rights; its citizenship was free to all. The 
 Gospel was to be preached to every creature. 
 There was one God and Father of all 9. The 
 Son had tasted death for every man"^*^. The 
 Holy Spirit would be poured forth upon all 
 flesh ^^ Neither the intellectual aristocracy of 
 Greece, nor the religious aristocracy of Judea, 
 nor the political aristocracy of Rome were 
 exempt from the universal condition, '^ God com- 
 mandeth all men everywhere to repent^'," or 
 excluded from the world-wide amnesty, ^' God 
 so loved the world ^^." 
 
 And if such w^as the charter of Christ's king- 
 dom, it was a charter faithfully administered, 
 at least in early days. The pioneers of that 
 kingdom emerged from Jerusalem ; they were 
 Jews, in whose veins the blood of Abraham and 
 
 ^ Jolin vi. 15. ^ Eph. iv. 6. 
 
 ^<' Heb. ii. 9.' ^^ Acts ii. 17. 
 
 ^^ Acts xvii. 30. ^^ John iii. 16. 
 
LECTURE I. 21 
 
 of the Prophets flowed, who had been brought 
 up in the pride of religious exclusiveness ; yet 
 the despotism of prejudice had been broken 
 down in them. They knew no man after the 
 flesh ^*. Christ has died for all ; all, therefore, 
 are dear to them ! they are debtors to the Jew 
 and to the Greek, to the bond and to the free ^^. 
 They are as ready to preach to the barbarians 
 of Malta as to the cultured Greek, the wealth}^ 
 Corinthian, or the influential Roman. The 
 Apostle pleads as earnestly w^ith the few women 
 of the river-side, as in the midst of Mars Hill or 
 in the precincts of the Imperial Palace. Phile- 
 mon is as much his care as Publius ; Timothy 
 as Sergius Paulus and Agri2)pa. And nothing 
 more rouses the hostile energies of St. Paul and 
 St James than the dawning wish on the part of 
 some to create a privileged class in the Church, 
 whether the effort was made on social or semi- 
 religious principles. Against the Judaiser, who 
 still indulged the dream of some fancied supe- 
 riority, the whole force of St. Paul's generous 
 and far-seeing enthusiasm awoke ^^. He had 
 caught the spirit of his Master too well to 
 allow the glorious kingdom of His Lord to be 
 limited by the narrowness of a proud sec- 
 tarianism. And just as St. Paul contended 
 ^* 2 Cor. V. i6. ^ Kom.i. 14. . " Gal. ii. 3-18. 
 
22 LECTURE I. 
 
 against a would-be religious aristocracy, St. 
 James protested against the broad house of the 
 Church of God being made the nursery of class 
 prejudices'"^. The Charter of the Kingdom 
 made its benefits free to all : this was their 
 conviction, and they acted on it. 
 
 But it would have been vain to have been the 
 preachers of so wide and loving a faith unless 
 the religion so preached had in itself elements 
 which proved it to be suited to all. But this is 
 what Christianity has been proved to possess. 
 All varieties of class, race, tongues and nations 
 and languages have acknowledged that the 
 kingdom of Christ affords a safe shelter from 
 their pains and cares. Other religions, like the 
 special products of their own soil and climate, 
 seem incapable of transplantation ; they may 
 grow in a specially prepared atmosphere as 
 scientific specimens for the curious, but they 
 cannot adjust themselves to the peculiarities of 
 the diverse climates ; they have not the native 
 hardihood of Christianity, which like the corn^ 
 its most fitting symbol,, can take root and grow 
 wherever man can breathe and live. This is her 
 privilege. Men have dreamed of an absolute 
 religion; Christianity alone of all creeds has 
 
 Jar 
 
LECTURE I. 23 
 
 shown herself fitted to be the Universal Faith ^*'. 
 All the systems of the ancient world were 
 "limited in their design and local in their 
 range ^\" The gods of Egypt would never com- 
 pel the respect of the cultured Greek. The wild 
 frenzies of the Celtic worship would find no 
 favour with the calm inflexible priesthood of 
 Egypt. But the cross of Christ found a welcome 
 in every land. 
 
 And the wonder of this is the greater when 
 we consider the marvellous diversities and op- 
 positions of character with which the kingdom 
 of Christ came into contact. The minds of the 
 
 ^® "Judaism, as a supreme religion, expired when its local 
 sanctuary was destro3'ed. Mohammedanism, after its first 
 burst of conquest, withdrew itself almost entirely within the 
 limits of the East. But Cliristianity has found not only its 
 shelter and refuge, bixt its throne and home, in countries 
 which, humanly speaking, it could hardly have been expected 
 to reach at all." — Sermon by Dean Stanley on "Christianity 
 the Universal Religion." 
 
 19 «. With the sole exception of Muhammadanism, — a heresy 
 that drew its dogmas and its very life-blood from Revealed 
 Religion, — we shall find that all the systems of the ancient 
 world were limited in their design and local in their range. 
 They were the images of separate nationalities ; they issued 
 from within ; they represented special modes of thought and 
 harmonised with states of feeling and imagination that pre- 
 vailed in certain districts : but with Christianity the case was 
 altogether diiferent. It came fresh from God : it rested on 
 a series of objective revelations : it was active and diffusive 
 as the light, and all-embracing as the firmament of heaven : 
 it dealt with man as man, and never faltered in its claim to 
 be regarded as a veritable ' world-religion.' " — Hardwick, 
 Christ and other Blasters, p. 42. 
 
24 LECTUEE I. 
 
 East and of tlie West; the brilliancy of the Gaul, 
 the sagacity of the Saxon, the imperious energy 
 of the Roman, the fertility of the Greek, the 
 subtlety of the Indian ; the zeal of the active, 
 the; repose of the contemplative ; the restlessness 
 of youth, the vigour of manhood, the sadness 
 of old age, — these are but some of the classes 
 which the Gospel encountered. But among all, 
 the Kino^dom of Christ found a home ^o. 
 
 The ambassadors of Christ were w^eleomed 
 with enthusiasm by the w^arm-hearted Galatian, 
 with affection and simple faith by the men 
 and women of Philippi ; with intelligence and 
 candour at Beroea : they made converts at 
 Athens and at Bome. They moved eastward. 
 " They discoursed as freely and effectively in 
 tents of wandering tribes, as in the schools and 
 temples of the land of Egypt. Though century 
 after century expired, the Gospel showed no 
 symptoms of decay or imbecility; it was adapted, 
 as at first, to the necessities of every race and all 
 
 Jo ti. When we see Him followed by the Greek, though a 
 founder of none of his sects ; revered by the Brahmin, though 
 preached unto him by men of the fishermen's caste ; wor- 
 shipped by the red nian of Canada, though belonging to the 
 hated pale race, — we cannot but consider Him as destined to 
 break down all distinction of colour, and shape, and counten- 
 ance, and habits, to form in Himself the type of unity to 
 which are referable all the sons of Adam." — Wiseman, 
 Lectures on Science and Religion, Lecture iv. 
 
LECTURE I. 25 
 
 the varied phases of society ^^" In every realm, 
 from the British Isles to the Euxine, the sounds 
 of Christian worship were heard. " Thou mayest 
 (so said St. Chrysostom) hear men everywhere 
 discoursing out of the scripture with another 
 voice indeed, but not with another faith." 
 
 And is the witness less true to-day ? No ! 
 
 Still to-day ^^ the Kingdom of Christ moves 
 silently but surely over the face of the earth 
 and captivates diversities of hearts. It was 
 always wonderful that a faith born in the East 
 should spread with an imperial power in the 
 West : but as the ages move the wonder is in- 
 creased. If marked differences betwen Oriental 
 and Western minds existed nineteen centuries 
 ago, time has deepened those differences; the 
 East has been stationary, the West has advanced, 
 but Christianity is '^ as vigorous in her age as 
 in her youth, and has upon her the prima J^acie 
 signs of the Divinity 2^." For she is not stricken 
 
 ^^ Hard wick, Christ and other Masters, p 42. 
 
 '^'^ "After a revolution of thirteen or fourteen centuries, 
 that religion is still professed by the nations of Europe, the 
 most distinguished portions of human-kind in arts and 
 learning as well as in arms." — Gibbon, vol. ii. p. 151, ed. by 
 Milman, 
 
 " The fishermen of Gennesaret planted Christianit}'', and 
 many a winter and many a summer have since rolled over it. 
 More than once it has shed its leaves and seemed to be dying, 
 and when the buds burst again, the colour of the foliage 
 was changed." — Froude, Short Studies, Series ii. p. 32. 
 
 23 «i What the Church has lost in lier appeal to the imagina- 
 
26 LECTUEE I. 
 
 with paralysis in Asia, and she exhibits an ex- 
 panding energy in Europe and America. " I 
 assure you/' it is the language of one who has 
 the right to speak of India, '^that whatever 
 3^ou may hear to the contrary, the teaching of 
 Christianity among one hundred millions of civi- 
 lised and industrious Hindoos and Moham- 
 medans is effecting changes, moral, social, and 
 
 tion she has gained in philosophical cogency by the evidence 
 of her persistent vitality. She is as vigorous in her age as 
 in her youth, and has upon her prima facie signs of divinity." 
 — Dr. Newman, Grammar of Assent, pp. 425-6, quoted in 
 Eaton's Bampton Lectures, p. 5, 
 
 Mr. Lecky writes in a similar strain : — " There is but one 
 example of a religion which is not naturally weakened 
 by civilisation, and that example is Christianity. In all 
 other cases the decay of dogmatic conceptions is tanta- 
 mount to a complete annihilation of the religion ; for 
 although there may be imperishable elements of moral truth 
 mingled with these conceptions, they have nothing distinctive 
 or peculiar. The moral truths coalesce with new systems ; 
 the men who uttered them take their place with many 
 others in the great pantheon of History, and the religion 
 having discharged its functions is spent and withered. But 
 the great characteristic of Christianity and the great moral 
 proof of its Divinity is that it has been the main source af 
 the moral development of Europe, and that it has discharged 
 this office, not so much by the inculcation of a system of 
 ethics, however pure, as by the assimilating and attractive 
 influence of a perfect ideal. The moral progress of mankind 
 can never cease to be distinctively and intensely Christian as 
 long as it consists of a gradual approximation to the character 
 of the Christian Founder. There is indeed nothing more 
 wonderful in the history of the human race, than the way in 
 which that ideal has traversed the lapse of ages, acquiring a 
 new strength and beauty with each advance of civilisation, 
 and infusing its beneficent influence into every sphere of 
 thought and action." — History of Rationalism in Europe, 
 vol. i. p. 336. 
 
LECTURE I. 27 
 
 political, which for extent and rapidity of effect 
 are far more extraordinary than anything you 
 or your fiithers have witnessed in Modern 
 Europe 24." 
 
 And if we turn from this dawn in the East, 
 what is the promise of the West ? '^ It is in 
 Italy, in France, in Germany, in England, and 
 America (I quote one whose character for can- 
 dour and impartiality is above all praise) that 
 the hopes of Christian civilisation have rested. 
 Christianity born in the East, has become the re- 
 ligion of the West even more than of the East^^." 
 There is no need of more. The Church of Christ, 
 if it witnesses nothing else, witnesses a power 
 to suit every class. She has her message of 
 hope for the young. She gives the exhilarating 
 satisfaction of noble work to the strong ; she 
 can soften the pang of regret to the old ; she 
 has gathered beneath her wide-spreading roof 
 every form of human sorrow, every class of 
 human character ; the nations of the world have 
 ransacked their treasures and have given up 
 their noblest to the sanctuary of Christ. It is 
 not that every nation casts a jealous eye, and 
 guards as a sacred trust, the sepulchre of Christ ; 
 
 ^* Sir Bartle Frere, p. 317, Christian Evidence Society 
 Lectures, " Faith and Free Thought." 
 2^ Dean Stanley, sermon above quoted. 
 
 C 2 
 
28 LECTURE I. 
 
 far more potent as a witness to the powers of 
 Christ, than this universal guardianship of the 
 tomb of the Redeemer, is the view which history 
 gives of every nation sending her choicest repre- 
 sentatives to the Church of Christ. Do you 
 ask who they are ? Do you ask for representa- 
 tives of the past? I bid you move along the 
 splendid corridors and aisles of the Church of 
 God. Behold Origen, and Athanasius, and Au- 
 gustine ! Do you ask where are the sons of 
 Greece and of Rome? Chrysostom and Am- 
 brose are here. Do you ask for Celt and Saxon, 
 Latin and Teuton, St. Bernard and Tauler, 
 Xavier and Luther, Fenelon and Pascal, Wy- 
 cliffe and Latimer, Hooker and Usher, Lancelot 
 Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor, Butler and John 
 Wesley are here. Thus from every land come 
 those whose highest honour is to honour Him 
 whose dominion is from sea to sea. Those that 
 dwell in earth's highest places have bowed before 
 Him : the kings of commerce and the kings of 
 intellect, the kings of science and the kings of 
 song, the kings of society and the kings of 
 saintliness, have offered the homage of their 
 various gifts. Yea! all kings have worshipped 
 before Him, and all nations have honoured Him, 
 who is the Prince of the kings of the earth. 
 II. The progressive power of His sway is the 
 
LECTURE I. 29 
 
 token of its eternity. The test of men's power 
 does not lie in their own age. The present 
 cannot estimate itself; it needs a larger wisdom, 
 an ampler view to contemplate the surroundings 
 and conditions of menu's lives, and a more im- 
 partial eye to form a fair and fitting judgment. 
 This lack is supplied by a power w^hich comes 
 forth to rectify the errors of men. History 
 emerges from her watch-tower and casts her 
 impartial eye upon the works of men : were I 
 to paint her I would picture her as still in 
 the freshness of youth, her broad, fair brow 
 unseamed with care ; scorn seated on her lip ; 
 her keen eye looking with equal calmness upon 
 the long past and upon the far future; and 
 bearing upon the girdle of truth, which binds 
 her simple robe, the legend, '"'She hath put down 
 the mighty from their seats and hath exalted 
 the humble and meek." She casts her glance 
 upon the works of men, and not without a quiet 
 irony reverses the prejudiced verdicts of men. 
 She shows that the wealth that dazzled could 
 not confer greatness ; she shows that men who 
 were credited with almost supernatural powers 
 were often but the creatures of circumstances; she 
 remorselessly unrobes men of the purple of an 
 imposing splendour, and reveals the insignifi- 
 cance which has been honoured with the title of 
 
30 LECTURE I. 
 
 Great. She shows the emptiness of high-sound- 
 ing titles : the glory of Croesus dwindles do\;vn 
 to a name ; the glittering reputation of literary 
 pretenders she tears into shreds. " She puts 
 down the mighty from their seat." But she 
 beckons forward modest and obscure worth and 
 bids it occupy a throne in the world. She reverses 
 the positions of men. She dismisses the monarch 
 of Egypt, scarcely deigning to pause and record 
 his name ; she enthrones the shepherd of Midian 
 among the legislators of the earth ; she flings 
 Nero into the horror chamber of history; 
 she enshrines St. Paul in the Pantheon of the 
 world. She silences the voice of the foolish 
 merry sovereign who filled Whitehall Chambers 
 with idlers and favourites ; she opens the mouth 
 of the blind, unheeded poet of Aldersgate-street, 
 and bids men listen to a voice ^' majestic like 
 the sea." 
 
 Such is the wise irony of impartial history — 
 and the reason is not far to seek. She measures 
 men not by the tawdry reputations of the hour, 
 but by the influence they can difiuse; she 
 watches the circling wave which forms as men 
 cast their force into the great ocean of life, 
 and she measures their power by the life of 
 that wave, and she finds that few — few indeed 
 —-have been able to spread their influence beyond 
 
LECTURE I. 31 
 
 their age ; she notes many exalted to the skies, 
 and she sees that in the next generation their 
 name is clean put out; she measures the great- 
 ness of men as men do the height of mountains, 
 by the length of the shadows they cast upon 
 the surface of the world ; and measuring thus 
 she bids those whose influence lives through the 
 ages to sit like gods among the hills of time. 
 Such is the test of history to the pretensions of 
 men. 
 
 Thus does Sovereign History deal with the 
 reputations of m.en. Christ, in founding His 
 kingdom, challenged the verdict of this inexor- 
 able and impartial sovereign ; He has braved 
 her power and He has triumphed. As the ages 
 moved, the lustre of His name gathered bright- 
 ness, and the stability of His influence grew 
 stronger. The Galilean peasant, the carpenter's 
 son, the Nazarene, has ascended the throne of 
 the world, and spread His empire through time. 
 He has not only vindicated His own power, but 
 He has shown Himself capable of conferring 
 dominion upon others. Let the name of Christ 
 be blotted out, and lo ! what numberless names 
 must die with His death. Let Christ be reckoned 
 as naught, and behold all those into whom He 
 breathed the breath of power must die with 
 Him. When the light of the sun pales, the hue 
 
32 LECTUEE I. 
 
 of every petal of every flower fades : thus would 
 the beauty which lingers round the names of 
 Mary and Lydia_, and the splendour which 
 adorns the names of St. Peter and St. John, of 
 Augustine and of Gregory, of Anselm and of 
 Melancthon, of Thomas a Kempis and of Donne, 
 fade, if He, who was once the Sim of the Day 
 of Christianity, sank from the heavens. But He 
 has not vanished beneath the horizon. He is 
 in the meridian of His glory ! He is seated 
 upon the Throne of the world ! Let the throne 
 of the world be declared vacant to-morrow. No 
 other name could be named that would not pro- 
 voke angry competition; but when Jesus Christ 
 is seated there, there is none that has dared to 
 dispute His right. Yea, those who withhold 
 from Him Divine homage acknowledge that He, 
 and He alone^ is worthy to be seated there. 
 '' Rest^ then, upon Thy Throne, O Thou vic- 
 torious One ; henceforth between Thee and God 
 men will no longer disting^uish ^'^." It is the 
 impassioned eloquence of a French sceptic. 
 Hear the sober and well-matured judgment of 
 an Englishman, whose clear, cold intellect was 
 never betrayed into words of meaningless pane- 
 gyric. "Nor even now would it be easy, even 
 
 ^^ Renan, Vie de Jesus. 
 
LECTURE I. 33 
 
 for an unbeliever, to find a better translation ot 
 the rule of virtue from the abstract or the con- 
 crete, than to endeavour so to live as that Christ 
 would approve our life^^.'^ Such is the ver- 
 dict of impartial history on One who nineteen 
 centuries ago was despised and rejected uf men. 
 Who is seated on the throne of the world, if it 
 be not Jesus of Nazareth ? 
 
 But we must not forget that certain grave 
 exceptions have been urged against the integrity 
 of Christ^s Empire. It is not a question it may 
 be said of personal power ; there is a poetical 
 homage which men are willing enough to give to 
 the idealised representations of men, but if we 
 are to apply a true test, we must not ask merely 
 what is the reputation of Christ, but we m.ust ask 
 how His Kingdom has fared. We must observe 
 how far it has proved itself to be a beneficent 
 empire, conferring blessings upon mankind ; and 
 it is not against Christ Himself, but against the 
 success of His administration, that the strongest 
 objections are made. 
 
 I shall notice three. First, it has been said that 
 Christianity has failed because the history of the 
 past shows that in many points the expecta- 
 tionsj which men were led to form, have proved 
 
 " J. S. Mill, Easai/ on Religion, p. 253. 
 
34 LECTURE I. 
 
 deceptive. Now this objection, when stated in 
 its simplest form, means that Christianity has 
 failed because men have not found that their 
 expectations have been realised. It certainly at 
 the outset is a strange thing that a man should 
 be held responsible for all the absurd expecta- 
 tions which have been entertained on his behalf, 
 and I would ask you to notice that almost every 
 new scheme, enterprise, and invention has had 
 to run the gauntlet of three different stages of 
 public opinion — the stage of ridicule, the stage 
 of exaggerated expectation_, and the stage of 
 just appreciation. Men first deride the hopes 
 of original genius ; then they rush to the ex- 
 treme of the most unmeasured applause; and 
 only at last the stirred ocean sinks to the calm 
 level of a fair judgment* Whether it is the 
 steam engine, or gas, or the electric light, you 
 first hear ridicule and contempt., then abject 
 and unreasoning wonder, and finally contented 
 understanding. Like the barbarians of Malta, 
 they look upon the apostle of every new cause, 
 first as a character with a blot on it; then as 
 a God ; and only at last, when the extremes 
 have passed, as a minister of simple, practical 
 good. And Christianity has not been exempt 
 from these paroxysms of prejudiced judgment. 
 It is true that the faith of Christians can never 
 
LECTURE I. 35 
 
 be too strong" ; and the faith of men in their 
 Lord will never be put to shame. But there is 
 all the difference in the world between strong 
 faith and an omnivorous credulity; between 
 simple trust and an exaggerated expectation. 
 If faith be the hand of the soul, its strength is 
 not to be measured by the number of things it 
 clutches at_, but rather by the firmness of its 
 grasp. That firm grasp of faith will never fail, 
 but the timid stupidity which seizes on straws 
 will likely enough sink beneath the waves of 
 doubt. It can never be too often affirmed that 
 there is a whole heaven of difference between 
 the faith of men and their expectations ; and it 
 is no proof that Christianity has failed in her 
 work because the silly expectations of infatuated 
 Christians have been over and over again fal- 
 sified : the failure of Christian expectations is 
 not the failure of the faith. 
 
 Examples will make this clearer. The faith 
 of the devout Jews was directed by their pro- 
 phets to the advent of a Messiah ; but as the 
 years moved on strange and gross conceptions 
 of the Messiah's work were formed. If he was 
 to be a king, a king to them meant territory 
 and armies,, wars and conquest, wealth and 
 worldly splendour. These were the expecta- 
 tions. The event fulfilled their faith, but it 
 
36 LECTURE 1. 
 
 falsified their expectations. The Messiah came, 
 but His Kingdom was not of this world. 
 Another era dawned. The disciples of Jesus 
 Christ took the place of the devout followers of 
 Moses. Their faith looked forward to the return 
 of their Lord ; and out of that faith, imagination 
 born of Mosaic literature, and perhaps nurtured 
 by present sorrow, began to build up once more 
 gross and material expectations ; they began to 
 measure the promises of their Master by their 
 own earthly wishes, and the years of Him who 
 liveth for ever and ever by the span of their 
 own narrow life. Then came the words of 
 apostolic caution to those who taught that the 
 day of the Lord is at hand. And what did that 
 caution (applicable to the self-constituted pro- 
 phets of our own day as to them) amount to ? 
 It told them that their faith was undoubtedly 
 right ; the day of the Lord would come ; but that 
 their expectations were entirely wrong. That 
 day would not come without the intervening 
 ages of trial and apostasy. And it is not in the 
 world of theology alone that men's faith has 
 been right but the expectations wrong. It was 
 the faith of Columbus that he could find land 
 by sailing towards the sunset. His expectation 
 was that the land so found would prove to be 
 the already known East Indies. His expecta- 
 
LECTUEE I. 37 
 
 tion was wrong — though his faith was right — 
 God^s world proved then (as it has often proved 
 since) to be larger than the little thoughts of 
 men. Thus evermore do the widening pur- 
 poses of God vindicate the faith and rebuke the 
 expectations of men. The broadening world 
 and the broadening future are like the finger of 
 God which beckons the Church of Christ on- 
 ward to take possession of new worlds and to 
 plan for new eras ; but the hand which beckons 
 us onward destroys our false and hastily- con- 
 ceived hopes. We are taught that faith need 
 not fall because the theories of men are proved 
 crude. The reality of a great fact is not to be 
 discredited by the stupidity of its interpreters, 
 else it would go hard with the Solar System 
 and the British Constitution. The Ptolemaic 
 theory goes down, but the planets are not 
 shaken from their courses ; the starry worlds 
 sweep onward in their quiet orbits : noisy poli- 
 ticians vapour their narrow thoughts ; the pro- 
 gress of free institutions moves forward. The 
 schemes of prophetic interpretation, the elaborate 
 ecclesiasticisms, the narrow and petrified con- 
 sistency of symmetrical dogmatism, all may 
 be disappointed, but Christ's Kingdom will 
 move forward on her starry course ; the 
 puerile and the antiquated notions of men and 
 
38 LECTURE I. 
 
 Churclies may vanisli, yet Thou, Christ, art 
 King. " They shall perish, but Thou remainest; 
 they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and 
 as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they 
 shall be changed : but Thou art the same, and 
 Thy years shall not fail 2^. " 
 
 A second objection is that Christianity, as a 
 system of moral regeneration, has failed when 
 tried by History, because she has developed 
 certain grave corruptions. It will not be denied 
 by any one that the history of the past eighteen 
 centuries has been darkened with violence and 
 stained with blood. We might perhaps plead 
 that whenever Christian influence has been in 
 the ascendant, then the moral tone and the 
 humane tone have prevailed; at least to such 
 an extent that the average standard is decidedly 
 in advance of that attained under other in- 
 fluences. If such be the case, as I believe it is, 
 may we not say that steady increments of good 
 are the most satisfying proofs of true and real 
 progress. Spasmodic prosperity may be due to 
 exceptional causes. Well-graduated and in- 
 creasing prosperity must be due to steady and 
 well-sustained growth of the sources of pros- 
 perity. 
 
 But it is important to distinguish between 
 
 ^ Heb. i. II, 12. 
 
LECTURE I. 39 
 
 things which differ. In any great movement 
 there are circumstances attending its growth 
 which need to be investigated before it can be 
 fairly assumed that they are the consequences 
 of the movement at all ; and even when we 
 have ascertained that they are the consequences 
 of the movement, we must again investigate 
 whether they are consequences which are the 
 real offspring of its own bosom, or only conse- 
 quences developed in the course of its progress. 
 There are thus three classes of circumstances — 
 circumstances independent of a movement but 
 attending it; circumstances which are the de- 
 veloped consequences of a movement; circum- 
 stances which are the real offspring of it. These 
 must be distinguished. A common-place illus- 
 tration will be forgiven. A man is ill ; his 
 doctor prescribes for him. If the sick man 
 injures himself by a fall, that is a circumstance 
 independent of the doctor or his remedy. But 
 if the doctor's remedy produces, because of the 
 poison in the man's bloody some painful symp- 
 toms, these are consequences for which the 
 medical man is not responsible ; they are inci- 
 dental consequences of the remedy: but if the 
 medicine given is wrong, and death or disease 
 ensues, then the doctor is responsible. We 
 cannot charge men or some new scheme with 
 
40 LECTURE 1. 
 
 any but those consequences which are deducible 
 from their principles. Liberty is not responsible 
 for revolution. Religion is not responsible 
 for the crimes committed in her name. In 
 estimating then the great events of human pro- 
 gress we must distinguish between essential 
 consequences and incidental consequences, and 
 also between consequences and after-events. 
 
 After-events must not be interpreted as con- 
 sequences. Post hoc ergo Propter hoc is an ab- 
 surd principle : it is ridiculed in daily life. The 
 thunderstorm which disturbs a wedding-party 
 is not a consequence of the wedding. Neither 
 are sickness and poverty and war^ as such, con- 
 sequences of Christianity: they were as rife 
 before Christ's coming as after: they existed 
 before : they could not, therefore, be consequences 
 of Christ's advent. Incidental consequences are 
 not the same as essential consequences. The 
 evils which a movement developes are not all 
 evils which it creates. It is the method of the 
 physician to develop the latent disease ; the 
 poison in the blood must be brought out ; he 
 does not create the evil, he only brings to light 
 what existed before. Similarly Christianity has 
 no doubt developed evils. The bringing to light 
 the hidden things of darkness was a part of 
 Christ's scheme. There is nothing hidden which 
 
LECTURE I. 41 
 
 shall not be made known, neither covered 
 that shall not be revealed. To convince the 
 world of sin was a part of the Holy Spirit's 
 work 2^. Is it to be wondered at, still less com- 
 plained of, that Christianity has made certain 
 evils reveal themselves as evils? Concealed 
 they were fatal to mankind, revealed they were 
 brought out to be seen and to be condemned. 
 An example may be given. Persecution for 
 opinion has been thought by some to have been 
 due to Christianity. Its intensity was no doubt 
 a consequence of Christianity, but not a creation 
 nor a legitimate offspring of her teaching. In 
 this she revealed what was in man — she gave 
 to man keener convictions as to the supreme 
 importance of religion. Religion was no longer 
 a mere ritual or an inoperative ceremonial ; 
 it was a power fraught with strange and far- 
 reaching consequences. A man's religion then 
 was no trifling accident of his life, like the 
 colour of his coat or of his hair. It w^as raised 
 to a matter of supreme interest. Earnestness 
 was created — we shall not blame her for that. 
 Want of earnestness will surely be condemned 
 as a moral suicide, and a high crime and mis- 
 demeanour against society. But this quickened 
 
 29 John xvi. 8. 
 D 
 
42 LECTURE I. 
 
 earnestness brouglit to light the hidden germ of 
 a fatal moral aberration in the heart of man- 
 kind. The same sun which ripens the good seed 
 ripens the evil also. " The faith that simply 
 adds to the folly and ferocity of one, is turned 
 to enduring sweetness, abounding charity, and 
 self-sacrifice in another. Christianity varies with 
 the nature upon which it falls ^^.'" Some natures 
 there were which found it impossible to be in 
 earnest without animosity. Why was this? 
 Was the animosity the creation of Christianity? 
 It was developed by the creation of religious 
 earnestness ; but the ill- weed sjorang not from 
 Christ, but from the soil of the human heart. 
 " Ye know not what manner of Spirit ye are 
 of," was the w^ail of religion at the stake and at 
 the rack ; the hand of religion was fain rather 
 to wipe the pain- sweat from the heretic's brow, 
 than to turn one look of approval on the In- 
 quisitor. Scenes like these are abhorrent to 
 humanity, and are abhorrent to Christianity 
 which was sent to be the guardian of all that 
 was humane and merciful, as well as holy; 
 scenes like these prove not that Christianity has 
 failed, but that there was a tremendous fund of 
 unholy passions in human nature which only 
 
 ^ Prof. Tyndall, Contemporary Reviexo, xx. p. 766. 
 
LECTURE I. 43 
 
 time, and faith, and knowledge could eradicate. 
 There are evils developed then by a system 
 which are not the essential outgrowth of it. 
 Only when the vice is bound up with the very 
 texture of a religion can we fairly charge her 
 with causing it, in the sense of being responsible 
 for its existence. The modifying influence of the 
 soil is to be taken into account; the seed is not 
 responsible for what springs up with it and tends 
 to choke it. It is diiferent when certain evils 
 are clearly inherent in the sj^irit of a religion. 
 The religion of Mohammed is not responsible 
 for many of the vices, which are rather of the 
 East than of the Prophet. But it is responsible 
 for the vices which it takes under its wing and 
 fosters, or to use the words of a great authority, 
 consecrates. "It has consecrated slavery; it 
 has consecrated polygamy; it has consecrated 
 despotism ^^" Here are three evils which go to 
 the degradation of man in the three spheres of 
 his life — the individual, the social, the political. 
 Man is degraded by slavery _, the family by poly- 
 gamy, the nation and the government by des- 
 potism. The sj^stem which consecrates these 
 makes them of her essence and must be respon- 
 sible. If, theU; the accusation be true that 
 
 ^^ Freeman. Saracens — quoted by Dean Church — 7n/«- 
 ences of Christianity on National Character, p. 8. 
 
 D 2, 
 
44 LECTURE I. 
 
 Moliammedism has consecrated these, she has 
 woven them into her creed and made them her 
 own. But who will say that Christianity has 
 consecrated persecution ? If wild fanatics and 
 slaughterous renegades loved to baptize their foes 
 in flames, they were not true disciples of that 
 creed which sought to baptize with that Holy 
 Spirit, whose first-fruits are love, joy, peace, 
 longsuffering. 
 
 But there is a third objection. Christ's 
 kingdom it is said must be pronounced a moral 
 failure, because it has not yet abolished many of 
 the unquestioned ills of society. The objection 
 is not to what Christianity has done, but to 
 what she has not done. It is said, ' If Chris- 
 tianity be a great social regenerator, how is it 
 that, after eighteen centuries of trial, there yet 
 remains so much undone that by all confession 
 ought to be done ?' 
 
 The objection is based, I think, upon a double 
 misconception — a misconception of the aim, and 
 a misconception of the method of Christ. 
 
 But, first, let me confess that the accusation, 
 though not fairly chargeable against Christ and 
 His Kingdom, is, alas ! in much, fairly charge- 
 able against His Church. Over and over again 
 we have found in our own lives, and we have 
 bad exemplified in the history of Churches, 
 
LECTURE I. 45 
 
 that the most indefensible result of our follies is 
 that we have cast a stumbling-block in our 
 brother's way. The self-seeking, the avarice, 
 the truculence of the Church has too often 
 created a profound distrust in men : the weak 
 and oppressed looked to her as an ally, but they 
 found, alas ! but too frequently, a tyrant. But 
 while all stand self-abashed, let us in our con- 
 fession clear our Master from complicity in our 
 weakness. If we have been selfish, worldly, 
 oppressive; supple-kneed to the wealthy and 
 iron-hearted to the weak ; it was in spite of Thy 
 word, against Thy will, O Thou who didst bid 
 the weary and the heavy-laden to come to Thee! 
 The objection is based, I said, on a two-fold 
 misconception — a misconception of the aim of 
 Christianity and of its method. It is surely *by 
 its aim and method that we are to judge of a new 
 system. Not our expectations, but its inten- 
 tions and purpose, should govern our estimate 
 of its value. Christianity did not design to be 
 a legislative abolition act of all evil ; it was not 
 of the nature of an Act of Parliament, still less 
 of an Oriental decree. It was rather to be an 
 educational force, and to throw its influence into 
 the slowly upward moving ages, and to guide 
 and assist their growth into freer life. If it 
 aimed to be an educational force, then in the 
 
46 LECTURE I. 
 
 nature of the case must she not adopt a method 
 adapted to the slowly developing capacities of 
 those to be educated ? 
 
 Thus the method of Christianity has also been 
 misconceived. That method is not immediate, 
 but progressive and ultimate. And it was 
 scarcely open to choose another method. It 
 might have seemed to some a more desirable 
 way to bring about an immediate cessation of 
 all forms of evil ; but this could only have been 
 done by an act of coercion ; and God deals with 
 us as with men, not as with slaves. The power 
 of Christianity is this, that it is a power which 
 waits on men. It promises much, but the pro- 
 mises are very largely contingent on man's co- 
 operation. This the New Testament constantly 
 warns us to notice. The abolition of war^ pain, 
 and disease was no doubt often longed for in 
 early Christian days; and men looked, as we 
 have seen, for an immediate millennium, but the 
 golden age was not to dawn so soon. It might 
 dawn at once if men instantly lived by the 
 principles Christ laid dowm. Then indeed, when 
 all men's good w^as each man's rule, would 
 universal peace cast her shaft of light athwart 
 the w^orld ^^, But the early Christians were 
 
 3* " But we grow old. Ah ! when shall all men's good 
 Be each man's rule, and universal Peace 
 
LECTUEE I. 47 
 
 warned that these high principles would only 
 be received slowly. Wars, famines, persecutions 
 must take place before the true reign of Christ 
 in its fulness and its beauty would be established. 
 The sacred seer at Patmos beheld in the con- 
 quering white-robed horseman the emblem of 
 an ultimate truth. Christ would be conqueror; 
 but that vision faded and its place was taken 
 by the emblems of war, death, persecution, and 
 revolution, before the still peace of the heavenly 
 reign could come ^^. For only as the moral power 
 of men ripened would they accept and adopt the 
 principles of Christ^s Kingdom ^*. It is then 
 always to be remembered that Christ deals with 
 men who are free to choose^ and with a race 
 which can only grow in moral elevation by slow 
 degrees. 
 
 Lie like a shaft of light across the land, 
 And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, 
 Tliro' all the circle of the golden year?" 
 
 Tennyson, The Golden Year. 
 ^ Rev. vi. and vii. i. 
 
 ^* "It was in vain that Christianity had taught a simple 
 doctrine and enjoined a simple worship. The minds of men 
 were too backward for so great a step, and required mora 
 complicated forms and a more complicated belief." — Buckle, 
 History of Civilization, vol, i. p. 259. 
 
 " Le Christianisme n'est pas ete depos^ sur la terre comme 
 une borne avec une inscription divine, marquante la limite 
 de notre activite ; il est un principe de vie, un germe fecond 
 appele k p^n<^trer I'individu et la soci^te come la levain 
 penetre la pate, suivant une compara'son familifere mais 
 frappante de I'Evangile." — E. de Pressens^, La Euine Sociale. 
 
48 LECTURE I. 
 
 And when we turn to the positive side of the 
 question and ask what Christianity has done, 
 we find that she has achieved her work on this 
 method of slow and well-graduated progress. 
 It took generations for men to perceive that 
 slavery was essentially at variance with the 
 theological principle of a redeemed w^orld. It 
 took years before men perceived what a vast 
 social revolution was effected by Christianity in 
 the restoration of woman to her rightful place 
 as the helpmeet of man. And slow as these 
 have been^ there is more to come. If war has 
 not ceased, it is only because the moral sense of 
 mankind is behindhand in this matter : the 
 ideal world set before us is a world in which 
 war shall be no more : an educated world will 
 perhaps be able to realise it, and the day come 
 when war will be reckoned as senseless a way of 
 settling disputes, as duelling is thought now by 
 all men when not suffering from the derange- 
 ment of personal and political excitement. In 
 this slow way Christianity accomplishes her 
 work — what has been done is the pledge of 
 what may be done. 
 
 We have touched on objections, but turn 
 your glance upon the advance made, and see 
 the positive evidence. Christ in establishing 
 His Kingdom challenged the verdict of history; 
 
LECTURE I. 49 
 
 and He triumphed ; for He by His influence 
 has changed the course of history, and spread 
 a higher civilisation over the world. I will not 
 claim what will not be conceded ; but Christ's 
 power over history is no fiction. He created 
 the Church, and made her a nursery for good^''. 
 In spite of the recklessness of her sons, she 
 has achieved much ; the nearer she keeps to 
 His spirit and instructions of His Word the 
 more she will achieve. As it is, the record is a 
 noble one. She diminished sensuality ^^ by point- 
 ing to the true dignity of man. She made 
 tyranny quail ; for she witnessed to a righteous 
 King. She smote the fetters from the slave. 
 She vivified and extended, even if she did not 
 create, the spirit of humane thoughtfulness for 
 the afflicted. She placed the bright crown of 
 domestic queenship upon woman's brow. She 
 consecrated every honest toil; she has mitigated 
 
 ^5 Mr. Eaton in his Bampton Lectures (" Permanence of 
 Christianity," p. 8) quotes two witnesses on this subject. 
 " All that we call modern civilization in a sense which deserves 
 the name, is the visible expression of the transforming power 
 of the Gospel." (Froude, Short Studies ii, p. 39.) "Chris- 
 tianity," writes Mr. Lecky, " the hfe of morality, the basis of 
 civilization, has regenerated the world." 
 
 ^® " It (the Christian religion) softens the character, 
 purifies and directs the imagination, blends insensibly' with 
 habitual modes of thought, and without revolutionising 
 gives a tone and bias to all the forms of action." — Lecky, 
 European Morals, vol. i. p. 205. 
 
50 LECTURE I. 
 
 the ferocity of war, and she has called into being 
 a noble rivalry of benevolence in the breasts of 
 civilised men. " As a matter of fact," writes 
 one whom all will acknowledge to be as erudite 
 as he is impartial, — ^' as a matter of fact Chris- 
 tianity has done more to quicken the affection 
 of mankind^ to promote piety, to create a pure 
 and merciful idea than any other influence that 
 has ever acted on the world ^'^." — Remembering 
 Him, who cared for the bodies of men, she 
 roused society to compassionate the sick and 
 afflicted ^^: mindful of .the brotherly love He 
 
 ^^ European Morals, vol. ii. p. 163. Compare the language 
 of M. Troplong : — "Chrlstiamty was really not only a pro- 
 gress in the truths received before its time which it enlarged, 
 completed, and clothed witli a character more sublime, and 
 a strength more sympathetic, but it was moreover (and this 
 is literally true even for the most incredulous) the descent of 
 a spirit from on high on the classes disinherited by science 
 and plunged in the darkness of polytheism. Ancient philo- 
 sophy, with all its merits, was chargeable with the unpar- 
 donable wrong of remaining cold in the presence of the evils 
 of humanity." — Quoted by Sir J. B. Byles, Foundations of 
 Ri'Jiyion in the Mind and Heart of Man, p. 122. 
 
 ■^ In an interesting article in the Westminster Revieiv, 
 entitled " Pre- christian Dispensaries and Hospitals," the in- 
 fluence of Christianity in the establishment of hospitals is 
 admitted: — "Thus we see that the glory of Christianity doe8 
 not lie in having originated the idea of hospitals, but in 
 having seized it, like the runners the torch in the ancient 
 games, and carried it forward with brighter flame and more 
 intense enthusiasm." It was the earnestness of Christians 
 which roused the heathen world: — "This work of the Chris- 
 tians excited the emulation of the Emperor Julian. These 
 impious Christians give themselves to this kind of humanity; 
 and although he thought their motives base, yet he orders 
 
LECTURE I. 51 
 
 taught, slie strove to awaken a true enthusiasm 
 of humanity: helieving in Ilim, who was the 
 true light and life of men, she sought to kindle 
 the flame of love and hope in every heart. 
 
 Such have been her achievements, and her 
 achievements are the measure of the extent and 
 duration of His influence, who has proved Him- 
 self king in the order of history, as He is king 
 over the varied characters of men. He has made 
 the tree of life to grow alongside the tree of 
 advancing knowledge, that knowledge may not 
 turn to decay. He has shone upon the world 
 not only as a sun difi^using light everywhere, 
 but His light has moved in the marching ages ; 
 never outstripping the growing thoughts of men, 
 but casting a Shekinah glory upon their ad- 
 vancing footsteps through the wilderness of toil, 
 to the Holy Land of Promise. 
 
 III. But there is another note of power in 
 the Kingdom of Christ. One of the greatest 
 difficulties of rulers is to treat adjusting rival 
 claims. It is comparatively easy to do justice 
 when one interest only has to be considered ; it 
 is the apparent conflict of interests and rights 
 
 Arsacius to establish abundance of hospit.ils in every city, 
 that our kindness may be enjoyed by strangers, not only of 
 our own people, but of those who are in need." — Vol. lii. pp. 
 445 and 444. 
 
52 LECTURE I. 
 
 which tests the wisdom and impartiality of 
 rulers. 
 
 Upon the life of man there are conflicting 
 claims. There is the claim of an urgent present, 
 but when we have devoted our thoughts to this, 
 there rises up the awful and half-veiled form of 
 a no less urgent future. Men have dealt in 
 various ways with these rival claimants. '^ Live 
 for the present^ the future is unknown," is the 
 language of the secularist. " Live for the future, 
 the present is vanity," is the language of the 
 religious fanatic. The outcome of these an- 
 tagonistic rules of life is what might have been 
 expected. ^' Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 
 we die/' is the verdict of the one ; '^ Handle not, 
 nor yet taste, nor even touch," is the conclusion 
 of the other. The secularist developes into a 
 voluptuary; the fanatic into an ascetic. These 
 opposite developments are not to be ignored, for 
 both are based on truth. Both have a measure 
 of right in them. There is no time like the 
 present ; yet all the harvest lies in the future. 
 The Kingdom of Christ was looked to by men to 
 reconcile the opposing claims of the present and 
 the future. Upon them Christ gives judgment, 
 and in doing so He ignores the rights of neither. 
 " Work while it is called to-day." Thus does 
 Christ turn the stream of man's energy upon 
 
LECTURE I. 53 
 
 the present. " The night cometh when no man 
 can work^^." Thus does He turn their thoughts 
 to the future. Of the present He says — Do 
 good : work, watch. This is the season of 
 labour ; to-morrow comes the harvest of fruit. 
 The Present is the seed-time^ in the Future we 
 reap. Throw energy into the present, but keep 
 an eye on the future. Let your oars plunge 
 boldly into the waves which are around you, but 
 keep your rudder straight for the haven. Live 
 in the world, but always with an aim above the 
 world. Thus does Christ reconcile what man 
 will divorce : the ascetic and the voluptuary 
 miss the meaning of life. Man lives in a present 
 he cannot forego ; and on the threshold of a 
 future he cannot ignore. Christ would have 
 men neither forego nor ignore. The way to 
 to-morrow lies through to-day; the duties of 
 to-day are the parents of to-morrow's powers, 
 and the ancestors of the joys which will dawn 
 hereafter. 
 
 But not only upon man's attention do the 
 present and the future press their imperious 
 claims ; but the government of the world is 
 distracted often between the rival claims of the 
 individual and the race. The theory of the 
 
 2^ John ix. 4. 
 
54 LECTtiEE I. 
 
 earlier empires preferred the interests of the 
 individual; the growth of intelligence has 
 learned to prefer the interests of the race. In 
 the ideal kingdom the rule, which w^as for the 
 interest of all, would be for the interest of each ; 
 and the Kingdom of Christ would fail of its 
 purpose unless it had a message for man as 
 well as for mankind, and for mankind as w^ell 
 as man. 
 
 Christianity has been accused of caring 
 nothing for the race, but only for the indi- 
 vidual. This seems to me a mistake. The 
 welfare of souls and the welfare of humanity 
 w^ere alike dear to Him. But His method 
 of securing the welfare of the race differed 
 from the methods of men. Twice Christ re- 
 fused to be a king; He would not purchase 
 a sovereignty on payment of tribute to one 
 single evil principle ; He would not ascend 
 a throne which was founded on a movement 
 which could only mean the ascendancy of one 
 nation over the world. His rule would have 
 effected great social benefits ; but He refused an 
 immediate sovereignty that He might win a 
 better sovereignty over the world. He refused 
 to reign over all unless He might first reign in 
 each. In that refusal He proclaimed His 
 method. He had no faith in reformations 
 
LECTURE I. 55 
 
 whicli were imposed from without. Conquerors 
 and philanthropists — the most sternly practical 
 and the most dreamy of men — have always 
 imagined that a paradisaical community could 
 be formed by bringing men to agree to unite 
 themselves in some ready-made organisation ; 
 but the jplialanstenes ^^ of the philanthropist and 
 the "happy-family" sort of empire of the abso- 
 lutist have been failures ; for they are attempts 
 to solve the problem in the wrong way. They 
 are efforts to heal the diseases of humanity by ex- 
 ternal remedies ; they work from the circumfer- 
 ence to the centre. They fail who hope to make 
 men happy and good by forcing them into con- 
 federacy. Coarse and brutal-minded conquerors 
 might weld men together by the clumsy method 
 of coercion. But Christ worked upon the oppo- 
 site method. The disease was in tlie individual ; 
 the reformation must commence with the centre, 
 that it might spread to the circumference : like 
 one who understood the problem, He refused to 
 
 *<* The name given to a social organization after the plan 
 of Charles Fourier : it was the supposed Firm Phalanx of 
 people who united their capital and energy in common : the 
 building where all the members dwelt together was called by 
 the same name. The reader of Aurora Leigh will remember 
 Romney Leigh's enthusiasm in this social direction : — 
 "His phalansteries there, his speeches here, 
 His pamphlets, pleas and statements, everywhere." 
 
 P-93. 
 
56 LECTURE 1. 
 
 work from without ; He would work from with- 
 in *^ ; the good within would blossom outwards : 
 He sought to cleanse the system ; for thus the 
 painful sores on the surface would one by one 
 disappear. He did not try to elevate individuals 
 through society first. He knew that the eleva- 
 tion of society could only be effected really and 
 enduringly by the elevation of individuals ; then 
 as their influence spread^ the moral tone would 
 rise and react upon individuals, for the moral 
 level of society is the average moral level of the 
 persons composing it. By the regeneration of 
 the individual then He would regenerate society. 
 But to force reformation upon unwilling people 
 and upon unripe generations was to lose the 
 moral value which the slow dawning of higher 
 ethical conceptions would bring to the race. 
 The method might be slower than the rougher 
 and readier one of compulsion_, but it was surer, 
 and it effected more completely the desired social 
 results. Each Christian was to be the pioneer 
 of greater progress, the centre of lights the 
 diffuser of the preserving influence of a high 
 moral and social life. Every regenerated soul 
 became in the highest sense a philanthropist. It 
 
 " All ! your Fouriers failed, 
 Because not poets enough to understand 
 That life developes from within." — Aurora Leigh, p. 60. 
 
LECTURE I. 57 
 
 was thus the good cause grew and the moral 
 atmosphere was relieved of the pestilential fogs 
 which a corrupt society had generated. 
 
 He surely cannot be accused of caring little 
 for the race who loved it too well, and knew it 
 too well to attempt to influence it, even for its 
 own good, by means other than those which 
 called into play its own moral sense in its own 
 education. 
 
 But neither did our Master forget individuals. 
 For what is His teaching? Every child of man 
 has an Eternal Father, who has stretched out a 
 hand to guide him through the intricate and 
 perplexing paths of life. To all_, He who is the 
 Son of Man as well as Son of God has come 
 with words fitted to all the varied needs of 
 sorrowing and sinful hearts, and with power to 
 remove the three-fold mystery and pain of our 
 life. For upon all of us lies in some form the 
 three-fold pain of life — the pain of an irrevocable 
 past, of an unsolaced present, and of an uncertain 
 future. For each of these Christ bears in His 
 hand the fitting remedy ; and in touching upon 
 these in future lectures we shall see the adapta- 
 tion of Christ's Kingdom to the individual wants 
 of man. But meanwhile let us recall the ground 
 we have travelled. We have passed rapidly 
 over the surface of a widespread territory. We 
 
 E 
 
58 LECTURE I. 
 
 have noted the varieties of its external features, 
 the gradations of climate, and the rich diversities 
 of its produce ; we have beheld its lofty ranges, 
 its broad plains, and its verdure-clad valleys ; we 
 have asked what single stream can bestow a 
 treasury of waters full enough and diffusive 
 enough to preserve in life and vigour such a 
 noble variety of produce spread over such an 
 ever-altering land. We have seen that there is 
 a river of water of life, unsealed by the pierced 
 hand of Jesus, which will flow through every 
 channel that men will dig for it, which runs 
 into the little valleys, which makes the pastures 
 soft with its touch, and bids the hills rejoice on 
 every side. This is the river which makes glad 
 the city of God ; this is the river of God which 
 is full of water; this is that stream which 
 Ezekiel saw spreading through the wilderness, 
 and turning its barrenness into beauty; this is 
 that living water which a man may drink and 
 never thirst; this is that stream which flows 
 to-day close to the oracle of God, and still has 
 power to heal and to refresh the wounded and 
 weary spirits of men. If it seem at times in- 
 sipid and tasteless, the salt of a little moral 
 earnestness, or better, the salt of the Holy 
 Spirit given in answer to prayer, will heal the 
 waters and restore the verdure of holiness to a 
 
LECTURE I. 59 
 
 barren life. This is the stream of life which 
 seems at times to disappear beneath the flood 
 and sea of human history, but carries yet its 
 unpolluted course to rise up in some new land or 
 age and cheer earth's exiles with a sweet liquid 
 music that tells Christians of their home. The 
 power of that life-stream is not gone : it makes 
 music at our feet ; but we must stoop if we 
 would drink of that brook and go on our way 
 with uplifted hearts. For it is not with pomp 
 or shout, with profound knowledge, or erudition, 
 or culture, that the Kingdom of God comes ; not 
 with observation or outward show, not in cere- 
 monial however splendid, not in sermons how- 
 ever oratorical, not in orthodoxy however dog- 
 matic^ not in modern symposiums, though the 
 voices we hear may sound like a revival of the 
 sad eloquence of the Gironde ; not in these will 
 the Kingdom of God be found. If you ask, 
 where, if not here ? the answer comes back 
 across the centuries. The Kingdom of God 
 is an everlasting Kingdom. His Kingdom 
 ruleth over all; but if that Kingdom is to be 
 realised by you, the Kingdom of God, lo ! it 
 must be within you; and if not within you^ then 
 though it is everywhere, it is for you — nowhere. 
 
 E 2 
 
LECTUEE II 
 
 " The kingdom of God is within you." — Luke xvii. ai. 
 
 The wide spread of Christianity, her power 
 to adjust herself to advancing ages and to re- 
 concile rival claims, are witnesses of her fitness 
 to be the helper of man. It is said that Richard 
 Baxter in reviewing his life related that in his 
 early years the miraculous evidences for Chris- 
 tianity influenced him most ; in his middle life 
 the prophetic and historical ; but in his later 
 years, the fitness of Christianity to give rest 
 to his spirit was to him the most convincing 
 evidence. 
 
 A similar progressive estimation of the rela- 
 tive force of evidences may perhaps be traced 
 in the history of Christendom : in its youth, 
 perhaps the miraculous appealed to it most 
 strongly; in its middle life, the wide range of 
 prophecy and history; in this, its eventide, it 
 seems more disposed to rest in its moral fitness 
 for man. But this must be a fitness for man 
 
LECTURE II. 61 
 
 as he is, not merely for man as he is painted ; 
 for man with thoughts now high and now low, 
 for man with his moral weaknesses^ his strong 
 affections, his dark faults and his lofty hopes. 
 It is for us to-day to consider this fitness with 
 reference to moral evil in man. We shall see 
 that her work must be with individual man 
 when she undertakes the task of moral regene- 
 ration. 
 
 I. The main work of Christianity is with in- 
 dividuals. It has been said that Christianity 
 cared nothing for the race, but only for the 
 individual^. The accusation is not in itself 
 true, and yet it contains a certain truth. It is 
 not in itself true : Christianity did care for the 
 race. Christ Himself set the example to His 
 Church. Twice I read that the Lord of Life 
 shed tears while upon earth. Once it was at 
 the grave of an individual ; once it was over 
 the opening grave of a nation. He who wept 
 over Lazarus could weep over Jerusalem. Those 
 tears of His are the witnesses that He, who had 
 a heart for the secret sorrow of souls, had a 
 heart also for those wider troubles which afflict 
 a people. Those tears were the prelude of la- 
 
 * " Christianity cared nothing for the species, and had only 
 the individual in its eye and mind." Feuerbach, quoted in 
 Eaton's Bampion Lectures, p. 104. 
 
62 LECTUBE II. 
 
 bours which Christian men undertook on behalf 
 of races ; for the genius of Christianity is on 
 the side of all those movements which tend to 
 bring peace and freedom to the world ; the foe 
 of anarchy, she is the advocate of liberty; her 
 sons laboured for emancipation ; her sons re- 
 buked the tyranny of princes ; the foe of cowardly 
 w^eakness, she is yet the advocate of peace ; and 
 it will be from her hands that men will receive 
 the boon which makes wars to cease unto the 
 ends of the earth ^. She fosters principles which 
 lie for a season dormant in the world : she waits 
 her time : she watches by the icebound fountains 
 till the temperature of the moral sense rises and 
 breaks the seal and lets them loose. The accu- 
 sation that she cares nothing for the race is 
 not true. 
 
 But there is a truth in it. The individual 
 was the chief object of Christ's care. To Him 
 who moved through earth refreshing the weary, 
 the sick, and the toiling, the sorrow of the 
 individual appealed, and to the relief of these 
 He turned His first thought. And there were 
 
 ^ " Centuries on centuries will be required to discipline fully 
 the human faculties that are to grow into the faith thus pre- 
 pared for them." Hutton's Essays, vol. i. p. 122, quoted in 
 Eaton's Permanence of Christianity, p. 24. Mr. Eaton well 
 remarks that one of the tests of the vitality of any religion is 
 the *' power of assimilating healthfully the altered conditions 
 of advancing: civilisation." 
 
LECTURE II. 63 
 
 reasons for this. He adopted a method different 
 from that of the conqueror and the sentimental 
 philanthropist. It is singular how men of totally- 
 opposite mould of character adopt the same 
 method; both the ambitious ruler and the 
 benevolent dreamer have thought that by weld- 
 ing men together in an ideal community they 
 could attain their aim. But the result has 
 always been failure. Neither the barl;aric splen- 
 dours of the East with its sumptuous tyrannies, 
 nor the imperial energy of Rome with its in- 
 exorable yoke, nor the mild and well-meant 
 absolutism of the Utopianist could really bind 
 together the social fabric. The witness of all 
 history is that the bond must be supplied from 
 within ; it must be the allegiance of loyal hearts, 
 of common sympathies, of congenial aspirations 
 which alone can cement the national or im- 
 perial structure. This Christ knew; and, there- 
 fore. He sought His Kingdom not through ex- 
 ternal force, but through inner conviction ; not 
 through magnificent displays of power, but by 
 arousing united affections and harmonious aims. 
 From this centre He might influence the cir- 
 cumference; from the circumference He could 
 not hope to reach the centre. It was a wise 
 policy which sought to reach the race through 
 the individual. 
 
64 LECTURE II. 
 
 But there was a personal reason also. All 
 progress towards wide-spread social happiness 
 must in the nature of the case be slow. It takes 
 generations before men perceive that their pas- 
 sions are hindering the advance of the world. 
 Only one by one are those great and much- 
 needed reforms adopted which secure personal 
 safety, personal freedom, personal happiness. It 
 was long, very long, before the sanctity of human 
 life was realised, and the sin of sacrificing it to 
 a fictitious sense of honour was perceived, but 
 now, except where political passions rob even 
 great men. of their better judgment, duelling 
 is reckoned ridiculous as well as disgraceful ; 
 and more slowly still will it dawn upon men's 
 moral sense that war is as foolish a method of 
 settling disputes as duelling. Thus the progress 
 of social reforms must be slow, and they are 
 usually the outcome of some great social or 
 political commotion ; but meanwhile individual 
 life is sacrificed, and individual interest is for- 
 gotten. As at the Pool of Bethesda, the angel 
 of reform descends and stirs the stagnant water 
 of human opinion, and then some single boon 
 is won for the world : he who steps down first 
 after the troubling of the water secures the 
 benefit. But the sufferers still lie round the 
 Pool, unblessed ; there are multitudes who can^ 
 
LECTUEE ir. 65 
 
 not endure to struggle in the great arena of 
 conflict to snatch at their brothers' expense the 
 reluctantly conceded boon ; the individual is 
 thrust aside; the good of the race or of the com- 
 munity must be secured. It is right ; but the 
 sufferers who lie looking on in pain have hearts, 
 and hopes, and throbbing sorrows and fears; 
 they can feel, and they can love : are these to 
 die without help or hope ? Politicians must 
 perhaps sacrifice the individual to the race ; 
 they can only consider the general weal ; but a 
 religion surely must carry a message to such. 
 Philosophers may ignore individual sorrow ; I 
 speak it with reverence when I say— Philoso- 
 phers may; but God dare not — and therefore 
 among the individual sufferers went Jesus, with 
 a word and a blessing for those who could not 
 grasp the struggled-for benefit of life, with 
 the blessing of health and hope for the sick 
 and the sad^. 
 
 But there is another reason also. And this 
 arose from the view Christ took of life's troubles. 
 
 3 " Observe, — it had not much 
 
 Consoled the race of mastodons to know, 
 Before they went to fossil, that anon 
 Their place would quicken with the elephant : 
 They were not elephants, but mastodons ; 
 And I, a man, as men are now, and not 
 As men may be hereafter, feel with men 
 In the agonising present." — Aurora Leigh, p. 54. 
 
66 LECTURE II. 
 
 He recognised sorrow in its various forms : His 
 sigh broke forth at the sight of withered limbs, 
 and palsied hands, and sightless eyes. But dark 
 as these troubles were, they were not to Him so 
 dark as moral evil. A withered hand was a 
 sad sight, but a withered heart was worse ; a 
 maimed body provoked the pity, but degraded 
 characters and diseased aflPections were sadder 
 spectacles. Death was painful ; but sin was 
 more so. Over the one. He wept ; over the 
 other, He sweat great drops of blood ; for a 
 Magdalene was a more pitiable sight than a 
 paralytic, and a Judas more terrible than a leper. 
 But this moral malady must be touched by 
 reaching the individual; it lay too deep for 
 statutes or decrees or reforms to move. And 
 thus, because the moral evil was the greatest 
 foe of human life and happiness, Christ made 
 the individual His first care ; and sent forth a 
 Gospel, not only for all nations but to every 
 creature ; to regenerate man became His first 
 and highest aim, to combat moral evil in man 
 His grand object. 
 
 We may notice, then, that no estimate of 
 Christianity will or can be a just one which 
 ignores this fundamental aim of Christ. We 
 ask that Christianity shall be judged as other 
 movements are, by their aim ; and we affirm 
 
LECTURE II. 67 
 
 that it is manifestly unfair to make some other 
 supposed end or aim the standard by which to 
 try her. We always judge things by the pur- 
 pose for which they are designed. We judge 
 of the eye by its power of seeing, of the ear 
 by its power of hearing. We judge of the 
 telescope by its power to reveal to us distant 
 landscapes of far-off worlds : we judge of the 
 microscope by its power to display to us the 
 subtle work of darkly-veiled nature beneath our 
 feet. But we do not judge these by what lies 
 outside their purpose. We do not ask the 
 microscope to show us the rings of Saturn, nor 
 the telescope to reveal to us the beauties of a 
 butterfly^s wing. We limit our expectations by 
 the aim or purpose of the instrument. Each 
 thing is perfect as it fulfils its end ^ : our criti- 
 cisms outside that end must be irrelevant. It 
 is as wise as looking for scientific accuracy in a 
 fairy tale, or dramatic power in a proposition of 
 Euclid. We should deem it elaborate trifling 
 to exert our ingenuity in pointing out the as- 
 tronomical blunders of the " Arabian Nights," 
 or complain of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" be- 
 cause the poet did not give us the data for 
 calculating the transit of Venus. The aim or 
 
 * " Each thing, said the sage who taught me, is perfect if 
 it can fulfil its end." — Lessing's Philotas. 
 
68 LECTURE ir. 
 
 intention in view limits the riglit of criticism 
 to that aim. So none can fairly judge of Chris- 
 tianity and her fitness for her work who will 
 not realise that she puts upon the forefront of 
 her advancing standard that her war is not 
 against institutions or men, but against sin 
 wherever found, and sin therefore most and 
 chiefest where Christ warned us its deadly roots 
 were planted, in the heart of man, whence Christ 
 would fain expel the foe and establish that 
 kingdom which now as always is a kingdom 
 within you. 
 
 II. The view which Christianity takes of 
 life's troubles^ then, is one which puts moral evil 
 in the fronts as the worst and most dangerous 
 foe. This view has been questioned. Three 
 objections have been urged. It has been said 
 (i) that the power of moral evil has been ex- 
 aggerated ; (ii) that the conception of it involves 
 fictitious notions; and (iii) that the enterprise 
 which assails it is Quixotic. 
 
 We may freely concede the right to criticise 
 the aim of Christianity. It is not indeed fair 
 in estimating the force and value of the Christian 
 religion to ignore that her efforts are mainly 
 directed against moral evil ; but it is perfectly 
 legitimate to open the question whether this 
 aim is in itself a desirable one. We may be 
 
LECTURE II. 69 
 
 assured that the machinery is perfectly adapted 
 to its purpose, but we may fairly question whe- 
 ther the purpose itself is one worth the ex- 
 penditure of the time and force involved. For 
 there is a great deal of misplaced ingenuity 
 in the world ; the ingenuity is not condemned, 
 though the purpose to which it is employed 
 may be so. The implement of a burglar may 
 be well fitted for his work ; but we have the 
 right to disapprove of the work itself. We may 
 criticise the aim as well as the execution. A 
 man may be a brilliant colourist, and capable 
 of producing the most astonishing combination 
 of effective contrasts ; but it is still open to us 
 to doubt whether in limiting his aim to so poor 
 a result he is fulfilling the highest purpose of 
 God's great gift of art. We freely concede the 
 right to criticise the aim of Christianity in 
 waging war against moral evil. 
 
 (i) Christianity, it has been declared,, by ex- 
 aggerating the power of moral evil stereotypes 
 morbid ideas, and darkens man's life with an 
 unkindly needless shadow. The whole earth is 
 full of beauty and sunshine : we lie in the sweet 
 deep shadow of a grove of trees : we watch the 
 morning sunbeams wandering elf-like along the 
 grass, or glancing on the ripples of the brook 
 that keeps sweet and melodious accompaniment 
 
70 LECTURE II. 
 
 to the music of the birds among the boughs; 
 and upon our calm and happy retreat the gaunt 
 shadow of some ascetic Christian falls ^, and shuts 
 out the sunlight from heart as well as life by 
 telling us that we are sinners, the victims of 
 moral evil. I admit it is hard to be disturbed 
 in so quiet and peaceful a resting-place. I 
 admit that Christians who have taken an in- 
 verted view of their Master's teaching have 
 written and spoken as though the fair things 
 of earth were wicked^ and trees and flowers 
 and sunshine were carnally - minded vanities. 
 But we must not make Christ, who blessed the 
 trees and flowers, and gave them fresh voice 
 and fuller teaching, and made them whisper 
 of the Father who clothed the grass and fed 
 the birds, responsible for the distorted thoughts 
 of those whose tastes have been so far depraved 
 that they can find no joy in the works of 
 
 5 " Sin, Lord Allen, said Mr. Storks, is a word that has 
 helped to retard moral and social progress more than any- 
 thing. Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so ; 
 and the superstitious and morbid way in which a number of 
 innocent things have been banned as sin, has caused more 
 than half the tragedies of the world. Science will establish 
 an entirely new basis of morality; and the sunlight of rational 
 approbation will shine on many a thing hitherto overshadowed 
 by the curse of a hypothetical God." — New Republic, by Mr. 
 W. H. Mallock, pp. 64, 65. It may be said that this is 
 caricature; but it would not be difficult to find opinions 
 substantially the same. 
 
LECTURE II. 71 
 
 God. It was not evil in things which Christ 
 assailed ; but evil in man, and the moral evil 
 which perverts and pollutes God's richest and 
 purest blessings. And I am prepared to main- 
 tain that Christianity has done wisely and well 
 in giving this prominence to moral evil, and 
 teaching us to see in it the real and most 
 dangerous foe of life. And for this I shall 
 advance some reasons. Christianity is right in 
 giving this prominence to moral evil, because 
 it is a subtle and insidious power. For what 
 is the Christian idea of sin ? It is the trans- 
 gression of the law : it is the open violation of 
 the decorums of life, of those restraints which 
 by all admission preserve the peace of society. 
 In this we have little difficulty. But Christ 
 points us further back. The outward life may 
 be unpolluted : men may be great and excellent : 
 their lives may be full of benevolent exertions 
 on behalf of their fellow-men, and yet the inner 
 and hidden currents may be all wrong. The 
 motives may be polluted ; the decent restraints 
 of life may 'keep back lusts from violent out- 
 break, but they may still be aglow with hidden 
 fires : the heart may be wrong, though the life 
 may seem to be right. It is not merely Chris- 
 tianity that teachete us this. The observers of 
 human life and character pierce below the spe- 
 
72 LECTURE II. 
 
 cious surface and find the evil beneath. They 
 remind us that the most illustrious patriot- 
 ism may be the offspring of the most paltry 
 ambition ; ^' and a modern and justly ho- 
 noured novelist has reminded us that the fear of 
 social ostracism and not any very high standard 
 of virtue keeps many a man from petty pilfering 6. 
 What is this but telling us that the moral evil 
 may be uncured though the life gives us no 
 clue to its presence. It is a subtle foe, this 
 moral evil. It is not a symptom ; it is a dis- 
 ease ; we, like men ignorant of medical science, 
 have our attention naturally drawn to the more 
 conspicuous symptoms : the discoloured skin, 
 the loathsome sore^ these catch our eye : the 
 well-skilled doctor sees in these the tokens of 
 a virus in the blood, and turns our thought 
 to the root of the disorder. So does Christianity 
 with regard to sin. She condemns acts, but 
 she asks us to see in men's acts the tokens of 
 a poisonous tendency in their nature. This is 
 the reason why St. James speaks of a man who 
 is guilty of one breach of the law as guilty of 
 
 ^ "You don't think he could do anything mean, or dis- 
 honourable?" "I think his own good opinion of himself 
 would guard against that," said Harding with a laugh ; "self- 
 esteem, and not any very high notion of morality, keeps 
 many a man from picking a pocket." — Madcap Violet, by 
 Mr. W. Black, pp. 120, 121. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 all : the one act is like the single black spot 
 upon the chest or cheek which betrays the subtle 
 working of life's most awful poison. Christianity 
 does right in putting this moral evil into pro- 
 minence because it is so subtle a foe to men. 
 But she is right also because this subtle foe 
 is the most fertile cause of earth's misery. 
 Religion, history, literature, science all will 
 witness to this. 
 
 Common experience will witness that the real 
 pain comes from within. Take a single simple 
 fact. What does all life teach us but that the 
 real sorrow is that which springs from the heart 
 of man himself? There are shadows in life 
 which men speak of with pain. Physical suffer- 
 ing, disappointed expectations^ love snatched 
 away. These are bitter, very bitter ; the words 
 of woe rise from every poet's lip ; when he sings^ 
 he sings of vanity and vexation of spirit — of 
 the inevitable shadow of multiform trouble which 
 haunts the paths of human life. Man is crowned 
 with gifts of sorrow — 
 
 Before the beginning of years 
 
 There came to the making of man : 
 
 Grief with a gift of tears, 
 Time with a glass that ran. 
 
 But the pain which is within is harder to bear 
 than the pain without. Do we doubt this? 
 
 F 
 
74 LECTURE II. 
 
 Take a simple fact of experience. No amount 
 of happy circumstances can in themselves make 
 men happy ; no loss of them can of themselves 
 make men unhappy; man is proved to have 
 sources of happiness and unhappiness inde- 
 pendent of facts outside himself. There have 
 been men dowered with every gift_, mnk, wealth, 
 intellect and power ; yet not one or all of these 
 could chase the care-lines from the brow. It 
 is utterly insipid to talk like this. You are 
 impatient with me because I repeat what is so 
 true : we all know that the splendour of his 
 palace, the beauty of his harem, the wealth of 
 his kingdom and the vastness of his knowledge 
 could not make Solomon happy: we know that 
 there have been men endowed with colossal 
 genius who have most sadly declared that they 
 could count their happy days upon their fingers '^. 
 External circumstances cannot give happiness 
 to an unquiet spirit. But reverse the picture, 
 and we see those robbed of all outward mi- 
 nistrations of happiness and yet able to keep 
 
 ' "I have been esteemed a man specially favoured by 
 fortune ; and I neither wish to complain nor to murmur at 
 the coarse of my life. But, in reality, it has been nothing 
 but pains and labour, and I may truly say, that during my 
 seventy -five years I have not had four weeks of real pleasure. 
 It has been the perpetual rolling of a stone which has to be 
 picked up again and again." — Goethe, Conversations with 
 Eckennann. 
 
LECTURE II. 75 
 
 a deep and abiding calm within the lake of 
 their heart. It is from within that the dis- 
 turbing* fires arise : it is within us the shadows 
 lie. which no outward cheer can charm away: 
 it is within us the sunlight dwells which no 
 sorrow or pain can ever fully or finally over- 
 shadow. It is the inner power of moral evil 
 which makes the heart fretful. Do you ask 
 more impartial evidence? Exaggerated self- 
 love is written down by a wise and able 
 medical^ man as one of the causes of that mental 
 care which, and not any real hard mental work, 
 is a fertile cause of insanity. History proves 
 that the true disturbing causes of public happi- 
 ness lie in moral evil. Where do the vastest 
 troubles spring from ? Not from the volcano or 
 the earthquake, but from that which devastates 
 more than the volcano and overthrows more 
 than the earthquake, the tremendous passions 
 of men. When the sacred seer saw the many- 
 headed beast which w^as the symbol of all man- 
 degrading power, he beheld it rise from the 
 
 ^ "When persons are said to have gone insane or to have 
 committed suicide, from mental overwork, the truth in nine 
 cases out of ten, if not in all cases, is that anxieties and 
 apprehensions, disappointed ambition, envies and jealousies, 
 the wounds of an exaggerated self-love, or similar heartaches, 
 have been the real causes of their breakdown." — Dr. Henry 
 Maudsley, EesponsihiUty in Mental Disease, p. 299. 
 
 F 2, 
 
76 LECTTJEE II. 
 
 waves of the sea, the fit emblems of that mad- 
 ness of the people out of which most despotisms 
 have grown. When a historian whom none 
 will suspect of partiality or a fondness for Chris- 
 tian ideas took a survey of the great and brilliant 
 epochs of history^ and showed us the golden 
 ages of the world — the golden age of Greece, 
 glorious with its teachers and its artists — with 
 Aristotle and Plato, Apelles and Phidias — the 
 golden age of Rome, the age of Caesar and of 
 Cicero, of Lucretius and of Horace — the golden 
 age of Florence, with its architects and its poets, 
 with Pico and Brunelleschi — the golden age of 
 France with Eacine and Corneille, wdth Bossuet 
 and Bourdaloue— he closed his pictures with 
 the sad reflection — All ages resemble one an- 
 other in the v/ickedness of men. When a 
 greater historian than Voltaire took up his pen 
 and gave to the world his calm and philoso- 
 phical history of Greece^, he told us in eff'ect 
 that the worst trouble from which Athens suf- 
 fered was the want of moral integrity among 
 her public men ; for he related that uprightness 
 of character was more valued than great abilities, 
 for this quality was rare. 
 
 Literature proves the same. It is moral evil 
 
 Grote, History of Greece. 
 
LECTURE II. 77 
 
 in man that the dramatist and novelist acknow- 
 ledge give them the power and right to speak. 
 It is against moral evil in man that the satirist 
 directs his sarcasm ; it is moral weakness in 
 man that the comedian exhibits to our ridicule ; 
 it is moral evil in man that the tragic writei- 
 unfolds to us in more awful aspects. One of 
 your own sons has told us — '^ The voice of law 
 addresses us even from Athens. There is a 
 stern and dark side to the Greek view of life. 
 The ' Prometheus ' and the ' Seven Ages of 
 Thebes' contain a 'natural testimony of the soul' 
 to the reality of sin and the inevitable penalty 
 which it carries in itself, and to the need which 
 man has of a Divine deliverer to check and con- 
 trol the consequences of violated law^^." I take 
 up a popular newspaper ^^ and I find the ac- 
 knowledgment — " It is difficult to see where 
 the dramatist is to find materials, if not in 
 breaches of the moral and social law, tragic in 
 their consequences, ludicrous in their incidental 
 aspects. Peoj^le who keep the letter and spirit 
 of the ten commandments do not furnish any 
 very promising dramatis personse for either 
 comedy or tragedy." 
 
 Philosophers have noticed the same. The 
 
 " Prof. Westcott, ^schylus as a Religious Teacher, Con- 
 temjjorary Revieiv, vol. iii. p. 373. "■ The World. 
 
78 LECTURE TI. 
 
 manj-lieaded heart of evil in man was a subject 
 of Plato^s reflections ; the natural love men have 
 for the lie itself gave food for thought to Bacon ; 
 and the philosophical poet of France remarked 
 that man was like ice to truth and a flame for 
 falsehood ^2. 
 
 Religion witnesses the same. It is no matter 
 in this whether we cite in evidence true religion 
 or false, because the witness of the less en- 
 lightened creeds is only the inarticulate ac- 
 knowledgment of that which a higher faith 
 freely admits. Let the early and degraded 
 religions speak ; and they tell you that there 
 is that in man which they feel needs to be 
 driven away : they speak of purgations, lustra- 
 tions, of bathing in consecrated streams, of 
 lacerating and subduing the offending flesh. 
 What did it all mean? Too often the wor- 
 shippers had little knowledge of deep moral 
 need, but all this anxiety, all these cleansings, 
 
 *^ Mr, Buckle, who declares that there is more of virtue 
 than of vice in men, yet admits that "whatever may be the 
 case with individuals, it is certain that the majority of men 
 find an extreme difficulty in loncf resisting temptation. And 
 when the temptation comes to them in tlie shape of honour 
 and emoluments, they are too often ready to profess the 
 dominant opinions and abandon, not indeed their belief, but 
 the external marks by whicli that belief is made public. 
 Everybody who takes this step is a hypocrite, and every 
 government which encourages this step to be taken is an 
 abettor of hyj^ocrisy and a creator of hypoci'ites.*' 
 
LECTURE II. 79 
 
 were witnesses to some ancient instinct that 
 there was an evil in man which needed to be 
 cleansed, and which was a fertile cause of human 
 misery. Saintliness proclaims the same. If 
 you turn to enlightened men, you find a clearer 
 witness — and the witness is one which is en- 
 titled to be heard. We give a higher credence 
 to those who have turned their attention to 
 the special subject on which we seek informa- 
 tion. We take a lawyer's opinion on a law 
 question; we rely on the doctor's opinion on 
 a medical question; their special training and 
 attention entitles their opinion to a higher 
 place than that which we accord to men 
 who have never had any professional educa- 
 tion. It is in the same spirit that we should 
 interrogate the saints of the earth. The men 
 who have made holiness their study and de- 
 voted their attention to the eradication of sin 
 are entitled to be heard on the subject ^^. I am 
 
 ^^ "And is it not just tliey who have made the greatest 
 advances upon the path of morality and sanctification who 
 most lament the distance which still separates them from 
 their goal?" — Luthardt, Lectures on Fundamental Truths of 
 Christianity, p. 33. The same writer in another work {Saving 
 Truths, pp. 344, &c.) gives the acknowledgment of Jakobi, 
 "It is very easy to do all kinds of good, and it is always a 
 pleasure to act nobly. But to live without sin, without trans- 
 gression — how difficult, but how surpassing all else ! To avoid 
 evil demands powers of quite another kind, for this the whole 
 man must collect all hi^ strength, must exert himself offceji 
 
80 LECTURE II. 
 
 not speaking" of casuists, who reduce sin to a 
 science and pride themselves on a morbid ana- 
 tomy of unwholesome subjects ; I mean simple 
 and holy men who have been the salt of the 
 earth ; and when I hear them bewailing, not 
 the troubles of earth, not their losses, not their 
 sufferings, but their sins, I think that that 
 must be evil which these who are so holy call 
 evil. When I see men who have been pure 
 and self-denying, with their clear eyes detecting 
 the flaw and blemish in their moral nature, I 
 feel constrained to feel that there must be de- 
 fects in me which my sin-blinded eyes cannot 
 detect. And from these comes this witness. 
 Saintly Bishop Wilson, heroic Henry Martyn, 
 holy Bishop Beveridge, pure and brave Bishop 
 Ken, chivalrous men of God like Charles Kings- 
 ley and Robert McCheyne, all combine to tell 
 us that the contest they have to encounter is 
 the moral evil within. 
 
 Nor need we wonder when science herself 
 witnesses to the fatal power of this inward 
 poison. She rises with the calmness of her 
 sovereign knowledge,, and tells us that there is 
 
 almost to his destruction, to find after all that the energies of 
 his whole manhood were too feeble." The man who wrote 
 thus was declared by Niebuhr to be "a man of unusual purity, 
 who seemed like a being from a better world." 
 
LECTURE II. 81 
 
 that in man which can work his deterioration ; 
 that it is untrue to say, as men have vainly 
 talked, that every fall is a fall upwards : she 
 notes the aspiring- growth of all created things ; 
 she records that along* the centuries there have 
 been upward aspirations in the universe : but 
 she also bids us see that there is an element in 
 man which makes degradation possible^*; that 
 the laws which men may bind to their service 
 the}^ may also arm with the poignard of in- 
 evitable retribution against themselves. She 
 tells us there is an evil disposition born in men 
 and growing with men which destroys health 
 and degrades the race. 
 
 "The moral element is an essential part of 
 a complete and sound character ; he who is 
 destitute of it being unquestionably to that 
 extent a defective being, is therefore on the 
 road to, or marks, race degeneracy; and it is 
 not a matter of much wonder that his children 
 should, where better influences do not intervene 
 
 14 " Whatever may be said about the possibility of such 
 Simian development, the possible human deterioration is an 
 inevitable attribute of the rational moral free a.t,fent man ; 
 capable of the noblest aspirations and of wcmdrous intellectual 
 development, but also with a capacity for moral degradation 
 sucli as belongs to him alone of all created things. The one 
 characteristic as well as the other separates man by an 
 impassable barrier from all those other living creatures that 
 might appear in some respects gifted with endowments akin 
 to his own." — Wilson's Prehistoric Man, p. 182. 
 
82 LECTURE II. 
 
 to check the morbid tendency, exhibit a greater 
 degree of degeneracy/' Such is the language 
 of one well entitled to speak on this subject ^"'^. 
 Nor is this all. Idiotcy, he tells us, is a manu- 
 factured article ^*^ ; and if we ask concerning its 
 origin we shall find that moral irregularity in 
 earlier generations has been in an appalling 
 proportion the parent of mental defect or weak- 
 ness ; for he tells that Dr. Howe, of Mas- 
 sachusetts, found that about fifty per cent, of 
 the idiots he examined were the offspring of 
 intemperate parents ; and that a French ph}^- 
 sician of eminence traced the defective intel- 
 ligence and final imbecility of one family back 
 through the hypochondria of the parent to the 
 intemperance and immorality of previous gene- 
 rations^^. It is one of the awful witnesses 
 
 '^ Dr. Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind, Lecture ii. 
 p. 67. 
 
 '^ Ihid. p. 44. 
 
 ^'^ " Morel has traced through four generations the family 
 history of a youth who was admitted into the asyhjin at 
 Rouen in a state of stupidity and semi-idiocy ; the summary 
 of which may fitly illustrate the natural course of degeneracy 
 when it goes on through generations. 
 
 First generation : Immorality, depravity, alcoholic excess, 
 and moral degradation in the great-grandfather, who was 
 killed in a tavern hrawl. 
 
 Second generation : Hereditary drunkenness, maniacal 
 attacks, ending in general pai-alysis in the grandfather. 
 
 Third generation : Sobriety, but hypochondriacal tendencies, 
 delusions of persecutions, and homicidal tendencies in the 
 father. 
 
LECTUEE II. 83 
 
 of modern investigation, which men must see 
 unless they are blind, that God answers us with 
 wonderful things in His righteousness ; that 
 He shows on a vast and terrific scale around 
 us, that not on the intellectual depends the 
 moral power of men, but that the disregard of 
 the moral law is sure to be followed by the 
 decline of the mental, and the dwindling of the 
 mental by the enfeebling of the physical from 
 generation to generation. Do we wonder, then ? 
 Do we not at once acknowledge that Christianity 
 is right in directing the strength of her attack 
 upon the moral weakness in man, and affirming 
 that the Kingdom of Christ must be a kingdom 
 within ? 
 
 (ii) But it is said : We do not deny the facts, 
 but we object to the way in which Christianity 
 asks us to reerard the facts. We think these 
 conceptions involve fictitious notions. We know 
 too well the terrific desolations which moral 
 evil has wrought ; but we deny that they ought 
 to be called sin. There is here an objection to 
 the use of the word sin in connection with in- 
 herited evil. The sin here spoken of, it is urged. 
 
 Fourth generation : Defective intelligence ; first attack of 
 mania at sixteen; stupidity, and transition to complete idiocy, 
 and furtherniore, probable extinction of the family." — Body 
 and Mind, p. 45. The whole lecture should be read, especially 
 PP- 43-53. 
 
84 LECTURE II. 
 
 is the inherited tendency for which no man is 
 fairly responsible. Is it my fault if there are 
 dipsomaniacal tendencies in my blood ? Surely 
 a man is no more to blame for this than that he 
 is born dumb, or blind, or crippled ? 
 
 The answer is — Christianity does not blame 
 man for what he cannot help. There is no 
 ground for the statement that she does so : but 
 Christianity is bound to call things by their 
 right names, for all that. We do not blame 
 a cripple, but surely we must call him deformed. 
 Christ did not blame men for the tendencies of 
 their birth, but He most emphatically refused 
 to call evil good, or to say that such tendencies 
 were morally good. We are justified in calling 
 defects in moral tendency immoral, just as we 
 are in speaking of phj^sical defects as deformities. 
 There is no more reason for not callino" such 
 tendencies immoral than for not calling a lame 
 man a cripple. Christianity affirms that these 
 moral traits are tokens of a moral failure in 
 an earlier generation ; and the analogy of 
 all scientific investigation goes to show that 
 she is right ; this inherited bias she calls 
 "■ original sin/' which is the theological equi- 
 valent for inherited moral defect. To say that 
 it is not moral because the seat is largely in the 
 physical nature is only to play with words, 
 
LECTURE II» 85 
 
 because whatever materialistic theory we hokl 
 we must distinguish between inherited vicious 
 dispositions and inherited bodily weakness''^. 
 We call the first moral though it may have 
 a powerful ally in the physical constitution ; we 
 call the second physical though it may be con- 
 ditioned by the moral temperament. 
 
 If it be objected that it is the word sin which 
 should be struck out, we have a right to ask 
 the sense in which the word is understood. We 
 understand it as the aspect of moral evil, as 
 a discord in the Kingdom of God. It is the 
 idea of God which gives us the right to call 
 moral defect sin, because we are sure that how- 
 ever it may have been originated, it is an 
 element out of harmony with His righteous 
 kingdom. To him who believes in God moral 
 evil will always have the nature of sin. 
 
 It is of course open to a man to speak other- 
 wise : it is open to a man to say that a breach 
 of the seventh commandment is not sin : he 
 may call it anything he pleases ; he may say it 
 
 ^* " That ' the distinction between right and wrong must 
 remain' is admitted. We thus see that even under the utmost 
 possible exaggeration of the doctrine of necessity, the dis- 
 tinction between moral good and evil in conduct would not 
 only subsist, but would stand out in a more marked manner 
 than ever, when the good and the wicked, liowever unlike, 
 are still regarded as of one common nature." — Ribot, EvylUJt 
 Psychology, p. 112. 
 
86 LECTURE II. 
 
 is not sinful, but only unhealtliy to society. 
 But when he speaks thus he only affirms that 
 society calls that unwholesome which the moral 
 sense of men calls sinful ; or he witnesses that 
 physical science calls that unhealthy which 
 conscience calls sinful ; or in other words, that 
 obedient nature registers the decrees of her 
 king, and that the physical world is the exe- 
 cutioner of the decrees of the moral world. 
 
 (iii) But there is a third objection : it is 
 said that the enterprise which seeks to regene- 
 rate man is Quixotic. It is the philosophy of 
 despair which speaks thus : it is the philosophy 
 of paganism which speaks thus : it is the warped 
 utterance of the determinist, not of the Christian, 
 which says ' I am as I am, and I can no more 
 help being what I am in character, than I can 
 change the colour of my hair^'^.' It was a 
 Pagan writer who ridiculed the idea that a 
 change of character was possible. The ancient 
 as well as the modern acknowledged that a 
 regeneration of character would be good, but 
 they proclaim that it is impossible. " Those 
 who are disposed by nature to vice, and ac- 
 
 ^9 ''Man is not free. He is as little responsible for his 
 acts as the stone which wounds our head by obeying the law 
 of gravitation : a crime is the necessary effect of a law of 
 nature." — Dankwardt, quoted by Luthardt {Saving Trutlis, 
 V' 345)- 
 
LECTURE II. 87 
 
 customed to it, cannot be transformed by punish- 
 ment, much less by mercy." That is the voice 
 of an ancient ^^. " It is folly to think one can 
 change his own character or that of another." 
 That is the voice of a modern ^^. It is not thus 
 Christianity speaks ^^. She calls to men, and 
 refuses to regard them as other than men — 
 men with strong passions, men with often base 
 thoughts, men with eager and ambitious temper- 
 aments, but yet men capable of recognising the 
 right and the holy, the true and the good — men 
 dowered with God's great gift of choice — men 
 who, whatever their past life or their antecedents 
 may have been, still largely hold in their hands 
 the making and the marring of their fate. 
 She knows the strength of the evil in man ; 
 yet she refuses to treat man as the sport of 
 fortune or the slave of fate. She will not suffer 
 man to unman himself by blaming heaven. 
 The fault, she cries — 
 
 " The fault is not in our stars, 
 But in ourselves that we are underlings ^^." 
 
 '^^ Celsus. ^^ Schopenhauer. 
 
 ^2 " A nature once thoroughly vitiated became altogether 
 incapable of appreciating it (virtue), and the transformation 
 of such a nature which was continually effected by Chris- 
 tianity was confessedly beyond the powers of philosophy." — 
 Lecky, vol. ii. p. 4. 
 
 ^^ Julius Ceesar. 
 
88 LECTURE II. 
 
 She scans the world, and sees all the environing- 
 evils which may assail men : she looks into the 
 horoscope, and gives her answer to expectant 
 and eager men. 
 
 " ' No horoscope makes fate,' 
 *Tis but a mirror, shows one image full 
 And leaves the future dark with sullen 'Ifs^*.'" 
 
 And in this she is right ; and in this the better 
 sense of mankind has expressed itself. Ever 
 since the dark cloud of necessity has fallen 
 athwart the world, men have felt that they 
 could not fight when the stars in their courses 
 fought against them. But the strong and 
 guiding light of an inspiring star has led them 
 to a better mind and a higher hope ; and 
 they have learned that the only foe whose alli- 
 ance with the power of evil they have to fear 
 is the weak vacillating will within them. They 
 have learned to bear in mind that there is a 
 difference between moral tendencies and physical 
 or mental defects. Two sources of evidence will 
 suffice. Let once more literature and science 
 speak : for in these w^e have witnesses who have 
 thought and observed. And what do we find 
 from these ? 
 
 I find that the dramatist and the novelist 
 do not select the physical or the mental weak- 
 
 '^* Spanish Gypsy, by George Eliot. 
 
LECTURE II. 89 
 
 ness of men for sarcasm : the play-writer that 
 ridiculed the idiot or the cripple would be hooted 
 from the stage ; but the moral weakness of 
 men — the conceit and bluster of Parolles and 
 Bobadil and Sir John Falstaff — the unctuous 
 hypocrisy of the hollow religionist are considered 
 fair subjects for satire and jest. But if the 
 conceit of the former and the hypocrisy of the 
 latter are only the inborn necessity of their 
 organisation^ what right has dramatist or novelist 
 to ridicule them ? It is the deep-rooted con- 
 viction that these men deserve ridicule and are 
 only preposterous egotists and self-made Phari- 
 sees w^hich makes it possible to caricature their 
 defects upon the stage. 
 
 And the power of self- culture which the 
 dramatist or novelist assumes is affirmed by the 
 deliberate voice of thoughtful men. Man, writes 
 one, can by acting upon circumstances which 
 will in time act upon him imperceptibly modify 
 his character 2^. Another reminds us of the 
 moral nature which enables man " alone of all 
 
 ^'' " The free-will doctrine, by keeping in view precisely 
 that portion of truth which the word necessity puts out of 
 sight, namely, the power of the mind to co-operate in the 
 formation of its own character, has given to its adherents a 
 practical feeling much nearer to the truth than has generally, 
 I believe, assisted in the minds of necessariani>." — Ribot, 
 English Pbydiology, p. no. 
 
 G 
 
90 LXCTUKE II. 
 
 created beings to classify his emotions, to oppose 
 the current of liis desires, and to aspire after 
 moral perfection-^." Thus do the students of 
 human nature stand at one with Christianity 
 in refusing" to reorard man as mere driftwood on 
 the relentless ocean of inexorable destiny. 
 
 III. But if Christianity in giving prominence 
 to the fact of moral e^*il spoke even more strongly 
 than she does, she at least of all others might 
 claim the right to do so ; for she alone claims 
 the power of removing this evil. It is idle for 
 those who have no power to charm away the 
 plague to dilate upon its terrors : it is allowable 
 for the physician to describe minutely the 
 symptoms. Thus it is with Christianity: she 
 may speak plainly, for she holds the healing 
 power in her hand. No other influence has 
 been able to check the tide. Philosophy gave 
 it up in despair. " Philosophy was admirably 
 fitted to dignify and ennoble,, but it was alto- 
 gether impotent to regenerate mankind 2'." 
 Such is the comment of a recent and impartial 
 writer. Nor could culture or the worship of 
 the beautiful work this change. " Through the 
 Jk'autiful, that door of dawn, we are to enter 
 
 ** Lecky, European 'Morals, vol. i. p. 4. 
 ^ Idem. 
 
l.l.OTVUK W. 1)1 
 
 the laud of moral tVoodonr-^." But (Iumv is (hjil 
 in the very worship of the beautiful which draws 
 meu away from duty: the stern realities oi' hie 
 are set ou one side by aesthetic jn-ineiples as 
 painful and incomprehensible. Disa^'reeahle 
 duties are disregarded. Xor could pride work 
 the change ■-\ Pride could indeed crush the 
 affections, and set up its own throne in the place 
 of the love and the pining weakness which it 
 had displaced. But besides that such a method 
 could only be adopted by heroes or stoics, and 
 was not fitted to the ordinary mind ; it is well 
 to remember that to exchange one vice for 
 another is not to regenerate the heart. Nor 
 could Law do it ^^. The sarcasm of Burke might 
 
 ^ " Schiller supposed that resthetics possessed this power : 
 he puts these in the phice of Kant's categorical imperative. 
 It is through the BeautifiL that door of dawn, that we are 
 to enter the land of moral freedom. But this has proved a 
 delusion. Xo natural ability, no power of the human mind, 
 can make us other men." — Luthardt (Lectures on Funda- 
 mental Truths of Christianity, p. 191), who quotes in a note 
 Schiller's essay on aesthetic education as follows : — " On the 
 other side the civilised classes present the repulsive aspect 
 of a laxity and depravity of character, which makes us the 
 more indignant because it has its source in culture." 
 
 ^^ '• Stoicism made Pride the first of graces and reduced 
 virtue to a kind of majestic egotism ; proposing as examples 
 such men as Anaxagoras, who, when told that his son had 
 died, simply observed, ' I never supposed that I had begotten 
 an immortal.'" — Lecky, European Morals, p. 201. 
 
 2*^ "A metaphysical theory cannot restrain the fury of the 
 passions : as we'l attempt to bind a lion with a cobweb." — 
 Reade, Martyrdom of Man, p. 531. 
 
 G 2 
 
92 LECTURE II. 
 
 be applied to this. He broke forth in his scath- 
 ing* way against those who thought to check 
 the aspirations of an infant empire by dockets 
 and briefs, by Acts of Parliament and blue 
 book reports. No statute can control the pas- 
 sions of man. Fine-spun decrees will not curb 
 men's passions, and even wise laws cannot reach 
 men's hearts. 
 
 But Christianity can work this regeneration : 
 where law and pride and song and culture have 
 failed, Christianity has succeeded. Her moral 
 influence has given a fixity to advancing civili- 
 sation and has pushed forward the regeneration 
 of the world. 
 
 It is said indeed by one who undervalues 
 Christian influence, that seeing* that moral 
 trutb remains the same whereas intellectual 
 knowledge advances, we must attribute the 
 advance of civilisation to the growing intellec- 
 tual and not to the stationary moral powers. 
 This is like saying that a number which re- 
 mains a constant factor of a whole and enlarging 
 expression does not add anything to the value 
 of the expression, though it is multiplied into 
 any new term. It is like saying that the 
 horse-power of the engine adds nothing to its 
 force because it has hitherto been moving at 
 half-steam. It is like saying that the mortar 
 
LECTUEE II. 93 
 
 adds no strength to the building" because the 
 building increases by the addition of stones, 
 not of the mortar. Whatever of firmness there 
 is in moral civilisation is due to its improved 
 moral tone. Wherever the moral tone is low, 
 the decay of society is at hand. It was sen- 
 suality and sin which killed Kome ; it was 
 corruption and vice which sold Athens into 
 the hands of her enemies ; it is always vice, 
 vice, vice — moral evil in society — which casts 
 down empires and overthrows the Babylons of 
 history. 
 
 But it is not in supplying the outward moral 
 strength to societies, it is in supplying the 
 regenerating power to individuals that Chris- 
 tianity shows her chiefest power. Men said it 
 was impossible to change the heart, and truly it 
 is hard, where passions are strong and sin 
 abounds; but the things which are impossible 
 with men are possible with God. The touch of 
 Christ bid the palsy and the fever cease ; the touch 
 of Christ bade also the fever of covetousness and 
 the palsy of timidity disappear from men. He 
 drew Matthew from the absorbing interests of 
 his gain; He gave hesitating Nicodemus the 
 courage of his convictions. And these witnesses 
 of His earthly ministry were but the earnest of 
 later triumphs of His Cross on earth. Far over 
 
94 LECTURE II. 
 
 the world in every land the sons of men groaned 
 beneath the yoke of sin^s tyranny; but Chris- 
 tianity draws near, the dead in trespasses and 
 sins are quickened into life. She points to the 
 Cross, and she asks : If the Divine can drink 
 the cup of death, the human may take the cup 
 of life ? If Christ can die, surely man may live 
 in newness of life ? She bids us look upwards 
 and see the glorious company of the redeemed, 
 and she tells that they were men of like passions 
 with ourselves. Pharisees like Saul of Tarsus 
 are there ; sensualists like Augustine and New- 
 ton are there ; Nothing is impossible, she cries 
 to the sin-burdened — nothing is impossible if 
 you w^ill but unbar the gate of your heart and 
 let Him in whose right it is to reign ; and there 
 in your heart He will set up His throne^ and 
 there will He commence His regenerating work ; 
 and there will you learn how He meets you in 
 the very lowest depths of your being, and know 
 Him to be divine because so suited to your 
 human needs, and behold with optning eyes the 
 spreading borders of His kingdom and the 
 shining glories of His palace walls ! Do you 
 ask where? Again the answer comes back, 
 across centuries of human experience and from 
 thousands of regenerated souls. His kingdom 
 is an everlasting kingdom, and His kingdom 
 
LECTURE II. 95 
 
 reigneth over all : but it comes not with out- 
 ward pomp ; and though it be everywhere, and 
 build its walls in every mountain and show its 
 beauties in every flower, yet if you are to be- 
 hold it it must be within you, and if not there 
 — then, though everywhere ; for you — nowhere. 
 
LECTUEE III. 
 
 " The kingdom of God is within you." — Luke xvii. 21. 
 
 One of the greatest of the sons of song* has 
 told us that it is not enough that poems should 
 be beautiful ; they must be sweet also. It is 
 true of all art that it must have a sj^mpathetic 
 touch. Without this we may admire, we may 
 wonder, we may criticise^ but we are unmoved. 
 We can forgive rudeness of execution, we can 
 pass over even grotesqueness, if only the affec- 
 tions are appealed to. Brilliancy which dazzles, 
 faultless composition, exact portraiture we ap- 
 preciate, we praise. The eye may be satisfied 
 with beauty; the heart can be satisfied with 
 love alone. 
 
 That which is true of poesy and painting is 
 true also of Religion. Religions may be beau- 
 tiful ; their mythology may be replete with 
 exquisite legends ; their worship alive with 
 fresh, joyous, or gorgeous ceremonial; their 
 
LECTURE 111. 97 
 
 teaching's full of profound thoughts ; but the 
 worshippers will g-o home with an unsatisfied 
 hunger of spirit : for a religion must not merely 
 attract or astonish, it must have that sweetness 
 which goes to the heart ; it must appeal not to 
 wonder or splendour only, it must appeal to 
 love also : for man is not a mere compound 
 of mind and body ; he has also affections^ and 
 the great world moves forward on the wheels of 
 love. 
 
 And the religion of the Gospel is adjusted to 
 this craving in man. Love has been the method 
 of Christ. It is needless to stop and prove this. 
 The whole New Testament bears on every page 
 a proof that love lies at the heart of Christ's 
 system. The first movement of the Gospel is 
 love — '^ God so loved the world ^;" the bond of 
 discipleship was love^; the motive of obedience 
 was love ^ ; the inspiring power pervading the 
 spirit of His religious system was love to God, 
 love to man ^; the first of the fruits of the Spirit 
 was love ^ ; the last of the Christian excellences 
 was love ^ ; the highest of the Christian graces 
 was love'^. When the Apostles reached their 
 happiest moments their words ran in the strain of 
 
 ^ John iii. i6. ^ John xiii. 35. 
 
 ^ John xiv. 15. * Romans xiii. jo. 
 
 5 Gal. V. 22. ^2 Pet. i. 7. 
 
 '' r Cor. xiii. 13. 
 
98 LECTUEE III. 
 
 love — " He loved me;" " we love Him ;" " Thou 
 hast loved us and washed us." The song, then, 
 that Christianity sung in the ears of a sad world 
 was a love song. Humanity had sunk low ; 
 the crown had dropped from her brow ; the 
 freshness had left her heart ; she toyed with 
 flowers that faded, and with fruits that turned 
 to dust ; pain and folly and disappointment 
 had made her heart proud and hard^. He 
 whose throne was in the realms of light laid 
 aside His robe of splendour ; veiled He came, a 
 harp of sweetness in His hand ; in the night 
 and in the storms He sang, and His song was 
 love, love evermore ; they were chords of home 
 and words of tenderness that floated to her ear ; 
 she paused, from her wearying tasks and more 
 wearisome pleasures, to listen ; the gaudy toys 
 she played with began to lose beauty in her 
 sight ; visions of a nobler inheritance and purer 
 life began to rush upon her mind — she wept. 
 Was the harper wise ? 
 
 * " In the reign of Augustus violence paused only because 
 it liad finished its woik. Faith was dead : morality had dis- 
 ai)peared. Around the shores of the Mediterranean the 
 conquered nations looked at one another — partakers of a 
 common misfortune, associated in a common lot, not one cf 
 thtm had found a God to help her in her day of need. 
 Europe, Asia, Africa were tranquil, but it was the silence of 
 despair." — Draper, The Intel'edual Development of Earo}->e, 
 vol. i. p. 267. 
 
LECTURE III. 99 
 
 Such is the method of Christ^. Let us dis- 
 miss imagery, and see 
 
 I. Whether it was wise, 
 
 II. What objections have been raised against, 
 and 
 
 III. How far it has been successful. 
 
 I. The method is wise, whether we turn our 
 attention to the nature of man, or the nature of 
 the evil which has to be vanquished. 
 
 (i.) It is wise when we consider the nature of 
 man. 
 
 I have in part anticipated this. The nature 
 of man demands love. We do not comprehend 
 the deep and awful meaning of this in early life. 
 In our young days we are as insects sipping 
 honey from every flower ; we like the glimpses 
 of the fair and beautiful ; we love the sunshine 
 and the birds, the grassy uplands, the patient 
 browsing cattle_, the ever-moving sea; it is the 
 Wordsworthian epoch of life ; we are impatient 
 of machinery and chimneys and smoke and tur- 
 moil, the roar of the crowd, and the fierce heats 
 of toiling life. But there comes a change; we 
 
 ^ " To the sorrowful in spirit and the weak in heax't, to 
 the weary and heavy-laden Jesus appeared as a shining angel 
 with words sweet as the honeycomb and bright as the 
 golden day. He laid His hands on the head of the lonely; 
 He bade the sorrowful be of good cheer, for that the day of 
 their deliverance and their glory was at hand." — Eeade, 
 Marfyrdom of Man, p. 222. 
 
100 LECTURE III. 
 
 must enter the arena ; the education of the taste, 
 or the sensibilities, or the sentiments is not the 
 whole of life ; we have no right to pamper 
 
 "the coward heart 
 With feelings all too delicate for use." 
 
 We must face facts and we must see humanity : 
 we must leave the God-made country and enter 
 the man-made town. What does it teach 
 us? It teaches us to abandon the misleading 
 phraseology which speaks of flowers and birds 
 and hills and mountains as the works of God, 
 as if these only were His works; it shows us 
 human life — its eagerness, its fevers of hope and 
 fear, its agonies, its failures, its terrible isola- 
 tions ; and there begins to break upon us slowly 
 the conviction that the thing we perhaps thought 
 least of — which we have trifled with, flung away 
 as useless because over-abundant — is the most 
 priceless heritage of man. We are taught in 
 the stern and real battle of life that there is 
 something for which the bravest heart longs, 
 without which his struggles may be courageous 
 and patient, but must be cheerless : we are 
 taught that the heart looks evermore for some 
 star of love upon the black dome of night. I 
 say life, as it enlarges, teaches us that. In life's 
 infancy we take the warm love which surrounds 
 us as a matter of course, but when Nurse Time 
 
LECTURE III. 101 
 
 bids US go forth from the shelter of the home, 
 we then see how scarce and precious a thing it 
 is. In our childhood, we thought love looked 
 forth from every flower, smiled in every sun- 
 beam, and sang by every stream ; our fresh 
 hearts saw love everywhere ; but our vision 
 grows keener with advancing years, we see with 
 clearer, aye terribly clearer vision ; the enchanter 
 has vanished from the landscape. All round is 
 a realm of death : death has built up the moun- 
 tains ; death has bidden the fair islets rise like 
 jewels from the ocean depths ; death with his 
 skeleton fingers has fashioned the noblest things 
 that survive in nature ^^j the ground beneath us, 
 
 '^^ Luthardt (Saving Truths, p. 331) gives in a note the views 
 of Professor Eoper on this subject : — " The notorious liana, a 
 plant like our ivy, crushes the tops of the proudest trees; 
 others absorb the bark, or consume the vital juices after the 
 manner of fungi. The magnificent clusia, which grow upon 
 the trees themselves, conceal them like coffins. . . . Most 
 beasts live upon animal, some upon living food. Those who 
 serve as food to others are often slowly tortm'ed to death. 
 The pretty, and, in some varieties, tuneful nine-mui'ders, 
 impale their prey — butterflies and other insects — upon thorns 
 and prickles where they may live for days. And then the 
 great massacres of the little ants who make regular war on 
 each other, unmercifully slaying their grown-up adversaries, 
 and bringing up the kidnapped larvae as slaves ! The 
 ichneumon fly lays its eggs in caterpillars, &c., and the 
 larvEe then consume the body of their host. ... In short, 
 here too there is no stability. All is groaning for redemption. 
 Nature 'preaches the most crushing fatalism, the most in- 
 exorable necessity and predestination.' In God alone is 
 peace." In the same note he refers to the saying of Schopen- 
 hauer, " If God made this world, I should not like to be God : 
 
102 LECTURE III. 
 
 the air around us, 3'ea, the very starry worlds 
 which are so bright above us, are worlds of 
 storm and death ; the leafage of the forest con- 
 ceals the coffins of earlier growth ; the bright 
 insects, which hover joyously over every sweet 
 flower, live too often but for martyrdom. " Life 
 is one long tragedy/' " its joys but pretty 
 children which grow into regrets ^^." We are 
 
 its woes would break my heart." With this we may compare 
 the words of Strauss: " It must have been an ill-advised God, 
 who could fall upon no better amusement ^han the trans- 
 forming of Himself into such an hungry world as this, which 
 is utterly miserable and worse than none at all." (Quoted in 
 British Quarterly Revie^o, Jan. 1877, p. 146, article Herbert 
 Spencer.) What a relief to turn from words like these and 
 hear Him, who spake not as man speaks, saying of the 
 sparrows sold in the market, "Not one of them is forgotten 
 before God." 
 
 ^^ The law of Murder is the law of Growth. Life is one 
 long tragedy ; creation is one great crime. And not only is 
 there waste in animal and human life, there is also waste in 
 moral life. The instinct of love is planted in the human 
 breast, and that which to some is a solace, is to others a 
 torture. How many hearts yearning for affection are 
 blighted in solitude and coldness. How many women seated 
 by their lonely firesides are musing of the days that minht 
 have been. How many eyes, when they meet these words 
 which remind them of their sorrows, will be filled with tears. 
 O cold, cruel, miserable life, how long are your pains, how 
 Ijrief are your delights ! W^hat are joys but pretty children 
 that grow into regrets ? What is happiness but a passing 
 dream in which we seem to be asleep, and which we know 
 only to have been when it is past ? Pain, grief, disease and 
 death, are these the inventions of a loving God ? That no 
 animal shall rise to excellence except by being fatal to the 
 life of others, is this the law of a kind Creator ? It is useless 
 to say that pain has its benevolence, that massacre has its 
 mercy. Why is it so ordained that bad should be the raw 
 
LECTURE III. 103 
 
 disenchanted ; the mask has dropped from the 
 scene and its hideousness is revealed; we 
 thought love was everywhere — we find it 
 scarcely anywhere. Nature has lost her love- 
 notes for all except the childlike that have 
 childlike ears ; and she speaks not love and life ; 
 her utterance is death and sorrow. And yet we 
 crave for love ; it is warmth more than light we 
 want within the heart. We crave for love — yet 
 there is no undying love in nature. And mean- 
 while years go by and the voices wdiich whis- 
 pered love in our ears have one by one been 
 silenced by the hand of death. Yes ! we with 
 hearts that can love strongly, tenderly, fiercely, 
 patiently, are bidden to look into the world's 
 face and see every lineament of love fading from 
 her features, and hear every note of tenderness 
 die out of her song, and feel every w^arm touch 
 of love turn to the icy grasp of death itself — 
 and still we can love and we do ; and with 
 passionate obstinacy hungry love rises up within 
 us and turns to the cold stars and the cruel 
 world, and cries out that still, though powers 
 too strong have smitten our loves into aslies, 
 
 material of good? Pain is not less pain because it is useful ; 
 murder is not less murder because it is con lucive to de- 
 velopment. There is blood upon the hand still, and all the 
 perfumes of Arabia loill not sweeten it." — Reade, Martyrdom 
 of Man, p. 520. 
 
104 LECTURE III. 
 
 though the wicked winds cast their dust into 
 our faces, we hold fast to love, and will not let 
 her go : and though we are bidden to walk 
 through a world turned to wilderness, all the 
 more it is love — love we seek in our lonely 
 pilgrimage, love that we pine for in our solitary 
 heart — for love is stronger than death. 
 
 Is that a true picture of life? Is that a true 
 story of the tenacity of love ? Let only the eyes 
 that have wept look up to answer. Let only 
 the hearts that have been broken form the 
 reply, and I know it will be — " Yes, yes ! a 
 thousand times yes."" There is but one passion^ 
 one power, one strength^ and that is love. 
 
 Was it not wise then ? Yea. Was it not but 
 tenderly wise that the Gospel should run in these 
 words — '^ God so loved the world." Is not that just 
 the utterance that broken, stumbling, and sinful 
 men are yearning to hear? Is not that the 
 word which vindicates the obstinate immortality 
 of love which refuses to believe in love's death, 
 and clings with resolute tenacity to the thought 
 — Love is nobler than dust, love is nobler than 
 suns and starry worlds ; these live on, and 
 therefore love, being nobler, cannot die. God 
 by Christ vindicates this faith. The universe 
 moves on the wheels of love ; death and sorrow 
 are but shadows, and there must be light be- 
 
LECTURE III. 105 
 
 hind. In God we live and move and have our 
 being ; and God ! O ! Glorious Evangel of the 
 broken-hearted and the sorrowing, " God is 
 Love/' 
 
 (ii.) But the method is wise if we consider 
 the evil to be vanquished. 
 
 We have seen what the evil is. It is not in 
 the tempest, the earthquake,, the pestilence, not 
 in the pains and sorrow^s which we cry aloud 
 against, that we are to see life''s worst evils. 
 There is one worse than all— it is the moral evil 
 which we call sin ; and, though many will not 
 agree with us respecting the nature of sin, 
 yet moral evil, by the admission of men of 
 scientific thought, is the seed which blossoms into 
 pain and death. Moral depravity is the parent 
 of intellectual imbecility, and mental imbecility 
 is the precursor of physical decay. The spread 
 of immorality sows the seed of race degeneracy ^^. 
 It is a fact for the world to face, for philan- 
 thropists and philosophers to consider ; it is the 
 foe against which Christianity makes war. Now 
 the enemy must be encountered upon his own 
 ground. When we go in pursuit of him we 
 must fight him where we find him. The fortress 
 in which this foe, sin, has entrenched hini- 
 
 See Lecture IT, pp. 78, 79. 
 H 
 
106 LECTURE III. 
 
 self is the heart of man. Such is Christ's 
 description^^. Out of the heart come those worst 
 evils, which alone defile the man. It was per- 
 fectly natural therefore in the development of 
 spiritual strategy that our Lord should proclaim 
 that heart of man as the battle-field of the 
 spiritual conflict. The Kingdom of God might 
 rule gloriously in sky and sea and earth ; but 
 the Kingdom of God as Christ wished to see it 
 and as Christ meant to establish it must be 
 where the encamped foe held his strongest 
 positions. The Kingdom of Christ, if anywhere, 
 must be within us. 
 
 Nor was this merely a teaching we hear from 
 the lips of Christ, and of which we can find no 
 confirming evidence in ourselves. We all know 
 perfectly well — and the very advance of moral 
 civilisation forces upon us the conviction — that 
 the true haunt of the enemy is within the heart. 
 The decorums of life may be observed ; we 
 cannot, perhaps, charge ourselves with gross 
 sins, but it needs not the keen eye of satirist or 
 cynic to see that the foe lurks in ambush behind 
 the ostentatious decencies of life. Yihy should 
 the conviction be so strong among us that we 
 are all very largely hj^pocrites, that we speak 
 
 ^^ Mark vii. 14-23. 
 
LECTUEE III. 107 
 
 not what we have seen^ known and believed, 
 but what we think will be acceptable, or ex- 
 pected or popular? Why do we talk about 
 '' the muddy source of the lustre of public ac- 
 tions," unless we know how true it is that the 
 tainted motive is too often there ? One who has 
 been called the Butler of our age^* has warned us 
 in words of profound and sagacious piety that 
 earnestness in religion is not necessarily re- 
 ligious earnestness, and that philanthropic en- 
 thusiasm may be only a thin veil of paltry 
 ambition. A modern novelist ^^ has, as we 
 have seen, reminded us that " Self-esteem, and 
 not any very high notion of morality, keeps 
 many a man from picking a pocket." And do 
 
 " "Is there n;)t as much human glory in the brilliant 
 summit of religious proselytism, as in the triumpli of a certain 
 set of political principles? Is it not a teiiiporal, an earthly, 
 and a worldly reward to be called Rabbi, Rabbi ? Christ 
 said it was. If then one of the great critics of man could 
 speak of ' the muddy source of the lustre of public actions,' 
 the scrutiny may be carried as well to a religious as a political 
 sphere. The truth is, wherever there is action, effort aims 
 at certain objects and ends ; — wherever the flame of human 
 energy mounts up ; all this may gather either round a centre 
 of pure and unselfish desire, as round a centre of egotism ; 
 and no superiority in the subject of the work can prevent 
 the lapse into tha superior motive. In the most diflTerent 
 fields of objects this may be the same : it is a quality of the 
 individual. Wliatever he does, if there is a degeneracy in the 
 temper of his mind, it all collects and gathers, by a false 
 direction which it receive-! from the false centre of attraction 
 round himself. The subject or cause which a man takes up 
 makes no difference." — Mozley, University/ Seruions, p. 80. 
 
 ^* See p. 72. 
 
 H 2 
 
108 LECTUUE III. 
 
 not all these point us back to the heart as the 
 true and only possible arena of the conflict? 
 Yes ! the Master was right. There in the heart 
 is the fountain of human energy; there from the 
 heart streams forth the subtle poisons of vanity, 
 conceit, petty selfishness, which corrupt even 
 the purest of our actions ; and therefore into the 
 heart, into the very spring of our moral vigour, 
 must the healing salt of His grace be flung, 
 that sOj there where God would have it, and 
 there where He is most honoured in having it, 
 God's throne may be set up and His kingdom 
 established within us. 
 
 (iii.) Nor must the enemy be thus pursued 
 into his stronghold only; it is needful when 
 there that he should be encountered with wea- 
 pons which are fit. It is too often forgotten 
 that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. 
 Material weapons will not vanquish moral evil. 
 Physical means may suit physical evils ; they 
 belong to the order demanded by the conflict. 
 It is through moral avenues that the heart must 
 be reached. 
 
 This will be the more apparent if we consider 
 
 the evil against which we have to contend. 
 
 What is sin ? The answer which has been given 
 
 by the most eminent student ^^ on the subject, 
 
 *^ Miiller, Christian Doctrine of Sin. 
 
LECTURE III. 109 
 
 and which has been adopted I think by the 
 majority of Christian thinkers, makes it to con- 
 sist in selfishness. For the present (though we 
 shall enlarge our view later on) let us take this 
 definition — the essence of sin is selfishness. It 
 is the following of our own hearts and passions 
 and desires, heedless of right and heedless of the 
 o^ood or well-beino" of others. It becomes in- 
 stantly apparent that love is the true antagonist 
 of this spirit. ^' Love worketh no ill to his 
 neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the 
 law." Love is the antidote of selfishness : selfish- 
 ness establishes an empire of sin : love will 
 establish the kingdom of God within. 
 
 But let us take another aspect. Those who 
 have taken pains to investigate man as he is 
 (I am not speaking of professional theologians, 
 but of professed men of scientific or philosophical 
 attainments) have reached as the result of their 
 analysis this conclusion — that the weakness of 
 human actions may be traced to the supremacy 
 of passion — that the passions are too strong and 
 carry away the will with them— that the will as 
 a regulative force in man is crippled. But I do 
 not wish you to have this in my own words. 
 Let me quote an independent witness — a French- 
 man, who has given us a capital resume of the 
 views of many of the most eminent modern 
 
no LECTUEE in. 
 
 psychologists. These are his words giving the 
 result of these men^s psychological investiga- 
 tions : " The root of our volitions is desire ^^." 
 And again^ giving a final summary of the con- 
 current views of those who are entitled to speak 
 with authority as independent witnesses, he 
 writes, " The will has its source in the activity 
 either of the organism or of the instincts^ appe- 
 tites or passions." Now, these opinions, if they 
 mean anything, mean that the will of man is a 
 crippled thing, too often the victim of desire. 
 It is true that the opinions here expressed 
 make the will to be nothing more than the 
 mouthpiece, so to speak, of aggregate passions, 
 appetites,, and instincts. This is going farther 
 than the Christian view of man's depravity as 
 it is called, and in the minds of many is little 
 more or less than the extinction of manhood, 
 by making the will merely a convenient term 
 for the resultant of our clustered passions. 
 But in any case the opinion points to this, 
 that strength of passion and feebleness of 
 will combine to work those moral weaknesses 
 which are the dishonour of mankind. Pre- 
 
 ^* The whole sentence in tlie English edition is as follows : 
 " The phenomena of affective life are the source of voluntary 
 development, and the root of our volitions is desire." — Ribot, 
 Unglish Psijchology, p. 173. Compare also Prof. Tyndall"^ 
 words, quoted on p. 115. 
 
LECTURE III. Ill 
 
 eisely in harmony with this speaks one of the 
 wisest and greatest of living- English physio- 
 logists, whose carefully and earnestly prepared 
 writings form a treasury of information. He 
 warns us that frequently we mistake children 
 and call that wilfulness which is in reality just 
 the contrary of will7/<'^//nesS; being the direct 
 result of the want of habitual control over the 
 automatic activity of the brain '^'\ His advice 
 then follows naturally enough that it is by 
 guiding the activity with kindly suggestions 
 that w^e shall be pursuing the wisest course. 
 Similarly later on he tells us that in dogged^ 
 natures, in whom the sense of duty is dead, we 
 ought to search out the impressive parts of such 
 natures, and appeal to some feeling which may 
 be roused into motive power. Weakened will, 
 swept away by powerful passions, is the analysis 
 of moral weakness given not by theologians, 
 but by men of scientific thought. There is an 
 avenue to the will through the affections; and 
 this is only saying that the method Chiibt 
 adopted is scientifically defensible — that the way 
 to capture the citadel of man's being and win it 
 
 19 a What is called wilfulness often is in reality just the 
 direct contrary of wilfulness, being the direct result of a 
 want of volitional control over the automatic activity of the 
 brain." — Carpenter, Mental Physioloyij, p. 134. 
 
112 LECTUEE III. 
 
 back to right and to God is through the affec- 
 tions. Thus Christ has acted. Like the ancient 
 conqueror, who knew that the surest path to 
 victory lay by the river that flowed past the 
 temples and palaces of the city, and along its 
 dried bed poured his troops and captured the 
 capital : so Christ knew that by the stream of 
 human affection lay the road to success ; along 
 the bed of that stream (dried up, alas ! by 
 burning passions) He poured the fresh full river 
 of His all-conquering love, entered in triumph 
 the heart of man, and established His kingdom 
 within-^. And this method gives the security 
 of permanent success. If through the channel 
 of the affections the w^ll is to be reached, so 
 also by the establishment of the higher love and 
 the higher principle is the heart fortified against 
 the intrusion of lower loves. It is the universal 
 experience of men that no object of affection can 
 be dislodged effectively or permanently unless 
 another is given to take its place. The child 
 will not abandon the injurious toy willingly 
 unless you substitute another. The taste for the 
 higher expels the taste for the lower. This was 
 
 '■^'^ Compare the closing words of the Parridi-;o : — 
 " Here viirour fail d the towering fantasy: 
 But yet the will rollM onward, like a wlieel 
 In even motion, by the love impelled. 
 That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars." 
 
LECTURE III. 113 
 
 Christ's metliocl, and this too was the tenor of 
 His teaching". Tlie expulsion of the evil spirit 
 was not enougli ; the good must dwell there, 
 or the seven devils more wicked than the first 
 would enter the empty and garnished chambers 
 of the souP^. You cannot kill a lust unless you 
 create a love to take its place. You may kill 
 the body, but if you destroy the organism you 
 make its regeneration impossible. Evil cannot 
 be eradicated merely; nature abhors a vacuum ; 
 the heart cannot feed upon itself. Evil must be 
 overcome not by law, force, annihilation ; but 
 expelled by good. Overcome evil — hate evil ; 
 these are good precepts, but vain ; you must 
 add the higher and active precej^t — overcome 
 evil witli good ; ye that love the Lord — having 
 Him to love — you and you only can truly learn 
 to hate evil. 
 
 A commentary of a practical character has 
 been made on this principle by a great philo- 
 sopher of modern times —. He tells us that the 
 
 2^ Matt. xii. 43-45. 
 
 ^^ " Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a 
 very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, 
 Init by mere want of sustenance ; and in the majority of 
 young ]iersons it speedily dies away if the occupation to 
 which their position in life has devoted them is not favourable 
 to keeping the higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their' 
 high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes because 
 they have not time or opportunity for indulging them." — 
 J. S. Mill, Vtilitarianum, pp. 14, 15. 
 
114 LECTURE III. 
 
 ascendency of lower tastes in young men is too 
 often the result of the lack of the opportunity 
 of educating the higher. Flung early into 
 business^ all love or prospect of cultivating 
 higher tastes is starved out, and then having 
 nothing else left, the craving heart and restless 
 affections turn to the lower. Food for the 
 higher is needed that the love of the lower may 
 be overcome. Surely in this the wisdom of the 
 gospel is vindicated. By love Christ will van- 
 quish. By the higher love, not by law, or 
 force, but by the sweet persuasion of love He 
 will rule in the hearts of men. He will not 
 destroy nature or close up the avenues of affec- 
 tion in men to obtain a mutilated conquest ; 
 He will not bind man to the mast or fill his 
 ears with wax, lest the siren voices of life seduce 
 him from his high and lofty purpose. He will 
 take His seat amongst the rowers, and seize His 
 harp and sing of higher joys than can be found 
 in the arms of earth's sirens. He will carry the 
 ravished hearts of men with Him safe through 
 the snares of the world, because He will unseal 
 their ears to the higher melody, fill their hearts 
 with a truer love, and shape their lives to a 
 nobler purpose. 
 
 II. The objections which have been raised. 
 
LECTURE in. 115 
 
 (i.) The motive power evoked is called an im- 
 moral one '-^'K 
 
 To plain people, who only understand man's 
 nature as they see it in every-day life, it seems 
 perfectly natural that Gcd who is love should 
 work through love. They see that love is in- 
 deed the greatest power of the world — that it is 
 love that moves the young man to his noblest 
 efforts, that it is love which holds homes and 
 nations together, that all the purest and most 
 glorious things of the world's story have been 
 wrought by love. They see love standing b}^ 
 the bright hearth, they see love leading the 
 soldier through snowy heights and amid merci- 
 less artillery, they see love urging even the clear 
 intellect of the man of science ; nay, they have 
 the confession from the philosopher's lips, " In- 
 deed, I believe that even the intellectual action 
 of a complete man is consciously or unconsciously 
 sustained by an undercurrent of the emotions-^." 
 
 ^^ " The current of religion is indirectly adverse to morals, 
 because it is adverse to the freedom of the intellect. But 
 it is also directly adverse to morals by inventing spurious 
 and bastard virtues." — Reade, Martyrdom of Man, p. 520. 
 
 -* " But man is not all intellect. If he weie so, science 
 would, I believe, be h's proper nutriment. But he feels as 
 well as thinks ; he is receptive of the sublime and beautiful 
 as the true. Indeed, I believe that even the intelltciual 
 action of a complete man is, consciously or unconsciously, 
 
116 LECTURE III. 
 
 Seeing in every spot the wondrous and all active 
 energies of love, it is no surprise, but only the 
 simplest thought, that God should seek to reach 
 man through that great and all pervading power. 
 The wonder of tho^e who thus note love's power, 
 if they have a wonder at all, is the delighted 
 wonder at finding in the work of an infinite 
 Creator a method so simple and so heart-fitting. 
 But the simple folk may love simplicity; there 
 are critical spirits who are not thus satisfied. 
 It may satisfy the weary children of sorrow that 
 God speaks to their heart, calls them His chil- 
 dren and bids them trust Him in the dark, and 
 love Him still through all the strange changing 
 scenes of life ; but this appeal to affection and 
 love and reverence seems to some an immoral 
 proceeding. This is the first objection. Right 
 .should be, it is said, done for right's sake ; it is 
 immoral to ask men to do right out of regard to 
 another, however exalted or however good. The 
 Christian scheme is, therefore, highly immoral 
 because Jesus Christ said, " If ye love Me keep 
 
 sustained by an undercurrent of the emotions. It is vain 
 1 think to attempt to separate moral and emotional nature 
 from intellectual nature. Let a man but observe himself 
 an'l he will, if I mistake not, find that, in nine cases out of 
 ten, moral or immoral considerations, as the esse may be, are 
 the motive force which pushes his intellect into action." — 
 TyndalL Address to Students in Fragments of Science, \>. 102. 
 
LECTURE III. 117 
 
 My commandments^^'';" and the Apostle was 
 moved by unworthy motives because he de- 
 clared that this love impelled him forward in 
 his glorious and evangelical philanthropy, for 
 did he not cry to those who thought him a mad 
 enthusiast, " The love of Christ constraineth 
 us^^." The system which thus inspired men 
 with a new spirit of philanthropy, and sent 
 them forth full of zeal for the lost, the sad, the 
 sinful, eager to gather into the fold of safety 
 the wandering and the lonely, is declared to be 
 a system which is at root immoral, for it de- 
 grades the true conscience of men by leading 
 them to do out of deference to another that 
 which they ought to do out of a native sense 
 of rig-ht. This is the indictment against the 
 Kingdom of Christ. It is no exaggeration, I 
 ffive the words of the accusers : " Children are 
 taught to do this and that, not because it is 
 right, but to please the King^"^." Hear another: 
 
 " John XIV. 15. ^-'2 Cor, v. 14, 
 
 " " Religion is mere loyalty. . . . This King it is true forbids 
 immorality and fraud. But the chief virtues required are of 
 the lick-spittle denomination — what is called a humble and 
 contrite heart. When a Christian sins as a man he makes 
 compensation as a courtier. When he has injured a fellow- 
 creature, he goes to church with more regularity, he offers 
 up more prayers, he reads a great number of chajiters in the 
 Bible, and so he believes that he has cleared off the sins that 
 are laid to his account. This thon is the immorality of 
 religion as it now exists. It creates artificial virtues and 
 
118 LECTURE III. 
 
 " Next I saw very painfully (I mean with the 
 pain of disgust) how much lower a thing it is 
 to lead even the loftiest life from regard to the 
 will or mind of any other being than from 
 a natural working out of our own powers ^^.'' 
 In the same spirit a Frenchman has written a 
 book in which he affirms that the rule of morality 
 is not to be found in any impulse external to 
 man ^^. 
 
 But surely this is a confusion or an over- 
 refinement. No one denies that when right is 
 ascertained it ought to be done for its own 
 sake, even were there no other motive in the 
 world to command the course; but it seldom 
 happens that there is no other motive at hand. 
 It is not conscientious knowledge alone which 
 urges man to act ; there are impulses which 
 move him as well. The act is right, and 
 my conscience says it should be done ; but the 
 act will benefit father, brother, sister, country, 
 
 sets them off against actual vices, Cliildren are taught to 
 do this or that, not because it is good, but to please the King." 
 — Reade, Martyrdom of Man, p. 533. 
 
 23 Miss Martineau. 
 
 29 " This rule [i.e. of Morality] is not external to man : 
 it dwells altogether in him. Impersonal and obligatory, x>er se, 
 carrying with it its own sanction, it imposes itself necessarily 
 on all things endowed like man with freedom, and like him 
 having the consciousness of their destinies and tlieir ends." — 
 M. de^Boutteville, Etudes Critiques, " La Moi-ale de I'Eglise 
 et la Morale Naturelle." 
 
LECTURE III. 119 
 
 and my affection says it ought to be done ; 
 for there is an obh'gation of motive as well as 
 of judgment. It would be a most pedantic 
 morality which would exclude all motives of 
 love from our actions. It would be a dismal 
 
 and grave sort of human life which would rise 
 up out of such theories. The child would have 
 to sa}^ to the father : ^'I do this not in the least 
 to please you, or because I love you, but only 
 because I think it is right; and if I thought 
 I was only urged to it by my love for you I 
 should refuse to do it at all ; for such an act 
 would be most immoral." Love of home, love 
 of friends, love of country, these have hitherto 
 been considered powers which have breathed 
 life through the mechanism of life, and put the 
 pulse of healthy activity into our manhood, 
 and inspired the dead code of mere moralism : 
 but now these must be looked upon as immoral 
 incentives ; and we are to bow down before the 
 fetish of self-evolved legalism which can scarcely 
 fail to grow into an insufferable egotism. And 
 surely if such a state of things would be in- 
 tolerable, we may proclaim it equally so in the 
 sphere of religious action. On any assumption 
 of religion as a thing possible — setting aside 
 Christianity altogether — and coming to the 
 most naked Deism, it is simply monstrous to 
 
120 LECTURE III. 
 
 declare that actions born of love to the great 
 Father Spirit of all are ?}j6-6? facto immoral. 
 There is a Creator, but it is immoral to act 
 out of love for Him ; there is a Spiritual 
 Father of human-kind, but we must not call 
 ourselves children lest we should recognise a 
 relationship which would give Him a claim of 
 affection over us, and might sway our actions. 
 Can the denaturalisation process be carried 
 farther ? 
 
 Nor is this all. This view ignores the grand 
 solidarity of creation. It is to invent a God, 
 whom we denominate an absolute tyrant, whose 
 will and fancy may take Him out of range of 
 right, and the love of whom may lead us to 
 act wrongly; but this is to ignore the unity 
 of nature and nature's system. There is a 
 solidarity between the Throne and the cottage, 
 between the King's Heaven and the most distant 
 parts of the realm ; the good of the hamlet is 
 one with the good of the metropolis ; wrong to 
 the subject is wrong to the sovereign; that 
 cannot be His will which is not right ; His will 
 is ever in harmony with the highest good, and 
 is the exhibition of the highest right ; and in 
 acting out of love of Him we receive not only 
 an impelling motive, pure as the motive of the 
 love a child bears a father, but also a spirit more 
 
LECTURE III. 121 
 
 zealous to serve the world, more keenly jealous 
 not to transgress the law of right. 
 
 For the motive of love to God is a pure and 
 elevating one. Proof of it we shall find in 
 another way. It is an axiom which I am not 
 afraid to lay down — that a deterioration in the 
 quality of man^s acts is a consequence of deteri- 
 oration of a man's motives. For a long time man 
 may detect no weakening in the moral force of 
 his actions ; but in the end it will tell. The 
 poet who sings for hire will soon take a lower 
 flight; but he who sings because he is God's 
 singer will mount up like the lark to the very 
 gate of God's paradise. "A man," said Dr. 
 Johnson, "is never lowered in his capacity 
 till he is first lowered in his tastes." The 
 man who sets his reward in the claps of the 
 crowd will soon learn to prostitute, like Dryden, 
 his glorious verse to unw^orthy ends. And the 
 deterioration of the motives will betray itself in 
 weakened and worthless song. But where has 
 the motive of love to God proved itself the 
 source of deterioration to the quality of the 
 work of any human being ? When Haydn does 
 homage to God before composing does he sing 
 less loftily of the verdant glories of the world, 
 or the poet voices of the stars ? Does not the 
 power of that motive — love to God — heighten 
 I 
 
122 LECTURE III. 
 
 by a holy and noble heroism the hearts of men ? 
 Since the day the Apostle declared ^' The love 
 of Christ constraineth us ^^Z' the aim of all 
 human life has been raised to a higher level, 
 and the streams of human charity have flowed 
 in broader and deeper channels. No deteriora- 
 tion of life has betrayed the immorality of 
 this motive. 
 
 But it is a fact that men must have motives ; 
 and when we are told that loving God is an 
 immoral motive, we perhaps may venture to 
 examine the motives which must be accepted in 
 its place. 
 
 We are to follow the natural working out of 
 our own powers. This must mean that there 
 is a law within which, left to itself, will mould 
 our life to its fullest beauty, if we will only let 
 it work itself out naturally. But this working 
 out of our own powers must either be one in which 
 we voluntarily co-operate, or which is a mere 
 blind force. The law must either be an irre- 
 sistible necessity, or it must be a law voluntarily 
 acquiesced in and co-operated with by our own 
 will. If it be a law of our being and irresistible, 
 then it is difficult to see why obedience to it 
 should be called noble, or a higher mode of life 
 
 ^ 2 Cor. V. 14. 
 
LECTURE III. 123 
 
 than a life which has been shaped by a spirit 
 of love to God. An act or life cannot be con- 
 sidered morally low, or unusually lofty, if that 
 life could not be other than it is ; and it is 
 strange that lives which are the out-working of 
 non-moral forces should be denominated noble, 
 and Christian lives called immoral by those 
 who obscure all morality by destroying all dif- 
 ferences between necessity and free moral action. 
 But if it be a law within which is voluntarily 
 adopted or acquiesced in by the will, then who 
 is to judge of the code of right which is thus 
 adopted ? There isj it is said, the inner light 
 in man's soul, and this, and this only, should 
 we follow. We grant an inner law_, a moral 
 code within ; but the whole history of the world 
 shows us that this, though sufficient to recognise 
 what is right, has never, without external aid, 
 been sufficient to lead men to do right. One 
 truth of all religion is that the soul must re- 
 main barren of all high and noble deeds unless 
 some outward stimulus quickens it into activity; 
 some love must move the spirit into work. 
 
 But another objection to the method of Chris- 
 tianity is that it is unnecessary. We can satisfy 
 all the conditions requisite for establishing a 
 pure religious morality without having resort 
 to Christian theology, for we can have our 
 T 2 
 
124 LECTURE III. 
 
 supreme moral centre of emotion — love ; and 
 we can liave our intellectual centre of thought 
 in a dominant power without us. Humanity 
 shall supply these ; the love of race shall be 
 our motive force, and the good of the race the 
 aim of our morality. 
 
 There is so much beauty in this that it seems 
 ungracious to point out that we have no security 
 that this so-called love of the race may not be 
 a very defective moral motive. Cynics have 
 told us that our hatred of injustice is little more 
 than our dread of suffering injustice. If there 
 is any sting in this, the truth gives the sting. 
 But more than cynics have spoken the same, 
 and showed us that the jealousy with which 
 moral interests are guarded is very largely due 
 to our deeply-rooted self-interest. The love of 
 humanity, the enthusiasm for the race, is not, 
 then, so wondrous a motive force as to be abso- 
 lutely above the possibility of being marred by 
 unworthy elements. 
 
 But the difficulty here seems to be to settle 
 the code of action. The interest of the race is 
 to be the guiding thought in the working out 
 of this morality; and men have thought that by 
 a careful survey of human needs and character 
 they might establish a scientific basis of morals, 
 which could be applied to govern all the actions 
 
LECTURE III. 125 
 
 of men. For this system to reach perfection 
 we must wait till history has unrolled her scroll 
 to its fullest length. The interests of the race 
 can only be the interests of the majority of the 
 race; but what majority? The majority of the 
 now race, or the majority of the race including 
 those who are yet unborn ? 
 
 But supposing all were fixed — the true 
 scientific code arranged and its infallible inter- 
 preters appointed, what would it amount to ? 
 It w^ould be found that the true scientific code 
 of morals was simply an enumeration of those 
 rules of life which were in conformity with the 
 laws of the universe. The utmost that we could 
 ascertain, in the widest and fullest induction, 
 would be that line of conduct which was dictated 
 by the general effect of those laws which make 
 up the order of creation, and we should reach 
 by this means a scientifie confirmation that 
 all the high and holy laws which Christ had 
 sanctioned and taught were precisely those the 
 observance of which would, when scientifically 
 considered,, promote the happiness of man. The 
 experience of the Jewish ceremonial code would 
 l)e repeated. Many of those laws which the 
 Jew was enjoined to observe appeared to him 
 simply religious ordinances. The eye of later 
 observation has seen what the Jew, perhaps. 
 
126 LECTUEE III. 
 
 never saw — that the laws he so religiously 
 observed were largely sanitary laws, enjoined 
 for the health and happiness of the people. 
 Thus would it be, I believe, with a full and 
 complete code (were such possible) of all the laws 
 which would promote human happiness ; they 
 would be found just those which are now com- 
 manded as the laws of moral and religious life. 
 It is in this sense true that no new discoveries 
 are to be made in morality. The discoveries of 
 science will serve to exhibit the wisdom of the 
 moral code Christ gave to man. 
 
 And when this discovery was made, would 
 an obedience to such a code — an obedience 
 only rendered because the code does promote 
 happiness and is in harmony with the order of 
 the universe — be one whit more moral than 
 that which Christians follow when they say, "We 
 follow these commandments of God because 
 we know He guides us right, gives us laws 
 which are in harmony with the order of the 
 universe, which He unlerstands fully and we do 
 not, and which, observed by all, will promote 
 the truest good and highest happiness of all ' ? 
 
 But 1 think we may venture to go further, 
 and say that the code of Christ, which puts 
 happiness before us as the aim, is a more fertile 
 one than that which speaks only of aggregate 
 
LECTURE III. 127 
 
 happiness, and that because it starts from a 
 higher platform. The axiom of the modern 
 philosopher would be — Whatever promotes the 
 greatest happiness of mankind gives us the true 
 code of holiness. The Christian starts from the 
 other side. Whatever is holy must contribute 
 to the general and ultimate happiness of the 
 world. Both are at one in the belief that the 
 law of holiness and the law of happiness will be 
 found identical. It is a truth which faith be- 
 lieves and which science may demonstrate. But, 
 meanwhile, it seems that the old impulse — this 
 is right, this is holy; it must, therefore, end in 
 the happiness of men — is the higher and the 
 truer impulse ; while, on the other hand, the 
 very instinct which seeks the good of human- 
 kind — and which is to take the place of religion 
 and faith in God — is an instinct which owes 
 its origin to Christianity. This enthusiasm of 
 humanity is a noble impulse ; it is a true in- 
 stinct ; it is in the moral world as a most fair 
 flower ; but it is a flower which was plucked 
 from the garden of Christ, and I think that 
 those who plucked it have left the root behind ; 
 for no force, no motive which merely puts before 
 us the far-off good of a far-off humanity, will 
 ever completely supplant the affection which is 
 personal between the soul and God, or create 
 
128 LECTURE III. 
 
 an enthusiasm equal to tliat which Christ created 
 when He said, '^ Inasmuch as ye have done 
 it unto one of these, ye have done it unto 
 Me 21." 
 
 (ii.) A second objection is that the command 
 to love is impossible. It would be good to be 
 able to love God ; the scheme is beautiful ; the 
 method is fair and theoretically wise ; but it 
 is impossible, whether we consider the nature 
 of God or the nature of man. 
 
 I. The nature of God. It is, I grant, very 
 difficult, if not impossible, to love God when 
 He is represented to us as a God of definitions, 
 as unfathomable, infinitely great, infinitely 
 powerful, eternal ; for those words convey ideas 
 of vastness and force ; they may command our 
 awe, they cannot command our love. But it is 
 forgotten that these terms are only the technical 
 side of Christianity; these are terms which are 
 most needful in discussing the scientific aspect 
 of religion ; they have served a good and useful 
 purpose in defining and defending the faith ; 
 they are as useful as the technical terms and 
 scientific classifications of botany; they are 
 essential to the philosophy or science of religion, 
 Init they are not in the least necessary for its 
 
 Matt. XXV. 40. 
 
LECTURE III. 129 
 
 enjoyment. There is all the difference in the 
 world between knowing about God and know- 
 ing God, between being able to discuss His 
 attributes and really loving Him. It is in 
 Christianity preeminently that the loving God, 
 the living to Him, is put forward and made 
 greater in importance than the being able to 
 define and to argue. Knowledge, prophecy, 
 tongues, the erudition, the gifts, the theology 
 of the Church are nothing compared with 
 charity. Christ's commandment is not ^^ Thou 
 shalt be able to define God, and to hedge Him 
 round with the fences of your ingenious defi- 
 nitions ;■" but " Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God ^^." It is indeed curious to note that the 
 very schemes of thought which are most hostile 
 to Christian theology are those which are slowly 
 substituting deities of definition for the Father 
 of the spirits of all flesh, whom Jesus Christ 
 
 32 " To know is not to have a notion which stands in the 
 place of the true object, but to be in direct cummunion with 
 the true object. And this is exactly most possible where 
 theory, or complete knowledge, is least possible. We know 
 the ' abysmal deeps ' of personality, but have no theory of 
 them. We know love and hatred, but have no theory of 
 til em. We know God better than we know ourselves, better 
 than we know any other human being, better than we know 
 either love or hatred, but have no theory of, simply because 
 we stand under, and not above. Him. We can recognise 
 and learn, but never comprehend." — Hutton, Theoloyicul 
 Assays, p. 82. 
 
130 LECTURE III. 
 
 revealed to mankind. It is in the writings of 
 theosopMsts, not in the writings of Christian 
 men, that we hear a jargon prolific of techni- 
 calities ; it is there that we read of •' streams of 
 tendency," the relation of man to *^the unseen," 
 to "the unknown,^' to "the invisible," to "the 
 unknowable." However useful such words may 
 be, they are not the terms in which Christianity 
 tells her message to mankind. She no more 
 thinks of adopting even her treasured expres- 
 sions of theological truth by the bedside of the 
 weary and the sad, than the doctor does of per- 
 plexing his patient with the dialect of the lecture- 
 room. Practical daily Christian teaching in its 
 work among men uses plain speech, and dis- 
 cards the cant of the Schools, and leaves to the 
 cultured few to regenerate a world and comfort 
 human hearts with longitudinous phraseology^^, 
 
 33 « From the point of view of those who know, or have 
 ever known, the majestic symmetry of any organised religion, 
 how flippant ai-e the terms in which we so often hear religion 
 described! 'The relation of man to the unseen,' 'to the 
 unknown,' 'to the invisible,' say many ; and one philosopher 
 has gone so far as to assure us that it is ' the relation of man 
 to the Unknowable.' Another declares that it is ' what the 
 Immensities have to say to us.' Another that it is 'the sense 
 of the stream of Tendency,' &c. One who has written more 
 about religion tlian ten theologians deliberately assures us, 
 at the close of thirty volumes, that it is ' a great heaven-high 
 Unquesti<mabiHty,' or 'the inner light of a man's soul.* 
 Well, but the inner light of some men's souls tells them to 
 get on in the world — to eat, drink, and be meiry. The Immen- 
 
LECTURE III. 131 
 
 and so help men towards some great and heaven- 
 high unquestionability. Ordinary Christianity 
 has eased our shoulders of such burdens and 
 delivered us from making pots among the 
 children of a strange language. " Fitness and 
 kinship are the truly great things for us^ not 
 force and massiveness and length of days^*." 
 The words are not the words of a Christian 
 believer, but a Christian believer would willingly 
 adopt them when he feels that his message is 
 not to explain to men infinite and eternal force 
 or all-pervading might_, but to tell them of a 
 Father, who is strong enough to save them, 
 who loves and longs for love in return, who 
 needs nothing, and j^et finds nothing as it 
 should be till the love of His creatures is given 
 back to Him, who feels that one alienated 
 heart in His universe is as a discordant note 
 in the great harmony of worlds and spirits, 
 and who, fatherlike, cannot endure that any 
 
 sities tell many men to make hay while the sun shines ; the 
 greeJy speculator finds the stream of Tendency take him into 
 swindling adventures ; the utter reprobate has long set his 
 teeth with a curse, that religion certainly is the Unknowable, 
 and treats of the Unknowable only. Now, I say to men who 
 have known what a working religion is, how hollow would 
 such phrases ring ! Take such men as St. Bernard or Aquinas, 
 or Cromwell, or Calvin, or Wesley, or Ken, to speak only 
 of Christians. They were not to be put off with only a 
 phrase." — Mr. Fred. Harrison. 
 
 ^* The late Professor Clifford in the Nineteenth Century. 
 
132 LECTURE III. 
 
 eliild of His should meet Him with averted 
 face ^^. 
 
 And does not this very difficulty, that we 
 cannot love mere abstractions, spiritual essences 
 of unknown and infinite greatness, teach us an 
 argument in support of the Christian faith? 
 It is true, perfectly true, we cannot love the 
 infinite and incomprehensible; and it is out 
 of this, among other things, that the fitness 
 of the Christian creed is seen. Here is the very 
 spot where the incarnation becomes not a mere 
 doctrine, but a fact for which human hearts 
 yearn. God, not far off, not dwelling in " the 
 solitary amplitudes of boundless space ^"^j" but 
 
 ^^ By the early Christians all these things were directly 
 traced to tlie Master they so dearly loved. . . . The universe 
 to them was transfigured by love. . . . Christianity offered a 
 deeper consolation than any prospect of endless life, or of 
 millennial glories. It taught the weary the sorrowing and 
 the lonely to look up to heaven and say " Thou God carest 
 for me ! " — Reade, Martyrdom of Man. 
 
 ^^ "God is so great that he does not deign to have per- 
 sonal relations with us human atoms called men." — Ibid. 
 
 V- .'^37.. 
 
 Against this idea of God the whole teaching of Christianity 
 protests. If there is one sheep lost, the shepherd will seek 
 it : there is joy over one sinner that repenteth : there is 
 nothing too small, there is none too insignificant for Him to 
 notice ; for His tender mercy is over all. The French lines 
 quoted by Pressense are nearer the truth : — 
 
 " Tous les cieux, et leur splendeur 
 Ne valent pas, pour ta gloire 
 Un seal soupir d'un seul coeur.'* 
 
 With this we may compare the remarkable language of John 
 
LECTURE III. 133 
 
 God manifest in the flesh — looking into our 
 faces with eyes of love that can read our soul's 
 depths, and saying in effect, " I know you can- 
 not love the distant, the impalpable, the infinite, 
 the Omnipotent ; but behold ! see Me ! handle 
 Me ! feel the touch of My hand upon your 
 hand, the breath of My spirit upon your brow; 
 look upon Me as manifest in your midst, sigh- 
 ing over your sorrows and sharing them, visiting 
 you in the robe and veil of flesh, which proves 
 and establishes kinship with you/' " He that 
 hath seen Me hath seen the Father 3^." Trul}^, 
 when I hear men crying we cannot love infini- 
 tudes and vast magnitudes and oppressive Omni- 
 potence, I think I hear a voice speaking sadly 
 as it spoke eighteen centuries ago in Judsea, 
 " Have I been so long time with you, and yet 
 have you not known Me^^?" 
 
 2. But it is declared impossible, because of 
 the nature of man. Love cannot be commanded. 
 Even were it possible to love God, it is not 
 
 Stuart Mill : " It is the God incarnate, more than the God of 
 the Jews, or of Nature, who being idealized has taken so 
 great and salutary a hold on the modern mind. And what- 
 ever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, 
 Christ is still left ; a unique figure, not more unlike all his 
 precursors than all his followers, even tliose who had the 
 direct benefit of his personal teaching." — Essaij on Reli(jion, 
 
 P- 253- 
 
 ^■^ John xiv. 9. 
 38 Ibid. 
 
134 LECTURE III. 
 
 possible to love Him by command ; for love, 
 true love, is a free and scornful spirit. Nay, 
 she is too noble to be bound or bought ; she 
 scoflPs at your command ; she spurns your bribe ; 
 she laughs alike at the treasure poured at her 
 feet, and the lash and chain brandished over 
 her head. She must be free, or cease to be. 
 I grant it. God did so make love ; she rises 
 in the heart often the solitary witness of the 
 departed virtues of the heart of man. But mark 
 that if she be true, free, and noble, it is no im- 
 moral method to hold parley with her. If she 
 is pure, strong, and scorns to be commanded, 
 she becomes the best and most fittins- am- 
 bassadress between the exiled heart and its 
 God. 
 
 No, she cannot be commanded; and though 
 the Christian precept is, '^ Thou shalt love the 
 Lord ^9," &c., yet it is not to be understood as 
 being an enslaving command. There is a reason, 
 a fitness, an inducement, an appeal to love. God, 
 indeed, might well look for the love of His 
 creatures ; but apart from this, there is that in 
 Him which, as we say, commands love. When 
 we speak of a man commanding our respect, we 
 do not conceive of an angry coxcomb hectoring 
 us into a servile and sycophantic adulation ; we 
 2® Matt. xxii. 37. 
 
LECTURE III. 135 
 
 think of a man so just and true, so honest and 
 generous, so pure and high-minded, that it would 
 argue a fault in ourselves if we did not yield 
 him the unbidden homage of our respect. It 
 is but a faint illustration : but it will suffice to 
 warn us that God does not issue a naked and 
 inconsequential command, an arbitrary and un- 
 reasonable precept. He made the hearty and 
 He knows well enough that to do this would be 
 to mock the heart He made. He bids us look 
 and love ; for He knows that when our eyes 
 will but look to Him and see Him as He is — 
 not as we have painted Him to be — we cannot 
 but love Him '*^, for as He has revealed Himself 
 to us in His Son, so shall we find in Him all 
 those elements which are the fit and needful 
 inducements to love — which the heart seeing 
 must, unless sodden with sin, love. And what 
 
 *^ "No power is so fresh and living as the power of His 
 name to those who have learned to know Him as He appears 
 in tlie simple and touching story of His disciples. He is 
 represented now as a mild effeminate Christ who repels men 
 of mind and power ; or as a kind of irascible pope, demanding 
 an unworthy subservience ; and the religion He founded is 
 stigmatized as iit only for an age of barbarians. But if from 
 this Christ of human invention you turn to the Christ of the 
 gospels you will find the reverse of all these misconceptions, 
 which arise not from the progress of science, but from the 
 shameful religious ignorance which prevails among us. You 
 will then recognize the manly strength which blends itself 
 in Christ with infinite goodness." — Pressensd, Jesus Christ, 
 p. 9. 
 
136 LECTURE III. 
 
 are these essential elements to love ? Roughly 
 speaking — There must be beauty to awaken ad- 
 miration, wisdom to waken reverence, character 
 to waken respect, personal kindness to waken 
 attachment. It is through these that love not 
 only grows, but must grow. Beauty to catch 
 the eye, wisdom to enchain the understanding, 
 character to impress the conscience, kindness to 
 rouse the heart. Love cannot withstand a siege 
 with these forces, if she be love at all. And this 
 we find in Christ. Behold Him : has He not 
 beauty? His life is like an idyll : there is the 
 freshness of the morning upon Him. He has 
 evermore the dew of His youth, the charm of 
 it is perennial. ^' All true moral progress is 
 made through admiration, and it is character- 
 istic of our religion that it makes a greater use 
 of example than any other system ^^." The 
 beauty of that life captivated the most recent 
 philosopher of France ; the "Imitation of Christ" 
 was his book companion during his closing 
 years. And, behold, here is wisdom also : " He 
 is the wisest among the holy, and the holiest 
 among the wise," is the exclamation of one him- 
 self a wise man. Christ's words have a quiet 
 force in them ; they have sunk deep into the 
 
 *^ Prof. Seeley, Lectures and Essays, p. 262, quoted in 
 Eaton's Bampton Lectures, p. 35. 
 
LECTURE Til. 137 
 
 mind of the world ; we use them and are hardly 
 aware of it ; we scarcely know how much even 
 as a thinker Christ has moulded the thoughts 
 and the phrases of mankind. Behold, also, here 
 is character to waken respect : " It was reserved 
 for Christ to present to the world an ideal cha- 
 racter, which, througli all the changes of eighteen 
 centuries, has inspired the hearts of men with 
 an impassioned love." So writes an impartial 
 historian *^. '^ Christ is the one character with- 
 out the idea of whom in the mind personal piety 
 is impossible.^' So writes a German sceptic ^''\ 
 And here, finally, is loving-kindness in all its 
 force, acting, suffering, and dying ; a love which 
 dwells not in lofty regions, nor on celestial 
 heights alone, but which goes about doing good, 
 which endures the pain, the sorrow, the shame, 
 the cruel thorns, the piercing nails, the painful 
 cross. It is not from the throne of the universe 
 that God calls most strongly for love. It is 
 from Bethlehem, from Nazareth, from Calvary, 
 
 *^ Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i. p. 4. 
 
 *^ Strauss. Compare the language of Napoleon Bonaparte : 
 *' Across a chasm of eighteen hunched years Jes-us Christ 
 makes a demand which is of all others ilifficult to satisfy. 
 He asks for the human heart ; He will have it entirely to 
 Himself. He demands it unconditionally, and forthwith His 
 demand is granted, millions of men to-day would die for Him. 
 This it is which proves to me quite convincingly the divinity 
 of Jesus Christ." 
 
 K 
 
138 LECTURE III. 
 
 for here are written these sweet incentives to 
 love, a beauty to win us^ an eloquence of loving* 
 deeds to woo us, and a life of suffering and a 
 death of pain to call forth gratitude and af- 
 fection to Him who loved us and gave Himself 
 for us. 
 
 And this appeal has not been in vain. 
 
 Time fails us to point out its strength in 
 contrast with the weakness of other creeds. 
 There have been splendid religions, full of noble 
 thoughts and sad pathetic utterances, and won- 
 drous heroism, but they have been objects of 
 contemplation rather than forces of action. They 
 have beauty, proportion, strength, but it is a 
 beauty which is unfinished and a proportion 
 which is incomplete. They are as a splendid 
 torso, in which we can trace the hand of a master- 
 genius in delicacy and force of touch, in vigor- 
 ous attitude, and well-moulded form ; but its 
 power has gone, the well-poised head, the strong- 
 planted feet, the pliant mouth, are not here. 
 They are creeds, but they have no "speculation" 
 in their eyes ; they are beautiful, but they are 
 dead; they are grand, or poetic guesses, but 
 they are only partial. There have been noble 
 conceptions of the religious kingdom, just as there 
 were wonderful guesses at the order of the hea- 
 venly kingdom, all of them based on some fact, 
 
LECTURE III. 139 
 
 or bringing to light some truth. God is beauty, 
 said some ; for see, all things are fair in form 
 and colour ; these are the varied hints and move- 
 ments of His presence ; and all this trembling 
 beauty is but the heaving bosom of God. God 
 is harmony, said another : listen how all na- 
 ture teems with music — the trilling brook, the 
 many-voiced ocean, the loud-speaking thunder, 
 the heart-pleasing cadence of falling rain ; it is 
 melody which presides over all : God is harmony. 
 Then said a third, God is thought : I pierce 
 beneath all sight and sound ; I detect the pro- 
 found significance of things, the wondrous un- 
 changed thought which lies beneath all changing 
 phenomena ; God rises before me as my thoughts 
 evolve, and God is thought. But to all the 
 answers came, ^' Eye hath not seen His beauty ; " 
 ear hath not heard Him ; mind hath not con- 
 ceived Him. 
 
 God is beautiful indeed, and His ways are 
 ways of harmony, and His thoughts are not 
 as our thoughts ; but He is not beauty, nor har- 
 mony, nor thought : He is love ; and love is 
 pure ; so He came as a little child, swaddled 
 in a manger, and stretching forth a hand of 
 help to humankind. And love is almost ever 
 sorrowing, so He came as a man of sorrows. 
 And love here is always suffering, so He suffered 
 
 K 2, 
 
140 LECTURE III. 
 
 the thorns, the scourge^ the cross **. And thus 
 men learned to love, through a love which did 
 not slumber, nor sleep, but which laboured, and 
 wept and died. Thus Christ's power grew. 
 From His cross He reached " His pierced hand 
 and lifted the old world" from its base. He 
 transformed all things. He gave to poetry her 
 highest themes. He gave power to art ; He 
 became a well-spring of inspiration ; He guided 
 the hand of Raphael, and the chisel of Michel 
 Angelo ; He gave unwonted pathos to the brush 
 of Rubens, and refined the coarse genius of 
 Murillo ; He drew confessions of love from men 
 of thought ; He put high and calming hope 
 into weakened and desponding minds ; He ga- 
 thered round His cross a great multitude, which 
 no man can number, and one song rises from 
 their various voices, " Thou hast loved us, and 
 Thou hast washed us from our sins." The 
 chorus so rises in marvellous harmony because 
 one love animates them all, and one — the King 
 of Love — has set up His throne in the hearts 
 of all. 
 
 Again, then, we ask. Where is the Kingdom 
 
 ** " All human heroism pales before His sacrifice. He died 
 to deliver souls, and never vs^as moral freedom more gloriously 
 asserted than on that day of His agony." — Pressensd, Jesus 
 Christ, p. lo. 
 
LECTURE III. 141 
 
 of God ? Again we say it is within — it is in 
 human hearts touched with gratitude and tuned 
 to love. If you look for it elsewhere, without 
 first looking here, you will mistake the scaffold- 
 ing for the building, and be scandalised by its 
 ungainly features and human advertisements 
 which spread themselves over the hoardings. 
 But if you will first look within, you will find 
 it afterwards without you ; for it is in the heart, 
 transfigured by love divine, that the dawning of 
 God's day is first seen. If you will recognise 
 His Kingdom, and know that you are in it, be- 
 hold, before all, the Kingdom of God must be 
 within you. 
 
LECTFEE IV. 
 
 ** The kingdom of God is within you." — Luke xvii. 21. 
 
 A RELIGION for man must be fitted to man : 
 it must address him as a being living in the 
 present, but as one who ever faces a future. I 
 know that it is sometimes thought and some- 
 times said that man is of the present alone : 
 there is a sense, but it is a very limited sense, 
 in which this is true enough; we cannot be 
 sure of more than the present. Of all human 
 work and human effort it is as true as it is of 
 religious opportunity, that To-day is the Day of 
 Salvation. It is only in the sense, then^ that 
 the uncertainty of life gives us no security that 
 the morrow shall be ours, because God doles 
 out to us the golden hours one by one, that we 
 can be said to be of the present alone. We are 
 beings with a future, and our connection with 
 that future is written upon half our language 
 and half our thoughts. Our daily words tell us 
 this. Wish, desire, hope, fear, suspense, am- 
 
LECTURE IV. 143 
 
 bition, prudence, all rise up before us and pro- 
 phesy to us as beings that are not of the present 
 only, but of the future ^. Now to every period 
 of our life there is a presiding* angel : over the 
 past Memory presides; over the present Duty; 
 and over the future Hope. And therefore it is 
 not enough that a religion should be a code of 
 morals, or an elaborate ceremonial, or a forgive- 
 ness, or a love : it must also be a guide, and 
 have a message for Hope. All religions have in 
 various ways tried to say something to men's 
 instincts of Hope. Every scheme which ig-nored 
 it, or deceived it with false promises, has ended 
 in failure. The cry of disappointment, of ex- 
 pectation, of sorrow, of bereavement, has been 
 ever a cry addressed to the future ; but the iron 
 doors of the Hereafter remained fast closed till 
 Christ opened the Kingdom of Hope and Heaven 
 to all believers. Christ came with a message 
 of Hope : He brought life and immortality to 
 light : He told mankind that Death was a de- 
 feated foe : He gave a future to man : He 
 pointed out to him a destiny and a home. 
 
 No part of the Christian scheme has been so 
 
 ^ *' Que cbacun ex.amine ses pen3(?e.s, 11 les trouvera toujours 
 occupies au passe et a Tavenir. ... La present n'est jamais 
 notre fin ; le passe et le present sont nos moyens ; le seul 
 avenir est notre fin." — Pascal. 
 
144 LECTURE IV. 
 
 strongly assailed as the Christian Hope. It has 
 been represented as being enfeebling to man's 
 moral nature, impoverishing to his social in- 
 stincts, and gross in its form. On the contrary, 
 I believe that it is elevating to man's character ; 
 quickening to his sense of social duty; and that 
 while satisfying his legitimate hopes, it presents 
 to him a large and an ennobling prospect. 
 
 I. The Hope is elevating to Man's character. 
 
 It is needful to keep in mind what is the true 
 glory of man : too often we find that the glory 
 of man is made to consist of that which is not 
 his glory, but only his good-fortune. The wor- 
 ship of man is prosperity, success, advancement : 
 but these are full often but the accidents of life, 
 or we would not so often say that there is 
 nothing so successful as success. Does it not 
 force itself upon our attention as a truth, that 
 the greatness of men does not consist in their 
 position, or the dignities of life conferred upon 
 them ? The man is as truly great, or as truly 
 little, being himself and none but himself, 
 whether the high place or the dignified rank be 
 added or not : these may be gratifying recog- 
 nitions of power and usefulness, but they do not 
 make him one whit more truly great than he 
 was before. The greatness must be within — 
 a part of himself, which the world-powers can 
 
LECTURE IV. 145 
 
 neither give nor take away. Is the true glory 
 of man^ then, in those inward gifts of genius or 
 intellectual power ? These are helps to great- 
 ness, but they are not that greatness. These 
 cultivated by patience and conscientious care 
 may prove avenues to real greatness, but the 
 glory of man lies not in these : it is the char- 
 acter which cultivates them which is the true 
 self. Squandered talents, revealing an ill- 
 balanced character or hastily-performed work, 
 betraying strength of egotism rather than con- 
 scientious genius, achieve no real greatness. 
 There is a need of moral worth to give weight 
 to ability: there is a moral force requisite for 
 all the higher manifestations of greatness. 
 
 This has been recognised by many. '^A 
 man's power in England," said an eminent 
 judge, "will depend upon his knowledge, his 
 eloquence, and his moral worth.^' The last is, 
 of course, the crown of the whole. Eloquence 
 without knowledge is only vapid declamation, but 
 knowledge and eloquence without moral worth 
 is but skilful rhetoric : there is no oratory with- 
 out moral force, for there is none without 
 earnestness. It is the character which gives the 
 power to man. The same has been recognised 
 in one of the noblest anecdotes of modern days. 
 When a great Frenchman lost all in the days of 
 
146 LECTURE IV. 
 
 political change, and found himself obliged to 
 turn his back upon his country and his home, 
 a penniless exile, one asked : " What is now left 
 you — when riches^ influence, and favour are gone 
 — what is now left?" " Myself," was the reply. 
 It was just so. When the true self is left, and 
 that self still preserves untainted its priceless 
 treasure, the character, then all remains that 
 need remain ; for then has man that which 
 really makes him man : his moral power is left 
 to him, and character which is the true glory of 
 man. This is it which adds strength and con- 
 sistent force to genius ; this is it which sits as a 
 crown, richer than gold, upon a peasant's brow ; 
 this is it which has given commonplace ability 
 a rank above erratic or corrupt genius. Do 
 you doubt it ? Ask the philosophic historian of 
 Greece^, and he will tell you that men in Athens 
 valued moral worth more than talent among 
 their statesmen; the genius of Alcibiades was 
 nothing compared with the simple integrity of 
 Nikias. Do you doubt it? Ask one of the 
 healthiest of modern novelists, and he will tell 
 you that the slightest stain upon the character, 
 yes, even a heedless action, works upon the 
 mind the painful feeling of self- contempt, to 
 
 2 Grote. 
 
LECTURE IV. 147 
 
 which no honeyed words or approving smile can 
 avail to remove. "Nobody need know," he 
 represents a young* man saying* to a high- 
 spirited girl who has joined him in a silly 
 escapade. "Don't I know it myself," is her 
 reply ^. This is the sting within — our moral 
 character is wounded ; we know it ourselves ; 
 our true glory is impaired. It is in a well- 
 balanced character that the true glory of man 
 consists ; for genius is a gift ; character is self- 
 discipline : genius belongs to a man ; character 
 is the man himself: genius is the colour of the 
 robe of life ; character is its texture ; and the 
 fading of the colour will not rob the robe of its 
 use ; but when the texture is frayed or worn^ 
 the most imperial purple becomes a rag, and not 
 a robe. Character is the glory of man, and it 
 is to character-culture that Christianity devotes 
 her aim ^. This is no ignoble aim. 
 
 3 Mr. W. Black, Madcap Violet. 
 
 * Compare Dr. Henry Maudsley's words: ''The question 
 to be entertained and decided at the outset will be, whether 
 this aim (i.e. a worthy aim in life) shall be internal or ex- 
 ternal — whether the individual shall seek first the completest 
 development of which his nature is capable, other gains, such 
 as riches, reputation, power, being allowed to fall to him by 
 the way ; or whether he shall seek worldly success, the 
 formation of character being allowed to be a secondary and 
 incidental matter ? It is a vital question, the practical answer 
 to which must influence most materially the training and 
 cultivation of the mind." — Responsibility in Mental Disease, 
 p. 294. 
 
148 LECTURE IV. 
 
 This character-culture is a noble aim ; but it 
 is also most needful^ and of this needfulness life 
 makes us only too conscious. For what is char- 
 acter ? I answer it is the product of disposition 
 into circumstances. One of the most eminent 
 sons of Ireland ^ defined knowledge as the pro- 
 duct of mind into nature : let us define character 
 as the product of the will into circumstances. 
 We shall not have reason to quarrel with the 
 definition ; the growth of self-reflectiveness will 
 show us its truth. The actions of childhood are 
 actions of impulse ; as the whim or the fancy 
 sways him, so he acts. In later life, prudence 
 aims to direct his acts, for he has learnt that 
 his actions produce approval or disapproval, 
 praise or blame from others; his interest has 
 learned to reflect upon the influence of his 
 actions on the minds of others; later, perhaps 
 benevolence teaches him to reflect upon another 
 influence, the influence of his actions, not upon 
 the judgments, but upon the moral character of 
 others. But besides these there is another, the 
 influence of our actions upon our own character. 
 There is a reflex power in every human act ; we 
 act upon circumstances and circumstances act 
 upon us : and character is thus gradually built 
 
 ^ Archer Butler, Lectures on Ancient Philosophy. 
 
LECTURE IV. 149 
 
 up : it is a product — the product of our will into 
 circumstances. Under the influence of circum- 
 stances characters change ^. This is a trite 
 observation, daily experience graves it upon our 
 minds. Time sours many a disposition ; the 
 bright, free, generous temperament of youth 
 has become the sad or morose character of aire ; 
 or the impetuous, self-asserting tone of young 
 life has become the gentle, strong, judicial firm- 
 ness of age. And it must be allowed that too 
 often the power of circumstances is apparently 
 against the character. The hopefulness of rising 
 years is gone, the checks and disappointments, 
 the hardships and the disloyalties of life, have 
 beaten down the spirit; time is too much for 
 many, even though the time be but the brief 
 space of threescore years and ten; ^'it is diffi- 
 cult," well has it been said, " it is difficult to 
 grow old gracefully"^." The victory of circum- 
 stances over the will may be seen in a debased 
 character. Is it then desirable that God should 
 
 * "Every man is the son of his own deeds." — Spanish 
 proverb. 
 
 ■^ " The ills which are the inevitable result of failing strength 
 are but the lesser sorrows of age. Far bitterer are the dis- 
 appointments, the misconceptions, the neglects, which age so 
 often has to experience. How seldom is even the most pros- 
 perous life followed by a pleasant evening ! And how difficult 
 is it — how far more difficult than the young suppose — to grow 
 old gracefully." — Luthardt, iSaving Truths, p. 292. 
 
150 LECTURE IV. 
 
 alter circumstances, seeing that they are too 
 strong" for human character? That would be 
 a method, perhaps, of easing men, but it would 
 not be a method of helping their character- 
 growth. It is not easy circumstances which 
 protect men's characters from deterioration. 
 Unfortunately ease is most deleterious ; pros- 
 perity may harden men's hearts, luxury may 
 enervate, comfort may deprave. The weakness 
 lies within, the changing circumstances develop, 
 they do not cause or create character, the fault 
 lies in ourselves ; the will is weak, and too often 
 fails to use any modifying force upon surround- 
 ing circumstances ; and so it is constantly 
 reaping in itself the reward of its weakness or 
 its folly. There is a tendency in the laws 
 around us to bring to light the slumbering 
 energies of the good and evil seeds in human 
 character ; the influence is strong to bring forth 
 into light the little unsuspected root of bitter- 
 ness, we scarcely note them in early life, the 
 wilful ways of the child are pretty and taking: — 
 
 " In love's spring all good seems possible ; 
 No threats, all promises, brooklets ripple full 
 And bathe the rushes, vicious crawliMg things 
 Are pretty eggs: the sun shines graciously 
 And parches notV 
 
 George Eliot, Spanish Gypsy. 
 
LECTURE IV. 151 
 
 But the slow character-forming years hatch the 
 beauteous eggs, and bring forth the viper brood. 
 The little pleasing fault grows to an ugly heart- 
 killing vice. There is a fertility in the growth- 
 power of evil. Hear how St. Chrysostom brings 
 out into terrible force the outgrowth of luxurious- 
 ness : " The luxurious soul is unable to hear or 
 to see anything. It becomes weak, ignoble, 
 unmanly, illiberal, cowardly, full of impudence, 
 servility, ignorance, rage, violence, and all kinds 
 of evil, and destitute of opposite virtues. The 
 body grows sleek and gross, the soul lean and 
 weakly." So does luxuriousness tend to deprave 
 the character, and character is the true nobility 
 of man. But hear another, a woman of high 
 character, shrewd insight, large and even vehe- 
 ment sympathies. She writes not in the fourth 
 but in the nineteenth century, not for the ladies 
 of Constantinople, but for the ladies of England; 
 and she attacks the foolish fashions, and the 
 self-constituted and would-be ladylike invalidism 
 which is partly true, and partly imaginary ; and 
 she shows with unsparing severity its fatal 
 effects upon the character. The mere indulgence 
 of the spirit of this agreeable invalidism brings 
 about a degeneracy of moral tone, a want of 
 ingenuousness. " It leads to self-indulgence, 
 and self-indulgence to selfishness, and selfishness 
 
152 LECTURE IV. 
 
 (invariably) to deceit and affectation, till the 
 whole character crumbles to pieces with dry 
 rot^/' So does self-indulgence deprave the 
 character, and character, we repeat, is the true 
 nobility of man. It is the terrible witness how 
 true it is that our actions are daily building a 
 character and circumstances are building with us. 
 " Every action becomes more certainly an eternal 
 mother than an eternal daughter." Such is the 
 significant utterance of Jean Paul Richter^^. 
 It is but saying that the influence of an action 
 is never limited to itself, for man is the product 
 of his will and the circumstances outside himself. 
 And the fixed type of character towards which 
 we grow is daily made more plain. The will, 
 indeed, should exert more modifying force, but 
 alas ! in the majority of cases the power of 
 some inner evil or the simple love of idleness 
 and pleasure carries away the will, and the 
 character is but the full growth of the long' 
 enshrined seed. Like vegetables, we passively 
 submit to the influences around ; we exert 
 neither will nor conscience to shape our heart- 
 growth ; the lines of character constantly be- 
 
 ® " Chronic petite sant^ leads to self-indulgence," &c. 
 Article on "The little health of Ladies," by Miss F. P. Cobbe, 
 Contemporary Review, vol. xxxi. p. 278. 
 
 ^** Quoted in Cook's Boston Lectures, Series i. p. 55. 
 
LECTUEE IV. 153 
 
 come clearer, and the looker-on can prophesy 
 the final form which it will assume. 
 
 " All characters 
 Must shrink or widen as our wine-skins do, 
 For more or less that we can pour in them 
 To fixed prediction ^^" 
 
 The awful prediction is the mere manifestation 
 of the destiny which is ours, not by reason of 
 any previous forecast or inevitable decree, but 
 because we have trifled with our will^ or left it 
 at the mercy of passions ; and uncontrolled 
 passions are always at the mercy of circum- 
 stances^^: we have sown — heedlessly sown — and 
 we have reaped the fruit of our own actions in. 
 the features which impartial time has stamped 
 upon us ; we have founded the type by which 
 our own characters are printed where all men 
 
 " George Eliot, Spanish Gypsy. 
 
 "^ I again quote Dr. Henry Maudsley: "The matter is 
 worse when a person has made success in business the one 
 aim of his life, when he has by long concentration of desire 
 and energy upon such an aim so completely grown to it as to 
 have made it the main part of his inner life — that to which 
 all his thoughts, feelings and actions are directed ; then if 
 some error of his own, or some misfortune beyond his control, 
 shatters his hopes, destroys the pride of his previous accom- 
 plishments, lays low the fabric which he has been building 
 with all the eagerness and energy of an intense egoism, he is 
 left naked and defenceless against his afflictions, sinks into 
 melancholy and from melancholy into madness. To neglect 
 the continued culture and exercise of the intellectual and 
 moral faculties is to leave the mind at the mercy of external 
 circumstances : with it as with the body, to cease to strive is 
 to begin to die." — ResponsihUity in Mental Disease^ p. 296. 
 
 L 
 
154 LECTURE IV. 
 
 may read them : the secret things become mani- 
 fest; our character is a fact known and read 
 of all men; it is our own child, and we are 
 ashamed of it. We shrink from the exaggerated 
 resemblance, as a man does from the full-grown 
 vices of the son whom he has trained in the 
 way of wrong-doing. We have depraved our 
 character by weakness, by waywardness, by sin ; 
 and character is the true nobility of man. It is 
 here, then, that the need of help is to be seen. 
 Circumstances cannot do more than co-operate 
 with will : they cannot create what does not 
 exist : they are powerful to aid the growth of 
 good, as well as the growth of evil. It is within, 
 that the help must be given : it is within, that 
 the change must be : our will, our disposition 
 is the force that needs aid and purification. If 
 only we had the ally within^ the law outside 
 would be our ally too. It is the weak element 
 within, which weakens the result. To give 
 elevation to character we need therefore some 
 assistant force within. It will not do to alter 
 the outward forces ; it is needful rather to re- 
 generate the inner, that that which is without 
 may be clean also. 
 
 This aid Christianity supplies. Its aim is to 
 assist in this character-growth. Its aim is the 
 bestowal of an assisting and co-operating spirit. 
 
LECTURE IV. 155 
 
 ^' Take heed unto thyself" is the lang-uage of 
 the Apostle ; let your aims be ever self-culture. 
 Remember the outward influences^ but remember 
 the inward power which can change them to 
 good or evil. To meet this, the Holy Spirit is 
 bestowed, that the law of good may be the law 
 of life ; the law is written in the heart ; God 
 works with us to will and to do ; and thus is 
 there created a grace-formed individualism 
 within man. He becomes gifted with an energy 
 to transform the hard clay of life, and he is thus 
 made spiritually the possessor of power like to 
 that dreamed-of stone at whose touch all thing's 
 become gold. Christianity promises the Divine 
 Spirit which so gives compactness and purpose 
 to man^s will that all circumstances are ministers 
 of stronger and nobler character-growth. All 
 things work together for good. Thus the im- 
 possible, as our fainting hearts and bafiled wills 
 have called it, becomes possible ; and the way 
 to the truest and highest greatness is laid open 
 to the weakest. All cannot be famous in earthly 
 story; all cannot acquire earthly wealth; all 
 cannot climb into the glittering uplands of life; 
 but there is a glory which all may reach^ the 
 glory of the full growth of a God-like character 
 — -a glory better and more truly honourable than 
 the glory of name or fame. To reach this full 
 
 L 2 
 
156 LECTUEE IV. 
 
 and true flower of life, to achieve this the real 
 end of our being, to ripen slowly through 
 changing years, renewed to the image of Him 
 who created us, is the Christian's aim ; and who 
 will say that it is needless or ignoble ; that this 
 is not the truest kingship, the kingship over 
 ourselves ; and that this is not the divinest 
 kingdom, the kingdom of God which is within ? 
 
 II. Neither is the hope selfish as regards 
 others. 
 
 It is said that the Christian hope so concen- 
 trates men's attention upon the saving of their 
 souls and the fitting themselves to live in another 
 world that they are often unfit or heedless how 
 to live in the present. Christianity, it is de- 
 clared, teaches men how to die ; it is time she 
 took to teaching them how to live. She teaches 
 men that they are strangers and pilgrims, that 
 this world is not their home, that it is polluted, 
 that their true rest and true home lies beyond, 
 and that therefore she unfits men for the 
 simple duties of citizens and friends ; that in 
 making them better Christians she makes them 
 less useful men. But this accusation mis- 
 conceives the meaning of Christian precepts, 
 ignores the pervading motive spirit of Chris- 
 tianity, and shuts out from view the quickening 
 power of the eternal hope. 
 
LECTURE IV. 157 
 
 (i.) It misconceives the meaning of Christian 
 precepts. It is true that we are taught to love 
 not the world, to regard the present life as a 
 pilgrimage, but it is not true that we are taught 
 to ignore either the natural enjoyment or the 
 obvious duties of the present. We are told to 
 take a true estimate of life, and to administer it 
 after some settled system, to have some aim and 
 worthy purpose in it. To love the world is to 
 take its passing joys and pleasures as the ter- 
 minus of our efforts and the culmination of our 
 activities ; it is to rest in these instead of subor- 
 dinating all life to its fit and true end. Life is 
 something which is worthy a wise aim^ and its 
 circumstances should be laid under contribution 
 to help forward that aim. To live in mere 
 enjoyment is to act like children who are pleased 
 with coloured threads but never try to weave 
 them to any pattern^ or who seize the brush of 
 the painter and dash the paint recklessly and 
 aimlessly on the canvas ; to live as God and 
 Christianity^ as reason and right would have us 
 live, is to take the colours and lay them on the 
 canvas in obedience to some high motive and in 
 harmony with some noble design, and thus to 
 subordinate all things to a great and well- 
 wrought purpose : and if this purpose be char- 
 acter-culture and self-reformation_, then surelv it 
 
158 LECTURE IV. 
 
 is no ignoble or selfish one; it is not a purpose 
 useless to mankind at large, but rather of the 
 very highest use. The truest philanthropy is 
 self-reformation. The weariness of the world is 
 much made up of the multitude of preachers 
 and the fewness of well-doers. AVell has a 
 modern man of science reflected on the few men 
 who definitely set self-culture before them as an 
 aim in life ^^. Well did Lavater exclaim, *^' The 
 man who reforms himself has done more 
 towards reforming the public than a dozen 
 noisy patriots." The aim of self-culture and the 
 building up of character by divine help to the 
 true Godlike type is a noble one, and is fraught 
 with the highest and most practical benefits to 
 the public. Such a character will not be pos- 
 sessed by the feverish haste to be rich which is 
 the source of commercial dishonesty and disaster. 
 Such a character will not be betrayed into 
 foolish and vain, ostentations of unreal wealth 
 which is the bane of so many circles of so-called 
 good society. Such a character will not be full 
 of vicious ambitions, or the restlessness which 
 is born of conceited merit. The quietude and 
 discipline of character is the elevation of self 
 
 ^' Dr. Henry Maudsley thus writes : " There is hardly 
 any one who sets self-development before himself as an aim 
 of life." — Ee-^2'^nsibilUy in Mental Disease, p. 290. 
 
LECTURE IV. 159 
 
 and the guarantee of the peace and order of 
 society. 
 
 (ii.) But the fear that Christian hope leads 
 to selfishness, practically ignores the whole 
 pervading spirit of Christianity. The spirit 
 which looks to God, and which impelled by love 
 to Him seeks to be like Him, is not a refined 
 and elevated pleasure which diverts our love 
 from mankind,, it is rather a spirit which draws 
 from a deep and unfailing spring the fresh 
 streams of noble impulses. Love to man is not 
 a precept added by Christ to balance the love 
 to God in the fear of an undue preponderance 
 of one command over the other. It is a natural 
 corollary. The second command is like unto 
 the first, because the features of the first are 
 reflected in it, as in its offspring. So much 
 was this felt by the sacred writers that St. John 
 deems that love to God is impossible where 
 there is no love to man. " He that loveth not 
 his brother whom he hath seen, how can he 
 love God whom he hath not seen ^^ ?" '' Whoso 
 seeth his brother have need and shutteth up 
 his compassion from him, how dwelleth (not 
 the love of man, but) the love of God in him ^^ ?'' 
 The love of man is the natural outcome of love 
 to God. Mankind is transfigured in the eyes 
 " I John iv. 20. ^ I John iii. 17. 
 
160 LECTURE IV. 
 
 of the man in whom the love of God dwells. 
 A growing" civilisation and a more philosophic 
 view of life might show us the grand solidarity 
 of the world, and teach us that he who lives by 
 others should live for others. But it has been 
 well said^^ that the thought has tenfold force 
 with the Christian : to him humanity is not a 
 mere aggregation of mutual interests or even 
 mutual sympathies : it is a divinely formed 
 family : no one member of it is to be despised : 
 the same Father made all : the same Father 
 loves all : the same Saviour redeemed all. The 
 lingering touch of God's hand is upon all hu- 
 manity: in the view of Him who is their Father 
 all meaner distinctions die : there is neither 
 Jew nor Greek, barbarian, bond or free : all are 
 one in Christ Jesus. It is here where God 
 made manifest His true Fatherhood that the 
 true Altruism bears its fruit. We do not under- 
 value the Altruism of to-day: it is a noble 
 thought ; it may bear fruit ; but while we ad- 
 mire the grandeur of the conception, we cannot 
 help thinking that it is a conception borrowed 
 from Christianity^"^; and when we hear it stated 
 
 ^^ Prof. Westcott, The Gospel of the Resurrection, Appendix 
 on Positivism. 
 
 " "Our present school of moralists are men who would 
 Btill retain the moral passion, but at the same time they deny 
 
LECTURE IV. 161 
 
 without reference to Him who made of one 
 blood all men to dwell on the face of the earthy 
 we fear that it must lack the vital force which 
 comes from Him alone. We admire the beauty 
 of the flower, but we think it has been plucked 
 from the garden of Christ, and that he who 
 plucked it has left the root behind ; we know 
 at least that those who have loved God most 
 have loved man most. He who loves the author 
 most will value most the autograph ; and the 
 Christian sees in every man the autograph of 
 God ; and just as the meanest things are cher- 
 ished by us and folded by in safe spots because 
 they are hallowed to us by the memory and love 
 of those who are gone, so however contradictory, 
 
 the existence of its only possible object, and set up others 
 that are utterly inadequate either to excite or appease it. 
 Such is the enthusiasm of humanity which is now offered as 
 an explanation of it. This is really nothing but the desire 
 of God, which will not confess itself, George Eliot's books, 
 to turn to a striking instance, are really instinct with a latent 
 Theism, with an unackn(jwledged religious dogmatism of the 
 most absolute and severest kind. George Eliot is really, as 
 Spinoza was, a pei-son intoxicated with God. Mr. Frederick 
 Harrison is another case in point. He too, like George 
 Eliot, is a suppressed theist. He is full of a longing for God 
 that declines to own itself, and when he tells us that all his 
 fine feelings are due to the teaching of Positivism, the best 
 reply we can make to him is in the lines of Byron, with tlie 
 alteration of a single word : — 
 
 If you think philosophy 'twas this did, 
 I can't help thinking 'Theism assisted." 
 Article by Mallock in Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1878, p. 
 166, 
 
162 LECTURE IV. 
 
 foolish, feeble, and degraded men may be, yet 
 do they become dear to us, because dear to Him 
 who loved them. " He that loveth Him that 
 begat, loves Him also that is begotten of Him^^." 
 All the most worthless and base are now kin to 
 the Christian, because all are now dignified with 
 the love of the unchanging God : we know that 
 they must be precious because He so vabied 
 them : we know that they are not and cannot 
 be vile : we dare not do aught to weaken or 
 degrade any for whom Christ died ^^. 
 
 (iii.) And the light which shines for the future 
 gives new power to this thought. Man seen in 
 the dim light of the clouded and fleeting pre- 
 sent looks meagre and contemptible ; but those 
 who take lofty views of man^s future see in him 
 a dignity which is unseen by others. The bright 
 light of eternal hope sheds a glory on all man- 
 kind. It is quite a mistake to think that the 
 sense of a life to come makes this life look 
 short and mean. Men speak as if the idea of 
 an eternal life has made this life of threescore 
 and ten years seem insignificant. They think 
 that the untold splendours of the future cast 
 into dimness the glories and kill out the in- 
 terests of the present, just as the first shilling'of 
 
 ^^ I John V. I. 
 
 ^^ Kom. xiv. 15, 20; I Gor. viii. ii. 
 
LECTURE IV. 163 
 
 the child is nothing in the eyes of the millionaire. 
 The comparison is unjust. Heaven is not as a 
 vast fortune, and earth but a poor inheritance. 
 The comparison would still be inaccurate but 
 more near the truth were the shilling the first 
 invested sum out of which the millionaire's for- 
 tune grew. Let that be the comparison and 
 then we read in the single coin the promise of 
 the stupendous wealth to follow. The life to 
 come gives its significance to the life now pre- 
 sent. It is the grand possibility which dignifies 
 present labour. The work of the teacher draws 
 its greatness not from the things taught, but 
 from the serious and real life for which he is. 
 fitting his pupils : the life of manhood stands 
 looking in at the door of the school-room ; the 
 spelling-book and the dull wearisome iterations 
 of school routine catch a new dignity from the 
 coming life ; without it they would be meaning- 
 less, perhaps mischievous. So it is that man's 
 life, short and painful as it is, gains new signi- 
 ficance from the future life and the immortality 
 to come. He who sees in man the noble pro- 
 mise of that future finds him invested with new 
 worth : while ^' he who thinks meanly of man's 
 destiny will think meanly of man." He who 
 catches if it be but a glimpse of the love of 
 God, and of a life to come, begins to comprehend 
 
164 LECTURE IV. 
 
 the grand future which remains. It is love 
 only which can learn to comprehend the length, 
 breadth, and depth and height of God's purposes 
 of love. She can see in the unshapely masses 
 of ruined life around her the lineaments of a 
 "transformed character, as the sculptor may read 
 in the unhewn block of marble the swelling 
 beauty and fair proportions of the statue yet 
 to be. 
 
 Yes, the future which is of God_, the hope 
 which is of God, like the love which is of God, 
 adds glorious meaning to human life. Love to 
 man is on the obverse of the medal which wears 
 the impress of the love of God on the reverse. 
 Hope for man is the answering legend to the 
 cry of the Psalmist, " My hope is in Thee, O 
 God." Lovers of God have been lovers of men, 
 hopeful for men and toiling for men ; the labour 
 of love and the patience of hope have sprung up 
 in the hearts of those who learned that God was 
 love. It is not true that Christian hope and 
 Christian love make men despise the present 
 or disregard the duties of this life. True there 
 have been erratic Christians who have lost their 
 power of sympathy with the struggles of men 
 by withdrawing from the arena of conflict ; but 
 the ascetic, the mystic, the puritan have all in 
 their turn been men of half-truths. The healthful 
 
LECTURE IV. 16^ 
 
 spirit of the Christian Church has, however, as- 
 serted itself elsewhere. Philanthropies have been 
 the work of Christians. The pagan world could 
 enjoy barbarities for amusement's sake, and let 
 men be tortured for a Roman holiday. It was 
 a Christian who broke the yoke of that tyran- 
 nous pleasure. Christian love and Christian hope 
 joined hands and, foremost in the noble race of 
 benevolence, laboured to raise the fallen and 
 console the weary. " There is not a secular re- 
 form," says a wise and thoughtful writer,, "in 
 the whole development of modern civilisation 
 which (if it is more than mechanical) has not 
 drawn its inspiration from a religious principle. 
 Infirmaries for the body have sprung out of duty 
 to the soul ; schools for the letter^ that free way 
 may be opened for the spirit ; sanitary laws, that 
 the diviner elements in human nature may not 
 become incredible and hopeless from their foul 
 environment. Who would ever lift a voice for 
 the slave that looked no further than his face ? 
 or build a reformatory for the culprit child, if 
 he saw nthing but the slouching gait and the 
 thievish eye ^^ ? " But because they have seen 
 more — seen the glitter of heaven and its true 
 mint-mark beneath the dust and rubbish of 
 
 2* Martineau, Hours of ThougJit, pp. i8] 
 
166 LECTUEE IV. 
 
 many a sin and many a crime — Christians have 
 been forward in this work. Raikes in Gloucester, 
 Howard among the lazar-houses and prisons of 
 Europe, Clarkson and Wilberforce preaching for 
 the slaves against selfish interests and heartless 
 expediency, — let these stand for thousands more 
 who are proofs that eternal hopes do not make 
 Christians unmindful of the present world and 
 its needs ; but that the servants of Christ love 
 with a love which has caught the reflection of 
 their Master's ; yea^ precisely, because they love 
 God they have learned to love their neighbours 
 with a love stronger than before. 
 
 III. The hope in the future is not a base one. 
 Yet this is what it is accused of being. 
 Christians, it is said, only live a life of self- 
 denial here in the hope of having free scope for 
 self-indulgence hereafter. Their lives are but 
 the climax of prudential epicureanism. They 
 deny themselves to-day in order to enjoy more 
 thoroughly the good tilings of to-morrow. They 
 do not live as men here, in order that they may 
 live as luxurious men in a paradise where the 
 joys will be precisely of the same kind, only far 
 better than those which they have seemingly 
 eschewed here. It is a hope of enjoying palatial 
 splendours in another world which will last 
 always instead of the limited chance and un- 
 
LECTURE IV. 167 
 
 certain tenure of similar splendours on earth. 
 Sucli is the accusation. 
 
 It is perfectly true that uneducated Christians, 
 in their feeble attempts to explain their thoughts 
 of that home to which their hearts look forward^ 
 have used language which savours somewhat of 
 a carnal paradise ; but the thoughts of their 
 hearts have infinitely transcended the words of 
 their lips. It does not always follow that be- 
 cause a man's speech is vulgar, his thoughts and 
 aspirations are base. The mind is often haunted 
 by images and hopes which it can express only 
 in wholly inadequate language or not at all. 
 The true Christian, however feebly he may ex- 
 press his hopes, has hopes which are far nobler 
 and purer than words can utter ; and the very 
 slightest attention would detect that he w^as 
 speaking in metaphors, which could but im- 
 perfectly shadow forth his meaning. The re2)re- 
 sentation of the hopes of heaven as merely 
 intensified earthly enjoyments is a mistake 
 which is based on a total misconception of the 
 meaning of Christianity. There are hopes 
 which the Christian entertains which he is not 
 ashamed to avow. He does look forward to the 
 vision of God : he does look forward to the 
 society of the good and the great : he does look 
 forward to the restoration of lost friendships 
 
168 LECTURE IV. 
 
 and too-early severed loves. If men call these 
 base hopes, it can only be because they have no 
 delight in the society of the good and great, 
 and no joy in sweet human friendship. That 
 which is noble and soul-inspiring here will not 
 be reckoned ignoble there. To grasp the hand 
 of love, to feel the thrill of that sweetest of 
 human pleasures, the joy of a love renewed, 
 is no mean or despicable hope. If it is so, then 
 are all glad companionships and intense affec- 
 tions here to be Teckoned base ; and home and 
 friendships are but tokens of weakness or of 
 selfishness. These we look for; but the Chris- 
 tian's hope is to be found in more than these 
 glad prospects ; it is to be found in that holiness 
 without which no one shall see God, in that 
 character which has been slowly formed here, 
 but which will be possessed in its fulness and 
 beauty hereafter. The carnal or the worldly 
 paradise is not to be found in the Bible. True 
 there is the imagery of the Apocalypse which 
 has been quoted as a sanction to such expecta- 
 tions ; but the symbols, simple in themselves, 
 reveal their meaning in the light of the real and 
 acknowledged spiritual hopes of the Christian. 
 The hope is to see God as He is and to be like 
 Him"^i ; to grow up unto Him in all things-^. 
 
 ^^ Jobn iii. 2. ^^ Ephesians iv. 15; Philippians iii. 8-12. 
 
LECTURE IV. 169 
 
 The Apocalypse says no other — the happiness 
 it holds forth is the happiness of hoh'ness : it is 
 a consummation of that which we have lonijed 
 for : the character, the hkeness to God will be 
 ours : His name will be on our foreheads -". 
 There may be physical emblems used. There is 
 a river, but it is for those who have thirsted for 
 righteousness^*: there are fruits, but they are 
 for those who have longed after knowledge ^^: 
 there is a city whose walls are gemmed with 
 various jewels-*^; and the names of Patriarchs 
 and Apostles are written there 2^; but it is to 
 tell us that all the types of human character, 
 the weak but brilliant Reubens of life, the 
 courageous but not unblemished Judahs, the 
 pure, quiet, and persistent Josephs will be there : 
 it is no place where pale counterparts of one 
 another will endure the dull monotony of each 
 other's society; but it is a spot where the valour 
 of the soldier, the fidelity of the man of business, 
 the achievements of impetuous love will be wel- 
 comed, and where all the Divine powers of holy 
 men will blend in sweet and various harmony 
 in that city which lieth four square, and whose 
 
 ^ Rev. xxii. 4. Cf. Hebrews xii. 14. 
 
 2* Rev. xxii. 2 ; Matt. v. 6 ; Ps. xxxvi. 8, 9. 
 
 2' Rev. xxii. 2 ; Prov. iii. 18. 
 
 2^ Rev. xxi. 19. 
 
 " Rev. xxi. 12, 14 ; comp. Rev. vii. 4-9. 
 
 M 
 
170 LECTUEE IV. 
 
 gates face to every point of the compass, and are 
 open to every son of man^^. There no labour 
 will be lost, no intellectual achievement will be 
 found valueless : the sage wall find new avenues 
 of investigation open where there are new 
 heavens and new earth : new fields of labour and 
 new visions of hope will exj^and before us there, 
 and everywhere the atmosphere will be that of 
 righteousness and rest. This is no base and 
 unworthy hope^ which speaks no words of carnal 
 delight, but promises only that the strivings 
 after the true character of the Master will re- 
 ceive their satisfaction there. Thus the hope of 
 the Christian lies in holiness, in likeness to 
 God, in the shaking off of the defilements of our 
 nature, and the rectification of the aw^kwardness 
 and baseness of our character. " Heaven is 
 principle," said Confucius; "Heaven is char- 
 acter/'' said a large-hearted Scotch divine ^^ ; 
 " Heaven is likeness to God/^ says every 
 Christian that ever breathed. It is no gross 
 or carnal pleasure which lies before us. It 
 is the realisation of ideals : it is the employ- 
 ment of powers apparently wasted for want 
 of field-room in this life, the opening of the 
 
 2^ Rev. xxi. 12-16, 25. 
 
 '^^ Chalmers, in his sermon, "Heaven a character, not a 
 locality." 
 
LECTURE IV. 171 
 
 prospect of new spheres in which the energies 
 which have found no scope here may find 
 opportunity. For there is nothing which is 
 so full of sadness as the spectacle, which is so 
 often seen, of lives cut short when in the full 
 force of true usefulness, and when their powers 
 of sympathy and love seemed most needful to 
 those around. It was said by one ^''^ who will 
 not be thought to be a partial witness,, that the 
 thought of a life to come has no trifling in- 
 fluence for good in allaying the pain we feel at 
 the irony of nature in snatching away fair and 
 good lives from the world when they seemed 
 on the road to higher usefulness. Such a 
 thought receives an emphasis in our minds to- 
 day 2^. Yes, it is well spoken — the hope does 
 
 2^ " The beneficial effect of such a hope is far from trifling. 
 It makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the 
 feelings, and gives greater strength as well as greater 
 solemnity to all the sentiments which are awakened in us by 
 our fellow-creatures or Ijy mankind at large. It allays the 
 sense of that irony of natui'e which is so painfully felt when 
 we see the exertions and sacrifices of a Kfe culminating in the 
 formation of a wise and noble mind, only to disappear from 
 the world when the time has just anived at which the world 
 seems about to begin reaping the benefit of it. The truth 
 that life is short and art is long is fi-om of old one of the 
 most discouraging parts of our condition ; this hope admits 
 the possibility that the art employed in improving and 
 beautifying the soul itself may avail for good in some other 
 life, even when seemingly useless for this." — J, S. Mill, Essay 
 on Relifjion, p. 249. 
 
 ^^ Dec. 15, 1878, the Sunday after the death of tlie' 
 Princess Alice. 
 
 1\I 2 
 
172 LECTUllE IV. 
 
 allay the pain we feel at the irony of nature, 
 when we see bright and useful lives cut short 
 in the maturity of their usefulness, when we 
 behold one in the noon of her life, endeared by 
 her wise benevolence and her sweet womanly 
 sympathy to the home of her adoption,, and no 
 less endeared by tender and touching memories 
 of self-sacrificing filial love to the home of her 
 birth — a nurse among princes, a princess among- 
 nurses^ tender and heroic in her family, a mother 
 among her people, whose mission was by the 
 sick bed — falling a victim^ on a day of dark 
 remembrance, to the sickness from which her 
 patient skill and loving hand had so often 
 shielded others ; it does let in one ray of light 
 to feel that the subtle tact and right royal love, 
 yea, all her powers of heart and tender life, 
 seemingly robbed of their full Iruit by being 
 removed too soon, may find scope and occupation 
 in a brighter and a larger sphere. 
 
 The instinct which feels thus our Master 
 acknowledges, for He holds out the promise of 
 hope — a hope which has been denounced as 
 ignoble and selfish and prudential, but which, 
 on the contrary, I have wished to show is noble 
 and elevating in regard to man, allaying his 
 natural anxieties and adequate to his legitimate 
 expectations. 
 
LECTUKE IV. 173 
 
 And now one word and I have done. We 
 have seen the spread of tlie Christian faith, its 
 wondrous adaptation to the needs of every raee 
 and climate, language and nation ; we have seen 
 man in his weakness, in his affection, and in his 
 hope ; and we have seen the fitness of Cinis- 
 tianity to minister to his feebleness, his love, and 
 his aspirations. We have seen that the gospel 
 is not to be understood without remembering 
 the nature of man. These two, man and Christ's 
 teachings, have a mutual inter-adaptation. They 
 fit as lock and key ; and the one is scarcely to 
 be understood, and certainly cannot be fairly 
 criticised, without reference to the other ; for it 
 isj to man as he is that Christ came. We have 
 seen man the victim of a moral disease, and 
 Christ the healer reaching forth His hand of 
 love, saying, '' I will, be thou clean." We have 
 seen man with love in his nature, trying to find 
 the truest and most abiding object of affection, 
 finding in Christ one who can fill him with 
 impassioned love. We have seen man with 
 hopes, man with fitful longings to rise higher 
 and be better than he is, and Christ standing 
 by and putting into his hand the crown of 
 saintliness ; and in all this we have seen that 
 it is not in outward show or pomp of circum- 
 stance that the Kingdom of God comes; but 
 
174 LECTURE IV. 
 
 that evermore it must be within — within, for 
 within is the moral evil; within^ for within is 
 the power of love ; within, for within is the 
 will and the hope which must reach forth to the 
 higher ideal of character. Thus once more the 
 Kingdom of God must be within. It will 
 indeed be seen around, outside, everywhere, 
 broadening on our view in its ever-enlarging 
 borders and its ever- varying beauties, but still 
 the flowers of God's realm must ever blossom 
 forth from a hidden seed, for the kingship Christ 
 desires is the kingship within. Evermore He 
 seeks to set up His Throne in the wills and 
 affections of men, and though all power is given 
 Him in heaven and in earth, and He is seated 
 at God's right hand, far above all principality 
 and power and might and dominion and every 
 name that is named, and the angels of God 
 worship Him, yet does He prefer before all 
 temples the temple of the heart, and before all 
 the thrones the throne of the kingdom which is 
 within. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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 DEPOSITORIES: 
 
 NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE. CHARING CROSS, S.W. 
 
 4, ROYAL EXCHANGE, E.G. ; 48, PICCADILLY, W. 
 
 London. 
 
■\*"-N